[78-L] Introduction (a bit long)

[David Lennick]

What art scandal involving the Lass Brothers? Never heard about that one! In 
fact I've heard only of Boris Lass.

White label pressings can be test pressings and they can be "under the counter" 
(party) records. What's on the one you have? Incidentally, they can also be 
commercial pressings supplied in small quantities where the customer was to 
provide paste-over labels which have since fallen off..these were pressed with 
plain white labels since presumably the paste-overs wouldn't adhere to blank 
shellac. Edison Diamond Discs often turn up minus their labels.

Some days it appears there ARE no limits to the topics, but before long cooler 
heads prevail (usually after hot tempered requests to end certain rants or 
threats by long-time members to depart).

You used to be able to find 3-speed record players or turntables equipped with 
turnover cartridges for about ten bucks in any second hand store but not too 
often these days. Yard sales are still a good bet, and they can still be found 
on eBay..look for Califones, which were school machines and which are still all 
over the place.

dl

Bart wrote:
> I joined the mailing list about 2 weeks ago and I thought I'd introduce
> myself briefly.  I'm surprised at how active a list it is.  
> 
> I'm too young to have memories of the 78rpm era except for its dying echo.
> I was born after, but not long after, it ended.  As a child, when I had my
> first record player, I had some 78's to play with; mostly classical music, 
> albums missing a broken disc, that sort of thing, which the grown-ups 
> considered too old, obsolete, or incomplete to worry that a kid might break 
> them.  And I broke a few, but far less than you might imagine.  It was an 
> early training in regarding records as precious and fragile that was only 
> strengthened in the Hi-Fi days of the seventies.  I don't have sentimental 
> memories of swing and big bands - my memories are of Led Zeppelin, CS&N, and
> Pink Floyd and the like.  
> 
> I did, as a child, have some non-classical 78's.  I remember a few, like 
> Song of India, and the St. Louis Blues on a twelve-inch by Duke Ellington 
> with vocals by Bing Crosby, and an album set with a missing broken disc of
> songs by Burl Ives.  Also had the Texas A&I (now defunct university) Fight 
> Song and Alma Mater on a 10 inch locally produced disk.  That's still around.
> I remember the photos of Arthur Fiedler as a young man with dark hair on 
> classical recordings of the Boston Pops, and also Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart..  
> 
> Really liked that St. Louis Blues.  And Creole Love Call which I also
> had by Duke Ellington.  
> 
> It was the Ellington sides that reignited my interest in older music.  
> Although there was already a sort of inevitability about it.  I lost 
> interest in rock-n-roll in the succession of punk to new wave to rap and 
> hip-hop.  In those years I was going backwards.  I had always been interested
> in the music of the late sixties though my generation's music was rightly
> the music of the seventies.  As pop went places I didn't want to go I went 
> to the music of the early sixties and fifties; at least the musics that fed
> the rock-n-roll stream: blues and doo-wop and rock-a-billy and such.  
> 
> In it's early days I largely missed the digital/mp3 revolution.  It would be
> better to say I came to the party very late.  For reasons relating to the 
> need for a specific, very expensive program in my work, I had to keep running
> a Windows 3.x machine longer than most anyone else.  Mp3's were introduced 
> after Win 3 and I never found in those days MP3 player software written for 
> Win 3.  Eventually got a more modern machine for fun and a few years ago 
> wondered idly, "There's supposed to be a lot of music on the Internet, I 
> wonder if I could find that old Duke Ellington tune."
> 
> What I found were sites like The Internet Archive, The Cylinder Digitization 
> Project, and The Virtual Gramophone.  From that I developed a big interest in
> old music, but what appealed to me most was the music of the 'teens, the first
> decade, and the nineteen-twenties.  Not only was this great music, it was 
> completely unheard and unknown - and because of the equipment needed to play
> some of it – the cylinders - almost unknowable before the digital
> revolution.  
> (Sometime in the late thirties, certainly after the war I largely lose
> interest.
> That's stuff I've had heard before in movies, on TV, radio, LPs etc.  It
> wasn't
> the boundless unknown of the earlier era.)
> 
> I recorded my (legally acquired!) sound files onto CD's and took them to
> work, 
> played them at home, just surrounded myself with my newly discovered
> favorite old
> music.  Then people would say, "You like that old stuff?  I've got some old
> records
> you can have if you want them." And I always do want them.  So I've
> acquired a 
> small collection (around 200) disks.  I don't expect they are rare, or
> valuable, 
> or even especially interesting except for a tiny handful.  I'm not
> interested in 
> what they are worth because I don't intend to sell them - I'm a confirmed
> pack-rat.
> But I'm full of questions about them.  
> 
> I don't have proper a set-up to play them now, though I can play them on 
> an old turntable at 33 or 45 and record them on the computer, then speed up 
> the recording digitally.  I don't have a proper stylus, and probably don't
> have 
> enough weight on the tone arm.  I would need to acquire equipment to play them
> in a casual fashion, but like (almost) all of us budget is limited.
> Nevertheless
> I have gotten good transcriptions from some of the latest discs.  (Were the 
> grooves smaller at the end of 78 production?)
> 
> The bulk of my collection came in two boxes from two individuals.  One was
> mostly hot sides from the late thirties, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Artie 
> Shaw, and other big recognizable names.  Most were well-loved, which is a 
> euphemism for very worn.  The other box from a different individual showed 
> more refined taste: Paul Robeson, Edith Piaf, Jack Hylton, Noel Coward and 
> Broadway recordings, foreign pressings, durium Hit-of-the-Week records, Paul 
> Whiteman, even a Little Wonder.
> 
> I apologize for the long post.  My posts will be shorter in the future.  I 
> don't expect to post too often - I'm here more as a student than a teacher, 
> an enthusiast than an expert.  But I know there are real experts on this list
> and I have a million questions.  I want to know what others recommend and what
> they've used / are using to play their records.  I want to see a picture of 
> Rae Eleanor Ball (there doesn't seem to be one anywhere on line).  I want to 
> know when Benny Bell recorded "Humoresque in C major".  I want to know what 
> became of the Lass brothers,  Mark and Boris, after they were arrested and
> charged
> in that fine art forgery scandal.   I want to know the story behind a disc
> I have
> that has a basically blank label with no record company name or logo, nor 
> performers' names, just a song title and a number, and a different performer 
> on each side.   Mostly, I want to know when certain records were recorded or 
> released, some sense of from when they are dated - for records where that 
> information isn't readily available in on-line discographies. 
> 
> I understand this list is mainly devoted to record collectors, but I don't 
> understand yet the limits of that discussion and what is off-topic.  Has there
> been much discussion of old songs independent of the recordings of the song
> (who 
> wrote it, stories about lyricist, composer, the history of the song itself)?  
> What about discussion of the early cylinders and records that can be heard
> from 
> university and government archives as opposed to just the discs I happen to
> have 
> in my living room?
> 
> Some of that will probably become more apparent as I read more postings.  And 
> other questions might have been covered before, but there doesn't seem to
> be an
> obvious way to search the archive of the group's past postings.
> 
> Enough for now.  Hello to all from central Texas and I hope to learn more from
> the busy traffic on this board.
> 
> How do you read them all???
> 
> Bart
> 
>