In my line of work, I end up using a lot of microphones. Overwhelmingly these days, a mic is a fairly utilitarian cylinder (with occasional exceptions, of course). However when you cast an ear over microphones of the past, not only do you experience microphones with many different aural characteristics, you also get a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
We all recognize the Shure "Elvis" microphone, the classic RCA capsule shaped mic (and its innumerable knockoffs), and I still get email from people wanting to buy the "Bob Barker" microphone I wrote about years ago. I do remember seeing the curvy Calrad DM-12 around years ago, probably at the local Czech polka hall. The mic is unusually... um... sensual for a microphone. I imagine that the DM-12 was designed to be seen as well as heard - though I don't have the proper cord to tell you whether it sounds as good as it looks.
In poking around online, I couldn't find anyone speaking too much about the actual sound of the microphone, just its looks. Several studios I found will rent these mics to you to capture that "vintage sound", but it doesn't take long to figure out that just because a mic is old, that doesn't mean you're going to get any special results out of it. Several of the vintage mics I have around my office look awesome, but make it sound like I've been gargling chain-saws.
When I record a voice-over, I'm usually alone in a room recording into a stubby gun-metal condenser mic. It does a great job, but there's little pizazz. Maybe a swingin' design like the DM-12 is what I need to give those long recording session a little kick. or maybe I should remember that I just referred to a microphone as "sensual", and call it a day.
I got my first keytar a while back, and pretty much everyone thought (thinks) I was (am) the biggest dork. Even other keyboard guys. I'm not saying that I haven't earned that title many times over (this existence of Retro Thing is testimony of that!), but over a keytar? When I got mine, it was a decidedly out thing... and it didn't help my case any that the instrument was large (full size keys, go figure.), blazing white, and had "Casio" written on it in a huge font.
We seem to be in a place now where there are new models of keytar every week. So when I wanted to hot dog on some blazin' keyboard solos I was weird, but when some smug ironic hipster straps into a keytar he's "totally meta"? Sorry dude - you're just a dork with moustache wax.
Maybe it's the wanna-be guitar shape of most keytars that cemented their role in the annals of music history as a peculiarity. Except for showboating, there's little real need for a keytar. You can only play one handed with your left mitt just swinging around whatever passes for a guitar-style neck. I'll bet the synth history books would tell a different story if we were all rocking the Roland SH-101.
First of all, you're talking about an excellent analog synth. Monophonic, I grant you... but that's perfect for soloing. All the knobs and tweaks are right there. It's small and square, so no phallic posturing here. An SH-101 player is clearly comfortable with himself as a person. Available in cheerful read, blue and silver. You can even bolt on a tiny guitar-ish handle for pitch & mod wheels, or just to more fully bring the rock. And of course it's the 80s you can be dressed like you're ready to go skiing at pretty much any time.
The first time I saw one of these in action was on a TV interview with John Tesh. The internet was there and remembered to put a tape in the VCR.
Tesh was struggling to get out from under the stone of his mid-afternoon Hollywood gossip show to prove that he was a serious musician too. True, his albums were mostly of the New Age variety, but on an appearance with Dweezil & Ahmet Zappa he produced his SH-101 and wowed the crowd with Black Sabbath's rock classic "The Wizard" (the harmonica sure can get kinda dark). Ahmet did his incomprehensible dance, Tesh nearly lost his specs (right at 1:42), and I was out of my chair! I was dancing along with John Tesh! I was jammin' along with Ahmet Zappa! And the Roland SH-101!
Two retro-fueled YouTube phenomena take the stage in a series of live shows in Las Vegas on February 27th. A couple years back, Cee Lo Green's Motown inspired grooves hit the net with a song who's name we're reluctant to say on a family website. You can hear a bowdlerized version on the radio called "Forget You", but it lacks the juice of the fiery original. It's a hysterical tune that namechecks Atari among other things, and the accompanying music video is a retro delight (you can spot a Casio SK-1 on the counter top in the diner). Love that song, and it went huge on the internet.
Another massive phenom on the net also goes back a few years with the Rock-afire explosion. This all mechanical group was the house band at kiddie pizzerias in the 80s. The robots don't really play the instruments, but their animated automaton antics won the hearts of many a joyous face covered in birthday cake. When Showbiz Pizza transformed into Chuck E. Cheese, some determined fans bought the old Rock-A-Fire robot "show" and reprogrammed them to sing new songs. It's both amazing and unsettling to see these cherished children's characters grinding ouut some sexy R&B beats. The internet went crazy, and there was even a fine documentary (watch it HERE for free) produced about the phenomenon.
Aaron Fechter, inventor of the Rock-afire Explosion, has been at the helm of this reprogramming scene. We've seen the RF band appear in music videos and feature films, and today the band takes up residency as part of Cee Lo Green's live Vegas show at Planet Hollywood opening the show with a rousing Rock-afire rendition of "F*** You".
"Cee Lo grew up having his childhood birthday parties at Showbiz Pizza Place in Atlanta," says Fechter, "and now, he's bringing his childhood's first live band, musical
influence with him!" This is a seven week engagement, with a hint of possible further performances after that.
If I were in Vegas, I'd grab a couple slices of cheap pizza and join the party. Any of our readers local and able to go?
Longtime readers will know that I'm a huge fan of Ernie Kovacs, TV genius & pioneer. Everyone pretty much agrees on how amazing Ernie was, but what a lot of people don't realize is just how amazing his wife Edie Adams was too. She's that gorgeous lady at the Hungarian's elbow (usually singing) in much of his television output. The lady who was equally at home as an opera singing grand dame, as she was a dame getting hit in the face with a pie. The amazing lady who had the foresight to save all of those classic TV shows when their destiny was the dumpster.
It might have been easy for someone else to get lost in the shadow of Ernie personality and legend, but multi-talented Edie had a significant career of her own; Broadway, movies, TV, and of course her long stint as the Muriel "why-don’t-ya-pick-one-up-and-smoke-it-sometime?" cigar girl.
She pressed a few albums in her time, but never released a Christmas album until now. This new CD is a collection of Christmas music from Kovacs' live morning TV show in the 50s - "Kovacs Unlimited". These are simple & unadorned arrangements of Christmas classics (along with some less shopworn tunes) as she performed them on live TV. These recordings come from acetate records of these live performances, so by all accounts it's a miracle that we can hear these songs today.
For audio purists out there, yes... you will hear some surface noise from these 60 year old acetates, but the restoration of Edie's voice is tremendous. Any extraneous noise doesn't matter to me in the least. The performances have that vitality that only live TV can create (you can even hear Ernie and crew chatter in the background on a couple cuts).
I thoroughly enjoyed this CD, one of the rare times my love of old TV can share space in my heart with love for these old classics. If you can't find the Edie Adams Christmas Album at your local record store (the CD's liner notes are worth getting the physical disc), you can download selected tracks or the whole album right away from Amazon.
A few years ago an internet community reared its mechanical head via YouTube. Fans who idolized the robot band that performed at Showbiz Pizza (a cousin of sorts to the current Chuck E. Cheese Questionable Pizza Emporium) bought the entire robot setup from closed restaurants and started programming their own shows. This became a sensation on YouTube, spawned a documentary, and efforts to mutate pop music through these pizza shilling robots continue.
During the production of the documentary, filmmakers spooled through hours of tapes that inventor Aaron Fechter hadn't seen in decades. They found these demo clips that show off what else Fechter was working on besides the Rockafire band we all know. There's an alien band, a Wizard of Oz show, and a Santa who I'm pretty sure started in a little early on the egg nog.
Stop reading this post. Watch the video first. You'll feel giddy, glowy, and laugh out loud happy. I guarantee it. Watched it? Good. It's a fake.
The 1926 Fotoplayer is a real instrument, and Joe Rinaudo really plays it with the vim you see. YouTube user "adnmusic" added the very credible sounding cacophony that could have backed an old timey version of "Sweet Child O' Mine". The Fotoplayer uses perforated rolls like a player piano, but with tons of extra (wait for it...) bells and whistles.
Movie theaters of the silent era installed Fotoplayers so that a non-musician (remember the piano rolls provided the main music "track") with a minimum of four hands could accompany the mute movies of the times. When I used to teach film history, I thought it was important to make clear that silent movies were never really silent movies. There was always some kind of accompaniment (sometimes live, sometimes on records) to liven up the flickers. It is only in an academic atmosphere like film school that we watch these movies in clinical silence.
Rinaudo painstakingly restored his Fotoplayer, taking thousands of hours to repair and fine tune the many, many moving parts. You can glimpse the drums, xylophone, and the many pull-cord sound effects in action with Joe's real performance in the genuine video below. Fewer than 50 Fotoplayers survive today, with only 12 in working condition. It's a privilege to see one in action, and it can still bring a smile to the face... even if it's not playing Guns N' Roses.
Longtime readers of Retro Thing may have picked up on my life-long admiration of Ernie Kovacs, early tv comedy pioneer and genius, no less. Kovacs invented many characters throughout his TV career. One of the most enduring is Percy Dovetonsils, a lithping dandy of a poet who'd bestow his oddball odes on a sometimes bewildered audience.
Percy painted a fine monochromatic picture with his tiger striped smoking jacket and cigarette holder, all while stealing sips from a large martini. Besides the outrageous lisp and wardrobe, it's Percy's eyes folks remember best. What started out as goofy novelty store glasses with painted on half-asleep eyeballs, became just as much a trademark as Percy's self-congratulatory little giggles.
Today it would be easy to point at Percy as being a rather politically incorrect character. Then there are those TV historians who point at Percy as being TVs first openly gay character. The performance is a collection of 50s stereotypes, but charming in a way. I'll leave this issue to the TV historians and sexual revolutionaries to debate. All I know is that Percy is clearly very happy with who he is, bless him.
Percy was one of Kovacs' most popular creations, and Ernie recorded a volume of poems for Vanguard Records back in 1961, along with notes and mockups for the LP's cover. The album never progressed beyond that point, as a tragic auto accident claimed Kovacs not long after. The unreleased album became the thing of rumors and was thought lost forever. Kovacs. We're fortunate that archivist Ben Model discovered the studio tapes recently, and after adding a piano score (Model is an accomplished accompanist for silent movies) the album is available for the first time today!
You can find "Percy Dovetonsils Thpeaks!" on CD, (delicious!) vinyl, or digital download (purchase of either CD or LP also includes full album digital download as well as many extra tracks unavailable anywhere else). I just had to get the LP - the first 1000 are in luscious lavender.
It may have taken decades to dust off the poems within the frilly covers of Percy's collected works, but I daresay it's been worth the wait. Omnivore Records has put together a really classy package. If you use the links below to purchase the CD or LP on Amazon, you'll be helping out Retro Thing as well as showing your love for these thuperb thonnets. Thankth!
What used to be the chattering racket of floppy drive data access is now music you can dance to. Mr Solid Snake has put the whirr of the floppy drive's stepper motors to good use in recreating that SNL standard "What Is Love" by Haddaway. You can check out his YouTube page for more floppy drive performances of the theme from Star Trek (actually quite amazing), Superman, and the inevitable cover of music from Zelda.
The only thing I'd change is to get some more microphones in there to really hear the nitty gritty of the eight musical motors. There's a lot going on in these arrangements that I'd want to capture.
Prefer your 90s clubskank themes in a more solid state mode? Okay, here's the same song as it might have looked and sounded on an old 8 bit NES.
I'm a kid who grew up on all kinds of American radio. Certainly television was the bigger portion on my plate, but I've always been entranced by audio-only entertainment. In the 5th grade when I discovered National Public Radio's dramas, jazz music, and also a local Chicago show dedicated to old time radio. I still have hundreds of cassettes from back then filled with Jack Benny and Suspense shows from radio's heyday.
Oddly, it wasn't until the late 80s in high school that I got into pop music. If you weren't on top of the top 40 in my school, you simply weren't part of youth culture. Again I have countless cassettes I taped off of the radio. I can download digital copies of those songs easily enough, but the parts of those tapes I cherish most are the local DJs that made me feel like they were talking right to me. The on-air talent on my favorite stations were from Chicago, they had all the lowdown on what was happening around town and in the world of music... local radio DJs were a crucial part of the snapshot of that time in my life.
Spin the dial to radio today. The recent deaths of Davy Jones and Whitney Houston are so sad for so many of us, but it further underlines the U.S. radio industry's fading relevance. Jones died on a weekday, so DJs were able to inform their listeners live on the air, perhaps even adding a few impromptu words of tribute. Houston died on a weekend. While TV and celebrity websites like the onerous TMZ were able to quickly spread the news, there was a scarcely a murmur on radio.
While in other countries, weekends are where radio goes into high gear (lots of ambitious and experimental shows broadcast in those hours when people can listen longer), in the U.S. the weekend is when many radio stations go into auto-pilot. Talent often pre-records homogeneous copy weeks ahead of time in the odious practice known as "tracking". It's a common radio practice today. Rather than hire local live talent, one voice records bland "evergreen" copy that stations can play back as part of pre-recorded programming anytime. This is also why you'll hear long "dance-party" or "countdown the hits" shows on American radio most weekends. Besides a skeleton crew to keep an eye on the transmitter, many times there are few people in the actual station on a weekend to handle live local broadcasts.
This isn't new. Corporate media owners have been downsizing U.S. radio interests for years, being especially savage in smaller markets. There is no regard for local flavor, nor is there a feeling of duty or service to the community ears they're selling to advertisers. In a bid to make radio cheaper, they've made it feel cheaper too. Yet the reality is that radio can be done on a shoestring. CHIRP Radio is a Chicago volunteer group that's 200 strong. Every day they produce compelling, dynamic, and fun real-live programming that streams on the web (the group is at the forefront of the legal fight for opening up more local over-the-air frequencies). Shawn Campbell, the director of CHIRP, has often said that people didn't leave radio, radio left the people.
It's sad to be reminded that this in many parts of this country, the fantastic world of radio... really relevant local radio... could soon fizz out in a sad burst of static. It seems that the future of radio is in the hands of volunteers and enthusiasts. Perhaps that's for the best. As smartphones become more and more common, streaming your favorite internet station while on the move is a reality. As the corporate types continue to create content with the balance sheet instead of listening with their hearts, more and more disenfranchised listeners will simply create radio of their own. Maybe it's up to more groups like CHIRP to remind us of what has always made radio great... when it's done right, radio is that intimate little voice in your ear speaking only to you.
I realize that chiptune covers of classic 80s songs aren't exactly new (someday we'll lay down a whole setlist of C64 SID chip covers of 80s classics), but this fresh take on the classic "This Charming Man" by The Smiths is just so right. Of course anyone can play any tune on any oddball instrument to get a laugh, but in this case the instrumentation and arrangement are perfection. How can this not have been a video game from the golden age? I dare you to get this tune out of your head, or to stop your d-pad thumb from twitching all day.
Okay, so what would a video game based on The Smiths be like? It would have to alternate between jubilance and murk, that's a given. I imagine you'd play the part of old Stephen Patrick Morrissey (his single-pixel pompadour bouncing with every skip). First level you'd have to slink quietly through a dusty library, trying to score dates with English Lit majors by dropping some Wilde, Keats & 60s pop queen references.
Spurned, you move on to an uncustomary bright London day looking for Shyness or Coyness (hoping they'll be nice, though they can also stop you). If you don't find Love, don't worry. The Bomb will bring you together. Hint: A+B+pause will give you even more tortured metaphors for "death". Avoid panic, the boy with the thorn in his side, hooligans (no matter how sweet and tender they may seem) and right when you think you have five seconds to spare - Bigmouth strikes again! In the bonus round, you upgrade your character to both son and heir, finding sadly that it's to nothing in particular. After all of your travails (and moping), you can see the the other members of The Smiths at the far end of the screen. Reunion concert? Nope... it's just Johhny Marr telling you that the rest of the band are in another castle. Actually it's 1998 and the other two members of the band await you in a courtroom to press a lawsuit. A bit depressing and anti-climactic for a video game, I grant you... but this is The Smiths game we're talking about. It was really nothing.
Miss ol' Moz's voice? Here's a (sloooooow, but impressive) mashup of "This Charming Man" and something by that Lana Del Rey so many people are grousing about.
In early April, New York's Museum of Modern Art will host eight consecutive nights of Kraftwerk performing all 8 of their original albums. Live. My God.
In these days of so many long-in-the-tooth musicians cashing in on their back catalog, this event promises to be a fresh look at the pivotal synth artists' entire repertoire in a series called "Kraftwerk - Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8" They promise that these eight performances will not only feature their sublime and seminal synth music, but each evening will feature 3D visualizations tailored to MOMA's Marron Atrium. Another break with contemporary music industry convention is that these once-in-a-lifetime performances are quite reasonably priced at $25.
If you're a New Yorker, or if like me you're trying to figure out a way to take two weeks off to fly to NY for this staggeringly cool sounding event, you can find more details at MOMA's website. The group did a similar residency in Munich in 2011. Is it possible that if this US exhbition goes well, Kraftwerk would consider doing similarly affordable "installations" in other cities around the globe? Pretty please?
It is really, really rare that I laugh till I get tears in the corners of my eyes, but these videos have done it.
I'm a longtime fan of the unrelenting gloominess and early synth work of Depeche Mode. In the 80s I'd never heard sounds and beats like that before, and it opened up a whole world of electronic music to me. The band did a lot to introduce and popularize entirely synthesized music (to more than just me, of course). Their radio and music video hit "Everything Counts" made a huge impact on ears that had never heard such an extraordinary collection of noises, which makes it even more hysterical when children do a pretty authentic cover of it with stuff from around the toy room.
Clearly this family knows how to make good use of Quality Time. My God, they even do "Strangelove"...
I know I'm courting controversy here, but I haven't been nearly as enthusiastic about DM since they moved away from their signature synth sound to a more rock band oriented thing in the 90s. I know plenty of people who (and I'll never understand this) got into the band precisely for that epic rock sound and not the crucial synth stuff that came before. I like to joke that DM has been around long enough to have fans of just their much crappier career phase.
I'm being dramatic, of course. There's plenty to like of their recent work (they have a recent live DVD that's pretty amazing), but those early unrelentingly electronic albums will always be very special in my heart. Those are very hardy songs that can even survive being covered by the mewling of adorable little moppets. Maybe we're down to projects like these to keep those early days of musical Depeche melancholia alive.
If there's a theme we encounter time and time again here on Retro Thing, it's the irrational emotional bond people form with retro tech... but this 80's (or 90's? This particular one is labeled 1991) tape recorder makes me a little uneasy. Is it just me, or is it almost like this kiddie cassette player is looking and grinning at us?
There have been lots of tape recorders (fewer these days, I suppose) made expressly for children. Usually these were just chunkier versions of regular adult tape recorders with giant colorful buttons. Playskool took kid-friendly design that extra step to create a funny faced recorder that my adult friends seem to take a shine to, even today.
As a budding junior audio engineer, I would have killed for a tape recorder with features like built-in AM/FM radio, and a hardwired mic for recording my own tapes as well as barking out my demands over the PA system. It's in this public address role that we saw the Rockin' Robot make an appearance in the first two Toy Story movies. Our lanky lead, Woody, used Mr. Mike (the recorder's stage name) to make speeches to the other characters.
Mr. Mike was even issued in non tape-recorder mini version as a Toy Story tie-in later in the 90's. The hard-to-find toy includes a voice-changer to turn you into any of several robots, which is very cool... but doesn't really explain the high prices either version of the toy seems to command on Ebay. I've seen this analog relic go for over a hundred dollars - which may be just enough to break my irrational emotional bond with this grimacing tape deck.
The 70s were a decade of the gritty anti-hero in movies. Some film historians credit the success of Star Wars to audiences responding to the movie's "good guy" heroes and high adventure. 1977's blockbuster success influenced more than just movies - sci fi trappings beamed up in a big way everywhere you looked.
Sadly, it wasn't all good. Here's a clip from ITV's Kenny Everett Video Show - British comedy skits and pop music, if you don't remember. This wasn't shown an awful lot in the states, but as a pre-teen I was fascinated by the show's early video effects, music I'd never heard before, and the (quite controversial and underdressed) Hot Gossip dancers. Here they are with their own simply awful sci-fi musical tribute. See how many SF theme songs snippets you can spot in this 1978 video clip.
When we find out how much our old baseball cards or comic books are worth today, some of us like to get mad at our moms for throwing out our precious collections when we went away to college. I could see having pangs at the throught of mom taking your carefully curated treasures out to the rubbish heap, but don't be mad at her for throwing out the cereal box that looks like it's going to fetch a couple of hundred bucks in the next few days.
This Ebay auction offers an intact cereal box with a record featuring the stylings of the Jackson 5. That's right - you're bidding on a box of petrified cereal from 1972. I have this record somewhere, and as I recall it's the full song.
Super Sugar Crisp cereal has gone through a couple of name changes over the years - specifically to eliminate the word "sugar" from the brand. Funny that they don't want to remind parents that the cereal is caked in sugar, but it's okay to have a mascot who's clearly high off his fuzzy ass all the time. I actually remember cereal boxes coming with records laminated onto the back like this one. I still have one from Alpha-Bits cereal that tells the spooky tale of Sleepy Hollow. You'd impatiently wolf down the cereal, and carefully cut off the back panel that had a thin vinyl record glued on to the back.
The fidelity of isn't great, but it isn't bad either. The record uses flexi-disc technology, those thin sheets included with magazines that played on your record player.
It's over $150 with two days to go, but I expect it'll get several times that once the hammer falls. There are several points of interest in this auction that will attract collectors of Michael Jackson, unusual records, and even cereal box fans. I'm fully expecting a bidding frenzy in the last seconds, probably by jangle-nerved collectors on a sugar high after consuming too much kiddie cereal.
This peaceful full color Parisian street scene was shot on July 19, 1914 - only a few days before the outbreak of WWI.
