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Foreword by Danny Hutton
I have been going to the same coffee shop across from the DGA in West Hollywood for years. After a while, you start to see some of the same faces, you start saying hi, you get used to seeing the regulars with their newspaper or laptop. But for this one man that I saw almost every day, I couldn’t tell what the heck he was doing. He had a book in front of him – self printed, spiral bound – called American English. He was joined by people – a young woman or an older man, a lot of hip looking guys and girls – and he was teaching them from this book, across the table, while drawing all over sheets of paper. Diagrams and arrows and certain words or letters. Weird way to learn English, but okay…
Eventually I realized that these people already knew English. What he was teaching them was more specific: it was to speak it without an accent getting in the way of being understood. He was an Accent Eliminator!
After many years in the music business, singing, performing, songwriting and producing, I have heard dozens of instruments and hundreds of trained and untrained vocalists. Every one of them – including my own band Three Dog Night – is always reaching for a sound that will connect with the audience. The one that will make them feel the music with you. The one perfect note that blends with the others and lets the audience members close their eyes and disappear into the song. Artists work all their lives to find that one perfect sound.
Well—I realize that speaking heavily accented English is a little like playing guitar with a cast on one arm: it’s just not going to sound right. Only in this case, the people didn’t even know the notes because some of them don’t exist in other languages. Imagine coming to Los Angeles to sell your script or your song, or even just cashier at the coffee shop, and all your Ws or Vs or your Rs and Ls are scrambled. It’d be hard to be understood, but it would also set up a wall between you and your dreams. Mitch Rubman’s students had done the hard work of learning English, but there was a final step that no one had told them about that would make them understood, that would help them belong: they were going to have to pronounce it. Beyond speaking words like Won and One, or Colonel or Yacht, he helped them with idioms. Imagine being in a meeting and having an exec start to say “I’m going to have to take a raincheck. “Huh?
I’d pop in for a coffee and hear him helping these people find the sounds for the first time. Then they’d start to relax, laugh and have fun. Using our idioms correctly was a lot like getting a song memorized. And speaking unaccented American English was like a piano in tune instead of out of it. It wasn’t natural for everyone, but it was something that could be learned. And Mitch helps his students do it. Year after year, he does it over a cup of coffee and a spiral bound textbook. He’s a confidence builder and provides what I call Accent Relief. This is one man who knows what he’s doing.
Danny Hutton
Three Dog Night
Hollywood, California.
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