500 dollars

I mentioned Al Jarvis and the Make Believe Ballroom once before in passing. His signifigance as an early disc jockey should not be under-rated. In 1932 Al Jarvis began hosting the Make Believe Ballroom. He was a DJ in a time when record labels still sued to prevent airplay. Jarvis was born in 1909 in Canada, to Russian emigrant parents. Little did they know that he would move to Los Angeles, become Americas first DJ and they the very first to succumb to the allure of payola. So far as I know Jarvis never commented on the payola, but did comment on his early DJ status:

"I was hounding the owner-manager to let me air pop records instead of those electrical transcriptions. By using commercial records, I figured, I woudl nto only have a more diversified program, but I could present some of the world's greatest stars. It was the first time on radio, it was the first time any records were played. "

It was a lie of course. But I think it was well meant. The point of his program was not just that he played records but that it w2as him playing them. In his program the DJ was not just a stiff narrator reading copy. So it is only fitting he be the recipient of the first payola.

It cost $500. In 1935 publicist Charlie Emge paid Al Jarvis $500to air Benny Goodman's records. Goodman was on a cross-country tour and Charlie was trying to stir up some advance interest in the swing band before they got to Los Angeles. The cross-country tour was not doing well. But the advance airplay in Los Angeles led to a stay at the Palomar Ballroom. That gig began on August 21 and is considered the beginning of the Swing Era. The Palomar had a capacity crowd that night and the show was broadcast live on the CBS network. More here.

Emge was unstained by the connection. He was just a writer and publicist at the time, and part owner of Tempo Magazine. By 1946 he was the west coast editor for Down Beat magazine.
KELW later became KFWB. In 1946 Al Jarvis crossed the street to KLAC getting paid an amazing quarter million dollars a year. But the rise of Rock n' Roll undid him, and he moved back to KFWB a couple years later. The Pallomar Ballroom was destroyed by a fire in late 1939.

PROCESS 70

In 1962 Time records announced that they had perfected PROCESS 70! the process has been used on all their Series 2000 LPs both stereo and mono from the beginning btu now, in the Spring of 1962, now it was perfect. They bought 2-page bifold ads in Billboard for a set of 4 PROCESS 70 releases by Gordon Jenkins, Billy May, Hugo Montenegro, and Orizaba. They described the process thusly:

"Unlike 35mm which was first used in 1957, and dropped by most recording companies, this is the first time PROCESS 70 is being brought to the attention of the public. Process 70 is the development of a pre-emphasis characteristic which is less than that normally used. We can effectively increase the overload handling capacity of the electronics, as well as the tape itself while still maintaining as even wider bandwidth of reproduction. As the tape moves by the head faster an inherent increase in high frequency response results in its use. Process 70 takes advantage of the gain in the high frequency response to improve the transient gain in the high frequency boost and compensating for it by reducing the amount of the high frequency de-emphasis"

The liner notes go in circles like that, very repetitive stuff. But it's basically describing a change in mastering. the end result to my ear is an album really short on bass response, but that's true of most everything before the late 1980s. Until the advent of all digital recordings everything was recorded on magnetic tape.

In this case "pre-emphasis" is a reference to a change in the magnitude of a band of frequencies, from the sound of the LP... very high ones. What they actually say is that in recording onto high speed tape, high frequencies are normally de-emphasized, to make it sound more normal. They do so to a lesser degree. I find the result shrill.

The engineer on the Billy May record I have here was Bill Putnam. In 1957 Bill founded United Western Recorders. It was a big deal independent studio in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1985 Putnam sold it to his partner Allen Sides, who renamed it Ocean Way Recording. Putnam was a big supporter of stereo sound. Bill stockpiled stereo recordings by orchestras as he handed over the mono mixes the labels ordered. Years later they came back to Putnam and paid up big time. Bill almost certainly had something to do with Process 70.

Transcription Mystery Disc #77

I almost never shell out more than junk-shop prices for transcription recordings. But this one spoke to me. In transferring it I applied a slightly heavier filter than usual. This did produce faint artifacts, but the vocals are so amazing that I really wanted them to be clear enough to discern how fast they are actually singing.The Miccolis Sisters were two sisters from a set of 11 children. Mary and Ruth Miccolis were born in 1922 and 1924 respectively. They became country yodelers of some renown at least regionally in the midwest. They were not bumpkins, they were city girls born right in Melrose Park, a Chicago suburb.

In 1938 they won a local talent show called the Rubins Hour which led to an audition for KMOX. That played out well despite the fact that the older of the two was only 16. At KMOX, they began singing harmonies for Pappy Cheshire's group on he Barnyard Follies show and The Old Fashioned Barn Dance show. They also played on the Ozark varieties Program which was syndicated on CBS. The program was sponsored by Dick Slack's Furniture Co. In 1946 They got their own program sponsored by Grove Quinine tablets.

In 1947, Ambrose Haley invited the sisters to perform on his program at the St. Louis Star-Times owned KXOK. This programming was syndicated on the NBC Blue Network. Working with Haley paid off, when Haley got an offer of a job at WIBW in Topeka, All three of them moved to Topeka and joined the Ozark Ramblers playing the Kansas Roundup Program.When he left in 1949 for WREN they stayed on.

They recorded 8 sides for DeLuxe, and two for King. I've only ever seen one of them and none of them are still in print anywhere, anyhow. They also had a songbook with twenty some songs worth of sheet music. This transcription is from a live broadcast, and the Song is the CowBoy Yodel, a song not in the DeLuxe catalog meaning that until now, it's never really been heard by anyone. That's a damn shame.

**************** UPDATE****************

I managed to Contact Ruth Miccolis now married as Ruth Williams. She is still with us and still performing. I hope to collect her few sides and provide her with digitized versions of her catalog. Please contact me if you can be of assistance.

Perikon detector

Strange as it may seem, the crystal in crystal radios wore out. The rectifier was a contact metal–semiconductor point-contact junction, aka a Schottky diode. I mentioned this once before so I wont get too much into the diode. But suffice it to say that not every part of the crystal would rectify the circuit. Rectification in this case means "act like a diode." More here.
Because the whisker was made of wire or a needle, and the crystal was softer, the surface was worn by use. OK hypothetically not every "crystal" was softer, but they were almost inherently of different harnesses. The very soft Graphite was used as a whisker sometimes. and at the other end, carborundum was considered durable. So either the whisker or the crystal was experiencing wear and usually it was the crystal. So hobbyist chose a crystal and whisker based both on it's sensitivity as a detector but also it's longevity. The hunt was on from the start for a "permanent detector."

Lets look at the hardness of some known whiskers and crystals:
WHISKERS
Graphite: 1-2 Mohs
Bornite: 3 Mohs
Iron: 4 Mohs
Steel: 7-8 Mohs
Bronze: 3 Mohs

CRYSTALS
Galena: 2.5 Mohs
Zincyte: 4 - 4.5 Mohs
Molybdenite: 1 - 1.5 Mohs
Iron Pyrite: 6-7 Mohs
Carborundum: 9 Mohs
Silicium: 7-8 Mohs
Chalcopyrite: 2.5 Mohs

As narrow as that variation is, remember that the Mohs scale is only a 10 point same topping out with diamond. not every whisker and crystal worked well together and even when they did, their mismatched harnesses could be problematic. Some combinations were proprietary and many of those were discovered by Mr. Greenleaf Whittier Pickard. He found both the Zincite /Bornite rectifier and the Zincite / rectifier. He called it the Perikon Detector.

He also tested versions with iron pyrite and silicon crystals. Silicon was novel enough he patented it's use in 1906. His Zinc Oxide detector was patented in 1909. He developed one with Molybdenite the same year. More here.

FESTIVVS

Taking a few days off for the holidays.
Back shortly

Transcription Mystery Disc: Fred Waring's Xmas (#39)

Sixty seven years ago this program was broadcast live to the world. Fred waring performed with his orchestra and glee club on Christmas Eve 1942. This transcription recording begins and ends abruptly on each side suggesting it's a dub of the original transcription, or that the engineer was piss poor.

In the 1920s Waring's Pennsylvanians were touring and recording and performing continually. They were a big seller for Victor Records. Waring also began to feature more and more choral music in his performances. In 1933 Fred stopped recording completely, furious that he could not stop radio stations from broadcasting his records, nor people playing them on Juke boxes. Then he came to find out that some stations were recording his performances and re-broadcasting them. He felt that it competed with his live broadcasts. Fred flipped his shit and filed a number of lawsuits and learned that essentially... there was nothing he could do.

It might have been surrender but he began recording again commercially in 1942 for Decca. During the recording hiatus Fred added troupe of male singers as a a Glee Club. The Waring Glee Club toured split off as it's own unit.

In the 1940 he concentrated on choral recordings. It was decidedly unhip even at the time. In 1942, the same year as this live broadcast they released "‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” This was a Christmas program with his Glee club on some station somewhere... Each side starts a bit rough and then cleans up to pretty listenable.

SIDE A

SIDE B

TRAVEL

TRAVEL.
...Back tomorrow with a Holiday Special.

Radio Stock Update 2

Twice before I've examined the ups and downs of a set of radio stocks. I revisit today because some of these chains are now declaring bankruptcy. After a year, it bears some scrutiny. the stock market rebounded significantly this year, and some radio stocks bounced back, others bottomed out. I added a couple to the list to round out the information.Two companies declared bankruptcy, three more may soon as well. Two went private and Clear Channel is expected to miss their first big interest payment to Bain-Capital January 15th and get the cleaver. On with the numbers...

Clear Channel Communications CCU/NYSE
IPO 7/6/1994 - 29.9
Peak - 11/5/07 - 38.4
went private.. took their stock and went home.

Cumulus Media CMLS/NASDAQ
IPO - 11/16/2001 - 6.99
Peak - 4/23/2004 -22.25
10/15/08 - 1.77
03/02/09 - 1.82
Currently - 2.27

Saga Communications SGA/NYSE
IPO - 10/15/1993 - 5.4
Peak - 5/3/2002 -23.20
10/15/08 - 4.9
03/02/09- 4.28
Currently - 12.75

Entravision Communications EVC/NYSE
IPO - 8/11//2000 - 18.1
Peak - 8/18/2000 - 20.0
10/15/08 - 1.3
03/02/09 - 0.84
Currently -3.39
DELISTING LETTER 12/17/08

Citadel Broadcasting CDL/NYSE
IPO - 8/1/2003 - 20.09
Peak - 12/26/03 - 22.7
10/15/08 - 0.26
03/02/09 - 0.2
Currently - 0.014
DELISTING LETTER 9/15/08
DECLARED BANKRUPTCY 12/20/09

Regent Communications RGCI/NASDAQ
IPO - 3/4/2000 - 13.12
Peak - 3/11/2008 - 13.68
10/15/08 - 0.7
03/02/09 - 0.1735
Currently - 0.2
DELISTING LETTER 8/16/08

Cox Radio CXR/NYSE
IPO - 10/11/1996 - 7.2
Peak - 12/31/1999 - 33.25
10/15/08- 6.85
03/02/09 - 5.20

WENT PRIVATE 05/13/2009

Entercom Communications ETM/NYSE
IPO - 3/12/1999 - 29.68
Peak - 2/4/2000 - 65.8
10/15/08- 2.34
03/02/09 - 1.28
Currently - 7.48

Salem Communications SALM/NASDAQ
IPO - 07/02/1999 - 26.375
Peak - 04/23/04 - 33.08
10/15/08- 1.01
03/02/09 - 0.56
Currently - 4.48

Beasley Broadcasting BBGI/NASDAQ
IPO - 02/11/2000 - 14.125
Peak - 02/13/2004 - 19.05
10/15/08- 1.71
03/02/09 - 1.11
Currently - 3.82

Emmis Communications EMMS/NASDAQ
IPO - 03/04/1994 - 7.75
Peak - 12/31/1999 - 62.32
10/15/08- 0.60
03/02/09 - 0.31
Currently - 1.23

Radio One ROIAK/NASDAQ
IPO - 06/02/2000 - 65.00
Peak - 06/02/2000 - 65.00
10/15/08- 0.301
03/02/09 - 0.41
Currently - 3.29

News and Reviews 2009

It's almost the end of the year 2009 and time again to consider the miles and days we have had in this trip around the sun. In the long, deep wake of personal trivialities it's comforting once a year to focus on the best of things. I'm sure David Wallechinsky would agree. It's a tradition I started years before I began this blog, compiling it for trade magazines and newspapers and wherever I happened to be published at the time. But most of those lists are lost. The only years which are recorded for posterity are here at Arcane Radio Trivia. I've made some more alterations this year, both adding and dropping categories. Change is inevitable.

2008
2007
2006
2005

Best Post: Each year has 52 weeks, 5 at posts a week (minus holidays) I write about 250 posts a year. My favorite of all time remains the Career Academy of Famous Broadcasters... but only because it's received such a huge and continued reaction. This year my favorite was a short piece I wrote back in February about a Philly station called WOO-AM. I found a receipt from 1935 in a book and a little research turned up a whole lot of radio.

Best Music Blog: Built on A Weak Spot continues to fill in the gaps where some how we always missed some spectacular band. Check daily, check weekly but never stop checking back. I cant possibly tell you how many bands this blog has turned me on to.

Best Radio Show: The Duke of Doo-Wop a.k.a. Bobby Vanderheyden does a program on 92.1 WQFM & 100.1 WQFN Sunday nights. It is not to be missed. He's focused on the singles but some prime B-sides make it on as well. Because of the simulcast and mountain top locations of their towers, the Duke blankets the Wilkes Barre-Scranton market. Also streaming here.

Best Record Store: I was down on the coast in Groton Connecticut getting some fried clams and there it was: The Mystic Disc. They have as much vinyl on the ceiling as they have on the in the bins. It gets harder and harder to find these die-hard real home town record stores.

Best Concert: On April 17th , the Movie Star Junkies played at Elevens Northampton Massachusetts. They didn't' go on until after midnight and everyone that wasn't wasted was staggering out of the bar under their own power more or less. they rocked, and stopped the out flux. I will not rest until I own everything they ever recorded.

Top 10 Records of 2009
(In no particular order)
1. Bloarzeyed - New
2. Crocodiles - Summer of Hate
3. Bang! Bang! Eche - Sonic Death Cunttt
4. The Horrors -Primary Colours
5. Cactus - Tropical Terror
6. White Ninja - Guacala los Modernos
7. Navvy - Idyll Intangible
8. Pelican - What we all come to need
9. Handsome Furs - Face Control
10. The Slew - 100%

Broadcast from the Sea Floor

I enjoy how exceedingly arcane some radio "firsts" are. Officially the first submarine broadcast was December 7th 1930. But on October 15th 1919 there was a two-way radio communication between Commander Clark Withers of the US Submarine H-2 and the US Destroyer Blakely. the submarine was submerged in the Hudson River off 96th street NYC. There is almost a decade between those two events. I didn't believe there was that size gap in experimentation.

In 1924 a diver from Philadelphia named C. O. Jackson, broadcast from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. A microphone was mounted inside his helmet wrapped in sponges to protect it from impact and to mute his voice at that range. the carbon mics of that era were very delicate.

He did not broadcast from the bottom. A cable ran back up to the boat where a more traditional transmitter and antenna rig relayed the signal to WIP-AM. From there the city of Philadelphia could hear Jackson describe the briny deep. At the time WIP was owned by the Gimbel Brothers Department Store.

WIP began it's first official broadcast on March 18, 1922. WIP had been a flashy station from day one. Back then, as a day share with WGBS in New York, they were audible straight into Manhattan. They broadcast from inside a glass DJ booth so that any onlooker could watch. So broadcasting from the sea floor may have been a stunt, but it was a stunt hundreds of thousands of people heard. More here.

Storecasting

Storecasting, hyphenated or otherwise is such an ugly word. Storecasting is the "broadcasts" beard only in retail spaces. It's descended from the Beautiful Music format and Muzak and all that bland, soulless, gutless, artless theme music of capitalism. It's music that's not for listening. it exists only to provide ambiance in commerce. TSL is nice, but in radio we want real listeners, listeners that can change the dial, but choose not to. I hesitate to mention storecasting in the context of radio because in many ways it's antithetical to the appeal of radio broadcasting. But sadly it is the bastard child of radio, so is should be acknowledged as the redheaded stepchild it is. Storecasting isn't new. I found a detailed reference to it in the June 1950 issue of Kiplingers that revaled it as a fully developed service over 5 decades ago. It gushes with enthusiasm over the service, but indicts it inadvertently in the same breath:

"It soothes the housewife while she eyes the bins and shelves, and relaxing her nerves it relaxes her purse strings. The technique is an old one. Storecasting is really a refinement of the old-time gaslight medicine shows, which always featured a bit of gaudy entertainment before the barker sprang the snake oil cures on the bemused customers."

The supposed "peak" shopping hour of 10-1 and 2-6 were targed by storecasting. The music was mild, and the ads demographically targeted at housewives. For the early FM stations it was a boon. It was 20 years before FM out-stepped AM. people just didn't own FM radios. But, broadcasting to a crowded store gained them a captive audience. I blame Stanley Jose Loff.
Stanley was the president of the Storecast Corporation of America. His first storcasting station was WEHS-FM in Chicago, then WSAM-FM in Saginaw, WJLB-FM in Detroit and WFFM-FM in Muskegon. Originally this was a SCA (Subsidiary Communications Authorization) service for FM radio. The station actually rented a subcarrier receiver to the retailer to cover the cost of the service. A inaudible tone was used to switch on and off the tuner so that shoppers would be spared from hearing disrupting jarring audio like talk or station identification. For some reason this really pissed off the FCC. More here.

The KMLA Broadcasting Corp. Vs. 20th Century Cigarette Vendors Corp. case blew up the whole issue. As part of a promotional campaign, 20th Century had given to some of its clients equipment which enabled them to receive KMLA's background music service without paying for it. KMLA sued. Remember, at this point broadcasts, all broadcasts were public domain. Anyone could listen. One cigarette vendor changed all that. The court held that KMLA's service was private, not public. the compared it to a point-to-point communication WHICH IT IS OBVIOUSLY NOT. While it was not KMLAs intent to broadcast it's storecast to the general public. the signal is not point-to-point, not all all. A lot of case law was built upon this which is just sad. More here.

In the wake of this case, the FCC decided that storecasting was not kosher. They disliked the tone-triggered system. They mandated that storecasting could continue but only through multiplexing. This was going on at the same time that Stereo FM was a hot topic. I think that the FCC chose this time to rule on store-casting because it narrowed the field in terms of which stereo systems might be implemented. No FM network or coalition would endorse a stereo system that prevented storecasting. Sneaky bastards.

The Full Linden

Adolph Frederik Linden (aka prisoner #14851) did it all. He owned a bank, a hotel, a record label and a radio network. But a lot of it was luck. He married well and inherited most of it. He was born in 1889 in Iowa but moved to Seattle as a youth. In high school he worked at a lumber camp, at a deli, and eventually Puget Sound Savings & Loan bank. He married the bank presidents daughter and the rest is history.

It's a great leap from banking into media. He began in 1927 with two moves, the purchase of KJR from Vincent Craft and the founding of the Northwest radio Network. At KJR he expanded the station with a full orchestra and a load of live talent. It was good for ratings, but not at all profitable. In 1929 he'd taken on so many loans form his own bank it became unseemly. He stepped down as president of the bank and focused on radio. In quick succession he bought KEX in Portland, KYA in San Francisco, and KGA in Spokane. Around this time he also began calling the network ABC, the American Broadcasting Network. Strangely, this is of no relation to the ABC network of today. More here.

By the Fall of 1929 it was in free-fall. Linden owed almost 100 grand just to the phone company for the networked programming. At the last second Twentieth Century Fox sent him a note that they'd like to buy up the beleaguered ABC network. Linden piled the family in the car and headed off to New York City to do the deal. It was the rescue he desperately needed. If you remember your history, you know what's coming next. While he was literally in transit to NYC on Tuesday, October 29th the stock market collapsed. It was Black Tuesday. The bank he just left went bankrupt. By the time he got to Manhattan the deal was dead.

Linden was broke. He sold his car, and borrowed money from a friend to open a small restaurant. It flopped. His wife took a floor job at Macy's. He was arrested on a grand jury warrant on charges relating to the bankruptcy of the Puget Sound Savings & Loan bank. There woudl be three messy dramatic trials. In 1932 he was convicted of grand larceny. [I wish we still arrested bankers] He served 5 years at Walla Walla State Penitentiary making acetate recording discs on an assembly line. More here.He was paroled in 1938 whereupon he started a business in vanity and short-run recordings. This time the honest business took off. By 1943 he opened Western Recording studios to supplement the field recording he'd been doing. By 1946 they were issuing commercial recordings on 78s. He had a few hits and worked his way back into radio from the programming side. His label put out over 200 albums even lasting long enough to see vinyl pressings in the 1950s before he sold it off. More here.

Transcription Mystery Disc #56

It was immediately concerning. This transcription disc started at the center, the opposite of modern convention. It's easy to absorb the direction but the physicals were strangely difficult to visualize. The record only ever can spin in one direction. That direction is clock-wise.
There is only one groove on either side of an LP (typically) This groove runs from the center to the outside edge. But the spiral can be clock-wise or counter clock-wise. That spiral determines if the needle needs dropped at the center or at the edge. [The hum is in the original recording]

On August 10th, 1943 John Miller recorded two songs on a 78 rpm Audiodisc transcription disc. Both sides start at the center. He even credited the original writers of each song. The Lord's Prayer is by Albert Hay Malotte, and Open the Gates is by Phoebe Palmer Knapp. I don't know anything about our vocalist, John Miller, except that he gifted this recording to a woman named Betty with the following caveat:

"What a disillusionment! You had an idea I could sing the Lord's Prayer I see now I should have never tried to record it. In addition to being in bad voice & playing for myself...believe it or not, I was plenty nervous. Hope the novelty of it at least will give you some pleasure out of playing this."

Radio Vs. Wolves

This is the sort of quackery that keeps me interested in radio history. In North America we spent that last two centuries killing off the wolves. Wolves do not carry off children in the night, they rarely raid chicken coops, and they do not carry off prize turkeys. It's a safer world, and one that is equally boring. But abroad that was not the case. Wolves continued to be perceived as a threat into the 1930s in some regions. that is what led us to this apparently.

"Howls of wolves running in packs are often audible for several miles over the silent Siberian plains, and as there are scarcely any interfering noises the radiophone system will have no difficulty in revealing the whereabouts of wolf pests."

In Siberia a plan was hatched to use microphones and short wave transmitters to monitor the whereabouts of wolf packs. The idea isn't that wacky. In Brooklyn New York, a similar system of microphones is used to triangulate the origin of gunshots. In Oregon today a nearly identical concept is used not to hunt wolves but to estimate their populations.

While this rudimentary system wasn't 3-dimensional it was pretty ambitious for 1931 when the article ran. The diagram clearly shows a simple carbon mic, and a short wave antenna. It does not spell out the power source but at the time battery power would have been not just inferred but assumed, as much of the world was off the grid.

Captain Midnight Strikes!

Captain Midnight: was he Superhero or Supervillain?

Today I write about Captain Midnight. Not the despite the fact that he was not a radio man in the strictest sense of the word. He did transmit his messages, but he did not broadcast them in the AM or FM radio bands. These events all take place on the TV and for that I apologize but these events must be told and retold so that his saga is forever known to all.

First of all, I refer to John R. MacDougal of Ocala, Florida, not the comic book character. Second of all, we only know about MacDougal because he was caught. There have been other Broadcast Signal Intruders who were not. Their stories are unknown and untold. So let us begin at the beginning.

The 25-year old Mr. MacDougal had watched his satellite dish business dry up as pay-per view channels like HBO switched to encoded satellite transmissions. He had a small grudge against HBO you might say. To pay the bills he got a night job at Central Florida Teleport, a company that uplinks services to satellites. He worked alone after 6 PM. Like clockwork, when the movie ended at 12:30 John flipped on the color bars and turned the 30-foot dish into it's resting position. In it's resting position, by sheer chance, that dish pointed at the Galaxy 1 satellite. Transponder 23 on that satellite carries the eastern feed of HBO. Suddenly he was seized by an idea. MacDougal was an engineer. He knew how to overpower the HBO signal. On April 27th 1986, at 12:32am Captain Midnight struck. The FCC considered him a threat to national security. MacDougal punched the transmit button and began typing:

GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]

It was an act of Broadcast Signal Intrusion. It's illegal, but personally I find it both harmless and amusing in small doses. But HBO had a conniption. On April 28, HBO chairman Michael J. Fuchs wrote to the FCC saying that the company had received calls threatening to move Galaxy 1 into a new orbit. He urged the FCC to capture Captain Midnight. The thought he was a terrorist. Monty Python couldn't make this up.

He was caught, had to pay a $5,000 fine and received a year’s probation. He got off easy because they really, really wanted to know how he did it. At one point he announced that he was going to write a book about the incident. I don't think he ever did. But MacDougal Electronics survived. They install Dish Network dishes these days.

The Hilarious Royalty Statement

I rarely send my handful of readers elsewhere but today I must.

By accident I came across an article on digital royalties that is fantastic. Just go read it. I used to work in the record biz, and the situation is even worse than he knows.. but what he does know, and what he subsequently discovers makes a truly great piece of writing.
I highly reccomend you go read it HERE

DJ John Cage

John Cage was an avant-garde composer among other things. He "wrote" compositions of pure silence, he played piano with debris placed on top of the strings, and experimented with tape cut-ups. His music career started out in radio but never really came back to it. He found some fame in the 1960s but all-in-all was too damn weird for general consumption.. which suited him just fine.

The closest he came to being a DJ was as a boyscout as a child. Cage had a radio program on KNX when he was 12, for the Boy Scouts of America. It began as a 30 minute program entirely comprised of performances by himself and other Boy scouts. Solo violin, solo piano piano and vocal. Strangely it's popularity led it to expand fo a 2-hour program. It was the kind of thing that was only possible in 1924. At the time KNX operated on 360 meters, and had only been granted those calls in May of 1922.

In 1982 he wrote a radio play "Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet" which was commissioned and performed on Westdeutscher Rundfunk WDR Radio in West Germany. It had 16 performers and one narrator and contained no music.

In 1966 Cage and Morton Feldman recorded four conversations billed as "Radio Happenings" at WBAI in New York. The series of sit downs ran from July 1966 and January 1967. There was no music, he composed nothing, they just rambled for half an hour or so each time.

CBS once commissioned a play group he worked with in Chicago to do a work based upon Kenneth Patchen's The City Wears a Slouch Hat. I can find no recording of it, but he does mention it in an interview here which I quote from below:

"My idea was to take a play, and thinking of the script as having ambient sounds to use those sounds, not as sound effects, but as the sounds of a music which would accompany the play. CBS liked that."

But the most famous connection to radio is in performance. In 1955 he "wrote" a composition for 5 radios with two performers stationed at each radio. One is for tuning the radio-stations, the second is for adjusting the volume and tone. I put quotations around the word "wrote" because the content of the composition is inherently different at each performance even if the rhythm is the same. Below is the video form a 1982 performance of it.

Transcription Mystery Disc #89

I don't recall setting out to have a string of "Transcription Tuesdays" but the trend continues this week. This one is actually from a set of three 7-inch cardboard-core Recordisc transcription discs. The sides are mostly labeled and dated. All are recorded at 78 RPM except the track labeled only as "Organ" which is 33.3 RPM. The inventory is as follows

04/04/1947
A. Eric Wilkinson - (Organ)
B. Morton Gould - Tea For Two

04/11/1947
A. Eric Wilkinson - If You Were The Only Girl
B. Horace Heidt - Dark Eyes

04/18/1947
A. Unknown - Drink to Me Only
B. Blank

You can see the engineers interest in proper labeling diminished over time. That track isn't by unknown.. there's just no performer listed. It is also interesting that two of the three discs have inner rings cut with grooves but no audio. Also notable that only one track has a snipped of narration. At the end of "Organ" a narrator comes in and is quickly cut off. He utters perhaps 4 words adding no identification just proving that these are live radio transcriptions.

Horace Heidt and Morton Gould are known names in radio land. They were composers and orchestra leaders. The problem is bringing them together with the totally unknown character Eric Wilkinson. In 1947 Heidt had come out of retirement to lead an orchestra on the Phillip Morris sponsored show "The Youth Opportunity Program." But that show debuted in December, he'd been off air since 1945. If this is anything but a dub from LP it's a one-off appearance I'll never find.

The same goes for Gould. In the 1940s he did the Cresta Blanca Program and the Chrysler Hour both on CBS. In the late 1940s he focused primarily on composing patriotic music. Books that mention this period of his career lament the lack of chronology. but it's for certain he was no longer on WOR, and no longer musical director of any radio program. This too is likely a dub from an LP.


But Eric Wilkinson is unlike the others. I include his audio above. In the December 1943 issue of Billboard I find an Eric Wilkinson playing organ on 990 WIBG-AM. It notes he formerly was the staff organist at KYW, and now leads an 8-piece band for WIBG. The Music year Book of 1943 also lists him as musical director for WIBG. the answer may lie in another issue of Billboard form July 1943 that also mentions him:

"Pacting with the music union also gives WIBG the privileged to go in for remote broadcasts. Station did not lose any time, running a wire backstage to the Earle Theatre for weekly interviews with the band celebs coming in each week."

The binaural Emory Cook

For a number of years, Emory Cook was considered a truly exceptional audio engineer. He was born and raised in Albany, NY and attended Cornell University. He worked for the Audio Engineering Department at Western Electric. He was a strong proponent of binaural sound, an inventor and audiophile. He once described binaural sound thusly:

"Stereophonic recording differs from Binaural in that the microphone placements are selected for loudspeaker reproduction. Binaural properly applies to a two-channel system designed for headphone reproduction. It thus requires the use of two channels fed by microphones spaced about seven inches apart."

Those magic 7 inches represent the average distance between a pair of normal human ears. it's the founding idea behind binaural sound. It is supposed to put the listeners perspective sonically where the sounds on the recording or broadcast originated. I consider it a subtype of stereo sound. Stereo sounds being if nothing else.. at least less specific. More here.

It's strange, but binaural sound actually predates stereo. In 1881 Clement Ader installed pairs of carbon mics on a Paris opera stage for telephone subscribers to listen in. How is this separate from the evolution of stereo? It's not. They're inextricably linked. Every step in the evolution of stereo sound can also be claimed by the evolution of binaural sound. The only difference is snobbery. There is a gri-gri quality to binaural sound that stereo lacks. But let's get back to Emory. There was a lot of gri-gri to him as well.

Emory created a record player with two needles meant to play records with two parallel grooves. He founded Cook records in 1949 and eventually put out more than a hundred binaural LPs. His plant was based in Stamford Connecticut. Emory was using his personal brand recognition to hype a series of binaural LPs: Sounds of the Sea, Nightmare in the Mosque, Speed the Parting Guest. He demonstrated them at the Worlds Fair. They're all over eBay now for the kitsch.

But there were also radio broadcasts were live like Toscanini, WQXR string quartet and the Godina opera hour. But this was 1952. stereo sound was entirely new in broadcasting. WQXR was achieving "stereo" by using it's using its AM and FM stations towers as separate Left and Right audio channels. Was it stereo, was it binaural? I don't distinguish a difference. Binaural enthusiast will tell you this was the first binaural broadcast. I think it's bunk. In 1925, on 5XX the BBC had broadcast stereo with the Left channel on medium wave and the right channel on long wave. That's 27 years before WQXR. WGN-AM and WGNB-FM did the same thing in 1952 just a few months before WQXR. All they're beating their chests over is microphone positioning in the source audio. It's bunk; clever bunk, but bunk nonetheless.
The irony is that in the process of supporting the bunk idea of binaural audio the very educated and clever Cook actually made other developments. He made microphone and amplifier improvements that made it possible to record audio above 20,000 cycles, he even developed a process to press vinyl in a powdered form to reduce surface noise. Previous to this they were always pressed starting with a preheated puck of vinyl, a technique based on shellac 78s. He called the new technique “microfusion.” Sadly it didn't catch on.

Emory Cook died in 2002 at the age of 89. Emory donated his master tapes, patents, and papers to the Smithsonian Institution in 1990. Obit here.

Stereo Compatible

Single Sideband Transmission

We call this SSB for short, Single Sideband Modulation. Before SSB we used straight Amplitude modulation. It was noisy and it used a lot of bandwidth. More specifically Amplitude modulation produced an output signal that used twice the bandwidth of the original baseband signal. This is where I should start defining my terms I expect. More here.
What's a sideband?
Every kind of modulation produces sidebands. A sideband is just the frequencies adjacent to the carrier wave that contain power as a result of signal modulation. Every transmission signal contains more than a single frequency, these are linked together or superimposed upon each other. Everything that isn't the carrier wave is in the side bands.

What's a baseband?
A baseband is a band of frequencies starting at zero reaching up to the to the highest frequency component of the transmission. RF Modulation results in shifting the signal up to a much higher frequency than it originally spanned. In a nutshell, this everything you had before you modulated the signal, or everything you have after demodulating a modulated signal. The reason we shift all these signals away from zero is that lower frequency signals tend to distort. More here.

How's that different from Bandwidth?
Easy. Bandwidth is the same thing but measured from the lowest frequency, if that's zero, higher than zero or even below zero. The RF bandwidth of a signal is usually about twice its baseband bandwidth.

Almost by default Amplitude modulation of a carrier wave results in two mirror-image sidebands, one on each side of the carrier wave. This is called double sideband modulation. The one below the carrier is the lower sideband, the one above it is called the upper sideband. It all seems intuitive now, but 5 minutes ago you had no idea what any of this was. More here.

In 1914 John R. Carson of AT&T invented single sideband transmission. Single Sideband could be either the upper or lower sideband. Before the FRC ever licensed a single AM radio station, John proved that either sideband could carry as much information as the two sides together. this was a revelation.

In 1915 he filed for the patent "Method and Means for Signaling with High Frequency Waves." After much litigation, Patent number 1449382 was granted in 1923 to Mr. Carson. Wait litigation? Yes, at the same time experiments were conducted at the US Naval Radio Station in Arlington an antenna was tuned to pass one sideband and attenuate the other. regardless.. Carson got the patent for AT&T. More here.

What makes this so interesting is that even though it produced a bandwidth savings of 50% it wasn't embraced. This was largely before broadcast applications, so it was used in telegraphy. But at that time message traffic didn't yet require spectrum-conservation. It had to wait until WWII and government intervention to standardize the power and bandwidth saving innovation.

Yodelin' Slim Clark

Modern music critics forget that there was country music in the North as well as the south. Yodelin' Slim Clark was from Massachusetts originally. The tradition continues in Canada whereas New England has largely moved on. Clark himself retired in the 1970s and began painting. Strangely beyond his discography and his career painting landscapes much of his biography is convoluted.

His career began in 1936 at the age of 19. On air he used the name "Wyoming Buck" thought he had never even been to Wyoming himself. Some sources state he went pro in 1931 but that seems absurd since he would have been 0nly 14. Regardless the "Wyoming Buck" name didn't' stick. The station manager dubbed him "Yodeling Slim Clark," a nick name he kept for the rest of his career.

In 1938 he got a weekly spot on a show at WKNE with announcer, Ozzie Wade. Numerous sources put him on the radio program "RFD Dinner Bell" out of Bangor but this does not jive. RDF Dinner Bell was at WSB in Atlanta about 1000 miles away. RFD stands for Radio Farmers Democracy. The acronym was a play on the Postal Service's Rural Free Delivery service which began in 1896 for farming families in rural areas. By 1905 the Post Office was serving 32,000 RFD routes. It was discontinued in 1915 in favor of parcel post. More here.

It was a program of agriculture and country music which would have aired him. Starting in 1926, it ran three times a week at noon sponsored by Sears & Roebuck. Sears stopped working with WSB in 1928 and the show was discontinued. Clark did not appear on a show of the same name for 10 more years. However, WLS ran their own version of the show, so it's entirely possible that 910 WABI-AM in Bangor did as well. More here.

He had several bands over the years. With the Red River Rangers he played often at 1240 WHAI-AM in Greenfield, MA. His later bands The Trailriders and The Trailsmen were nearly as successful. In 1952 he started in television at WABI-TV.

In 1946 he signed a record deal with Continental Records in New York City. He stayed with them until 1957. He wasn't on to record another 50 albums before he began his second career as a painter.

Transcription Mystery Disc #83

This disc came with no label on either side. But even with not a lick of text, we can piece together some of the story. The presence of two holes indicates this is probably an Audiodisc blank or a Duodisc. We can eliminate Prestos because they had Four holes and Wilcox-gay which had three. Sound Craft's had two holes but they painted the shellac all the way to the center hole. Recordisc were typically on a cardboard blank not aluminum.

Yeah that doesn't help much. But the audio does. It's recorded from tape to transcription disc. You can hear jumps in the audio that can only come from inconsistent tape speed. In the era this must have been made it was rare for someone to own a transcription recorder. It would be more rare for them to own both a transcription machine and a reel-to-reel deck. This was almost certainly made at a radio station. I think this is a dub of a broadcast made for a performer in the recording.
That would explain the sloppiness of the dub. Side A has about 4 minutes of audio and Side B has about 2 minutes. the two sides are parts of two different songs. they probably ran out of disc on Side A and flipped it and dropped the needle again. It's clearly not made for broadcast, it's made for personal use. In this rip I've spliced together the two sides with a short gap between.

At the very end of the recording the mystery recording finally finds a source. In the beginning the tape jumps obscure some key words but the pianist is from Schwenksville, PA. "Thank you very much Karl. Ladies and gentlemen you've been listening to another in a series of cultural and arts broadcasts sponsored jointly by station WFI..." And it cuts off.

It probably is the station we now call 560 WFIL-AM. Station WFI-AM became WFIL-AM in 1935 they kept those calls until 1993. They reclaimed the calls in 1994 and continue to use them today. In the 1930s it was an NBC affiliate and in the 1940s an ABC affiliate. Dick Clark worked there in 1952. In the 1960s they were a top 40 station. I would guess this recording is from the late 1940s, early 50s. You can see a schedule from that era here. It's got everything from Walter Winchell to cooking shows.