Tuesday, December 8, 2015

A lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years…and not all of ’em was good




I bought the record, and you shouldn’t have to pay what I paid, so please help yourself. Half of these tracks (cuts 3, 4, 5, and 7) are available on CD, so I’ve ripped them from CD sources. The other half (cuts 1, 2, 6, and 8) have never been issued on CD to the best of my knowledge, so I've digitized them from the soundtrack record.

There’s a Wikipedia entry on this movie and its soundtrack album which is slightly helpful; and there’s an obsessive, in-depth analysis of all the music sources used in the film which is a lot more helpful; but I’m still left with two unanswered questions.

Question #1. Why were so few copies of this album pressed, and why is it not available on CD? The Wikipedia entry has a footnote referencing a book written by a L.A. City College professor who asserts that licensing problems were to blame. But the book doesn’t specify what those problems were.

Question #2. Why is track 6 not what it purports to be? The piece was first performed in 1974. As is always the case in classical music, any conductor can record a piece using any ensemble, and every resulting recording is unique; but very few recordings of this piece existed when the movie debuted in 1980. So you’d think it must be just what the LP sleeve – and Wikipedia, and this guy’s discography – says it is: a specific performance conducted by the composer for the PRNSO. The PRNSO version was released by EMI on German vinyl in 1976, and later reissued multiple times on CD. I’ve bought that record, and I’ve bought two of those CDs, all of which contain the same PRNSO performance. That version, categorically, is NOT what’s in the movie or what’s on the soundtrack LP. If the fact that the two versions are different lengths doesn’t convince you, just A/B them:

Here’s the PRNSO version from EMI. The total time is 7:31. Go to time index 2:00.

Here’s the soundtrack LP version, which matches what’s used in the movie. The total time is 7:58. Now go to time index 2:15. The piccolo. Oh my god, the piccolo.

What the hell happened? The director’s music editor has spoken of how creating the music bed for this film ran the gamut of techniques from importing giant chunks of source music with no edits to basically atomizing multiple music sources and layering them on top of each other like collage. Never mind the question of the true original source of the performance – does it sound to you like maybe they put this music through a harmonizer? Is that phasing I hear? Did it get time-stretched without pitch-shifting, to the best degree possible with 1980 technology? Do you think the composer would have LIKED it if the director did that to his music? Is it possible the composer would have disapproved to the point where he demanded the record company withdraw the record?

Or could it be that question 1 and question 2 answer each other? Did some brain donor at Warners misattribute the source of this performance, and the wrong label was applied to it all the way through mastering, pressing, and distribution, and only when the LP actually got back to the composer did someone at the record company realize they’d paid licensing fees to the wrong publisher?

Anway, thank heavens there are no OTHER unanswered questions about this movie, being a completely straightforward horror film with just one possible interpretation and lacking the handicap of any ambiguity whatsoever. Except, of course: Unanswered Question #3: How long until the hospital-and-tennis-ball cut scene surfaces on YouTube?

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Iannis Xenakis: Electro-Acoustic Music

1970 album by Greek musique concrète pioneer Iannis Xenakis, from Nonesuch's essay-on-the-cover series of groundbreaking new music.

Bohor I
Concret P-H II
Diamorphoses II
Orient-Occident III

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Various Artists: Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

From 1964, perhaps four years before the trend really exploded, here's a scarce Columbia collection of electronic music by some of the pioneers of the medium.

Bülent Arel: Stereo Electronic Music No. 1
Halim El-Dabh: Leiyla and the Poet
Vladimir Ussachevsky: Creation—Prologue
Milton Babbitt: Composition for Synthesizer
Mario Davidovsky: Electronic Study No. 1
Otto Luening: Gargoyles

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

The George Garabedian Players: Hooray for Hollywood



In a world where there’s a studio dedicated entirely to ripping off Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks animated features, it will surprise no one that in the days when Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were king, Tijuana Brass sound-alikes were so abundant they practically had their own Billboard chart.

One Tijuana-Be was producer George Garabedian, who ran Mark 56 Records of Anaheim, California. From 1967-1970, his label released ten LPs of “great hits made famous by you know who”: Spudnuts Presents Tijuana Taxi, Top Hits Made Famous By Herb Alpert And The Tijuana Brass, Der Wienerschnitzel Presents Tijuana Taxi, Colonel Sanders’ Tijuana Picnic, Taco Bell Presents – Tijuana Taxi, Pizza Inn Presents…Tijuana Party, Der Wienerschnitzel Presents…Up-Up And Away In My Beautiful Balloon, Phillips 66 Presents Tijuana Christmas, Such Brass!, and Squirt Does Its Thing (Semi-Soft Music In Tijuana Style). I hope most of these were promotional giveaways, because the unlucky soul who actually BOUGHT all ten would find himself with just 47 original songs repeated endlessly amongst 100 album tracks.

Anyway, amidst all this musical recycling and re-recycling, Garabedian was sitting in a mix session sometime in 1968 listening to the admittedly clean and well-produced work of his (uncredited) session musicians, and he had the idea for this gag record. To this respectable MOR production he had one trumpeter come back and add overdubs in a style that’s the secret heart’s desire of any pro: the 8th grader who took concert band to get out of study hall – out of tune, missing notes, and fracking like there’s no tomorrow. Trumpeter “Harry Arms” basically shits all over a doggie bag of pop hits from the late '60s, some of which deserve the stain more than others. In the end, what Garabedian probably intended just as yer basic party record has become a perfect piece of trolling, a record that screams out to young and old “There’s a thing called trying hard – and we’ll look into it!” And which, I must say, contains possibly the funniest final moments of an album I’ve ever heard.

The artist who did the color portion of the cover art isn’t credited, but the black and white cartoon is by genius Virgil Partch, who was a very busy cover artist in the 1960s. Keep an eye out for two other LPs on Mark 56 with Partch covers, Music for Happy Bowlers and Music for Dancing Doctors.

(Thanks to Doug Wellman and his Puzzling Evidence show for inspiring me to find, buy, and rescue this horrible thing.)

Hooray for Hollywood
Born Free
Begin the Beguine
Up-Up and Away
Whipped Cream
Sound of Music
Georgy Girl
Winchester Cathedral
Spanish Flea
Spanish Nose


DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Austin Pendleton / James Massengale / Peter Bergman: Booth Is Back in Town!

One of his sons became the greatest actor of his generation! The other son killed Lincoln! Yep, if you think there’s a play in life of Junius Brutus Booth, the most notorious actor on the American stage in the mid-19th century, you’re not the only one: Booth, his self-destructive arc as an actor, and the family and friends he sucked into that tragic orbit, are subjects that Austin Pendleton has been obsessing over for more than 50 years.

Here are some artifacts from the first version of a Booth-centered play that Pendleton wrote while at Yale in 1961. Booth Is Back In Town! was originally staged as a near three-hour musical, with songs by James Massengale and lyrics by Peter Bergman, first performed at Yale in May/June 1961. Phil Proctor played Junius’ son Edwin. It was the second time Bergman had worked alongside Proctor, his soon-to-be collaborator in The Firesign Theatre (the first being the original play Tom Jones, which also debuted at Yale). Here’s the track listing of the 1961 original cast album:



Overture
The Book of Mr. Booth
Lettin’ My Feet Run Free
Booth Is Back in Town
Jenny Joanne
Round Clear Tones
Why Was I Born, Mother, Tell Me
Now at the Farm
American Fireman Sequence
Everybody Knows
La Lune Est Tombee
The Southern Fried
The Green Lime Tree
We’ll Never Waltz Again
Seeing the Elephant / Finale



Pendleton later revised the play and retitled it Mr. Booth, with Arthur Rubinstein coming on board to write new music and Bergman returning to write new lyrics. The revised version debuted in Williamstown, Massachusetts in August 1963. 



A cache of ephemera survives in Bergman’s collection, including an original cast album from 1961, three advertising flyers, some vintage photos of Bergman, Pendleton, et al from the 1960s, press clippings from the local papers in 1961 and 1963, the 1961 Yale program and the 1963 Williamstown program, and a typed script from 1961. Massengale became a musicologist and went on to teach at UCLA; Rubenstein did music for television and films including Blue Thunder and WarGames; Bergman became one of the hippest people ever to set foot in a radio station; and Pendleton became an acting teacher, theatre director, playwright, and actor with approximately 6 trillion credits.


DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.