Author: DOuG pRATt

It was fifty years ago today…

… George Martin told the band to play.

http://youtu.be/i1mgIZrlLSE

From Bruce Spizer’s Beatle.net.

June 6, 2012 is the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first visit to Abbey Road Studios. The group, consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best, arrived at what was then called EMI Studios on June 6, 1962, for a commercial test (an evaluation of a signed artist). Two days earlier, the band had signed a recording contract with “The Parlophone Company Limited of Hayes in the County of Middlesex.” The group was paid Musicians Union rates for the June 6 session, indicating that the Beatles were in fact EMI recording artists by the time they arrived at Abbey Road.

Engineers attending the session in Studio Two remember the poor shape of the group’s equipment, particularly Paul’s bass amp, which was deemed unusable due to its rattling and rumbling. Engineers Norman Smith and Ken Townsend improvised and created a bass rig by soldering an input jack to a preamp and combining it with an amp and a large Tannoy speaker taken from Echo Chamber No. 1. A string was tied around John’s amplifier to prevent it from rattling. After resolving these problems, the Abbey Road staff was ready to record the group.

Four songs were recorded that day… What four songs were recorded by EMI at the Beatles commercial test held at Abbey Road Studios on June 6, 1962? Besame Mucho, P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why and Love Me Do. The first tune, written by Consuelo Velazquez and Sunny Skylar, was a Latin standard that came to the attention of the Beatles by way of the Coasters, who issued the song in two parts on Atco 6163 in 1960. The other three songs were Lennon-McCartney originals. The tape containing the songs was sent to EMI headquarters for evaluation and is presumed lost; however, acetates of Besame Mucho and Love Me Do survived. These songs were released in 1995 on Anthology 1. All three of the Lennon-McCartney songs were later re-recorded for commercial release, with Love Me Do and P.S. I Love You issued as the Beatles first single and Ask Me Why appearing as the B-side to the group’s second single.

The Father of Modern Science Fiction

Ray Bradbury has died. He called himself a writer of Fantasy fiction, but I think of Bradbury the same way as I do Vonnegut, as a writer of “soft” Science Fiction, and he helped to redefine in my mind what the genre was, and could be. “Hard” Sci-Fi is old school, with an emphasis on getting the science right, or at least making it somewhat plausible. Bradbury’s plots include space ships and time travel, but these are merely the trappings of his stories. In contrast to the strength of Bradbury’s ideas, his prose has a delicacy that isn’t found in the work of Asimov or Heinlein.

Denro had these comments:

I recalled that everyone I knew read “Martian Chronicles” in Jr. High… not because we had too, but because we wanted to. That was my intro to Bradbury and still my favorite, I guess. Plenty of comic stories came out of there! Along with a comic book store name.

Being a collection of related short stories, The Martian Chronicles is a particularly accessible book for young readers. Not since reading Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman in the third grade had I been affected as much by a book as I was by The Martian Chronicles. Later, I was pleased to learn that in the 1950’s some of Bradbury’s stories had been adapted in comic books and in radio shows like X Minus 1.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/XMinus1_A/xminusone_550508_MarsIsHeaven.mp3|titles=X Minus One: Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury]

The Million Year Picnic is a comic book store in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. It was named by its founder Jerry Weist after the last story in The Martian Chronicles, and having opened in 1974 it was one of the first shops dedicated to selling comics.

WBZ’s Steve LeVeille announces retirement

Well, I sure don’t like this very much. In a surprise announcement on Facebook, one of my favorite radio guys, Steve LeVeille, who has the overnight shift on WBZ in Boston, is retiring at the end of the week.

Assuming this is entirely Steve’s decision, it comes only weeks after his friend Carl Beane, the Voice of Fenway Park, died of a heart attack while driving. Here’s a clip with Steve talking about Carl.

[audio:http://nyc.podcast.play.it/media/d0/d0/d1/d0/dI/dA/dR/10IAR_3.MP3|titles=Steve LeVeille on Carl Beane]

Why they fought

During World War II the English, minus Alfred Hitchcock who had left for America, somehow managed to not only make movies, they made some truly outstanding ones. I am particularly fond of the films that showed life on the home front. One of them is This Happy Breed, by Noel Coward and David Lean, and another is Millions Like Us, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. The latter film has a funny surprise in it for animation fans, because it uses Raymond Scott’s tune Powerhouse in a factory scene.

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2012/Millions.flv 400 300]

That double turntable setup with a single tonearm is neat. Powerhouse became a fixture in the Warner Bros. cartoons starting with Porky’s Pig Feat, as seen in this post from about a year ago. Porky’s Pig Feat was released on July 17, 1943, and Millions Like Us was released in the UK on November 5, 1943, so it would seem likely that somebody involved with the making the film had seen the cartoon.