Category: Music

The Misery of Peter, Paul & Mary

When I was a little kid, up to the time when the Beatles arrived in America, and beyond, the first three Peter, Paul & Mary albums were played a lot at home. They were my first popular musical reference point.

Listening to those old mono LP’s this week for the first time in years, I’m struck by how depressing they all are! Even “Puff the Magic Dragon” is sad. I guess “If I Had a Hammer” is supposed to be the happy song?

Many of the songs are weighed down by allusions to Biblical times. This one, from the second album, is filled with despair. It’s based on a tune from sometime in the 1800’s.

This reminds me of John Lennon making fun of protest songs in the 1965 Beatles fan club Christmas record, with Ringo tossing in a River Jordan dig for good measure. Later on, John was of course big on protest songs himself.

This must be the first time I have ever significantly revised my view of some of the music that I grew up with. “Rock and Roll Music” is the only bouncy and fun Peter Paul & Mary record that comes to mind. But I think its message rings hollow, serving not to knock those other artists, but to point out just how good they were.

Needle Exchange

I posted this in the Turntables group on Facebook. It’s a “private” group with almost 13,000 members. Is it any wonder that records continue their hold over obsessive hobbyists, against other music formats?

For a few years after college I earned a very modest living talking into a mic at an AM radio station. The format was Adult Contemporary, and the program manager let the DJ’s take whatever records we wanted the station couldn’t play. Recently I was asked if the DJ demo records of old were “hot stampers.” From the records I got from work long ago, and still have, I’d say yes.

For example, there is my copy of Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Live at Hollywood High. In my Pioneer PL-112D turntable I like using P-Mount cartridges with standard adapters. The VTA [vertical tracking angle] hits nicely with the fixed height of the tonearm. My Grado Green completely falls apart on the hot grooves of “Accidents Will Happen.” It buzzes like crazy on Elvis’ vocal! Swapping in my humble Audio-Technica AT-92ECD, installed in a spare head shell, it easily sails right through the same track.

Record Swap

The 2008 Universal Studios backlot fire is an infamous event for music business artists and insiders. “None of the masters are there,” said the COO at that time. Uh…….. not true, at least for the music.

A New York Times feature about the fire two years ago revealed the significance of the warehouse burning down, if not the true extent of the loss.

A year ago there was an update from the new management at UMG. It’s a lot of corporate spin that downplays the loss and provides no actual specifics. “Responding as quickly as possible”… twelve years after the event.

We are committed to responding as quickly as possible with complete transparency to any artist who inquires about master recordings in our archives. However, it can take weeks to conduct research on a single artist in order to present an accurate picture of the assets we have.

The music biz people I’m in touch with, who specialize in reissues from original master recordings, say the loss was far worse than the NYT was able to uncover. The fire was the result of simple and stupid carelessness by night shift workers.

That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. They finished the job at 3 a.m. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled. But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up.

I sent the NYT article to tastewar, and in return he sent this one to me. It’s about a rich Brazilian, named Zero Freitas, who’s been buying up every vinyl recording he can get, literally millions of them, regardless of genre.

What irony that a guy in Brazil, on his own, is doing more for the preservation of records than UMG did for the recordings they were in charge of protecting.

This reminds me of something that I was going to post a few years ago. Wait. A few years? Eight years ago! It’s Rutherford Chang’s White Album exhibit in New York.

For Once In My Life, Spare Me

Ah, NOS. That self-contradictory term, New Old Stock.

It’s a spindle/bearing assembly for my 1976 vintage Pioneer PL-112D turntable. The old assembly is in the picture. It had a bothersome spur on the top edge. I tried to smooth it out but, of course, that only made things worse.

Fortunately, an eBay seller has some Pioneer NOS spare parts at a reasonable price. An easy 10-minute job, even with replacing the original oil that still looked fresh after more than 40 years. The oil in the old spindle/bearing was black.

The book is Joel Whitburn’s authoritative compilation of 1960’s music charts from Billboard magazine. A gift from good, ol’ Denro. I got it out after Pandora played Frank Sinatra doing “For Once in My Life,” from his 1969 album My Way.

[“Frank Sinatra saved my life once. He said, ‘Okay, boys. That’s enough.'” – Shecky Greene]

Stevie Wonder had a #2 hit with the tune, released November 2, 1968. It stayed on the charts for 14 weeks.

But wait, was Stevie the first to release the song as a single? Jackie Wilson’s recording of “For Once in My Life” came out THE VERY SAME DAY, but it lasted only 3 weeks, reaching #70 on Billboard.

But wait again. Sinatra’s pal Tony Bennett beat Stevie and Jackie by more than a year, with his record coming out on September 9, 1967. Tony’s take on the song lasted for 19 weeks on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, and it reached #8.

You may have heard that Tony, who is 94, has Alzheimer’s Disease. If Bennett dies tonight Denro will blame me, and rightly so, given my track record of famous people dying soon after I mention them. It’s my deadly superpower.