music

Somewhere in a New York dollar store back in the late 90s, we found a dusty cassette tape. The band was called Rotondi.

When we later all gathered around the cassette player in the family’s recreation room, we were bathed in a weird mix of happy, excited, catchy… polka. And we loved it.

Now, technically, this was ‘New Wave Polka’, a tiny little music scene that seems to have existed for about 30 minutes in a small part of California during the mid-1990s (though some polka-ologists credit the Brave Combo with launching the underpopulated movement in the late 70s). So, we weren’t nearly as dorky as the ‘polka’ label would imply. ‘New Wave Polka’ incorporates all of the accordions, but jazzes up the oom-pah beats and infuses it all with a little bit of rock, pushes it towards zydeco, and takes on the flavor of everything it touches. And kid in upstate NY wasn’t aware of any of this back before the internet did stuff. We had Simon and Garfunkel.

Between my mother and myself, we pretty much wore the tape out, though it still flutters along to this day. It wasn’t until years later that we actually encountered Rotondi’s ‘Preaching and Confessing’ on CD at a different dollar store. Sadly, these two releases seemed to be the only things that Rotondi recorded.

So, I wrote a letter (on actual paper) to their record label to see if there was any more music to be had, and it was actually answered by a band member. For five dollars (to cover shipping), he offered to make me a cassette of some unreleased Rotondi music – and I didn’t follow through, marking one of my biggest music collecting regrets. Back then, I didn’t understand the rarity of a band member actually offering to share their process with you, pre-polish. I want to kick that kid in the pants region.

Rotondi’s response to my initial letter mentioned an even earlier album than the one I’d obtained, though the local Camelot music was useless at helping me find it, and it’s long been out of print. ‘Polka Changed My Life Today’ is actually comprised of a material that would later be released (sometimes after being re-recorded) on future albums, as well as a few songs that remain buried in history. It was only recently that digital music juggernaut iTunes has made these available for download, and the rest of the internet seems to have followed suit. It’s just as the ancient prophets foretold : “Patience is a virtue when hunting for New Wave Polka albums.” Or something like that.

Sure, it’s a discography that spans three whole albums, but it finally feels like a very old collection has finally been completed. In order to completely round out the collection, it became essential to track town an album or two by the Loose Acoustic Trio. This band includes members from Rotondi, and even includes a few re-recordings of great Rotondi songs – in a bluegrass style, which is perhaps the most unexpected departure from polka that one can conceptualize.

It’s because of finding Rotondi in a dollar store bin that I realized that there was amazing, very hidden music in every possible nook and cranny out there, and where you find it should have no bearing on your appreciation of it.

It’s no secret that fans of The Beatles are pretty hardcore collectors. If you’re a Beatles fan, you probably have at least a few LPs around, a handful of cassettes, and some CDs that you’re already ripped onto your iPod. You may have purchased the complete mono and stereo ‘master’ editions earlier this year. Through all of this, The Beatles, or the corporation that represents their interests now, had never ‘officially’ made any of their works available in a digital, or downloadable, format – until December 8th, 2009.

While their catalogue of classics is not available through iTunes or Amazon as MP3s (though the questionable world of MP3Panda has them in droves), they have made the strange and untraditional choice of  releasing this full catalogue in the form of a USB stick. Yes, a 16GB flash drive is The Beatles’ media delivery method of choice. I’m no technologist, but I feel that it won’t be too long before the flash drive is phased out for a newer, better, denser form of media storage – so enjoy it while it lasts, which will be when out computers evolve beyond USB, as they have with 3.5” disks and ZIP drives. And punch cards. We’re pretty much pushing our way past CDs as it is.

Here’s the rub : we have all of this music already. Granted, what we have is in a format that offers slightly less clarity and depth than these 24-bit digital USB offerings (in FLAC format, which is superior to CD), but there are no surprises. While the reviews of this USB collection are fairly glowing, they mostly come from intense audiophiles. These are people with high-end audio systems and top of the line, expensive equipment to enjoy their tunes on. On the other end of the spectrum is myself – I’m dedicated enough to own a turntable , but I get all of my music via my iPod and car audio system, or through computer speakers that I sometimes have to smack to get working again. This USB Collection, which runs about $250 and is limited to 30,000 copies, is intended to only truly benefit audiophiles. There are probably 30,000 audiophiles, or people who don’t know the difference, out there somewhere.

The reason it’s taken so long for The Beatles to release anything digitally is because of a fear of piracy. What this demonstrates is an absolutely fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet, technology, and the world work. Anyone who is remotely modern in their music intake has converted most of their CDs into DRM-free, easily tradable MP3s already. By not releasing your music digitally, The Beatles forced this action – and it’s honestly ignorant to expect people to hang onto their Discmen in the interest of loyalty to one recording artist. If you released MP3s years ago, you’d have already sold them to a certain portion of this audience instead. The selling point here, this tragically late in the game, is an USB stick that pops out of an apple-shaped holder, and ridiculously high audio quality that a minority of music enthusiasts can appreciate.

The pack also comes with a bunch of videos and photos, as well as original cover art. I also have doubts that these are truly revelatory things – we pretty much know what Ringo ate for breakfast, and when precisely it passed through his body, for every day of recording Abbey Road.

If you are fortunate enough to have a standalone music player that can handle flash media, this is a pretty neat idea. Otherwise, you’re tethered to your computer until you burn off / transfer the DRM-free files to the media of your choice, at which point you may need to reduce the quality anyhow so they’ll all fit in one place.

It’s a beautiful-looking, clever, pricey bauble of Beatles-ness, but I can’t help but feel that it’s too little, too late – unless you’re really, really, really into The Beatles.

(PS – I also wouldn’t mind reviewing one of these in person, Apple Corps. Wink wink.)

I’ve mentioned it here once before, but my reputation in this town precedes me. I’m the guy you talk to before you throw your LPs in the trash, and no matter what they are, I’ll probably salivate over them. Sure, I might end up painting on them, but I’ll use them. The locals know that I’m a painter too, so it’s not unexpected.

So, it happened again today. I was handed a milk crate full of LPs by a local woman who comes into the library often, and she told me, “These are for you! If you don’t want them, the library can have them.” Her sons, both musicians, were no longer living at home and she was clearing out some space. I gladly accepted the lot, as our particular library has no consistent or reliable means for selling vinyl, nor do we really have the audience for it. I am essentially the whole audience.

I started to leaf through my treasures and I wasn’t too excited by the front of the box – Shaka Khan and The Thompson Twins aren’t really my idea of a pleasing sonic experience.

Now, there are countless albums that were designed for the turntable, so this is my attraction. I could listen to an MP3 of a song from the 1970s, or I could listen to it on the original LP and lend the experience some additional authenticity. I don’t debate the clarity, just the action.

As an aside, I also enjoy the fact that we still call it a ‘discography’ as our musical media becomes more and more distant from assuming the shape of discs.

I continued to hunt through the box, and I was not disappointed – some very clean Pink Floyd and Blue Oyster Cult indicated a fixation with prog rock – and then I came across nine Rush albums, from their very first 1974 self titled release through 1982’s Signals, and three live albums. While not a complete discography, I was just handed a collection. I love things that come pre-collected for me. And when I am handed a collection, I hunt down the value of what’s in my hands – not to re-sell it, but to see how carefully I need to preserve it.

All albums, generally speaking, are worth much more in their sealed forms than their opened forms, and many even have a respectable value if they retain their original plastic wrapping, despite being opened on one side.

Rush’s first album, simply titled ‘Rush‘ seems to have had at least three versions. The initial pressing of 3500 copies features a cream-colored label and a blue ‘Moon Records’ logo. The second pressing includes a red logo, as opposed to the later pink lettering, as well as a small logo for Moon Records which is missing from later pressings. The pressing of 5000 ‘red’ copies reach prices around $80, opened. Reprints of the ‘pink’ LP sell fairly consistently around the $10 mark. Mine, of course, is the latter.

I’ve also come across at least three versions of 1978’s Hemispheres. While the plain, black vinyl copy sells for only a few bucks, an alternate pressing on red vinyl sells for between $15 and $25. A picturedisc featuring the cover artwork sells for a similar price.

Most of these LPs have versions which were released exclusively in Japan, and while almost identical, they have an ‘obi’, or a little paper belt of sorts that wraps around the record sleeve to describe what it is in Japanese. These copies consistently surface for about $30 to $50 bucks. A Japanese picturedisc version of Fly By Night recently sold for $200, having met some kind of holy trifecta of rarity.

A comparable price was reached by a rare, sealed 2002 pressing of Vapor Trails. By 2002, LPs had already faded out of the mainstream, so vinyl pressings of things have become scarce by their very nature – but the best musicians out there still make vinyl releases. And I still collect them.

Of course, there are always a few auditory odds and ends out there in the world of vinyl, including promos, radio station releases and fan club specials, but this is the main crux of it. Keep an eye out for picturediscs and red logos and you’ll have something of monetary value. For nw, I’ll enjoy my musical value.

At least a few times every week, I encounter music that I really, really love embedded into YouTube videos or streaming media from other sources. As a music fanatic who never leaves home without his shiny iPod Classic, I have a serious need to take these gems and carry them around with me,  file them safely away in my carefully organized collection of mp3s on a secondary hard drive, and sing way too loudly along with them in the car.

Unfortunately, YouTube and streaming media aren’t inherently downloadable. They’re ostensibly forced to exist forever within the applets that run them, trapped inside of their web-cages. Of course, there are little software add-ons like SoThink and FlashGet for Firefox and other browsers that will let you snag a lot of streaming media files for yourself and house them indefinitely on your computer if you’re afraid that they’ll somehow vanish. The fact still remains – media that’s been compressed for smooth web use isn’t at the top of its game. At best, any video that you swipe from the online universe is a small, pixelated shadow of what it would be on an official release. These things fall under the ‘good enough’ category, and the legal territory that delineates what you can look at but not touch is still murky.

While I collect a lot of music, I’m typically not obsessive about gathering up live performances of any artist – except for Brooklyn’s Elysian Fields. So, when I found a 90 minute streaming concert video that was filmed on a smoky French stage this past June, I knew I had to find a way to have it. I found their lost Clinical Trial tapes after years of searching, I found 2005’s Black Session, I joined eMusic to get a four song set that they played there, and I needed this.

While web video isn’t great, audio – while still imperfect – suffers a lot less when it’s compressed for slick internet usage. It’s pretty fair game, and since I don’t anticipate any live Elysian Fields releases, it’s ‘good enough’. This is where Audio Hijack comes in.

I talked about Audio Hijack once before. It’s a beautiful little piece of software that will allow you to record audio from any source that your computer can hear – streaming radio shows, your browser, your webcam, and any other sounds your computer makes. You can capture them all. Traditionally, I’ve only used Audio Hijack to capture audio from my record player to preserve the old discs in a more durable digital format, but the opportunity to record a ‘live’ show form the browser also exists.

It’s amazingly simple – just open Audio Hijack, direct the source to the browser of your choice, and hit ‘hijack’ and ‘record’.

Given the fact that web video sometimes has a tendency to buffer and rebuffer itself as it plays (which would make your audio recording useless), there are a few simple steps which I took in order to make everything as simple as possible.

First, close up anything else that will suck up your bandwidth. The only thing that your computer should be talking to the internet about is your streaming video.

Second, if you’re recording from a browser, don’t leave any other browser windows open. You’d hate to have your relatively clean 90-minute concert recording broken up by the little click of Facebook IMs popping up.

Ultimately, the 90 minute show was recorded perfectly and clocked in at under 70 MB. You can adjust your recording clarity to a wide variety of levels for all manner of output later, but ‘Internet (High)’ always works fine for me. I’m not an audiophile, though – any clicks and pops I run into I usually just accept as an integral part of the recorded musical experience. The quest for real-life clarity is best left for concerts that you actually attend. Note that recording is also in real time, much like making a mixtape on a dual cassette recorder. You can’t speed up or skip ahead. It’s a little romantic that way.

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t support your favorite artists by actually purchasing their work. I download plenty of stuff, but my collection of CDs (even if I never use them) matches much of what I’ve downloaded. As a creator myself, I understand the value of having your work both appreciated and compensated for. As with all things, act responsibly.

The fact that I’ve been recording old 1980s toy commercials from ancient VHS tapes for YouTube is another story entirely. Someone’s gotta keep these things safe.

As I’ve often said, normally the most interesting thing to me about vintage sheet music is the cover art; this because I’m so musically illiterate that the only way I am able to carry a tune is to buy sheet music *ba dum dum* But did you know that inside the cute collectible covers, there’s actually music?!

And sometimes, the very best music is hiding under very plain, boring, wraps. Seriously, these covers are nearly blank (save for some fonts hubby would identify for me — if I cared to let him handle my vintage sheet music), but I’m fascinated anyway.

I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle

This copy of Jingle Jangle Jingle is proof that my mom, who sang parts of this song, wasn’t as nuts as I thought. I guess if I watched any classic Westerns, I’d have heard of it; but that’s not my genre. And now I know, should a music trivia contest break-out any time soon, that this song was not written by Gene Autry but by Frank Loesser (music by Joseph J. Lilley).

(And while I’m being so particular, I’d like to note that I was at first incensed that some idiot had yard-sale tagged it with a 75 cents sticker; but it appears that the sticker is original, a way to mark-up the price from 60 cents.)

Before we go any further, I should clarify: When I say “the very best music”, I mean in terms of collecting stories and discoveries. Like I said, I can’t read a note of it and even if I could, I’m no music expert — but I sure do know words. Lyrics. Good stories. Or bad stories, as the case may be. For sometimes, that bland manila paper cloaks some serious racism. Double the “OMG” (Oh My God) points when the racist tunes were formerly the property of a nun. (To be fair, Sister Patricia also owned this cheeky little naughty clock song. I’m not sure that makes things ‘better’… But at least I’m being completely truthful, so spare me the ruler, Sister.)

Ham-ing It Up With Vintage Sheet Music

Another such “goody” I would have missed if I had merely been waiting for fetching cover art to catch my fancy is Ham & Eggs, by John Martin:

When the borders hear the dinner bell
And gather ’round the table;
They eat whatever they are served
As fast as they are able;
Roast beef, veal, or corn beef hash
Stewed prunes and a cup of tea
Is the bill of fare at the boarding house
But here’s the bill for me.

Chrous:
H-A-M and eggs, there’s nothing in the world can beat;
They go to the spot whenever I long for something good to eat
The Dutchman loves his sauer kraut
And the Frenchman fried frogs legs;
But when I’m hungry, what I want is H-A-M and eggs.

When I take my girl to a swell cafe
And ask “what are you eating?”
She answers “Oysters and Champagne”
Lord, how my heart starts beating;
I’ve just got one dollar bill
And I’m in an awful stew;
So I tell the waiter to bring us on
Some ham and eggs for two.

(Chorus)

My mother in law was very sick
We thot that she was dying
And every body in the room
(Excepting me) was crying.
But she’s up and ’round to day
Strong as ever on her legs;
For they brought her back from the very grave
With a dish of Ham and Eggs.

(Chorus)

When I got married years ago
My wife was quite good looking;
But we were nearly starved, because,
She was no good at cooking;
So I bought some Ham and Eggs
Put ‘em on the frying pan,
From that day all my trouble ceased
And I’m a happy man.

(Don’t forget the big chorus finish now!)

I guess when they said it was a “Comic Male Quartette” they weren’t kidding.

The cover also boasts that “Every Quartette Should Have This Fine New Number In Their Repertoire. A GREAT ENCORE NUMBER” For some reason I want to get a hold of the writers at Scrubs and see if they want a copy of this tune so that Ted’s Band can sing it.

Then again, why not ask the actual cappella band themselves. They’re called The Blanks, and you can’t get much more full circle than that when you started out talking about rather blank sheet music, can you?