Showing posts with label
The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records.
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Showing posts with label
The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records.
Show all posts
The fairy-lit and decorated tree stands in the living room and supermarkets are beginning to clear their shelves to make room for Easter eggs which means it must be time to look back at the best albums of 2014. Beginning as usual with the best re-releases and box sets.
The most excitement this year seems to have been generated by the release of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series Volume 11.
In other words 'The Basement Tapes'.
Understandable I guess when one considers the significance of those recordings. Without those informal sessions I doubt there would have been any 'Music From Big Pink'
nor any of the genre which we now call 'Americana'. So, pretty important then. But what of the actual musical content of the set itself?
Well to satisfy the Dylan fans, it simply had to be a complete release of all the tracks available including alternate takes, demos and false starts. But therein lies the problem for me because the truth is that most of that stuff is not very good. Nevertheless it is an historic document and most of those who were prepared to fork out about £100 appear to have been well pleased. Personally I have found it more enjoyable to create a playlist of my favourite pieces, and let's be honest, there are some truly great songs there, but each to his own.
Other box sets this year have included the Small Faces excellent 'Here Comes The Nice' which I wrote about here. Of course this release has been made even more poignant by the recent death of Ian McLagan.
Also Led Zeppelin have released remastered and expanded versions of their first five albums, Wilco have released a collection of rarities entitled 'Alpha Mike Foxtrot' and Crosby Stills Nash & Young have also brought us a 4 CD set of live recordings from their 1974 stadium tour. Another fine box set came from the occasionally overlooked Mike Bloomfield. 'From His Head To His Heart To His Hands' is a mixed bag of material from throughout Bloomfield's career including a dozen previously unreleased tracks. It has all been nicely compiled by his friend and frequent collaborator, Al Kooper.
All very nice indeed.
However I suspect that they will all pale into insignificance when I eventually get to hear Volume 2 of 'The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records'. I have repeatedly been drawn back to the wonders of Volume 1 which was released last year, and the second volume covering the period 1928 to 1932 promises to be even more wonderful, featuring the recordings of Charley Patton and my own personal favourites, Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas. I can't wait to hear it in it's entirety (800 tracks)
I'm now turning my attention to the best of the new releases of 2014. Check back soon to see if you agree with my selections.
No sooner had I finished reading George Gissing's 'New Grub Street' than I commenced (and very quickly finished) music journalist
Amanda Petrusich's 'Do Not Sell At Any Price'.
As the book cover tells us, this is the story of "the wild, obsessive hunt for the world's rarest 78 RPM records". And a fascinating tale it is too; hence me finishing it in under a week.
I should perhaps first explain my own albeit brief association with these thick but brittle discs. As a youngster aged about 11 or 12 I would occasionally be taken by my mother to visit an elderly aunt. It wasn't a visit I relished as frankly there was little for me to do apart from listen to older people talk about things that were of no interest to me. In short, I was bored. That is until I discovered a strange contraption in a back bedroom that has once been occupied by an older female cousin who had since married and left home. This was a wind up gramophone and in the cabinet below were stored a pile of 78 RPM records in their quaint, paper covers. I played them all and soon selected my particular favourites which I played over and over again. Suddenly my visits to the elderly aunt became a joy simply because we did not even have a record player at home so the only music I could listen to came from the radio - or as we called it back then, the wireless.
Among those favourite records were 'Dimples' by John Lee Hooker on the Vee-Jay label, 'A Handful of Songs' by Tommy Steele (on Decca) and rather embarrassingly now, 'Look Homeward, Angel' by Johnnie Ray on Philips. I loved the colourful labels, I loved the smell and the feel, I even loved having to wind the machine up when the turntable began to revolve too slowly. And of course I loved the sound and a passion for recorded music began then and has never waned.
So what became of those records? Well sadly my sister who is ten years younger than me decided one day to test her new found walking skills and toddled into the bedroom and right across the records that I had left lying on the floor. I don't think that they were all shattered but certainly some of my favourites were. The experience at least taught me never to leave my own records in the vicinity of my sister.
To return to the book in question in which the author sets out on a quest to track down and meet some of the small band of obsessive collectors of what we generally just refer to as 78's. I almost inserted the word 'old' in there but as production ceased in the early 1960's, the word is somewhat superfluous. Nevertheless there exists a group of people who are prepared to devote their lives, and an awful lot of cash, on tracking down very rare examples of this format of music reproduction.
So, Ms Petrusich discusses the well known figure of Harry Smith who curated and edited the famous and wonderful collection entitled 'The Anthology of American Folk Music'. Smith died in 1991 but among those who are, or have been carrying on the quest for this rare music, are John Heneghan, Christopher King, John Tefteller, James McKune, Nathan Salsburg, Joe Bussard and the only female in the bunch, Sarah Bryan. I confess that with the exception of Smith and Joe Bussard, none of these names meant anything to me.
The fact that there is only one female listed, confirmed one of my stereotypical thoughts, that this is a male dominated area. I also carried mental pictures of middle aged or elderly men with long hair and beards, who were predominantly single. For the most part, my views were confirmed, though there were obvious exceptions.
As to why people become so obsessed with collecting generally is dealt with and provided me with a fascinating, though not always comfortable insight. At times the descriptions were just a little too close for comfort as I recognised some of the behavioural tendencies in people I regard as friends and, dare I say it, even in myself. The thing that concerned me about some (and I stress, some) of the characters in the book, was the compulsion to collect, yet with little or no intention of ever playing the items collected. Personally I have never understood that mentality as for me the music is everything. Why pursue a piece of music for years, pay a fortune for it and then never actually listen to it? Thankfully some of the characters were of like mind and Ms Petrusich described how the collectors expressed delight and excitement upon hearing certain pieces of music.
Through this book, I rapidly came to realise that without this group of people, a great deal of music originally released on 78's would now be lost to us. As the format was replaced by vinyl records, cassettes, CD's and MP3 files, the use of these fragile, shellac records has diminished and consequently thousands of them have been consigned to rubbish bins or to languish in dark corners of attics or basements. Also most of the original metal master discs have been lost or destroyed so there remains only one way of preventing the music disappearing into history. Find a copy of the record and reproduce it onto a more durable format that can be enjoyed by current or future generations.
And this is exactly what has been happening. Take for example a collection that I own entitled 'Down in the Basement (Joe Bussard's Treasure Trove of Vintage 78's)' which, as the title suggests, was sourced from 78 RPM records collected by Bussard over the past 50 years. Besides other rarities, this album includes the track 'Original Stack O'Lee Blues' by Long 'Cleve' Reed and Little Harvey Hull, a track that would have been lost to us all but for Bussard's one copy. A sobering thought!
Thanks to Bussard, we can now all enjoy this great blues piece. Click here if you don't believe me.
The book also references other collections that I own or am familiar with. For example the superb collection, 'The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records Vol 1' which was issued last year on Jack White's Third Man Records. Ms Petrusich even made a journey to view the site of the Grafton, Wisconsin factory where the records were produced and in the least interesting part of the book, describes her preparation, training and subsequent scuba dive into the murky Milwaukee River to try to recover some discs which may or may not have been dumped there when the plant closed. (I did tell you that these people were obsessed).
Perhaps the most poignant part of the book deals with a collector named Don Wahle who appears to have ended his days in squalor but left behind a huge record collection. Collector Nathan Salsburg rescued those that he could and subsequently compiled a collection along the same lines as 'The Anthology of American Folk Music', where the songs are sorted into different categories. This three disc album was issued through Tomkins Square in 2012 and covers music from 1923 to 1936. It is called 'Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard' and since release it has deservedly garnered great reviews. This may well be a subject I return to in my occasional 'Box Sets' series.
For now from this collection, I leave you with a fascinating track recorded in 1930 in two parts (one on each side of the 78 record). The track is 'Flat Wheel Train Blues' as recorded by Red Gay (fiddle) and Jack Wellman (guitar) and is a train blues with a difference, being the most evocative version of this genre I have ever heard. Listen particularly to part two in which a mule standing by the side of the track attempts to outrun the train. As Salsburg describes it, "It is hilarious and beautiful and melancholy'.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
'Flat Wheel Train Blues'
The book 'Do Not Sell At Any Price' is published by Scribner and I highly recommend it.
I feel that I am doing this package something of an injustice to call it merely a 'box set'.
Billed in the publicity material as a 'cabinet of wonder', this must surely be the most elaborate and dare I say beautiful package ever assembled for the purpose of bringing music into our homes.
Jack White's Third Man Records and John Fahey's Revenant Records have teamed together to bring us volume one of 'The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records' and in so doing, they have created a truly wonderful limited edition set. First there is the cabinet itself which is manufactured from quarter-sawn oak and which replicates the cabinets which once housed phonograph record players. All very appropriate considering how Paramount actually began as a furniture company manufacturing these very same items for other recording companies. The cabinet is lined with lush velvet upholstery with sections housing each of the splendid contents. These include six long playing records on burled chestnut coloured vinyl which themselves are set within a laser etched, white birch folio. Then there are two books. One is a 360 page field guide containing fascinating portraits of the artists and a full catalogue of Paramount record releases.
The second is a 250 page clothbound hard-cover art book. Finally, what is designed to resemble the metal contraption that held the needle on old phonograph machines, turns out to be a USB stick containing no fewer than 800 tracks by 172 different artists.
Phew!
Of course, the fact that this package is so aesthetically pleasing means that in so many reviews, the actual musical content has been all but overlooked. This is a great shame!
True, we are dealing here with sounds that were produced between 1917 and 1927 and Paramount were infamous for using cheap materials in the production of their recordings. Consequently we are not being treated to hi fidelity sound. Nevertheless the music is vibrant, often energetic and always historically relevant. For this is where modern music began. Included within the styles are blues, jazz, gospel, folk, vaudeville and quirky novelty songs. The artists represented include some well known names such as Ma Rainey, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Blind Lemon Jefferson. There are also some whose names I was familiar with but whose music I was not. These include Alberta Hunter, Fletcher Henderson, Ida Cox and Ethel Waters. How glad I am to have discovered them.
Obviously I have not worked my way through all 800 sides yet but of those I have heard, I have been delighted by The Beale Street Sheiks (listen if you can to 'Mr Crumb Don't Like It'), Jack Penewell (listen to his awesome and appropriate slide guitar playing on 'Hen House Blues') and the wonderfully named Jimmy O'Bryants Famous Original Washboard Band.
Congratulations to Third Man and Revenant for having the guts to produce this wonderful package. Also there is Volume Two to look forward to towards the end of 2014. This will cover the remainder of Paramount history from 1927 to 1932 and will I am informed contain music by Charlie Patton, Skip James, Son House and many others.
If you are interested in any of the artists contained in this set and wish to get in touch, then please contact me either through this blog or by email. I look forward to hearing from others who appreciate this 'cabinet of wonder'.
Bye for now.
