A great Ian Tyson song, sung here by Tom Russell:
Music
Cool Retrotech Project
I recently saw the retrosilent film The Artist (which I thought was pretty good), and by chance, a couple of days later I picked up a magazine with an article on the history of early talking-picture technologies. This in turn led me to do some Internet searching. One of the early sound-movie technologies was something called Vitaphone. With this approach, the sound was recorded separately from the film, using a very large (16 inch diameter) phonograph record.
“How on earth did they ever keep the sound and the picture in sync?” you may well be asking. During recording, the camera and the record-cutting machine were both driven by AC synchronous motors powered by a common line; during exhibition, a direct mechanical connection between projector and record-player was employed. Lots of detail about the process, as well as a review of the pioneering talking movie Don Juan, in this 1926 NYT article.
Vitaphone was heavily used by Warner Brothers and its sister studio First National between 1926 and 1931–in addition to feature films, the technology was used for over 1000 short subjects. While the technology offered good fidelity by the standards of the times–electronic amplification was used–the separation of picture media and sound media made editing difficult, and during exhibition of a film it was necessary to change the records every 10 minutes or so.
When Vitaphone was displaced by the sound-on-film approach, circa 1931,some–but by no means all–of the Vitaphone movies were transferred to the new technology. The Vitaphone Project, which has been active since 1991, is dedicated to finding the old films and old disks and bringing them together in playable format again.
Related posts:
Czarist Russia, in color (the first link at this post doesn’t work anymore, but the rest of them do)
Men, Women, Bulls, and Horses
Several good songs about the rodeo:
Tom Russell, Bucking Horse Moon
Tom Russell, All This Way for the Short Ride
Dan Seals, Everything That Glitters (is not Gold)
Judy Collins, Someday Soon
Others?
(Earlier songs-with-related-themes post: Heartsignals)
Music And the New Shared Commons
Earlier in the summer I asked Dan if he wanted to see the band PELICAN when they came into town for a show. Pelican is a pretty obscure band – they are an all-instrumental band (no vocalist) and they play using major (not minor) chords unlike most metal acts and have few guitar solos. In linking to wikipedia for this post I noted that Pelican might be broken up as of June, 2012, or at least one of their main founders left.
Pelican is the type of band that gets no radio airplay, as in, ZERO. Their music is nowhere in the popular culture. However, they are a great band and I have all their albums and enjoy listening to them, particularly when I work out.
Dan surprised me by saying “Of course I would like to see them, but I can’t make that date.” I was surprised by him wanting to go immediately until I thought, hey, this might be a reason why he is a big Pelican fan too…
Every so often I “fill up” Dan’s shuffles with new tunes that he uses when he works out. Working out for Dan isn’t what it is for you or me – it probably is an hour long at a pace that would KILL you in the first five minutes. It is also hilarious that Dan has the older generation shuffles, but they still work fine and hold at least 500 MB of songs, which is enough for a workout or trip, and by now they are completely expendable. If you are kind of a shuffle collector too check out the Wikipedia page for the history of the iPod and go down memory lane too (these are a mix of first, second and fourth generation shuffles, the cursed third generation didn’t have the ability to move forward or back without touching a dumb little thing on the headphones and thus sucked).
Thus even though Dan and I don’t live in the same city nor are we around at the same time to listen to music, we like a lot of the same bands, and whether they are (relatively) obscure bands or not, they are in heavy airplay in our respective heads all the time, thanks to the iPod. This isn’t completely new, since people have passed around “mix tapes” since time immemorial, but the atomization of the listening experience is now virtually complete.
If you go to Pandora you can make your own custom playlists – I have Pelican there, too (along with a lot of obscure bands that they link to) and then there are a host of metal and / or hard rock channels on Sirius / XM that play songs that would NEVER get on the radio. There are a lot of great rap / hip-hop stations there too, including some old-school ones that give me a laugh.
On the topic of metal – I saw an interview with Rodrigo Y Gabriela, on the Guitar Center sessions on Direct TV (highly recommended, they also had an awesome one with Social Distortion and now Megadeth doing “Symphony of Destruction”) where this double acoustic guitar band (you need to watch them to understand, also a lot of percussion) said that in every town they have ever been to around the world there is a local metal scene, the only type of music that can make that type of claim.
Radio in Chicago is absolutely miserable – unless I am listening to local sports or perhaps news there is no point turning it on at all – so the choices are Sirius / XM in your car or just hooking up your iPod to your stereo. You can also stream Pandora through your car, as well, if your data plan allows it.
So as mainstream radio completely dies (for rock, at least) it is replaced by a customized format of local and specific choices that are as unique as the listener. Anything you want can be found or acquired. And Pelican fans (along with other obscure bands) can put it on heavy rotation where ever they go. Sometimes as I work out in a big health club I laugh to think about what would happen if they streamed what was on my headphones throughout the club or from the guy next to me who, for all I know, is into music even more obscure.
Cross posted at LITGM
Afghan Whigs Lollapalooza After Show
This year, for the first time in several years, I didn’t go to Lollapalooza. The people I normally go with were exhausted by the heat and the lineup wasn’t that exciting. I am a heavy metal fan, but damn, Ozzy was old back when I saw him with Randy Rhodes (on TV) and that was about 25 or so years ago.
We went to see the Afghan Whigs at a Lollapalooza after-show at the Metro. The Afghan Whigs are fronted by Greg Dulli and he has had a great career, not only with the Afghan Whigs who hit it semi-big in the 1990’s but on his own. It was great to see him back in the spotlight again.
There was a DJ and an opening act and the Afghan Whigs didn’t go on until 12:15pm. But they went right on time at 12:15pm and sounded great. There was a horn section and their heavy groove with hard rock thrown in method was working.
I learned something else – I am too damn old for the Metro. That place was completely packed and you couldn’t see anything unless you wanted to push to the front and battle everyone in a sweatbox. I don’t know if it was oversold or it was always like that (my older memories of the Metro are faded) but there were people everywhere and I basically watched it from the hallway. You’d need to stand in line and rush to the stage and sit through the opening acts to see pretty much anything at all (literally) and, hey, forget that.
On another note Lollapalooza was a rain soaked mess on Saturday. They evacuated it and everyone apparently just poured out into the surrounding neighborhoods, as if that is some sort of “plan” (you’d want to go to shelter, right?) While we were in Wrigleyville checking out bars and waiting for the show we saw an immense stream of completely f’d up people covered in mud just screaming, howling and weaving around. It looked like some sort of mud bomb went off. There was even a guy passed out on the mailbox that his friends were trying to drag him away from (an inside joke for Dan).
If you are interested in the Afghan Whigs or Dulli’s solo work which I’d highly recommend some tracks to download are
– Gentlemen, Somethin’ Hot, 66, Dobonair, Miles Iz Ded, Honkey’s Ladder
– Teenage Wristband, Bonnie Brae, On the Corner (the Twilight Singers)
– Cigarettes (Greg Dulli)
Cross posted at LITGM