Vocal Tracks

Spoken Word

2011-01-27T20:59:00.000-08:00

My new book, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures, is now out.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520267046

http://www.amazon.com/Spoken-Word-American-Phonograph-Cultures/dp/0520267044/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296190230&sr=1-1

The Most Wanted Song

2010-09-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about the emerging economy surrounding “musical intelligence” software. Through the systematic comparison of a new song to a database containing millions of songs from the past, this software makes a prediction about whether or not the new track will be successful. The pioneer in this field was the Spanish company Polyphonic HMI, who market their service as “Hit Song Science.” Some executives at Polyphonic HMI left to start their own company, Platinum Blue Music Intelligence, which promotes its service under the name Music Xray. Platinum Blue’s software visually plots an individual record as a point of light in a three-dimensional “music universe,” with each point placed in proximity to other records with similar sonic traits. Once the data had been visualized in this manner, the people at Platinum Blue observed that the vast majority of chart-topping hit songs were clumped together in approximately fifty “clusters.” The closer a new song lies to one of these clusters, the more likely that it will be a hit. Musical intelligence software is used by record companies hoping to minimize risk, by amateur musicians hoping to convince labels that they have what it takes for mainstream success, and by online radio providers like Pandora, whose “Music Genome Project” recommends new tracks to users on the basis of an algorithm comprised of 400 musical components. Music intelligence software now shapes creative choices in the recording studio and helps to determine which tracks a record label will promote, and so can easily be perceived as the latest evidence of the utter desperation and moral bankruptcy of the record industry. Some assert however, that the software can convince reluctant record executives to get behind new and innovative artists, provided that their “HSS” scores are high enough (the oft-cited example here being the claim that software predicted the success of Norah Jones’ CD Come Away With Me (2002) in the face of industry skepticism).

The widespread adoption of services such as Hit Song Science, Music Xray and the Music Genome Project suggests that scholars interested in popular culture need to pay more attention to emerging articulations between cultural analytics and the cultural industries. In fact, the discourse surrounding Pandora frames the Music Genome Project as a response to Cultural Studies. A writer for the New York Times notes that in contrast to prevalent “social” theories of musical preference, Pandora’s data-driven approach “ignores the crowd”: “The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.” What Pandora’s system ignores, the author concludes with a shrug in the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, is the social dimension of taste. How might scholars interested not in filtering out cultural information, but in bringing it into sharper focus deploy this same software? Popular musicians have long been known for “misusing” new technology, for throwing away the instruction manual and deploying the latest gadgets in unforeseen ways – using digital samplers for example, not simply to capture a more faithful cello sound, but to cut and paste old Parliament records. Can humanities researchers make a similar move and hot-wire the latest hit song science to create “musical knowledge” in addition to “musical intelligence”? In addition to the continued interest in “social” theories of musical culture, scholars might have something to learn from digital analyses of sound form. Press reports describe how software tends to uncover surprising similarities between artists commonly considered to be vastly different – U2 and Beethoven for example, or Van Halen and MOR piano singer Vanessa Carlton. Could hit clusters in the “music universe” reveal new genres, or new histories of popular culture? What insights might be gained if we expanded the sonic data set beyond the Billboard charts, to include types of recording besides popular music, or tracks made outside of the United States and Western Europe? What significant clusters might appear in an analysis of the recordings found in the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Project, which contains over six thousand digitized sound recordings from the first decades of recorded sound?

Those interested in the different models of “hit song science” might look for inspiration to Dave Soldier’s thought-provoking 1997 People’s Choice Music project. Working with Komar and Melamid, Soldier composed two songs determined by a survey on musical preferences. The least popular musical traits as determined by the poll were synthesized into the 25-minute “Most Unwanted Song,” which features wild variations in tempo and volume, an operatic soprano rapping, plugs for Wal-mart, and a healthy serving of bagpipes. More interesting is “The Most Wanted Song,” whose lite-rock synths, meandering saxophone, and romance narrative is both hilarious and eerily familiar. Think of it as the sonic equivalent of Platinum Blue’s digital visualization of a certain well-trod corner of the musical universe.

Alice in Audioland, Part Three

2010-07-17T07:20:00.000-07:00

Director Tim Burton stated that he wanted to make his cinematic Alice someone with whom he could identify. Such an adult-friendly Alice was provided by scriptwriter Linda Woolverton, who had previously worked on Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), and Mulan (1998). As opposed to Lewis Carroll’s imaginary space of timeless childhood wonder lost to adults, Burton and Woolverton made Wonderland an actual place that can be revisited by a nineteen-year-old Alice on the verge of marriage and a career. Instead of lingering in the magic realm of childhood in endless mad tea parties and wonderfully pointless dialogues, Burton’s film feels as though it is in a hurry to move on to the sequel: a cinematic reification of the modern complaint that “kids are getting older younger.” Even the caterpillar in the film is in the act of becoming, changing into a butterfly as a metaphor for the transition to adulthood. Most notably, Woolverton has made Alice into a Hollywood action hero, vorpal sword in hand. While the feminist message is to be applauded, the application of any adult moral negates exactly the quality that was so revolutionary and funny about Carroll’s books: their revelry in sheer nonsense for its own sake.

My last example of an audio Wonderland is an earlier female interpretation of Carroll: the 1948 RCA Victor record of Eva Le Gallienne’s touring stage production of “Alice in Wonderland.” Le Gallienne’s adaptation was first performed at the New York Civic Repertory Theatre in 1932, and then made several tours of the US. The show was revived in 1947, when Le Gallienne was working with the American Repertory Theatre. Le Gallienne was a powerful and influential figure in American Theater, and was also romantically linked with Hollywood stars such as Alla Nazimova and Tallulah Bankhead, as well as one of the actresses who played Alice to her White Queen. Listen to her scene as the White Queen here:

The RCA record of Le Gallienne’s show is my favorite adaptation of Carroll’s work, and demonstrates that – evidence to the contrary – the Alice books can be successfully adapted for the stage, screen, or loudspeaker with their delicate charm intact. Listen here to Le Gallienne’s version of one of the funniest moments from “Through the Looking-Glass”: Alice’s encounter with Humpty Dumpty.

Alice in Audioland, Part Two

2010-06-01T00:28:00.000-07:00

Two of the most disappointing moments in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) are when Avril Lavigne’s uninspired “Alice” plays over the film’s end credits, and when Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter breaks into a cringe-inducing “futterwacken” dance. There is little doubt that both are motivated by strategies of corporate synergy: the Lavigne track serves as a marketing tool in music videos and soundtrack releases; and the dance has become the key to a “Single Ladies”-style viral marketing campaign in Disney’s buildup to the film’s DVD release (see the “Show Us Your Futterwacken” contest at http://alicedance.disney.go.com/). It’s a shame that neither the song nor the dance were integrated into the film with any kind of subtlety or coherence, given that Lewis Carroll’s books are essentially musicals: think of the violent lullaby the Duchess sings to her child; the Mad Hatter’s “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat”; the Lobster-Quadrille; the songs of the Mock Turtle and the White Knight; and the grand choruses sung in praise of Queen Alice. Maybe Burton and Disney didn’t take the synergistic possibilities of the project far enough. What if the film had been conceived as a gigantic mashup of contemporary popular music and Carroll’s narrative universe? Lou Reed as the caterpillar, Lady Gaga as the Red Queen, Dizzee Rascal as the Mad Hatter, Noel and Liam Gallagher as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Missy Elliott as the White Queen, Willie Nelson as the Cheshire Cat, Jack White as the White Rabbit, Joanna Newsom as Alice… I know – this is starting to sound like a recipe for disaster along the lines of the dreadful 1978 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” film starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, but an Alice musical could make for a more coherent kind of media industry synergy and could provide a narrative form that lends itself to Carroll’s lyrical and episodic stories.

In this second installment of audio adaptations of Alice’s adventures, I offer an Alice/musical mashup in the form of Decca’s 1944 children’s record, “Alice in Wonderland,” featuring Hollywood musical icon Ginger Rogers in the title role. Rogers’ performance is nothing to write home about, and the musical setting of “How doth the little crocodile” isn’t particularly inspired, but it makes me wonder how the scene might have worked if Carroll’s poem had been set to music by say, Timbaland or Aphex Twin. Bonus points for identifying the voice of the White Rabbit (or should I say, White Wabbit).

Alice in Audioland, Part One

2010-05-06T23:17:00.000-07:00

Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland" (2010) is the latest in a long line of screen adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s books. There have been versions from the silent era of film (Cecil Hepworth’s of 1903 and W. W. Young’s of 1915); a star-studded MGM film from 1933; the 1951 Walt Disney animated film; Jonathan Miller’s trippy 1966 BBC television adaptation, which features British comedy icons like Peter Cook and Peter Sellers and the music of Ravi Shankar; an X-rated “musical fantasy” version from 1976; and a wonderfully dark and surreal 1988 offering by animator Jan Svankmajer. All of these films illustrate the pros and cons of adapting Carroll’s singular works. On the one hand, the Alice stories allow filmmakers to showcase the latest in cinematic special effects as the heroine falls down the rabbit-hole, grows and shrinks, or encounters the Cheshire cat’s lingering grin. On the other hand, Carroll’s intricate verbal humor, circuitous plots, fantastic creatures and events, when coupled with the iconic status of John Tenniel’s illustrations, make the books difficult to visualize. The result tends to be films with some isolated stunning moments, but that disappoint adult fans and either bore or terrify the children that they were ostensibly meant to entertain.

Might Carroll’s surreal wordplay and flashing leaps of the imagination be easier to adapt in a sound-only medium? In the next few blog entries, I will post excerpts from some of the audio adaptations of Alice’s adventures. For my first installment, I offer a December 1937 radio broadcast of CBS’s prestigious “Columbia Workshop.” This show was directed by William N. Robeson, and featured an “experimental musical score” meant to determine the extent to which orchestra instruments could provide a radio drama’s sound effects. Listen below to how the show dramatizes a scene from Carroll’s "Through the Looking Glass" (1871) that is not typically found in the films: Alice’s ride on the Wonderland train and her conversation with the gnat. The scene highlights how the broadcast uses musical instruments as sound effects, and also reminds us that Carroll’s prose is populated by a wild cacophony of voices: we hear Alice’s long-suffering politeness, as well as uncanny disembodied voices that speak and think in chorus; the murmurs of overheard speech from the other passengers in the coach; a train announcement that morphs into the whinny of a horse; and the piping of a gnat in Alice’s ear.

I've Told Every Little Pumpkin

2010-04-12T02:14:00.000-07:00

The fact that I am in the process of finishing a semester teaching a class on the work of David Lynch, and am also a long-time fan of mashup mixes, must make me the ideal demographic for the Mashed in Plastic project: a collection of mashups featuring music from Lynch’s films and television shows (www.mashedinplastic.co.uk). Though all the tracks will be of interest to hardcore Lynch fans, Totom’s “I’ve Told Every Little Pumpkin” has an immediacy and power that ranks it with my favorite mashups. Totom has combined the vocals from Linda Scott’s recording of “I’ve Told Every Little Star” (1961) – which was featured in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) – with the backing track and chorus vocals of Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” (1996).

The term “mashup” has gained widespread usage in the past five years or so, but it is often used in a broad sense to mean the same thing as a “re-mix.” In the strictest terms, a mashup is not simply a re-mix of multiple recordings, but a special category of re-mix that combines two discrete tracks (usually the vocals from one track and the instruments from another) in order to produce a new song. The technical simplicity of that maneuver is significant: mashups are not about virtuosic editing technique, but about “high concept” ideas and a certain DIY Punk attitude. Also like Punk, the best mashups work simultaneously as both pop music and pop music criticism: for example, when Destiny’s Child sing over a Nirvana track we are prompted to think about the segregation of white and black musical genres since the 1990s on radio formats and charts; or when we hear Christina Aguilera front the Strokes we confront the different approaches taken to romance in various genres of pop music, or how the division of labor between writing lyrics, melodies, and instrumentation tends to work in contemporary songwriting.

Another test of a classic mashup is whether or not it transcends its sources, and for me, Totom’s track passes with distinction. After hearing “Every Little Pumpkin,” Linda Scott’s 1961 record sounds too slow, and more importantly, its showtune chord structures create a harmonic landscape that doesn’t seem to encompass the full emotional range of the lyrical references to painful secrets, longing and loneliness. By contrast, the heavy, open guitar chords of the Pumpkins track lend both an emotional weight and a productive ambiguity to the lyrics. The bright, candy-coating of the 1961 track can, of course, be seen in a positive light, and must have been part of its allure for Lynch, who we should note, has been doing his own cinematic mashups since re-working Bobby Vinton and Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet (1986).

It is the Smashing Pumpkins track that fares the worse by comparison with the mashup, however. Listen to how flat and lifeless the verse melody to “1979” sounds after we’re used to hearing Scott’s vocals over the guitar riff. Billy Corgan’s anonymous delivery on the verses of “1979” helps the slight melody to fade into the background so that the track feels like an empty stage setting without any featured actors. Ironically, Scott’s vocal performance brings the Pumpkins backing track to life, fusing with the rhythm track in a more “organic” way than Corgan’s: listen for example, to how her phrasing weaves in and out of the kick drum pattern. When Corgan moves to a higher register on the chorus, “1979” finally switches into high gear, but now I can’t hear this section of the song without missing Scott’s urgent counterpoint in the background (“dum-da-dum…”); another example of how vocal performances work as instruments of rhythm as much as melody.

The chorus of “Every Little Pumpkin” creates a duet in which Scott’s brassy, full-voiced style coexists with Corgan’s alt-rock whispers and rasps. Mashups are, after all, inherently utopian, since they make us imagine a world where we can have it all; where we don’t have to choose between perky melodies and heavy tracks; between early sixties optimism and mid-nineties irony; between pop and rock. The fact that these utopian musical moments are “impossible” only adds to their bittersweet charm. It is on this point that we should recall “Every Little Pumpkin’s” connection to Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. After all, in her remarkable starring role in that film, Naomi Watts performs her own kind of actorly mashup, embodying both the perversely perky “Betty” and the dark, psychotic Diane Selwyn. Watts' performance gets folded into those of Scott and Corgan in the brilliant video mashup of the Totom track:

Pastor Gary Greenwald on Backmasking

2010-01-31T02:27:00.000-08:00

Of all the ink that’s been spilled describing what has been lost with the passing of the vinyl record, little attention has been paid to debates about the existence of “backmasking”: a process whereby messages were thought to be placed in popular recordings such that their meaning could only be discovered when the record was played in reverse. Some of my most vivid memories of interacting with vinyl and turntable are of methodically spinning discs counter-clockwise on my parent’s old record player, straining to find the eerie secret messages supposedly hidden in the Beatles’ “Revolution #9,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” or Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” Now, in the cold laser light of the digital age, those rites and secrets seem as esoteric as table rapping, but they have something besides nostalgia to offer those interested in media history. I didn’t think about it at the time, but my basement explorations of backmasking were enactments of what William Boddy refers to as a “vernacular theory of electronic communication.” The vernacular theory of backmasking was made known to the public through the lectures of anti-rock activists who claimed to have discovered an uncanny power in popular recordings. Consider these excerpts from a 1982 lecture by Pastor Gary Greenwald:

It will not come as a shock that Greenwald’s “neurological explanation” for backmasking has not held up under scrutiny. Psychological studies have produced no evidence that listeners are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the content of backward messages. To decode reversed messages, the unconscious brain would have to be simultaneously hearing language forward and backward, all the while identifying and deciphering an intended message from the chaos of reversed sound. Studies have shown that the forward meaning of backward statements do not “leak” through, even when the backward statements themselves are coherent and memorable, let alone if they are something as esoteric as “turn me on, dead man.”
It is easy to point out what the backmasking theorists got wrong in their hodgepodge of haunted media, media effects panic, subliminal advertising anxiety and cultural xenophobia, but what I find more compelling is what they got right. That is, backmasking theory was remarkably productive in record culture. First, it provided otherwise “faceless” rock bands like ELO and Styx with a certain transgressive edge and a compelling marketing strategy at just the moment when the industry was in a prolonged sales slump, rock promotion was becoming thoroughly routinized, and the baby boom generation that had driven its massive expansion was aging out of the key record-buying demographic. In the longer term, backmasking crusaders helped to create their own worst nightmare in the form of the overtly satanic rock of bands like Venom, Grim Reaper, and Slayer, all of whom surely grew up playing their Led Zeppelin records backwards and contemplating the details of Jimmy Page’s pact with the devil. At the same time, kids like me who scoured the grooves of their LPs for hidden messages put the theory of backmasking to action, and in the process, rediscovered a sense of wonder at the familiar medium of sound recording. Backmasking theory was most influential then, not as a critique of record producers, but as a stimulus for new types of record consumption. In other words, the performances of showmen like Gary Greenwald renewed rock and re-enchanted the old medium of recorded sound.

Tippy Toe Bubble Book

2009-12-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

In 1914, Ralph Mayhew was working for Harper & Brothers on a children’s book of verse in which he planned to have “a child sitting blowing bubbles which ascended and burst into the little pictures and nursery rhymes.” Mayhew struck upon the idea of incorporating small phonograph records in his Bubble Book, and was eventually able to convince Harper & Brothers and Columbia Records to back him, with the first edition of the Bubble Books pressed in 1917. The first Bubble Book – which contained three single-sided 5 ½-inch records featuring musical versions of traditional children’s verses and an accompanying package with illustrations – met with immediate success, and subsequent editions were released through the early 1930s. The Bubble Books were the first book and record hybrids marketed to children, and so represent a pioneering instance of cross-media synergy between book publishing and the record industry. As we can hear on this example, the Bubble Books consisted of a repackaged oral tradition of children’s nursery rhymes and songs.

Forms of children’s entertainment like nursery rhymes were well-suited to the time limitations of early records: with only approximately four minutes of recording time per side, it was difficult to develop longer narrative forms. But nursery rhymes also helped to associate these mass-produced records with oral traditions of parenting. In fact, the rhetoric of Columbia’s ad campaigns connected Bubble Books to a timeless matrilineal oral tradition, and at the same time attempted to upstage that tradition by arguing for the supremacy of the modern media: records could stockpile and reproduce all the old familiar rhymes, and with accompanying pictures lovelier than anything available in the past. Further, while mothers were portrayed as the vehicle of a beloved tradition, ads imagined a future in which her role was replaced by the phonograph. Note how a 1918 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal presents “Tom the piper’s son,” who asked mothers, “Let me sing to your child…I’ve always wanted to tell those children of yours my story, and to sing them a song – and now at last I can do it.”
We find here the substitution of the phonograph for the mother’s voice and a tradition of oral nursery rhymes. Bubble Book ads were aimed at mothers as the “middle term” in the chain of family consumption, but implied that the phonograph could “cut out the middleman” between oral tradition and the child; the middleman being the mother, who was reminded of her parental responsibilities even as her role was threatened. Bubble Book ads took part in a larger tendency of advertising copy of this era to address feelings of regret at the loss of earlier traditions, and to offer consumer goods to assuage anxieties about the passage to a culture of mass consumption. Such ads suggested that the modern consumer could simultaneously enjoy both the modern and the traditional via the product, and so, in Roland Marchand’s words, civilization could be “redeemed.” Bubble Book ads claiming that traditional characters like “Tom the piper’s son” wanted to speak directly to children may have made their media products more innocuous to parents, but that rhetoric also reveals some of the underlying anxieties that parents were feeling concerning their children’s consumption of mass produced media. It was of course, the record companies and Harper & Brothers, not “Tom the piper’s son,” who were looking for new ways to speak directly to children.

The Clyde Beatty Show

2009-09-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

Clyde Beatty was the most famous circus lion tamer of the 1930s. Beatty’s act showcased a particularly American style of animal training, one that depicted a suspenseful struggle between man and beast, and featured snarling animals, cracking whips, and pistols ablaze with blank cartridges. Beatty began his career with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, but it was national press coverage of his recovery from a lion bite in 1932 that elevated him to a new level of renown. By 1933 Beatty was famous enough to publish his memoirs and have them made into a Hollywood film entitled, The Big Cage, the success of which helped him to achieve a remarkable degree of celebrity: he graced the cover of Time Magazine in March 1937, and formed his own organization, the Cole Bros. – Clyde Beatty Circus, which opened the 1937 season at Madison Square Garden, something that the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus had done every year since 1909. Even during the declining years of the American circus, Beatty maintained a long career that straddled the circus and the modern media: he appeared in feature films, film serials, and a radio drama series, “The Clyde Beatty Show” (1949-1950). Below you can here some excerpts from an episode of “The Clyde Beatty Show” called “Crisis on the Set,” which dramatizes Beatty’s trip to Hollywood to make a film of his act.

At several points in the narrative, the episode makes reference to problems faced by early twentieth century lion tamers who sought to make the transition from circus big cage to film studio: animals had trouble interacting with large film crews; it took hours to get the animals in position for the cameras; the glare of the lights and sudden flashes had the potential to disorient and agitate the animals; and early motion picture studios often had limited space. In addition to those challenges, there was a long-standing belief that animal training and acting were inherently incompatible since, if the trainer took on a role or outwardly changed his persona for even a moment, the animals might not recognize or obey him. This sonic depiction of Beatty’s act found here also indicates how the spectacle of the big cat act was equally balanced between sound and image: we hear the snarling of the animals, the crack of the whip, Beatty’s sharp commands, and the explosion of blank cartridges. In fact, the lion became a kind of quintessential test subject in the linking of sound and image in the form of one of the most iconic images in the history of film: the roaring lion on the MGM trademark. That iconic logo also stands as a succinct reminder of the extent to which the cinema “remediated” the spectacle and thrills of nineteenth century entertainments like the circus lion tamer.

We’re Off on a Lengthy Trip, We Are!

2009-08-21T03:57:00.000-07:00

Jim Copp once said that he had not really made his quirky recordings for children. “However,” he added, “I thought that maybe that was the best way to sell them.” Copp and his partner Ed Brown devised an innovative approach to promoting and distributing their postwar kidisks, which were released on their own independent label, Playhouse Records. As my last two posts have shown, Playhouse was a postwar indie label working at the same cutting edge of innovation in multi-track studio technique as better known rock labels like Sun, Chess, and Atlantic. As Andre Millard and other recording industry historians have noted, the biggest business problem facing the indie labels was not in the studio, but in distribution. Millard writes that this was where being a major label really counted: being a major meant national distribution networks, ownership of record presses and systems of warehouses, wholesalers, and record jobbers. Indie labels selling musical genres like rock and rhythm and blues got a much-needed boost in promotion from risk-taking radio DJs. Copp and Brown not only lacked access to major label distribution, but there was little chance that their idiosyncratic kid’s records would be promoted on the radio. Their solution was to develop an alternative circuit of promotion and distribution based around the children’s departments of upscale department stores across the country. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Copp and Brown had an annual work schedule whereby they would record a new LP, and then hit the road to visit children’s departments in stores like F.A.O. Schwartz in Beverly Hills, Neiman Marcus in Dallas, I. Magnin and Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Bloomingdales and Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, and Woodward and Lothrop in Washington. Copp and Brown made these cross-country jaunts the subject of a track entitled, “We’re Off on a Lengthy Trip, We Are!” which is an essential part of any road trip mix CD.

National toy manufacturers and media companies like Walt Disney had long marketed their wares in year-round toy departments that had emerged in American department stores during the 1910s and ‘20s: children were enticed to such spaces with parades, fairy-tale plays, and manufacturer-sponsored doll’s tea parties; and Mickey Mouse merchandize had been a fixture in toy departments since Disney sold his licensing rights in 1929. Copp and Brown hijacked this marketing infrastructure to sustain their two-man, unorthodox operation, and so became a “Disney alternative” for postwar children’s media in more ways than one.

The Talking House

2009-07-31T03:06:00.000-07:00

Jim Copp made his first album of children’s material, entitled “Jim Copp Tales,” in 1958. On subsequent releases throughout the 1960s, Copp worked with his partner Ed Brown to concoct a series of remarkable lo-fi soundscapes populated by a cast of indelible sonic characters. Copp explored the possibilities of multi-tracking with magnetic tape technology in much the same way as someone like Les Paul or rock producers at independent companies like Atlantic, King, Sun and Chess. Like those groundbreaking indie rock records, the tone and sensibility of Copp’s material provided an alternative to major label releases. As children’s culture, these records could be remarkably dark and surreal, and stand in stark contrast to the competition in the “kidisk” marketplace of this era. As a kind of “Disney alternative,” we should note that critics frequently compared Copp’s work to UPA animation. UPA was founded by animators who left the Disney studios and produced cartoons with a modern art aesthetic and experimental approach, as can be seen in the Mr. Magoo series, Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951) (based on a Dr. Seuss story), or The Unicorn in the Garden (1953) (the product of a collaboration with James Thurber). As UPA had brought a sense of postwar modern design and a literate sensibility to children’s animation, so Copp was seen to be bringing a degree of sly sophistication and a modern sound to children’s records.

Listen to Copp’s “Miss Goggins and the Gorilla” from his debut LP. Notice the intricate layering of tracks to create the cacophony of a school choir in which Copp performs all the voices. We might also note the various degrees of gentle satire going on here: first of course, the satire of the truly repulsive and ridiculous authority figure; but second, of joyless music education for children. Keep in mind that many kid’s records released by the larger record companies during this era featured lessons in music appreciation.

Tracks heard on other Copp and Brown LPs confirm the duo’s claim that their records were as much for “sophisticated adults” as they were for “small fry.” The wistful “Cloudy Afternoon” is a Proustian childhood reverie, filled with the remembered details of a bike ride through the park during a rainstorm. Perhaps most remarkable however, both in terms of content and production, is “The Talking House,” from the 1961 LP, “East of Flumdiddle.”

This track contains many unforgettable sounds: the ghostly melody played by the old man, created through a combination of piano, celesta and a guitar soaked in Sun Studio-esque slapback echo; the eerie voices of the talking furniture; and the uncanny whispered epigraph, “flowers fade fast, but leather will last.” Besides it’s striking sound, that line of dialogue drives home the fact that Copp was moving into largely uncharted territory for children’s records at this time. “The Talking House” deals head-on with issues of aging, loneliness, and death, and in a tone that denies easy morals or sentimentality. “He doesn’t like us because we’re old,” says the rocking chair. What’s more, the whole piece takes on a vaguely disorienting and dreamlike quality as Mark moves further into the creepy, and increasingly animated old house. When he finally meets the old man, it feels as though Mark is somehow confronting himself, and observing the stages of his own life. The kind of thematic and stylistic density found here rewards careful and repeated listening, and just as Phil Spector once claimed to be making “little symphonies for the kids,” so Copp and Brown brought a care and intelligence to children’s record production that pushed the boundaries of the medium and took the youth audience seriously.

The Noisy Eater

2009-06-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

This is the first of several tributes to Jim Copp: an overlooked master in the art of sound recording during the era of magnetic tape. In the field of postwar children’s records, Copp was Les Paul, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and Lee Perry rolled into one. Copp wrote, performed, engineered and produced a series of children’s records throughout the 1950s and ‘60s. Recorded in his home with only the help of partner Ed Brown, Copp used overdubbing to create an unforgettable cast of characters, comic scenes, and vignettes. He edited his tapes by hand until they resembled works of musique concrete, and used ingenious lo-fi recording techniques to create fantastic soundscapes. The resulting mini-masterpieces were then released on his own independent label, “Playhouse Records,” and Brown and Copp distributed them on cross-country tours of department stores. The records themselves contain darkly funny skits and songs that resemble Edward Lear or Fleischer Brothers animation, and came in Brown’s elaborate LP packaging designs that included Copp’s Thurber-esque line drawings. Put it all together and you get a sense of the richness of the Playhouse Records catalog, what one critic called the “Disney alternative” for thousands of kids in the postwar era.

Born in Los Angeles in 1913, Copp studied at Stanford and Harvard. After college he performed In New York nightclubs as a piano player and surreal comic in an act billed as “James Copp III and His Things.” Legendary producer John Hammond saw his act and liked it, and booked Copp in nightclub appearances in the early 1940s, including an appearance opening up for Billie Holiday. After a stint serving in an intelligence unit during World War II, Copp relocated to Los Angeles, where he wrote a society column called “Skylarking” for the Los Angeles Times from 1950 to 1956. His first column demonstrates his absurdist sensibility: “a few things we are NOT going to write about. WE ARE NOT going to write about orangutans. That is final. If a group of them get together to hold a dance, and ask to have their names in the paper, they may rest assured we’ll be uncooperative. This column will not be concerned with orangutans.” After “Skylarking,” Copp’s off-the-wall approach became even more pronounced in a mock-prognostication column he wrote for the Times called “The Eyes of Argus.” In a typical entry, Copp had the reader work out their daily score: “If you are outdoors at this moment, score yourself 5 points. If you are in a room with papered walls, score 10. If the wallpaper has a flowered design, add 1…if you have (or have ever had) an uncle younger than you, add 6. If you read any part of a novel yesterday, add 3. Now add up your score.” Copp then gave his predictions: “If your score is zero, you will meet a sailor within the year. He will become a real pal… If your score is 3-6, your nails need attention… If your score is 8 or 9, eat a radish… If your score is 14-16, the wife of a bricklayer will call you by mistake… If you score is 17-20, you would have excelled at the hammer throw”, and so on.

It was around this time that Copp made his first children’s record. In 1952 he approached Capitol Records with a pitch for a project called “The Noisy Eater.” Capitol liked the idea but wanted Jerry Lewis to record it instead of Copp. Copp got writing credits on the record, which was performed by Lewis and produced by Alan Livingston, the Capitol executive behind their hugely successful Bozo records.

On the surface, the “The Noisy Eater” is similar to many other “manners” records being released at the time, but there are some notable differences. First, there is a certain dark, Edward Gorey-esque humor to the depiction of parental authority: notice how his parents kick him out of the house for his bad table manners. What is more, the record comes close to overturning its own pedagogical motives by lingering for so long on the wonderfully repulsive sounds of Lewis’ noisy eating. In that way, the record is the sonic equivalent of cheap, garishly colorful candies like “Space Dust” and “gross-out” toys that are the antithesis of adult conceptions of healthy or quality kids’ culture, and are indeed enjoyed by children precisely because they disgust their parents. Finally, we should note the quirky musical number and the unexpectedly clever way in which the record ends. All of these distinctive qualities would become even more pronounced when Copp began making his own records.

Uncle Josh Buys a Victrola

2009-05-13T10:04:00.000-07:00

In his phonographic “descriptive specialties,” Cal Stewart played the role of a gullible Yankee rube named Uncle Josh Weathersby from the fictional town of Pumpkin Center. Alongside Uncle Josh’s comical encounters with modernity in New York City, Stewart’s records also featured descriptions of everyday life in Pumpkin Center: a rural, northeastern town populated by a recurring cast of rustic characters. Stewart’s Pumpkin Center stories illustrate what Raymond Williams calls a knowable community: “a whole community, wholly knowable.” Williams argued that in literature, such a community was often set in the past, in a country village that was held up as an epitome of “direct relationships,” as opposed to the opacity of the city. When placed in their turn of the century context, we might say that Uncle Josh records addressed what Richard Terdiman has called the “memory crisis” of the modern era: listeners got a lesson in how to navigate the “newly disquieting lack of transparency” in a New York City bus or department store; and at the same time, were provided with a reassuring representation of a traditional society in which people carried “their pasts and meanings openly,” a past still tantalizingly knowable through the community of Pumpkin Center. Uncle Josh records are keyed at exactly the spot where past and present; modern and traditional; rural and urban intersect; and Stewart’s performances function to define those distinctions through the voice of the Yankee rube. Stewart’s records were pioneering responses to a crisis in memory caused by the dislocations of modernity, responses that took the form of products of the emerging memory industry. On “Uncle Josh buys a Victrola” (Victor 1919), our Yankee protagonist brings a new phonograph player to Pumpkin Center and “in less than no time” the entire town has gathered in his house to listen to it. Uncle Josh plays religious records for Deacon Witherspoon, opera for Hank Weaver, “Silver Threads Among the Gold” has “the womenfolk pretty nigh crying,” and later they play jazz records over the telephone to neighboring Hickory Corners. At one point, Uncle Josh plays a rather strange record to the assembled villagers.

This depiction of Pumpkin Center convened around the phonograph, listening to records about themselves, is a striking moment of media reflexivity, as well as an early instance of product placement, but it is also emblematic of the modern media’s emergence as a central force in the forging of collective memory and identity. The knowable community of Pumpkin Center that had served as a reassuring embodiment of the past, now consumes itself in the form of a product of the “memory industries.”

New Years at Old Trinity

2009-04-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

[Taken from a forthcoming article co-written with Patrick Feaster]

Film scholars have typically taken film editing as the primary gauge of measuring narrative expression in early cinema. Dramatic routines heard on early phonograph records reveal sonic analogues to some much-discussed cinematic editing techniques. In the case of the Haydn Quartet’s New Years at Old Trinity (Victor 1904), a group of young men are heard to gather outside a church in downtown New York City in the moments before midnight on New Year’s Eve. One of the men addresses the group: “Say boys, I’ve got a good story to tell you,” he says, “you know that Jones girl with the black eyes?” He is interrupted by one of his friends, who jokes, “who gave ’em to her?” The group laughs, and the conversation stops as we hear the sounds of revellers in the background. After a moment, a voice announces, “Hold on boys, the chimes are going to play.” We hear the sound of the church chimes, and the young man returns to his story. Before long, he is interrupted again, this time by an Irish policeman who says, “Move along there, don’t block up the sidewalk.” Later the men are narrowly missed by a passing car that hits a dog, and then by Columbia University students singing their school song. “Say, will you ever finish that story?” one of the men asks. The answer is no, as after the group sings “Auld Land Syne,” the record ends with the sound of the church clock striking twelve and the eruption of noisy celebration at the arrival of the New Year.

The young man’s never-finished story becomes a unifying narrative theme joining together disparate bits of ethnic humor and scenic interest, but note how the shifting back and forth between multiple scenes can be heard as a sonic analogue to crosscutting or parallel editing: editing which moves between simultaneous events in separated locales. The impression created by the intercalation of the young man’s storytelling and the various events surrounding and interrupting it is not so much that these events are unfolding in linear time as that they are different, virtually simultaneous events taking place in a larger contiguous space. Like crosscutting, the sonic narrative technique heard here provides a heightened sense of suspense, since it builds the listeners anticipation of hearing the end of the young man’s story, as well as the arrival of midnight. The richness and diversity of audio story-telling techniques heard on early recordings captured in a “single shot” suggests an over-reliance on editing as the guiding consideration for narrative development in the modern media. Phonograph records such as New Years at Old Trinity, Night Trip to Buffalo, Trip to the County Fair, and Muggsy’s Dream were developing their own complex and compelling narrative language for depicting multiple times and spaces, as well as various subjective states.

1942 Lifebuoy radio ad

2009-02-01T03:34:00.000-08:00

One day in the late 1930s, Gilbert H. Wright was shaving with an electric razor, when he noticed that “queer sounds came out of his mouth” when the razor passed over his Adam’s apple. He soon discovered that by silently articulating words with his mouth and lips, the sound of the razor was formed into speech. From this initial observation, Wright developed a device that he dubbed the Sonovox, whereby a sound recording was fed into two hand-held speakers that would be placed on each side of the throat. Whatever sounds were on the recording were transmitted to the larynx, so that they came out of the throat as if produced there, and could then be shaped into speech by articulating the desired words. Sounds could thus be made to speak, or as a 1939 Time magazine article put it: “a grunting pig, relayed through the human voice-box, can be made to observe: ‘It’s a wise pig who knows his own fodder.’” What practical applications could be found for Wright’s bizarre invention in the early 1940s?

The Sonovox found one of its most lucrative implementations in the field of radio advertising. Wright’s Sonovox made its broadcasting debut in September 1941, a time when the radio industry was debating the role of spot advertisements. A widespread radio advertising technique of that time was the musical jingle. Advertisers had learned from market research that the repetition provided by jingles was an important form of brand identification. The Sonovox was thought to provide some of the same sonic attributes and benefits, and Wright’s brother-in-law, James L. Free, who worked in radio advertising, actively shopped the Sonovox to the industry. The Sonovox’s distinction in the field of radio advertising, one article stated, was that it could “make a vacuum cleaner talk.” On radio ads of this time, Wright’s invention sometimes made musical instruments speak commercial messages: in a Shell ad, an organ said, “Stop at the sign of the Shell”; a Colgate ad featured a Novachord playing the tune of “Good Night, Ladies,” which was made to say, “V-E-L, my hands feel so soft and smooth with Vel. Vel swell, ladies.” The Sonovox also made objects speak: “pots and pans…sang that they just loved to be washed” in an advertisement for dish soap; a chugging locomotive became the words, “Bromo Seltzer”; and a car horn was made to say, “Better Buy Buick.” A 1942 radio spot for Lifebuoy soap begins with two long blasts of a foghorn.

Sonovox spot ads spurred the imagination of writers and advertisers who described a world of the not-so-distant future in which brand name goods would speak to consumers at every turn: one article gushed that a day would come “when sound will talk and sing on every side – not merely in the movies and on the air but all over the place, with bus horns proclaiming the name of the bus company, delivery trucks calling out their wares as they honk, and train whistles announcing the name of the train. Once it would have been regarded as exotic if milk trucks could moo. Thanks to Sonovox, they can now moo the name of the dairy.” Such fantasies may not have materialized, but Sonovox radio spots were certainly precursors to well-known animated television ads of the 1950s that depicted square-dancing Lucky Strike cigarettes, marching Rheingold beer bottles, and singing Muriel cigars. In his famous description of the commodity fetish, Karl Marx offered the image of a table that, as soon as it becomes a commodity, changes into a thing that “stands on its head, and evolves out of its brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” The Sonovox seemed to provide commodities the chance not only to come to life, but to articulate some of those “grotesque ideas” directly to consumers.

Silent George(s)

2009-01-03T06:22:00.000-08:00

Rudy Ray Moore, who just passed away last October, is best known for his starring role in the “Dolemite” blaxploitation films of the mid 1970s, but he first achieved media notoriety as the creator of a series of party records that featured recitations such as “The Great Titanic” and “The Signifying Monkey.” Some of Moore’s records were re-makes of earlier under the counter “blue discs” or “party records”. Consider Moore and his collaborator Lady Reed’s version of a blue disc entitled “Silent George.” The source text of Moore and Reed’s adaptation was released anonymously on a 78 rpm record circa the 1930s, and begins with a man’s half-whispered voice.

“Silent George” stands out among pre-1950s blue discs because of its female narrator and breathless performance of passion. But equally notable is the record’s subsequent appearance in African American culture. Swing bandleader Lucky Millinder released a musical version in 1950, and Rudy Ray Moore’s version of “Silent George” was released on the album “The Rudy Ray Moore House Party Album, The Dirty Dozens, Vol. 1” (Cherry Red Records). Moore and Reed stick closely to the earlier version of “Silent George,” but Moore’s remake does more than duplicate the blue disc. Note that it is Moore in the role of Clotia, narrating the sexual action in an exaggerated falsetto voice: both an instance of female impersonation and vocal whiteface that “signifies” on white performance. Meanwhile, Lady Reed complicates the listener’s engagement with the interaction between George and Clotia by making sardonic comments as she secretly watches the amorous couple.

By simultaneously presenting a recording of a past era and Reed’s sly commentary on it, Moore’s “Silent George” feels a bit like an audio version of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” But more than nostalgia or cynical irony, Moore and Reed’s performances send up mainstream white erotica, and by extension certain white sexual preoccupations. For example, blue discs typically only provide verbal descriptions of female bodies. Recall the introductory framing material on the blue disc version of “Silent George,” in which a male speaker colludes with the audience and asks that we visualize “a beautiful young girl.” Lady Reed’s commentary on “Silent George” displays an open and unabashed appreciation of the male body: it is Lady Reed who colludes with listeners and encourages us to visualize George. Where the blue disc of “Silent George” ends with Mary Jones’ calls for her “Daddy,” Moore and Reed’s record returns to the introductory narrative frame, as the two friends leave the lovemaking couple to walk back to the party. This framing narrative depicts a platonic male – female friendship that contrasts with the ridiculously empurpled George and Clotia, and so broadens the scope of the routine beyond the heterosexual couple. To put it another way, Moore and Reed’s revisions make us hear blue discs such as “Silent George” in a considerably whiter shade of blue – that is, they make us hear the white, middle-class origins of much “blue” material.

Lt. Rudder

2008-12-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

Under-the-counter recordings of erotic material – referred to as either “blue discs” or “party records” – have circulated since at least the 1930s, but attained a new degree of cultural visibility in the 1950s and ‘60s, when they were often intended for a culture of male hi-fi aficionados. Many American men developed an interest in high fidelity audio equipment after World War II, in part because of the extensive electronics training they received in the armed forces. Risqué records provided a means of bringing frank discussions of sex and the rough language traditionally associated with men into the home. Military themes are prevalent on postwar party records, from Fax’s series of “Wild Service Songs” albums to blue discs that dramatized the experience of American soldiers. For example, a record from the late 1940s entitled “Lt. Rudder” features a routine that circulated amongst soldiers during the final years of World War II. The routine was described in a 1945 Associated Press article:

Someone got weary of reading the honeyed accounts of America’s returning air warriors and wrote a parody account of the homecoming of such a gay, cocky, young flier that has half the European theater of operations in stitches. The pilots, themselves, think it is wonderful, because they think the acclaim that greets their exploits is sometimes false and foolish and smacks of mock heroics.

The newspaper article could only reprint what it called a “heavily censored” version of the routine, with apologies to the original anonymous author, “in whatever pub or opium den he lies dreaming.” The under-the-counter recording of the routine however, was free to unleash Lt. Rudder in all his gay, cocky glory.
The “Lt. Rudder” skit articulated soldiers’ ambivalent feelings about re-integrating into civilian life, where very different social rules held sway than in the homosocial context of the military. The record begins as an elaborate send-up of radio: following a fake commercial, we hear an earnest announcer declare that he is taking us to LaGuardia Airport for a special broadcast to welcome home Lt. Ronald Rudder, one of “America’s leading aces” overseas. Listen to the two sides of the record here:

The “Lt. Rudder” record mocks the platitudes and clichés of “false and foolish” accounts of male wartime experience – accounts that are associated both with feminized domestic life as well as broadcasting. Unlike radio and television, bawdy phonograph records such as “Lt. Rudder” and “In Hawaii” (a blue disc that dramatizes the adventures of two “lovable Marines” on leave in Honolulu), could present the rough, frank talk of soldiers, while also providing a means of virtual escape from a postwar domestic space increasingly devoted to family togetherness.

Doing the Bard

2008-11-14T11:48:00.000-08:00

American improvisation comedy is typically traced to Chicago’s Compass Theater, formed by David Shepherd and Paul Sills in 1955. The Compass encouraged an interactive and spontaneous relationship between performer and audience akin to European cabaret. The two most famous practitioners of the Compass school of improv were known to the American public in large part though LP records: Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Nichols and May were not the first Compass graduates to find success in the record business. Shelley Berman got his start as an entertainer at the Compass, where he was often teamed up with Nichols and May. Berman set out on his own as a stand-up comedian, and his much-imitated telephone monologues were part of an act that helped to invent what is now called “observational” comedy. Berman’s LPs, which were soon followed up the charts by the albums of Jonathan Winters and Bob Newhart, marked the beginning of the comedy LP’s economic and cultural renaissance and helped to tip the industry balance toward the LP market.
Mike Nichols and Elaine May also began at the Compass, and like Berman, set out on their own in the late 1950s. An important break came when they appeared on the television show “Omnibus” in 1958, doing skits that they had developed on stage at the Compass. Though it was a television appearance that rocketed them to celebrity, the duo maintained a low profile on television even at the peak of their success, putting their creative energy instead into stage shows, radio appearances, and the release of chart-topping LPs. Not only did they concentrate on other media forms, but Nichols and May were known for a somewhat critical stance towards TV, and even turned down potentially lucrative network development deals. When they appeared at the Emmy Awards in 1959, May praised the men who “year in, year out,” were “quietly producing garbage.” Nichols played the winner of the “Total Mediocrity” award, and assured viewers that “no matter what suggestions the sponsors make, I take them”. The popular team was scheduled for a return performance at the 1960 Emmy Award show, but the sponsor, Proctor and Gamble, rejected their sketch just hours before the broadcast, and Nichols and May refused to replace the censored bit with old material. The sketch was to have featured Nichols presenting May with the “David Susskind award for contributing to the maturity and dignity of television.” After vigorously denying charges that television was controlled by advertisers, May was to remove a wig and make a plug for a home-permanent application. NBC and Proctor and Gamble found the bit to be “inappropriate,” particularly as it was to be immediately followed by an ad for the sponsor’s Lilt home-permanent.
Similar barbs at TV sponsorship can be found on a “Monitor” sketch called “Doing the Bard,” on which we hear Nichols recite a soliloquy from Hamlet until he is interrupted by May, who plays the representative of a beer company sponsoring the production.

Critiques of network sponsorship like the one found here, and their well-publicized experiences with the Emmy Awards show how comedy LPs could function in the 1960s and ‘70s as a potent medium for television criticism.

Cinderella, and A Trip to the Circus

2008-10-04T06:18:00.000-07:00

It can be argued that the history of the children’s phonograph record begins with the history of recorded sound itself, since the oft-repeated “creation story” of the phonograph has Thomas Edison reciting the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into his tinfoil recording device. Phonograph historian Patrick Feaster has suggested that this heart-warming anecdote is quite probably a re-write of history: given Edison’s penchant for salty humor, the first test was likely to have been quite different. Nonetheless, from the very beginning, the phonograph was cast as a device with a certain affinity for children’s entertainment. In fact, one of Edison’s earliest intended uses for recorded sound was to make children’s dolls that could speak. In 1890, Edison outfitted his West Orange, New Jersey laboratory as a production line for dolls containing tiny phonograph players. The dolls did not sell well, and the company folded in 1891, by which time the market for entertainment phonograph cylinders had begun to take off. Though the phonograph would not speak to American children through dolls, the major phonograph companies actively marketed their wares to children as early as the 1890s and 1900s.
“Juvenile records” were made by performers such as pioneer recording artist Len Spencer. On his Columbia 1899 recording of “Cinderella,” we hear Spencer say, “Now children, draw your little chairs near the Graphophone Grand, and Uncle John will tell you the story of Cinderella and the glass slipper.” At the end of the tale, Spencer says, “there now, wasn’t that a nice story? Run off to bed now little ones, kiss Uncle John ‘good night.’”

Gilbert Girard was the premiere vocal mimic of the early phonograph industry, and frequently applied his talents to making records for children. On titles such as “A Trip to the Circus” (Victor 1901) and “Auction Sale of a Bird and Animal Store” (Edison 1902), Girard and Len Spencer presented animal mimicry, auctioneer performance, and broad jokes: a range of offerings that could appeal to both children and adults. “A Trip to the Circus” (Victor 1901) is introduced as a “descriptive selection for the little folks,” and then we hear Spencer announce, “Now children, hold tight to my hand, and don’t get too near to the animals.” “Oh, see the elephants,” Spencer declares, and Girard provides a loud trumpeting sound.

We tend to think of the widespread introduction of television as the turning point in the marketing of media products to children because of the way in which it allowed advertisers a more direct link to children. But these records indicate, along with other recent scholarship on the history of children’s consumer culture, that children were seen as an important part of home media consumption decades before Disney, television, and even radio.

Flogging Scene From Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Crushed Tragedian

2008-09-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

Early phonograph records are a wonderful resource for understanding the acting styles of the turn of the century. Acting on the English and American stage before the late nineteenth century has frequently been described as featuring a “presentational” style with formulaic poses and gestures that were tied to specific expressive meanings. As the actor’s body was ostentatiously displayed in codified expressions, so too was the voice. Voice instructional manuals from the 1890s charted out connections between specific pitches and timbres of the voice and their meanings on the stage. In one manual from 1891, we are told that a “Bright” tone of voice relates to “Cheerfulness or Vitality,” a “Pure” voice to “Beauty,” and a “Gutteral” voice to “Hatred”. Performances found on some phonograph recordings from the turn of the twentieth century provide examples of how a voice trained in this manner might have sounded. Consider two recordings featuring Len Spencer, one of the most prolific phonograph artists in the 1890s and 1900s. A remarkably versatile performer, Spencer recorded comic skits, songs, as well as famous speeches and dramatic scenes. An example of that last category can be heard on Spencer’s “Flogging Scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Edison 1904), which also features a stark contrast between a “pure” and “gutteral” vocal style. The record begins with Tom’s low, rich voice slowly intoning, “I’ve come at last to the veil of shadows. My heart sinks and the tears roll from my poor old eyes.” Spencer then quickly shifts to a high-pitched, raspy sneer for the cruel overseer, who tells Tom, “Quit that howlin’. So you’ve made up your mind to run away, huh?” For the rest of the record, Spencer alternates between these two characters and their starkly defined vocal styles.

Spencer’s vocal performance of each character is steady and consistent: the patterns of the voice do not so much adapt themselves to the meaning of particular lines, as represent the unwavering moral nature of the characters. One might even say that, in some regards, the lines become superfluous, or, as Simon Frith has stated in regard to the singing of popular music, the words function primarily as the “signs of a voice.”
By the turn of the century, this presentational approach to acting was in the process of being eclipsed by a more modern style and vocal training was one of the primary ways in which a shift in the acting styles of the late nineteenth century was understood. The new representational style of acting featured an attempt at a more “natural” style with fewer gestures, posturing and raised voices. The kind of vocal training outlined above would have been inappropriate for the psychological, drawing-room dramas coming into vogue at this time. Another record featuring Len Spencer can illustrate that the conventions of the stage voice were becoming outmoded by the early teens. Some of Spencer’s most famous work was done in conjunction with Ada Jones, one of the first female recording stars. In “The Crushed Tragedian” (Edison 1911) Spencer plays a pompous actor named Richard Chatterton who encounters a street-smart city girl played by Jones.

The girl’s distinction between acting on the stage and in films nicely demonstrates how the status of motion picture performers at this time was unclear. Chatterton becomes a laughable figure to the extent that he has fallen in love with his own voice, as can be heard by his extravagantly rolled r’s and grandiose tones. Those affectations are thrown into stark relief by Jones’ comparatively natural Bowery dialect. This record suggests that the vocal conventions of the histrionic stage were becoming all too audible as conventions to many listeners: a stylistic shift in which new media like cinema and the phonograph were playing an important role.

The Last Laugh

2008-08-22T10:42:00.001-07:00

Many recordings of prank phone calls hinge on the pleasures of impersonation. The telephone allowed the user into spaces and interactions that could or would not be broached in person. Even though people make most of their calls within the neighborhood in which they live, there still exists in the telephone the potential to transcend spatial boundaries within towns and neighborhoods and to interact with those who live “across the tracks.” That is, the phone can be used to infiltrate the spaces of economic or ethnic “Others.” The ability to cross social boundaries is taken up by phone pranksters who infiltrate the homes of people whose ethnicity, race or class might typically have prevented a face-to-face interaction. The infiltration of space on prank calls is often achieved through the vocal impersonation of ethnic, racial and class types. Impersonation was relatively easy to achieve on the telephone, a context where signs of class and background that would be obvious in face-to-face exchanges were, in Carolyn Marvin’s words, “disturbingly invisible.”
One prankster who utilizes gender impersonation is Brother Russell, whose victims are the hosts of ultra-conservative Christian radio call-in shows. Russell often impersonates an elderly Christian woman, and on a call titled “The Last Laugh,” he poses as an elderly woman named Emily and asks for a prayer for “her” wayward nephew. After the prayer is performed over the radio, she and the radio preacher exchange bursts of ecstatic laughter. The title of the track becomes clear when, just as the stirring background music swells, Emily’s laughter becomes both maniacal and clearly male.

Brother Russell subtly reveals his act of impersonation and the depth with which he was able to infiltrate the show’s religious proceedings. The call features a remarkable vocal “sleight of hand” when the impersonation is suddenly revealed. The sound-only environment of the telephone allows for this stunning technique, a performance somewhere between quick-change slapstick comedy and the digital morphing of 1990s cinema.
The play with morphing flexible identities through vocal performance suggests how telephone interaction might be compared to other recent media practices. Scholars writing about new digital media have often described how identity can become fluid and flexible in the virtual space of the Internet. Much of the academic analysis of race and gender on the Internet has stressed the virtual, fragmented nature of online identity. Examples of prank and obscene phone calling reveal how a similar flexibility existed in the virtual space of telephone talk. But race tends to assert its presence on the Internet nonetheless, in the language and graphic images users employ. Similarly, the fluidity of identity heard on prank calls is not used to eliminate social or racial hierarchies, but instead to bring them into even sharper focus.

Cohen ‘Phones For a ‘Phone

2008-08-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

This is the first of two entries on recordings of prank phone calls: a fascinating amateur comedy entertainment based on secret recording.

Though anxieties about telephone misuse existed at the turn of the century, anonymous prank calling would have been difficult in an era of operator switchboards and party lines. During the first decades of the century, telephone service involved routing calls to a central office where the caller would speak to an operator who would manually connect the two parties. Operator switching made anonymous calling difficult if not impossible since the operator knew the source of any incoming call. Further, it was widely believed that operators eavesdropped on conversations. Operator switching would also have made evident the way in which the phone exchange represented a modern technological and social network or what Tom Gunning, in his analysis of how the telephone functions in the films of Fritz Lang, describes as a “technological web”.
A genre of popular phonograph records recorded in the first decades of the twentieth century illustrate some ways in which the social and technological network of the phone was experienced at this time. “Cohen on the Telephone” was a popular comedy skit that was recorded by numerous performers and record labels between 1910 and 1930. “Cohen” records are an example of the ethnic stereotyping typical of the Vaudeville stage and heard on much of the early output of the phonograph industry. Cohen is a Jewish immigrant whose comic monologs are motivated by telephone conversations in which he is unable to accomplish his goals, most often due to misunderstandings based on his thick European accent. On the majority of Cohen records, we hear only Cohen’s side of the conversation: a technique for motivating a comedic monolog employed more recently by performers such as Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart and Lily Tomlin. An interesting variation on that form can be heard on a record featuring Joe Hayman, a performer credited as the originator of the Cohen character. Note how, on “Cohen ‘Phones for a ‘Phone” (Columbia), we are presented with a more complex range of characters in order to suggest the “technological web” of the telephone network.

The expanded cast is used to represent the social network of the telephone as tangled, confusing, and overwhelming. We laugh at Cohen’s difficulty in navigating through a bureaucratic telephonic space where visual cues are absent and standards of social status and decorum become uncertain.
Cohen makes clear how not to behave on the telephone, demonstrating Jonathan Sterne’s assertion that “early telephone conversation was a learned skill,” and enacting a cautionary tale for an immigrant population struggling to learn the codes of modernity. But Cohen is not presented solely for ridicule: after all, he has the best lines and his sardonic wisecracks and asides work to forge a sense of camaraderie with the listener. Indeed, part of the popularity of these sketches, presumably with immigrants very similar to the hapless Cohen, can be traced to the way in which Cohen’s failures can be due as much to the deficiencies of the telephone as to his inability to cope with modernity. Either way, the Cohen sketches demonstrate how telephone service with operator switching was experienced as an entry point to, and reflection of, larger social networks of the modern city: the phone is Cohen’s connection to his landlord, the phone company, the plumber, the health department, and the gas company. “Cohen ‘Phones for a ‘Phone” also illustrates another reason why anonymous calling would have been difficult at this time: party lines. One might never be sure when “some guy on the wire” might “butt in,” or simply listen in to a personal conversation. Cohen records represent telephonic space as a confusing urban grid as well as a crowded modern street.

The Okeh Laughing Record

2008-08-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

Besides Steve Porter’s “Laughing Spectator,” a lot of laughter can be heard on early phonograph records. One of the most successful examples was the “Okeh Laughing Record,” released in 1922. This recording did so well that it was quickly followed by two sequels called, not surprisingly, “The Second Laughing Record” and “The Okeh Laughing Dance Record.” In the most prevalent model of the laughing record genre, a recurring, elementary narrative frames the laughter. The record begins with a very solemn performance of a musical solo (often a horn or a vocal performance). The introductory music on these laughing records establishes a classical performance with a one-to-one relationship between the musical performer and a listener. This performance is then punctuated by a fluff of some kind, an audible (sometimes barely audible) mistake that interrupts the smooth flow of the musical solo. Immediately following the mistake, a woman is heard to break out laughing. As the recording develops, the musician nobly tries to continue the instrumental solo, but the laughter of the woman in the audience proves so unsettling and infectious that the performer “cracks up” as well, revealing his identity as a man. What follows for the rest of the record are waves of laughter from both the man and woman, each one’s guffaws stimulating and encouraging the other’s, interspersed by short-lived attempts by the man to return to his performance.

The main purpose of these recordings seems to have been the incitation of the listener’s infectious laughter, a project in which they were successful far beyond the scope of their local cultural origins. Early gramophone producer F.W. Gaisberg wrote that Burt Sheppard’s “Laughing Record” was “world famous,” and had sold “over half a million in India alone.” He provides this brief description of its reception: “In the bazaars of India I have seen dozens of natives seated on their haunches round a gramophone, rocking with laughter, whilst playing Sheppard’s laughing record.” It seems to me that laughing records helped to ease anxieties about a potentially disturbing new medium. Laughter served as a kind of suture between the rigid and the flexible, the social and the individual, the mechanical and the human. The incitation of infectious laughter in the listener would work to remove anxiety about interacting with a machine, making the phonographic apparatus appear more “human.” The ability of a mechanical recording to “crack up” helps it to emanate a sense of authentic presence and humanity. Laughing records, then, were important ways of establishing the credibility and authenticity of early recordings, alleviating the anxiety of hearing a disembodied, recorded voice.

The Laughing Spectator

2008-08-05T01:38:00.001-07:00

Hello, and welcome to this new blog: Vocal Tracks. Each post will include a sound recording and some of my comments on it. The first several entries will be recordings that are discussed in my book, VOCAL TRACKS: PERFORMANCE AND SOUND MEDIA (University of California Press 2008). After that, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on whatever wonders of the century of recorded sound have most recently captured my fancy. I’m starting out this month with the record that I use to begin my book: Steve Porter’s “The Laughing Spectator” from 1908. It’s a record that was released in only the second decade that sound recordings were mass-marketed for entertainment. Made at the dawn of an era of mass media, “The Laughing Spectator” demonstrates the remarkable versatility of the voice as an instrument of performance.

In the course of little more than two minutes, we have heard a spoken announcement, a comic dialogue, the laughter of an audience, and singing. Porter’s voice is more versatile than it might at first appear, since he is performing the parts of both Mac and Reilly. In this, Porter was part of a phonographic tradition in which performers would play multiple parts of a dramatic routine. Such an act often had to be specifically identified on record company promotional material to be fully appreciated, and the brief opening dialogue with the “Professor” (“Say, Mac, where’s your partner?”) is meant to cue the listener to appreciate the full dimensions of Porter’s vocal achievement. This is only one way in which performers took advantage of how the modern media separated them in time and space from their audiences. But of all the voices we hear, it is the performance of the laughing spectator himself that fascinates me. We hear an individual performer emerge from an anonymous, undifferentiated audience. As we recognize that goat-like laughter as a performance, the laughter of the crowd is made to seem “real,” even though the sounds of the audience are every bit as constructed a performance as the other sounds we hear. But the “The Laughing Spectator” can also illustrate how the sound media have gravitated toward the voice at the limits of language. Consider how the wordless vocalizing of the eponymous hero is able, through his unrestrained and unmistakable laughter, not only to distinguish himself from the rest of the audience, but eventually to join the performers onstage: the voice that functions as an index of the body in the throes of raw, unrestrained emotion upstages a comic performance built on wordplay. Modern media technologies have been adept at capturing expressions such as this, and in the process have redefined what counts as performance and allowed us to hear the voice in new ways.