Wow, this is an odd time window it seems to me... I mean between this Beatles release date and that little time to digest, learn, arrange, rehearse and record this material... Some of which can be quite quirky by pop music standards... Not accounting the fact that it's from an album with all the looks of something with no commercial potential and featuring zero single-released track... Of course it turned out to be a huge international hit album, but... but... Could an advanced copy have been given to Ramsey as a sort of "side-promo" effort perhaps? R&B superstar Fats Domino also released, as a single, a very cool cover of "Everybody's Got Something To Hide...", but that was in 1969. In jazz, Jaco Pastorius recorded (much later) an amazing re-writing of the beautiful "Blackbird", alongside Toots Thielemans. Tracklist from Ramsey's album: Mother Nature's Son Rocky Raccoon Julia Back In The USSR Dear Prudence Cry Baby Cry Good Night Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey Sexy Sadie Black Bird
My father's Plymouth only had a 78 player. The whole neighborhood thought we were squares. These car players were the primary reason that 16 2/3 RPM records were made, as some could play nearly an hour on one side of a 7 inch record. The grooves on the extended length 16RPM records were called "ultramicrogroove" unlike microgroove on the regular LPs. They had serious tracking problems.
Here is a clip from the web on car players and 16 RPM. But it gets one thing terribly wrong. Record players in cars did not die out because of the development of cassettes (or even 8 tracks). They died because they were terrible, and because anybody who brought along some records in the car found they got completely ruined by warpage. In addition, the very high stylus force necessary to prevent skipping on the road destroyed 45s after even one or two plays. Most everyone here knows cassettes did not catch on until many years later. This writer may be too young to know that. The quote Chrysler Corporation created Highway Hi-Fi, an audio format that enabled the 16 RPM records to be played in their cars from 1956 to 1958. The system employed a sapphire stylus with a ceramic pick up on a turntable that was installed below the instrument panel. A record player installed in a car? Yes, it really happened. Here is the Wikipedia article about it should you be interested in learning more. It is obvious why the format died. Cassettes came along allowing people to listen to books in their cars or while jogging around town. Broadcasters also discovered superior sounding and more efficient ways to solve their transcription needs but, for a brief era, the 16 RPM record served a specific and useful purpose.
I too have been watching this discussion and I find myself continually amazed at the binary positions we all seems to take on any issue these days. While I agree pretty much with everything you say here C it’s possible to also love and cherish an artifact of history that archaic records are. To enjoy the tangible products of history when we live (as we always have) in a world where we constantly repeat our mistakes due to forgetting our past . It is important to some of us to simply cherish being able to hold a physical record or CD in a world where more and more aspects of our lives seem to become ephemeral .
Here is one for the curious. Look closely at the label. Why was this manufactured? Possibly because some bars and restaurants were experimenting with 16 RPM playback so that records would not have to be changed very often. That experiment died too. I have a few 16 RPM records, just as curiosities.
I had a portable record player with a 16 rpm setting yet I have never read any reference to a recording at this speed until reading your comment now. And that’s after almost 6 decades of listening and reading about records. I would love to know if anyone out there actually had a 16 rpm disc. (An unrecognized significant benefit of a 16rpm setting on a record player was the laughter it could bring to an 8 year old boy playing 33rpm records)
What’s wrong with “obsessing over the differences of production and manufacture, not of the music but of the objects -- the records, the CDs, the jackets, the labels, etc.”? That’s part of the joy of collecting and listening to music. Some prefer not to deal with any of that and just stream their music, which is fine, while others like to debate if version A or version B of a recording sounds better and others seek out the original pressing and others are happy with the latest rendition, and those are fine too. It’s all part of the joy of music.
I don't have facts and figures, but social historians have stated that the percentage of the total population that is involved in music making, on all levels (professional and amateur), has never been smaller than in recent times. Of course, nearly every household made its own music, did its own singing. You might blame that on the invention of recording and broadcasting. But there are likely many factors at play, and those factors have shifted and evolved since these inventions more than a century ago. It is also interesting that the percentage of the population that comprise professional musicians, making their living from music making, is likely to be far smaller today than it was in the 1920's and 1930's (after the invention of records and broadcasting), despite the explosion of commercial music. Perhaps this can be attributed to the centralization of control of commercial music, along with universal adoption of electronics in public places. Before WWII, virtually every hotel or inn had a group of professional musicians, even small orchestras, on staff to play every day. Many restaurants did as well. Every radio station had multiple groups of musicians on staff. Every theater (including movie theaters) had many musicians on staff. Employment was not hard to find, if you had the skills required. Unlike today, the musicians did not need a "day job". I make a habit of asking many people about their grandparents. It is amazing how many have told me that their grandfather was a full time musician in hotels and theaters in the 1920's and 1930's. In the mid 1970's, when I was doing agricultural surveys, I often came across long abandoned farmhouses. I often entered. Most everything was gone, but there was almost always a broken down piano and piles of old sheet music. I would look at the music and imagine the music being played in that collapsing house.
After it became obvious that they were not ideal for music, the 16 RPM speed was often used for spoken word and language instruction. Those 16RPM records that used ultramicrogroove had playback problems even with a decent turntable. Skipping was the problem. Here are a few, not from my collection. They were also used for religious records (bible readings) If your turntable only had 33/45/78. no problem. There was a fix for that They were still making them for far longer than you might expect. This one is from 1968. It was probably for a bar/restaurant that wanted a 16 RPM system to reduce the need to flip records.
There were many 8 year old boys who enjoyed lip-synching to Elvis in a basso profundo voice. Play a 45 at 16, and you can hear the Voice of God.
I knew one guy who was so obsessed with collecting Sinatra, that he started collecting records that simply had the name Frank printed on the cover, even if it wasn't Sinatra. Really. He showed me a bunch. I said nothing. Frank wasn't as common on record covers as you might think. But he refused to buy Zappa records. He should have stuck with Bing.
No. Actually, I was thinking of Frank's brother, Bing Zappa. Their father had a strange sense of humor. He would walk around the house playing cowboy with the boys, shooting toy pistols and shouting "BING! ZAPPA!"
I had (but think that I no longer do, but I'm not completely sure) some 16 rpm records as a kid, late '50s/pre-1961 (we moved), but they weren't Miles, they were of things like Tubby The Tuba, yellow Scholastic records I want to say... No idea what became of them or the floor-standing Victrola, which didn't make the move...
For the Canadian friends of the thread who live in Montreal: Best Record Stores in Montreal, Canada | Discogs
I doubt they could do that here in the US but I do wish they would in my area, which is close to the beach. Starting about 4 years ago, almost every single home that has hit the market in my neighborhood was bought as a rental property. The house diagonally behind me is huge - it probably has 15 beds in there - and they have even had weddings there, DJ and all. It gets really bad in the summer, when I can barely get down my street due to the cars parked on both sides of the road.
THE VIEW FROM JAZZBO'S HEAD - THE SIX (Bethlehem/Solid) CD with Bob Wilber (clarinet/tenor sax), John Glasel (trumpet), Sonny Truitt (trombone), Bob Hammer (piano), Bill Britto (bass), Jackie Moffett (drums) Track list. 1 - Giggles (Bill Potts) 2 - Phweedah (Bob Wilber) 3 - Over The Rainbow (Harold Arlen / E. Y. Harburg) 4 - The View From Jazzbo's Head (Bill Britto) 5 - Blue Lou (Edgar Sampson / Irving Mills) 6 - Our Delight (Tadd Dameron) 7 - My Old Flame (Arthur Johnston / Sam Coslow) 8 - The Troglodyte (Bill Britto) Recorded 1956 with a playing time just over 37 minutes. Japanese CD edition re-issued 2014 as part of the Bethlehem Album Collection 1000 via The Verse Music Group under license to Solid Records / Ultra-Vybe. Jazzbo is disc jockey Al 'Jazzbo' Collins who is pictured on the cover. The second Bethlehem album released by the (little known) 6.
Stopped by an estate sale after the morning rush yesterday a few fun $1 records left, found this one… Louis Prima & Keely Smith – Louis Prima Digs Keely Smith Label: Fleet Records (7) – FL-202 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Mono Country: US Released: Genre: Jazz, Folk, World, & Country
NP: One that I pulled yesterday while filing some others: Dick Meldonian, Sonny Igoe And Their Big Swing Jazz Band – Plays Gene Roland Music (1983, Vinyl)
NOAH HOWARD | THE BLACK ARK | FREEDOM | RECORDED IN 1969 | RELEASED IN 1972 | JAPANESE PROMO STEREO PRESSING PA_7035 LP Haven't listened to that one in a while. The line-up is phenomenal (Arthur Doyle, his performance is incredible) and the music, of course, is even better.
