History of CBS Records 30th Street Studio NYC (many pictures)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by DMortensen, Oct 21, 2014.

  1. lukpac

    lukpac Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee, WI
    It does with Goddard leaving for good in 1975.

    My feeling is the new console is a red herring; that was for the move to 16-track.
     
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  2. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Time certainly has a way of going by before you know it.

    I was looking through a file of pictures over the weekend that were either sent to me by or that I mined from the wonderful Flickr site of Al Q, who I believe is retired from Columbia Records. Al Q's Flickr Page

    He has been a wonderful source of information about 30th St history and people, and his interests as shown on his page are vintage advertising, vintage filler cartoons from pulp-type magazines, recording history and marketing, and a lot of other cool stuff. Be prepared to spend some serious time getting through it (not unlike our site here, tbh), but it's seriously enjoyable time.

    I'll post some things from him over the next week or two that relate to 30th St, and will offer some commentary with them for your further comments.

    The first one:

    [​IMG]

    is from the November 16, 1946 Billboard, announcing that WLIB, which had purchased 207 E. 30th St a few years earlier, would be soon moving its entire operation there, and that renovations on the four-story building would be commencing soon.

    I have building permits that show first applications on July 25 of that year for its use as a film studio, and amended building permits on November 6, 25, and 27 saying that the building will have no film studios or (flammable) film stock, and will be exclusively broadcasting studios and offices. The owner of record is the 207 E. 30th St. Corp., Ed and Harry Danziger Pres. and Vice-Pres., respectively.

    Looking them up just now for the first time finds an Ed and Harry Danziger who were active at the correct times who were movie producers/directors in London (!), and who bought Cartier jewelers in 1969.

    Harry Lee Danziger - Biography - IMDb

    Edward J. Danziger - Biography - IMDb

    "They turned out literally hundreds of low budget second features of no more than 70 minutes length. According to actor Christopher Lee, if shooting of a picture went on for more than three days, the film would be well in excess of its budget!"

    That was all I could find about them. Anybody able to find anything else? How did they own 30th St.? WLIB is listed on a plumbing permit as the lessee of the building; maybe WLIB didn't own it at all and just occupied it.

    The sidewalk shed permit, which indicates a need to protect passers-by from things like brickwork and/or tower removal, didn't get issued until February 10 of the next year (~3 months later than the Billboard article). I don't know if that time frame is normal or if somebody new got involved. The owner of record on the shed permit is WLIB, managed by "Mr. Thompson".

    It's easy to get into the weeds when trying to sort out the early ownership of that building.
     
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  3. lukpac

    lukpac Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee, WI
    Yes. Al Quaglieri.
     
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  4. That’s some impressive scrapbook - collage of pictures. Thanks for posting. :tiphat:
     
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  5. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Yes. Super nice guy.
     
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  6. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Here's another of Al's finds, from the December 18, 1948 Billboard but written on Dec. 11:

    [​IMG]

    So the decision for 30th St to be an audio recording studio rather than the new TV studios for the new medium was made before Dec. 11.

    Note that recording studios were "waxing studios" in Billboard talk, because they were cutting wax rather than tape at that time. Nothing about phone lines to where the actual waxing was done...

    And by "high frequency waxing", they mean "often" rather than sonically, right?
     
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  7. lukpac

    lukpac Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee, WI
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  8. MMM

    MMM Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    Lodi, New Jersey
    Lacquer disc, not wax, and for many years before 30th Street. Billboard was probably using "waxing" poetically, or just didn't know Columbia's recording format.

    By at least earlier in 1950, tape was already being used, though I believe for a while concurrently with lacquer.
     
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  9. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    We still say “cutting a record “ even though the term is antiquated.
     
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  10. jamo spingal

    jamo spingal Forum Resident

    Location:
    Europe
    And an album of 10" discs making up a long play ...
     
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  11. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    It must be nice to have total recall; I definitely don't. Maybe you should tell me if you already have posted all of Al's article collection, but I don't know how you'd know if you had all of them.

    Here's another one, from the Billboard of August 4, 1956. Let's see if I can get the size to be similar to normal type, since we can read that just fine:

    [​IMG]

    Well, that took 3 tries, assuming the preview looks similar to the final.

    He mentions 30th St for some reason in the article, but it's mostly about record manufacturing and quality control.
     
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  12. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Colette Laico (Frank's wife) mailed me a full page article from what must be (she cut the date off) a recent NY Times article by Anthony Tommasini about a new Glenn Gould box set of all recordings and outtakes from the first Goldberg Variations album recorded in 1955. Five discs, a big book, 282 tracks. It's notable here because the article has five wonderful pictures from those sessions, one almost a quarter page, all taken by Fred Plaut.

    She's 96 now and fit as a fiddle, generally, and still lots of fun to talk with. I found a movie starring Vera Zorina (Goddard Lieberson's wife) called "I Was An Adventuress" and we're going to get together soon and watch it.
     
  13. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Here is an article from the Record World of December 21, 1968 recapping a party held in 30th St. by Masterworks showcasing a bunch of music from the new "switched-on" world:

    [​IMG]

    apparently to sell modern versions of classical music to the gigantic Rock Audience. I note that Goddard wasn't mentioned as being present.

    Also, I had no idea that David Rubinson looked like a hairy version of Mitch Miller, at least in that picture.

    Was this event associated with that Happening in the Armory that was discussed much earlier in this thread that Gordon Mumia (sp?) and David Tudor were part of? Or an offspring of it, since my feeble recollection is that the Happening was a few years earlier than 1968.

    Regardless, an Amazon search finds a book by J. Marks and Linda Eastman "Rock and Other Four Letter Words", as well as an album by J. Marks and Shipen Lebzelter with the same title. Reviews on Amazon of the book are generally positive regarding its summing up of the times in which it was written, as well as a statement by the reviewer that he'd never heard of J. Marks in any other context.

    A bit of Googling finds some interesting bits about J. Marks, and one item that describes the event in this post more fully and amusingly.

    The Googlebooks site has a chunk of a book called
    "Electronic and Experimental Music" by Thom Holmes
    which has this priceless passage (can't seem to copy/paste):

    "Columbia Records didn't expect much from Switched-On Bach. It was good timing in that it fit with Columbia's 'Bach to Rock' sales campaign at the time. At the time of its release, the record was one of three new Columbia albums being promoted. Another was In C by Terry Riley, which was part of the Columbia Masterworks, Music of Our Time series produced, interestingly enough, by electronic music composer David Behrman (Dan's note: more about him at the end of this). A third new album was expected to be the biggest commercial success of the three–– a rock album called Rock and Other Four Letter Words, by two rock journalists, J. Marks and Shipen Lebzelter. The latter album featured a collage of free jazz and psychedelic music intermixed with snippets of interviews with rock notables, including Brian Wilson, Jefferson Airplane, Tim Buckley, Ginger Baker, and a host of others.

    "The New York press party for the three albums was held at Columbia's famous 30th Street studio in New York. Carlos dropped in to make a brief appearance, 'grabbed a press kit and snuck back out.' Robert Moog was asked to demonstrate his synthesizer:

    'I remember there was a nice big bowl of joints on top of the mixing console, and Terry Riley was there in his white Jesus suit, up on a pedestal, playing live on a Farfisa organ against a backdrop of tape delays. Rock and Other Four Letter Words went on to sell a few thousand records. In C sold a few tens of thousands. Switched-On Bach sold over a million and just keeps going on and on.' "

    Cool, huh? That quote, which I assume is from Moog, gives a very vivid mental picture in context with this thread.

    David Behrman is in a number of Plaut pictures, including this one

    [​IMG]

    with John Cage and a lady playing a toy piano.

    Here's another view of them, with a look at Cage's face:

    [​IMG]

    David on the right.

    Art Kendy ID'd David from some pictures of unknown people some time ago, and was in contact with him fairly recently. David is still active, in electronic music as I recall from Art.

    Any idea who the lady is or what piece they're working on?

    To make this more interesting, the picture folder that contained the pictures of David and John also contained a picture of the Moog synthesizer that I posted earlier in this thread that Luke ID'd the model and production dates. This is the one posted earlier

    [​IMG]

    This is the picture in the Cage folder, in definitely the same place, which I think might be Studio or Control Room D in 30th St., but can't prove:

    [​IMG]

    Hmm, it looks like I didn't clean those up at all, sorry.

    The same synths in the same place but at different times. The tables are different, the wall and curtain are the same, and the patches are different.

    Nice look into the guy's briefcase, huh?

    Wrapping this up, another result from the Googling search was an article titled "Jack Marks Is Dead, Oh Well" which starts out:

    "Jack Marks died on June 3, 2001, in Los Angeles. At least, Jack Marks seems to have been his most likely name. For twenty-five years, he conned white American intelligentsia — including PBS, the American Library Association, Joseph Campbell, the New York Public Library, and Oxford University Press — into believing he was an American Indian intellectual. His Indian identity, fluid as mercury, was named Jamake Highwater.

    "It was as J Marks (one version of his biography claims "he never had a first name," apparently one of the poignant indignities of being an orphan) that he published his first two books, pieces of shock journalism called, respectively, Rock and Other Four Letter Words and Mick Jagger.

    "The latter was distinguished mainly for its arch implication that the author had confirmed Jagger's bisexual tastes through first-hand experience."

    With that as a titillating intro I'll wrap this post up and assume that you might be interested in reading more of an interesting article, which, alas, focuses much more on Jamake Highwater and much too little on J. Marks.

    It is from www.dancingbadger.com, and unfortunately I can't tell who wrote it.

    Edit: Note that the initial clipping is from AlQ, the pictures are from the Yale Plaut collection, and the rest is sourced as is.
     
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  14. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Here's another great Al Q find:

    [​IMG]
    Does it seem like it's describing the linear fader console? I didn't know the stuff about the simultaneous 16 track, quadraphonic, stereo, and mono recording capability. It makes sense, since CBS had that proprietary quad playback system, right?

    It would have been nice if they'd broken out the "six live and mechanical echo chambers" by type, since that could be one live and five mechanical (EMT plates?) or more than one live and fewer mechanical. Doug Pomeroy swears there were at least two live chambers on the second floor, and Frank Laico said it was in the basement mentioned no others. Both could be right...

    The part about "eliminate the noise of a gasoline truck explosion on the corner" seems optimistic to me, absent tape cutting, but maybe that electronic stuff is more mighty than I think.

    It also tells us the control room was redecorated prior to July 1971, but the console was in there before the redecoration, so why the announcement about the console now (July 1971)?

    Still, I like this article a lot.
     
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  15. lukpac

    lukpac Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee, WI
    Yes, linear fader console.

    CBS didn't have a proprietary quadraphonic system. They did introduce the SQ matrix system for records, but it was also used by other labels, and they also issued discrete recordings on 8-track.

    I'm not sure what you mean when you say the new console was present before the redecoration. Do you have photos to that effect? I'm not recalling any.
     
  16. Mike Ga

    Mike Ga Formerly meredrums and MikeG

    Location:
    Wylie, Tx.
    I take a shot in the dark and say Maro Ajemian? She recorded the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano with Cage attending/preparing. He also wrote for Toy Piano.
    Sort of looks like her searching Google, but there are no shots of her wearing glasses. Could be that she didn't wear them in official promo shots, and this is a candid situation.
     
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  17. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Thanks for the guess and inspiration to look further.

    You're right, Maro doesn't look to me like the woman in the picture. However, Googling "john cage toy piano" eventually got to an album produced by David Behrman called "John Cage - Music for Keyboard 1935-1948" which was originally released on Columbia and was recorded at the 30th St Studio on September 11, 12 & December 3, 4, 17 & 18, 1969 (Discogs).

    The pianist was Jeanne Rosenblum Kirstein, and Fred Plaut was both engineer and photographer for the original vinyl. There is a CD reissue on New World Records, as well as Japan Sony, but I can't tell that there is a booklet in either, and , if there is, that the picture(s) from Fred Plaut made it in.

    All versions are way more expensive than I want to spend just to see a picture of Ms. Kirstein. Elsewhere it says that she died in 1980, with no other info.

    There's some other Cage toy piano music where the pianist is Margaret Leng Tan, but she doesn't appear to be the woman in the Plaut picture.

    My money is on Jeanne Kirstein. Thanks again for the inspiration, though.

    Anybody have the vinyl of that album?
     
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  18. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Yes, there was a pic from the Masterworks site from "A Little Night Music",

    [​IMG]

    with Glynis John, Hermione Gingold, Judy Kahan, Goddard, Sondheim, with the back wall looking a lot like it ever had and showing the back of the linear fader console and the patch panel/gear racks behind the console, like in the pictures with the rotary fader console.

    Then there was another pic I have from somewhere else showing the racks over on the side of the control room and no racks behind the console and the ceiling and walls all different. I don't think I'm allowed to show that picture.

    Huh, though now I look at the Masterworks "A Little Night Music" pic, and it's from 1973, not 1971 like the article would indicate it should be. Shoot.

    So that means the console went in in 1971, and the studio was slightly redecorated. That slight redecoration was still present in 1973, and the lighting and back wall in the pic above looks very much like it was in the Company days to my eye, hence the "slight".

    Sometime after 1973 the control room was remodeled again, with the racks moved from behind the console over to the wall between control room and machine room. (The unpostable picture shows the door to the back hall (or whatever is back there) between control room and machine room, and the intersection of walls/door/ceiling/opening looks exactly like that in earlier pictures, with a different ceiling and wall treatment. I guess for now you'll have to trust me on that, but I look forward to sharing that with you sometime.

    I said what you responded to with the assumption that the "slight" resulted in something more profound than what's visible above.

    If I come up with more pics in defense of this summary that I can post, I will.
     
  19. lukpac

    lukpac Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee, WI
    Yeah, that photo shows the redecoration mentioned in the article. Although "redecoration" seems like a stretch. Note the different back wall in this shot from Here's Love in 1963:

    [​IMG]

    The "redecoration" has white pegboard everywhere:

    [​IMG]

    I'm guessing the photo of the later remodeling you've seen is similar to what is seen in the Gould video:



    Which, if I had to guess, I'd say was probably done when the old control room was removed, the floor refinished, etc, etc.

    Funny that the light dimmers never moved.
     
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  20. Mike Ga

    Mike Ga Formerly meredrums and MikeG

    Location:
    Wylie, Tx.
    Great detective work! Its got to be Jeanne Kirstein. Not Margaret Leng Tan, for sure. I'll need to pick up the NWR disc pronto. The liner notes are available, just under the cover picture, and while they don't have any photos, there's a short essay by David Behrman about Columbia records in the 1960's that is sadly interesting. Great thread, by the way! I've learned a lot from everyone's posts and pictures. New World Records: Album Details
     
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  21. vanhooserd

    vanhooserd Senior Member

    Location:
    Nashville,TN
    Goddard, please go back to the white shirt & tie.
     
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  22. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Please do, and when you get it I hope you can post the pictures so we can confirm who is who, and I'm fascinated to guess which Plaut pictures were used and if I have them.

    You quite accurately described that essay by David Behrman. It really confirms my unoriginal guesses.

    Glad you like the thread; I've sure learned a lot and am grateful that the learning continues.
     
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  23. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    Here's another from Al Q, from Record World in December 1977

    [​IMG]

    The wall treatment with the holes looks like those 1' x 1' squares of the shredded paper/cardboard/woodpulp that was a thing around that time.

    The racks are still behind the console, and we can see the confluence of door/machine room/wall that is familiar to us.

    That doesn't look like Don Puluse to me, but that just goes to show how people can look different in pictures.
     
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  24. lukpac

    lukpac Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee, WI
    Still the same acoustic tile that was installed in 1971.

    Dan, do you have anything in your files about when the date of this session would have been? It seems it must have been in November or December 1977, as the above indicates the session followed a 4 week tour, and this NYT article indicates there was a show at Carnegie Hall on November 11 (the article is from the 13th, and indicates the show was on Friday, which was the 11th).

    I believe the below photo is the earliest indication we have that the old control room was removed. *IF* we assume that happened at the same time the control room was remodeled (and the floor refinished), we're looking at a time frame of November 1977 to July 1978. Are there any notable gaps in the session logs during that period? Perhaps the changes weren't made immediately after Goddard retired in 1975. That said, he didn't *die* until May 1977.

    Unfortunately, that those things took place at the same time is still just a guess, albeit a semi-educated one. Also unfortunately, photos from the studio's later years seem to be sparse.

     
  25. DMortensen

    DMortensen Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Seattle, WA USA
    CBS All-Stars session was December 6, 1977. Oh, and another January 8, 1978. George Butler produced the first one, Jim Fishell, the second. Both are in the picture posted.

    The original Broadway cast recording of "On the Twentieth Century" was February 26-March 3, 1978; the Masterworks site pictures were inconclusive from the last time I was online looking. If there were other ones they might give us more info.

    Don't know when I'm going to the archives next, but if I can be reminded to look whenever that is I will, since they have more pics for each show than are online.

    The longest gap I see between October 1977 and the end of September 1978 is Wed. Aug. 30 through Monday Sept. 4, which would have been the Labor Day weekend. There are multiple two or three day gaps, though. Not sure how long it would take to demolish, remove, and refinish that project.

    There are gaps in the schedule in other years, where there is just not a record for a day or several days in a row; I didn't notice that for this time period but I'm not going to swear there is nothing like that there.
     
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