[78-L] Glad you guys are back and Radiex Question

[Donna Halper]

>Steven wrote--
>
>(2) Grey Gull was famed for re-recording "hits" using different artists! As
>well, they usually DIDN'T re-print labels, since that cost MONEY...?!

For the newbies on the list, the owner of GG, Theodore Lyman Shaw, 
never spent money unless he absolutely had to.  That has always 
puzzled me, given that he came from a fabulously wealthy upper-class 
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family, with a long and distinguished 
history in Massachusetts.  But I think they all got upset with him 
because (a) he married a Catholic (gasp) and not just any Catholic 
but a manicurist... not exactly upper-class, don't ya know.  And (b) 
he didn't go into the family businesses (banking, real estate, 
dealing in antiques) but instead sunk some of the family money into 
creating and maintaining a recording studio and a record company, 
which at one time had offices in New York and Chicago as well as 
Massachusetts.  He became the black sheep of the Shaw family.  There 
was a period of time when it seems Theo did in fact try to promote 
and publicise his artists, but by the mid-1920s, rumours were 
circulating about his not paying them, plus the sound quality of the 
GG family of records was not exactly the best... And yet, he did have 
a good relationship with Andy Sannella and Mike Mosiello-- both did 
lots of work for him under a variety of names.  But other 
musicians... well, they didn't stay with him for very long, and by 
the late 1920s, just about nobody had much good to say about 
GG/Radiex/Van Dyke or anything else Theo put out.