I bought this last month at Portland's legendary Memory Den. It's part mall, part thrift store, part Kowloon Walled City. If you visit, say hi to their ghosts.
As someone who produces reissues (and posts blog entries that gleam with the same cleaned-up audio and historical exegesis as a reissue, but in a context that won't make anybody a dime), I am driven as much by curiosity and craving for accomplishment as I am by naked compulsion. So the cover of this album has a certain...resonance. I may look like I'm winding up all these toys you're reading about, but something wound me up first.
And, given that every el cheapo children's record is a tiny gamble that usually pays off with one good track, this surely delivered. The last cut, "Night Time", is so sickly-sweet creepy that if publishing and copyright information existed, every ghost story film director in the world would be lining up to put it in their trailer.
That is, "if". Why, I wondered, is there no circle-P, no circle-C, no credit of any kind to be found on this package? Who wrote these songs? Who performed them? Who is the "H. Wilbur" assigned authorship of the back cover blurb?
I'm fully aware that the Children's record industry of the 1950s/1960s/1970s was not exempt from the bottom-feeding prerogatives that ruled the rest of the entertainment industry. Firesign Theatre, who never back-announced anything they played in their 1970s radio shows, spun a children's record once with the refrain "I'd like to do a lot of things, I don't care which / As long as it's something that makes me rich." It's a real face-palmer, and I scoured the bins at the Pasadena City College swap meet for a year until I found its source: Daydreaming for Children from Golden Records, an LP of kids singing about what they want to be when they grow up. I was feeling proud of myself for finding such a unique artifact until I looked at the back cover with its little grid of "also available" LP thumbnails, and saw there was another Golden Records album called When I Grow Up I Want To Be A... These albums had many similar tracks. In fact they were all similar. In fact they were the same album, first released in 1966, then reissued under a new name in 1969.
"Exploitation" is a broad category, but no matter the genre, taking advantage of the public is much easier when your audience isn't too discerning. Cheap and sensational movies that come back again and again under different titles have been a thing since the 1930s. The 15- to 25-year-old demographic that made I Was a Teenage Werewolf one of the highest-grossing films of 1957 were not letting critical thinking steer Daddy's car to the drive-in. Entertainment marketed to the very young is probably the most critic-proof category of all. Everything's new and exciting to a toddler, and Mommy, who bought the record, is never going to listen to it anyway.
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| Monrovia, California Daily News-Post 3/12/1964, pg. 20 |
Given all that, this album's parent label—Carousel Records—took this game to a whole new level, because they weren't just Carousel Records. They were also Playtime Records. They both shared a PO box in Lawndale, California. They both put a blurb on the back of every record they released listing the same litany of virtues to ensnare the parents, with near-identical phrasing ("It makes them feel good inside"..."a sweet happy feeling"..."produced by talented artists"..."recorded on the finest equipment"..."durability even under the sometimes not-too-careful handling of their young owners"). The Playtime blurbs are signed by "Harriet Smith", and the Carousel blurbs are signed by "H. Wilbur". They are who exactly? What difference does it make when their names are so wholesome.
The best part is that, although we don't know how the Playtime masters were produced, all that was required to make the Carousel masters was the Playtime masters and a razor blade. Playtime released 18 records between 1960 and 1962. The first six titles dropped in 1960. The next twelve arrived in 1962.
Meanwhile, Carousel released 12 of its own titles in 1962. That year, amongst the product of the two labels, 76 pairs of songs match. That is to say, some guy (and this MUST have been a guy, picture him with me: white short-sleeved shirt, burned from golfing without his sunscreen, crewcut, pack of Chesterfields, black fan bolted to the ceiling of his 125-square-foot office in the back of his brother-in-law's typewriter repair place at the corner of Manhattan Beach and Hawthorne Blvd.)—some guy, I say, was selling largely the same material on two of his own kiddie record imprints at the same time in 1962.
One way he helped obfuscate the fact that all these phonographic children came from the same father was by giving each label its own distinct brief for the art direction. The Playtime records are all mid-century cartoon covers, very UPA-influenced...
...while the Carousel records have more traditional kidlit illustration designs...
...all of which helps distract Mommy from the fact that Playtime's Come Join the Parade and Carousel's Let's Go Marching, which are next to each other in the bin at Penney's, are the SAME FUCKING RECORD with the tracks in a different order. And why not? Even if little Billy knew what the Better Business Bureau was, he can't dial the phone by himself.
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| Miami Herald, 6/30/1963 pg. 5F |
The Merry-Go-Round cover collection is a hoot; eight of the ten covers are built around photographs from a single anonymous stock photo session, in which a handful of kids were handed different costumes and different props and shuffled around a variety of sets. Two almost-identical photos of five kids with two wooden soldiers are used for two different LPs—one is flipped left-to-right for variety.
The real tell-tale fingerprints in the pablum are that, among the 10 records from Merry-Go-Round, and the 18 records from Playtime, and the 12 records from Carousel, the same 44 songs appear in every label's product.
I mean, I get it--some production music shingle in the late '50s knocked out a couple hundred of these kids' songs, made them available to all comers under a blanket license, and sent them out into the world, where they reproduced. But why did our guy have to be quite such a schmuck? Let's call him "Jerry". "Jerry" seems right. Jerry, why did you have to be such a schmuck? Side one of Smokey the Fire Engine has two songs that were clearly RIPPED FROM VINYL, for crissakes. And I haven't bought a copy of Carousel's Let's Blast Off Into Space, but it includes the tracks "Foundini the Spaceman" parts 1 & 2, and there's a two-track Bunin Puppets record from 1949 on the Caravan label called Foodini's Trip to the Moon, and you know what, Jerry? 2 plus 2 equals you're a schmuck.
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| Tusla World, 2/19/1961, Downtown section pg. 20 |
Yes, I made a spreadsheet to take along on this fool's errand. (See below if you're curious about the names of the songs that got the most repeats.) Discogs pages for each of these labels were threadbare, so I fattened them up as best I could using articles from Newspapers.com and pictures from eBay auctions. There are three records on Carousel, Folk Songs for Little Folk, Sing Us a Song—Tell Us a Story, and Pied Piper, whose track names are unknown. And there's a record on Merry-Go-Round from 1959 that I know must exist, part number MGR-10009, but I can find no information on it whatsoever.
And I don't know Jerry's real name. But let's all write to him at PO box 125, Lawndale, CA, tell him we're H. Wilbur, and say he owes us comp copies of every record. Come on, Jerry! They fill us with such a sweet happy feeling!
Schmuck.
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.
