Photos

So many recent posts have been about our plans for the Record Store Day block party, or about shows that we are sponsoring, that it seems like ages since we shared a fun record.  Here’s an interesting one to make up for it:

This album featuring Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra was produced by Bell Laboratories in 1979 as a promotional give-away, using recordings from their very own archives.  The superfluous liner notes credit Bell Labs with the development of electronically recorded music and the orthophonic phonograph (both earlier developed by Western Electric and first introduced to the mass market by Victor in 1925) and overstate their role in the development of magnetic tape decades later, but the recordings on the album “speak” for themselves.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(“Roman Carnival Overture” by Hector Berlioz)

In 1931 and 1932 Bell Labs experimented with recording technology in a variety of ways, including a “wall of sound” approach entire unique from the recording technique made famous by Phil Spector in the 1960s.  The “wall of sound” developed by engineer Harvey Fletcher in the 1920a.  Fletcher’s system used a literal wall which was covered with microphones, each connected to a loudspeaker on a corresponding wall in a listening room.

They also explored, most famously, stereophonic recording.  The term stereophonic was first used by Western Electric in 1927, combining the Greek stereo (στερεός meaning “solid, firm”), with phone (φωνή, “sound”).  EMI cut a stereo disc a few years earlier, but this recording did not survive.  The oldest existing stereophonic recording – Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra performing an excerpt from Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire - is on this promotional album.

Even the monophonic tracks on this album are remarkable.  The 1931 recording of Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival Overture” up above is a good example.  They sound surprisingly vivid for recordings from the early 30s.  It’s a really exciting document of the confluence of technological innovation and artistry.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(“Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells” from Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky – this one is in stereo)

This album by the 9th Ward Marching Band has been one of my favorite records to play in the record shop ever since our friend Micah loaned it to us.  He gave me permission to keep it until after my DJ set at the Triple Rock Social Club tonight.  I’ll be spinning some songs as part of the Fuck Knights monthlong residency.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(“Crazy Train / Drum Cadence #2″ by the 9th Ward Marching Band)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Dave Grohl performing “Tiny Dancer” on television)

I felt especially inspired last night after watching my favorite scenes from Almost Famous.  Have you seen this movie?  If you love 70s rock it’s a must-see, if only for the soundtrack and the fun setting.  In portraying a fictional band-on-the-brink it’s also a fair portrait of rock and roll as a business, which corrodes a lot of the glitter.  The truth is you have no idea the kind problems somebody lives with, even if you think he must have the most fun job in the world.  When’s the last time you listened to Elton John or Tumbleweed Connection?  “Take me to the pilot”?  Shit, take me to the bus driver.  What’s your hurry?

There’s a desperation to a lot of the attempted anthems of the era – The Who, for instance, stumbled at best with “Long Live Rock”.  Electric Light Orchestra hit a little closer to the mark when they kicked out “Rock and Roll is King”, but even still fell short of “Roll Over Beethoven”, the middle-50s single by Chuck Berry they loved to play.  “Rock On” by David Essex and about half of Electric Warrior (T Rex) fall into the same category:  fun music, but uninspiring after digestion.  For all the celebration of rock and roll as redemptive in Tommy and Quadrophenia, it was pretty depressing by the middle of the decade, hardly if ever uplifting.  It reminds me of a scene from another movie from around the same time as Almost Famous:

“What came first, the music or the misery?  People worry about kids playing with guns and watching violent videos – we’re scared that a culture of violence is taking them over.But nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and pain and rejection.

Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”
(Scene from High Fidelity)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(“Surrender” by Cheap Trick)

I think there was a time rock and roll was circling the drain and it’s desperation was reflected in the music.  The infrastructure that supported it changed, the business fundamentals changed.  It’s pretty simple economics but the artists who created the actual widgets caught on slowly.  Sincere uplifting music was marginalized, along with genuine innovators.

The thing is we’re in that end of the cycle again.  Everything in pop music moves on a cycle (think rockabilly).  It seems like gloomy music is celebrated for it’s courageous gloominess these days, and what gets put to the side is the music that’s genuinely uplifting and fun.  I think it would have been hard to write a rock and roll anthem in the 70s.  I think it would be hard today, too (although Juvie sure did a helluva good job of it last summer).  You gotta respect the people who can do it pretty well.

Long live rock, be it dead or alive.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(“Long Live Rock” by the Who)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(“Blue Blooded Woman” by Alan Jackson)

Yep, it’s on blue vinyl.