Category: Music

Audio’s magnetic personality

Magnetic recording tape. Perfected by the Nazis, it is one of the most important innovations in the history of audio, along with Edwin Armstrong’s invention of frequency modulation. These two technologies changed everything.

Magnetic recording in studios, and vinyl microgroove records for homes, first appeared at about the same time — 1947-1948. The transistor was also created in 1947, but it wouldn’t be established in high fidelity audio for another 20 years.

The first tape recorders were brought to America from Germany after World War II by a man named Jack Mullin, who modified one of the units and demonstrated it for Bing Crosby’s technical producer. The tale is told at the end of this link, with the fascinating story of the development of videotape.

Jack Mullin, Frank Healey, Wayne Johnson, Bing Crosby

On October 1, 1947, two takes of Philco Radio Time with Bing Crosby were recorded magnetically by Mullin, and edited into a single, seamless show. The audio player has a minute of that historic program, preceded by a minute of how Bing sounded on January 29 of that year, using disc recording technology. You may recognize the name of Bing’s guitar player, whose son had a successful career as a record producer and musician, and be sure to catch the name of Bing’s arranger-conductor, who would later have a connection to the Peanuts TV specials.

With Crosby’s financial backing, Ampex began manufacturing tape recorders. One of the first production units was given to Les Paul, who had played guitar for Bing. It’s impossible to overstate the influence of what Les Paul did with his tape recorders.

Here are a couple of captivating videos of Les with Mary Ford, performing two of their best known numbers, taken from films of TV shows. Ironically, Ampex wouldn’t perfect magnetic videotape recording until Les and Mary were off of TV. In the second clip, Les kids around before getting to the real demonstration of how he and Mary did what they did so beautifully. These are worth watching twice — first, for Les, and then for Mary. I eat up this stuff like ice cream.

These clips are being streamed from Oobleckboy on YouTube. The comments are his.

Dishing on the Dash

Sony’s new Internet appliance, the Dash, looks very slick, and Sony’s using a Beatles song to promote it. They can do that because they own the publishing rights to most of the Beatles catalog, but not the performance rights to the EMI/Apple recordings.

[media id=109 width=512 height=312]

Discussions about flexible-yet-limited Net appliances, like the Chumby and the Sony Dash, include a lot of naysayers. They call them glorified alarm clock radios, and for now they’re right, but in the big picture they’re wrong. Eventually you’ll see touch screen devices like these built into refrigerator doors.

Saturday Morning Beatles

Ah, Saturday morning TV in the 1960’s. A sublime mixture of awful-to-pretty good cartoons. During the Summer of Love, 1967, Marvel Comics featured this centerfold ad for ABC-TV’s “America’s Best TV Comics”. The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man were being introduced, having not been a part of the syndicated Marvel Super Heroes cartoon series from the year before.

The Beatles first appeared as cartoon characters on US TV in 1965. How Brian Epstein cut the deal is explained in a book, now out of print, called Beatletoons, by Mitchell Axelrod.

I have a fondness for the cheaply-produced Beatles cartoons, but it’s been said that John Lennon, persistent curmudgeon that he was, disliked them. This photo of Lennon contemplating some layout drawings seems to back that up.

The third season of the show would be the last to include some new material. Two of the titles — ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Nowhere Man’ — were later animated again, with strikingly different interpretations, for Yellow Submarine. It’s hard to believe that some of the people who worked on the Saturday morning cartoons were also involved with Yellow Submarine, but you’ll find some fab bits of surreal creativity in there.

By 1967 the Beatles looked nothing like they had in 1964-65, yet their character designs didn’t change. The producer of the series, Al Brodax, more than made up for that with Yellow Submarine.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PRUE BURY!

Happy birthday to Prudence Bury, my all-time favorite Beatles girl. After many years of curiosity and sporatic searching, I got serious about using the Internet to find Prue, and with the help of Lia Pamina I finally did. Prue and I began corresponding last year, and an in-person introduction is tentatively scheduled for this coming September.

Having wondered about Prue since seeing a 10th anniversary screening of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, I had built up a rather idealized image of her in my mind. I wasn’t prepared for how easily she breezed past that ideal, totally knocking me out with her charm, humor, warmth, and sincerity.

Independent of her Beatles connection, Prue Bury is impressive and accomplished, and she is the very definition of a true Class Act. It is my great privilege to know her in a small way.