When the owner of Rolling Stone magazine invites you to be a part of a staff band to sing a Beatles song in front of an audience including Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s son Sean, of course you want to give it 100 percent.
John Colapinto gave it 200 percent and damaged his vocal chords, and that experience set him on a path to explore the science and the mystery of the human voice.
John Colapinto Photo: JOHN VINCENT / SIMON & SCHUSTER
Colapinto tells Jesse Mulligan he got the gig as lead singer for the Rolling Stone’s staff band because of his reputation for being able to carry a tune.
“I used to socialise with the senior editor there, Bob Love, and we’d sit around his apartment at night and they’d break out the guitars and I cannot be stopped from wailing away over the guitars. It must have made it’s way back to the magazine in some gossipy way.”
He started to think he was in over his head when he was told to meet at the rehearsal space and discovered it was S.I.R studios which is where people such as Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones prepare for tours.
“Trying to sing when Bette Midler is sitting there watching you is terrifying. I knew right away I’d really screwed myself.”
He paid a heavy price for putting his all into the concert. Twenty years later, there’s a gravelly tone to his voice.
“I did not know how to warm my voice up properly, I’d always sung casually as an amateur. I’d had hoarseness in the past, I’d even lost my voice, but it had come back 100 percent.”
Colapinto explains that there are no pain receptors in the vocal chords so while he was giving it his all in rehearsals, he was unknowingly damaging his voice. He says there was a bit of grit and hoarseness leading up to the show. To compensate, he would sing harder.
“I ended up with this permanently raspy voice, which I didn’t know was a problem really, until a woman in my building heard me talk and she told me I had a seriously bad vocal injury. This was months after the show and I sort of brushed it off, but she told to me at least get it looked at.”
He explains that the woman was a voice coach for Broadway stars and warned him it could be serious.
“I knew it was a euphemism for cancer so within a day I was in a laryngologist’s office here on the Upper East Side where I live. It turns out it was a world-renowned guy called Pete Woo and he looked down my throat and said I had what’s called a vocal polyp, quite a massive one.”
That polyp essentially meant that Colapinto couldn’t sing anymore unless he had surgery and underwent six weeks of vocal silence. He decided instead to leave it and it wasn’t until 10 years later that he saw another doctor about it. Colapinto wanted to do a story for the New Yorker about the vocal surgeon who fixed Adele’s voice, who herself had a serious vocal polyp.
“I was doing a story on him and when I phoned him the first time and said, hey would you be interested in a story, he was like, you’ve got a pretty bad voice. So, he insisted on looking at it as well and my vocal polyp had gotten a lot bigger.
“He said there’s no way you can sing, but your real problem is your talking. This is when I came to get a real global sense of how our voices are us, they’re our identity, our sonic signature.”
That doctor told him that he’d begun to talk in a lower range in order to communicate melody and other, more less noticeable, signifiers that we use when speaking.
“He said I could still do that, but I was in a more monotone range. And he said, your voice isn’t communicating you, because you sound different because of what you’re doing, you’re also withdrawing from situations because you know your voice is going to be bad for a week if you got to that loud cocktail party.”
Essentially, the doctor told him the small bump on his vocal chord was changing his life.
“And he was right, and that sort of set in motion these wheels in my head that the voice is a little more than I thought.”
It was when Colapinto began researching the book he discovered how deep it went and how the voice has made humans the dominant species on Earth.
He says the voice is the first stimulation we get. At around 28 weeks gestation, babies can hear their mother and other people speaking while they’re in the womb.
“The amniotic fluid we’re living in becomes like a living speaker and vibrates against our entire body. We have such a primal and atavistic connection to the voice, but the other thing is that the voice is how we developed capacity to speak language, to do what no other animal can do.
“That gave us an advantage over predators which were much bigger, faster and stronger than us. We gained this capacity to beam our thoughts into each other’s heads with the vocal signal.”
While reading and writing is only around 5000 years old, people have been speaking for more than 100,000 years, he says. And still, when we read we perform mental gymnastics to convert it into sound in our brains.
Noam Chomsky had a theory that language was innate in human beings, but that was upended by an Amazonian tribe which didn’t share the characteristics Chomsky said proved his theory. Colapinto travelled to the Amazon with missionary linguists and saw the tribe first-hand where he discovered that language was being taught from mother to child through song and the language was so musical that things could be communicated through musical notes alone.
“That was just stunning to me. Darwin had said our language capability emerged and evolved out of song, which never made a whole lot of sense to me, but suddenly here I was with a hunter-gatherer tribe that had rejected all outside culture for tens of thousands of years.
“You couldn’t help but feel you were seeing something very primal, very much a snapshot of what we might have been like at an earlier stage of our humanhood.”
