Music in the night: The anachronism edition

Here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, we're taking a break this week from the Big Show, but not from music in the night.

In the process, I may have accidentally created a historical, technological and cultural mishmash for the ages. Let me explain here. 

While doing some maintenance on our laptop (and waiting for the interminable latest major update to Windows 10 to . . . well . . . terminate), I decided to listen to the radio. So I turned on our 1928 RCA Radiola 18, one of the earliest "light socket" sets, which translates to "electric" from the 1920s technobabble.

IN 1928, a technomiracle was as simple as "No more messy lead-acid batteries in the living room!"

"OK, whatevs," you say. But I totally get it. F'rinstance:

What if everybody's big flat-screen TV set ran off car batteries. In a cabinet. In your living room.

THEN, WHILE still waiting for the computer to update while listening to the local AM-oldies station, I decided to take a couple of geeky, artsy photos with . . . my iPhone. While the radio still is going strong after 91 years, I do not expect the iPhone to still be operational decades after I have ceased to.

Then I uploaded the pictures to the iMac, edited them, then uploaded the finished products to the blog, via the Internet.

So what you see here is a nine-decade span of technological advancement (whether it's "progress" is debatable, depending), several massive leaps of the human imagination and at least as many head-spinning cultural shifts spurred by all the other shifts.

That, when you come to think of it, kind of tires you out. That is all.

My day in almost-dead formats

It's been this kind of day at the studio here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

The anachronism is great in this one. May the anachronism be with you.

While I'm eyeball deep in this kind of thing, maybe you can be listening to the
3 Chords & the Truth sort of thing. Just a suggestion.

Fun with Polaroids

Remember when "instant" photography meant pulling the picture out of the camera, waiting a minute or two, peeling off the print, then trying to find a garbage can for the gooey negative?

Polaroids. Your Polaroid camera produced what we simply called "Polaroids."

We went to a lot of trouble to produce what, truth be told, were really crappy pictures. Exposure was a crapshoot, and even the most exactingly focused shots came out fuzzy.

Young folks with no memory of Polaroids and Instamatics (the take-the film-to-the-drug-store version of fuzzy photography) have no idea how spoiled they have been by their smartphone cameras.

The Polaroid Colorpack II of my childhood is long lost. But the Colorpack II and the fancy-schmancy Polaroid 320 Land camera of someone else's long-ago now are part of my present, thanks to estate sales.

And the pictures still are "Meh." Fun as hell, but decidedly "Meh."

THERE'S JUST something satisfying about snapping a picture, then physically pulling the undeveloped picture out of the camera. The photos on your phone can seem like an abstraction. Your Polaroid shots are anything but.

They're real. They're physical. The experience is tactile. And what you're gonna come out with is a mystery -- at least for 90 seconds or a couple minutes, depending on the temperature.

What I came out with is a little dark. That's what happens when the bloody flash doesn't work. And by "flash," I mean a flash attachment that takes a flash bulb, which you must replace after every flash picture.

Kids cannot fathom this. But I am here to tell them this, to us old people, was the stuff of science fiction at the time. Before Polaroid and flash bulbs, we had to illuminate our subject with a torch to do our cave paintings.

You try it sometime.

But one fun, artsy thing you can do with your wet, gooey Polaroid negative after you've pulled off the print is to carefully place it on a sheet of copy paper -- wet side down -- and roll the hell out of it with a hard rubber roller. What you get is an instant print -- a funky bonus artwork from the throwaway part of your Polaroid snapshot.

Scan it, then enlarge and enhance it on your computer, and you just might have created something artistic. Like this.

It's digital magic. But first, you have to go old school.

Is what grandpa is sayin'.

How'd we stereo on radio before there was stereo radio?

The era of FM stereo radio began in June 1961, but the era of hi-fi stereo radio dates back to the 1950s.

But in the days before FM multiplex broadcasting, listening to stereo radio required two stations . . . and two radios, one AM and one FM. Or you could just buy a "binaural" AM-FM stereo tuner -- two dials, two tuning knobs, and in stereo mode, it would play AM and FM at the same time.

AM was on the left, FM on the right. (Unless, of course, it was the other way around. Or a complete free-for-all?)
 

What in the world would that have sounded like in, for instance, 1958? Let's take what we know about the capabilities of AM broadcasting and FM stations in the '50s, then see whether we can re-create the binaural AM-FM stereo experience.

It's November 1958. You're in Baton Rouge, La. It's 9 p.m. on a weeknight (Monday through Thursday), and you're in the mood to hear some WJBO "3-D" stereophonic sound on your new hi-fi setup.

ON YOUR NEW binaural high-fidelity tuner, your tune in 1150 on the AM dial. Left channel, check.

On the FM dial at 98.1 megacycles, you tune in WJBO's sister station, WBRL. Right channel, check.

Now it's time to sit back, relax and experience "music in three dimensions." For those of us back here in the future, the result sounds better than you would think.

Then again, so did AM radio in 1958. It's amazing what could be done with a wider AM bandwidth, owners who cared and well-engineered radios in listeners' homes.

I HOPE the following video demonstrates that, as I try to re-create what the WJBO-WBRL, AM-FM stereo pairing might have sounded like. I can't tell you how many times I redid this, trying to get the AM sound "right" . . . AM heard over excellent equipment, much better than what we're accustomed to today, from an era decades past.



I KEPT redoing this because I kept thinking, "No. This sounds too good. This can't be right."

And I kept saying this as someone who has a couple of AM-FM hi-fi tuners made in 1960 and knows that some amplitude-modulated stations, to this day, sound pretty decent on a true wideband tuner. This, despite the Federal Communications Commission -- in order to lessen interference and shoehorn more stations onto the dial three decades ago -- putting brick-wall limits on AM stations' frequency response out of the transmitter at 10 kHz.

A young person with good hearing can perceive frequencies up to 20 kHz. 

But in 1958, many AM stations' transmitters had a frequency response almost as good as FM stations. FM's big advantage was in improved dynamic range, a lower noise floor and, as Steely Dan sang, "No static, no static at all."

Below is a rough representation of the frequency response of the "AM side" -- the left channel -- of the video above.

YOU'LL NOTE that I rolled off the low frequencies, just like a typical AM signal, then sharply rolled off the high end right below 15 kHz. I also bumped up the equalizer curve here and there to "sweeten" the sound a little, as an engineer would have done with even the rudimentary audio processing of the day. I tried not to overdo it. After all, I was worried that it sounded too good; I still wonder what I missed.

Too, the AM channel is more processed -- more compressed and a bit "louder" -- than the FM track. The reason? The easy answer is "That's what AM does."

The longer answer involves an attempt to, first, mimic the lesser dynamic range of AM broadcasting and, second, reflect that AM stations were much more heavily compressed and "hard-limited," because loudness equals distance and listenability on the noisy AM band.

Oh . . . I also added some "AM noise" to the "AM side" of the recording. Not too much, I hope, and not too little, either.

On the "FM side" of the soundtrack, I frankly worry that the audio may be too processed. Alternatively, however, if I were a chief engineer or a program director in 1958 and my AM-FM combo was going to dive into the "binaural stereo" thing . . . I'd want the FM side to match the AM side at least somewhat for loudness.

THAT'S IT for the technical and audio-geek minutiae. I doubt a normal person could stand much more.

Even if you're not a full-bore nerd like me, I hope you've still found a little fascination in this esoteric inquiry into one of the more forgotten aspects of hi-fi and broadcasting.

A phenomenon that births advertising like this (from 1959, after WBRL had changed call letters to WJBO-FM) -- not to mention a moniker like Soundascope Radio -- can't have been a total bust.

This was the city: Omaha, Nebraska

It was a Saturday — July 3. It was hot and muggy in Omaha, Nebraska.

We got up at the usual time that morning, 7:45. About 8:30, we started to open every window, turn on every fan.

We started to draw the blinds to block the hot sun come afternoon. It was supposed to be almost 90.

While we were doing that, we turned on the radio. My brother’s Winthrop. We call him Stinky. The boss was Dad. My name’s Favog.

GREAT. Mom left the thing on KFAB, not KOWH. Must have been listening to her soap operas. I always preferred Sandy Jackson.

Eight forty-five. What was "Big Mike" selling now? He was talking to the salad dressing guy -- Louis Albert. It seemed strangely interesting.

We sat down to listen. . . .

Please stand by

Your program will resume shortly.

1964 Personal Role Radio, new

If you suffer from geek allergies, now is your opportunity to move farther along the Internet Trail.

This post, however, will get us much closer to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

What you see here is a brand-new Army "morale radio," right out of the box -- an R-1289 PRR receiver. Vendor: General Electric Company, Radio Receiver Department, Utica, New York, USA. Date of manufacture: September 1964.

The first wave of American troops in Vietnam would have gotten this from the quartermaster. I just got mine from eBay -- I was a little young to be sent to 'Nam in late 1964, being just 3½ years old at the time.

It's a strange thing, getting something that's 52 years old basically new out of the box. Call it a time capsule, which it is.

A TIME CAPSULE complete with an instruction manual, a schematic and an eight transistor radio in a moisture-proof canvas pouch. 

Moisture-proof is good for things being shipped to the jungle.

From what the Internet (and the eBay seller) tells me, this little GE model -- the P925 back in The World -- was the last of the military "morale radios," or "Personal Role Radio (PRR)" in Army speak. By 1964, after all, what young American didn't already have a transistor radio?

T.B. Player certainly did when he shipped out in '64.

This has been your Geek Minute on Revolution 21. We now return you to your modern, digitized programming.

I'm your rumba man

This is a 1956 iPod playing a 1950s iTunes download -- Xavier Cugat's favorite rumbas, to be specific.

And I'm still doing the rumba, baby. I can't seem to quit. If Chris Brown catches us doing the rumba, Chris Brown would just pitch a fit. (With firearms.)

But I can't help myself; it's much bigger than me. If I were you, I'd hang onto a rumba man like me.

NOW, you might ask, what sort of geekery gets a rumba man like me excited? Old LP records, yes. But more than that . . . old LP records in great shape that have price tags on them from a St. Louis record store that went out of business about the time your rumba man was getting in business.

So to speak.

Don't get me started about how to figure out how old a pressing is, or where did the filler songs come from when a record company reissues a 1948 10-inch LP as a mid-'50s 12-inch LP and adds four songs to it . . . because more space.

Just don't. You ain't geek enough.

Well, that's about all for now. File this under Things That Probably Will End Up on This Week's Show.

I'll build a (vinyl) stairway to paradise

This afternoon's listening was . . . transcendent.

Sarah Vaughan. George Gershwin's very large segment of the American Songbook. Where could you go wrong?

Answer: You can't.

Boy, oh boy, are you in for a treat this week on 3 Chords & the Truth. My dilemma is deciding what to play off this 1957 masterpiece of an LP.

I have a couple of thoughts, but I almost feel like I'd be cheating you by not just playing the whole thing. The problem is that I have lots of other great music, too.

I'd feel like I was cheating you by not getting around to all that, too.

In brief, my dilemma is your gain. That's the Big Show for you.

Be there. Aloha.

Tonight's vinylpalooza

I'm cheap enough that paying $15 for this 1959 stereo release gave me serious pause at the LP bins of an Old Market antique emporium.

On one hand, I'd rather find a gem for a song at an estate sale or something.

On the other hand, the records from this vendor are usually in marvelous playing condition.

On the third hand, a stereo rock 'n' roll record from 1959 -- the mono version of Bobby Freeman's Do You Wanna Dance album came out the previous year -- and from an indie label, no less. That's likely on the rare side, making the $15 price not a rip-off.

I'll say!

BEFORE LISTENING to this early-rock classic this evening, I did a little Internet price checking for the stereo version of Do You Wanna Dance . . . Jubilee 1086 for all you record geeks out there. And the low price I found it being sold for was something like $29.95. The high price (on eBay, of course) was . . . was . . . gulp! . . . $110. I understand a mint first pressing goes for $200.

Mine seems to be a second pressing. Sigh. I coulda been rich.

Now note that amid all this "What's it wurf???" nerd-o-mania, not a word was written about the actual music, which was great despite following the rock-album convention of the day for a hot act. That would be:

SIDE A

• Cover something.
• Cover something.
• Cover something.
• Original that'll never be released as a single.
• Cover something.
• Hit record we named the LP for.

 SIDE B

• Cover something.
• Cover something.
• Original that you'll hear nowhere else. Ever.
• Cover something.
• Original that sounds exactly like the big hit on Side 1.
• Cover something inspiring. Or something.

That is all. Good night, and good listening.

How your hi-fi stereo record works

Click on the picture for larger, readable view

This afternoon's vintage-LP listening comes with a technical note.

And our tech talk today centers on a question: You ever wonder how stereo records put the stereo on the record?

Well, the top photo of the inner sleeve of our 1958 release by David Carroll and His Orchestra explains how the modern marvel of stereophonic records work. And it also contains a caveat for the stereo newbie, as nearly everyone was 57 years ago -- do not play this thing on a monophonic record player.

A mono cartridge on your mono phonograph will tear this sucker up.

See the explanation on the record sleeve for why that is.

Vintage LP du jour

 

On the menu tonight at La Maison de Trois Chords is The Friends of Distinction's Real Friends album, a nice 1970 vintage for our listening pleasure.

Not only does it feature one of my all-time favorite songs, "Love or Let Me Be Lonely," it also sounds better than many new albums right out of the shrink wrap, even though this particular LP left its shrink wrap around 1970.

DO YOU THINK I still could get me a "Complete RCA Catalog" if I mailed a quarter to Dept. C, Rockaway, New Jersey 07866?

On the other hand, maybe I can dig out the Complete RCA Catalog that I did get for 25 cents back then.

Once a geek, always a geek.

That is all.

Let's dance!

Here's some of what's been on the old record player the past couple of days.

In 1956, Capitol Records got Benny Goodman and some of the old orchestra gang together to recut some of his classics in hi-fi. And boy do they sound good in high fidelity, pointing out the advancements in recording technology in just the decade and a half or so since the originals came out on 78 r.p.m. discs.

THE ALBUM, The Benny Goodman Story, featured selections from the motion picture of the same name that had just hit movie houses all across America.

What's interesting about this album, which just may be a first-run pressing -- given the packaging and red Capitol label, which changed to turquoise sometime that same year -- is how the cardboard LP sleeve came inside a paper outer sleeve. I don't think I've ever run across that sort of packaging before for a record album.

And that's your bit of vinyl-nerd bait for the day, all the way from the fabulous '50s.

Where Jefferson met Lincoln

Welcome to the hamlet of Colo, Iowa, population 869.

Colo, about a 20-minute drive east on U.S. 30 from Ames -- itself about 25 minutes north of Des Moines -- isn't exactly a destination these days for most folks. The little Story County town isn't a real swingin' place, though you can get a mighty fine burger and perfect fries at Niland's Cafe.

But if you're a road geek (And doesn't everybody have a little road geek in him?), Colo, Iowa is something approaching a Holy Grail of geekdom. Turn off Highway 30, head north on U.S. 65 and soon enough you'll come to County Road E41. Turn left, and you find yourself at what once was the crossroads of America.


There you'll find the Colo Motel, the cafe and a filling station that hasn't filled anything up since the 1960s. Between 1913 and 1928, though, if you wanted to get from Times Square to San Francisco -- or from New Orleans to Winnipeg, Manitoba -- you'd eventually find yourself in Colo.

There's another name for County Road E41 -- the Lincoln Highway, the first cross-country road in the United States. Likewise, what now is U.S. 65 through Colo once was the Jefferson Highway, the first great north-south road in North America, starting in 1916.
 
Jefferson met Lincoln in little Colo, Iowa.

TODAY, if you want to get from the East Coast to the West, you take Interstate 80. If you want the scenic route, you take Highway 30, which now runs about a mile south of this stretch of the old Lincoln Highway.

If you're headed north to Winnipeg, you'll need to head over to I-29, a couple of hours west.

Once upon a time, however, Colo was the crossroads of North America.

Now, Niland's Cafe is, in addition to that of a home-cooked meal, the home of a small museum dedicated to the Jefferson and Lincoln Highways. And the old gas station has been left more or less untouched since pumping its last tankful, except for the addition of three restored vintage pumps out front and some general sprucing up.

Last week, after wandering around Ames on a roundabout journey back to Omaha from the Iowa State Fair, a stop at the crossroads was a must. I live less than a mile from the Lincoln Highway's old route through Omaha. In Baton Rouge, I once lived on Jefferson Highway. The Jefferson Highway, which in many places has kept its name after it lost its official status.

Given my journey in life, it was only fitting to pay homage to the Crossroads.

Last evening's vintage listening

Here's a glimpse at my vintage listening for last night -- Billy Vaughn and his orchestra goes Hawaiian back in 1959.

Well, contrary to Dot Record's sloganeering, this LP represents not "the greatest sound on records!" but rather, "Really great, but still no RCA Victor release from the same era."

I know this because I'm a nerd. 

A vintage record nerd, with geek tendencies.

ACTUALLY, this LP was amazingly clean and unworn, despite its vintage. It sounded new, even after all these decades.

The vinyl itself was a little warped but still played flawlessly. And the album still was in the Sears and Roebuck plastic wrap.

I can almost see, a half century and six years past, the music going 'round and 'round on something like this . . . right out of Sears' 1959 Christmas catalog. Musical satisfaction guaranteed.

Aloha.

Merry Christmas from your local radio geek

Welcome to FM radio as it looked in 1947.

This is a vintage Pilotuner FM tuner, made by the Pilot Radio Corp., of Long Island City, N.Y. Back in the day, you'd hook this up to the phono input of your existing "standard" radio or console to enjoy the exciting full-fidelity world of frequency modulation broadcasting.

As such this vintage Model T-601 might be called the granddaddy of hi-fi tuners for your sound system. And some 67 years on, it doesn't sound bad -- in glorious monophonic sound with none of the bells and whistles of modern FM gear, but not bad at all considering.
  
SO . . . if this awakens your inner audio geek, here's a video of my mono hi-fi setup -- an 1957-vintage Realistic FM tuner and amplifier pair, along with a Zenith stereo record changer (outfitted with a modern magnetic cartridge) which has seen better days and likely will be replaced soon . . . and the vintage 1947 Pilotuner I just found via eBay. The Pilotuner is what's playing here, with only a length of wire for an antenna.

The speaker , which you've seen (and heard) before here on the blog is a newly built Gough speaker enclosure from the original 1960 plans and outfitted with a 1962-ish Electro-Voice "Wolverine" 8-inch triaxial driver.

Eventually, the Pilotuner will live in our bedroom, paired with a 1951 (or thereabouts) Bell amp and a 12-inch Electro-Voice Wolverine speaker kludged into a vintage Wharfedale speaker cabinet.

No, my geekery knows no bounds. I have a loving and tolerant wife, thanks be to God.

Vintage vinyl o' the day

You don't have to ask me twice whether I want to buy -- $2.50 . . . cheap! -- some flaming red vinyl.

I almost don't care what's on it, though in this case, I lucked out. It's classic David Rose, from a 1962 promotional album put out by Montgomery Ward in honor of the venerable department store's 90th anniversary.

This was one of nine put out that year by Ward's, which called the special releases the Nine Top Artist Series. Obviously, with artists like Rose and his orchestra, Lawrence Welk, Artie Shaw, The Ink Spots and The Three Suns, these LPs did not represent the Nine Top Artist Series for Teenyboppers.

Click on album covers to enlarge

But speaking as someone who was a toddlerbopper in 1962, I still think it's all pretty jake . . . er, cool . . . er, groovy . . . er, exemplary.

WHAT I ALSO think is pretty exemplary are my memories of great old department stores like Monkey Ward's, as everyone called the late, great company back then. It was one entity of what I guess you could have called the Holy Trinity of Retailers -- Sears and Roebuck, J.C. Penney and Montgomery Ward, founded (if you do the early-'60s math) in 1872.

Ward's succumbed to modernity in 2000 but was sort of resurrected in 2004 as an online retailer by a company -- itself since acquired by yet another company -- that bought the name and intellectual property of the gone-bust giant. Meantime, Sears and Penney's are hanging on by their fingernails, mere shells of what they once were commercially and as cultural icons.

THE MUSIC with which Montgomery Ward celebrated its success once upon a time remains, though. Music, unlike institutions, never dies.

Though time marches on and memories eventually fade, the music plays on. The music plays on.

And it plays on 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there this weekend. Aloha.

This was an entertainment center

Did you know there were wireless remote controls in 1940?

There were -- for your top-of-the-line Philco radio-phonographs.

Did you know there were phonographs that worked kind of like modern CD players?


IN 1940, there were -- on your deluxe Philco radio-phonographs. The electronics giant's Beam of Light record players were as easy on your 78s as they were hard on your bank account at the end of the Great Depression.

When you dialed up the phonograph on your radio-frequency remote, the tone arm would come down on the record, a lightweight sapphire stylus with an attached mirror would lower onto the record and reflect a light beam off of the moving mirror to a photovoltaic cell, which would modulate electric current into electrical impulses that would be amplified and . . . voila!

Music.

If you love old electronics like I love old electronics, it doesn't get much cooler than this. The miracle of modern technology -- 70-something years ago!

And the glowing tone-arm head just looks cooler than hell. The whole thing is just cooler than hell.

Because there's one born every minute

I'm an audio geek.

OK, I'm an audio geek who likes to look at this kind of stuff on eBay. Anyway, I know a little about what old hi-fi equipment is worth -- particularly the stuff that's so coveted that folks will pay insane prices for it.

But a starting bid of $650 for a Sherwood tuner and amplifier? That strikes me a a little bit, shall we say, outrageous. Then again, a sucker really is born every minute, and there are people out there for whom price is no object.

A VINTAGE McIntosh tuner or amp is fairly valued at an astronomical figure because that's what the market will bear based on quality and popularity. A mid-1950s REL Precedent is fairly valued at an insanely astronomical figure because it's even better than a McIntosh and many times as rare.

But for pretty much anything else not a vintage Marantz amplifier or tuner, not so much. You can buy a lot of good stuff for the $650 you'd be spending on this "good but, oh, come on" tuner and amplifier.

Money doesn't grow on trees, you know. When it does, you can pay that kind of money for this kind of vintage hi-fi-gear.

This has been your Revolution 21 Geek Minute for today, March 19, 2014.