Larynx

This past week I happened to see two movies from different decades and noticed that the electronic novelty, the SONOVOX, serendipitously appeared in each. The first was the Kay Kyser horror comedy You'll Find Out (1940), the second the Australian SF action-adventure film released almost forty years later, Mad Max (1979). In the latter film, a character who seems to have suffered some sort of trauma to his throat uses the then anachronistic Sonovox as a voice prosthesis, unavoidably lending his speech that hollow metallic ring that makes the sound created by the Sonovox so distinctive, if slightly chilling. (Indeed, the makers of the films featuring "Mad Max" seem compelled to portray a vast array of prosthetic devices throughout the trilogy.)

The Sonovox was an electronic novelty used exclusively to create vocal effects. Hence, it was a device of extremely narrow application (unlike the vocoder), which eventually led to its demise and its interest to us now as a museum piece. A couple of posts back I wrote about Bell Labs' voder, an electronic speech synthesis device. What's unusual about the Sonovox is that it uses two biscuit-sized microphones placed on either side of a person's throat to simulate electronically synthesized speech: thus, it was used to simulate a simulation. An easy way to simulate the artificiality of mechanically created speech, the invention quickly led to anthropomorphized trains, steam shovels, pianos, and vacuum cleaners, that is, to its application in the field of children's entertainment. In yet another serendipity, the voder and the Sonovox were introduced to the general public the same year, 1939 (see my earlier post on the voder for historical information). According to this article from Time (24 July 1939), the Sonovox was invented by Gilbert Wright (the son of the hugely popular early twentieth-century novelist Harold Bell Wright) around January 1939. During a meditative moment while Wright was scratching the whiskers on his Adam's Apple (that is, his laryngeal prominence), he noticed the unusual sounds emanating from his mouth. If you've ever seen Bruce McGill ("D-Day") in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) play the William Tell "Overture" by drumming his fingers on his windpipe, you get the same general idea.

In this clip, actress Lucille Ball is shown demonstrating the Sonovox in a British Pathé newsreel dated 25 September 1939,  although the apparatus isn't referred to as such, the newsreel instead being titled Machine Made Voices! So far as I've been able to discover, the Sonovox made its first appearance in the aforementioned Kay Kyser haunted house comedy You'll Find Out (November 1940). In this film (which also starred Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre), Lugosi employs the ethereal vocal effect of the Sonovox to simulate the voice of a revenant spirit during a seance, and it is later used by the Kyser Orchestra singer Harry Babbitt during a song, as shown in this clip from the film available on YouTube. The apparatus was perhaps most famously used as the anthropomorphized voice of the train, Casey Junior, in Dumbo (October 1941) but was demonstrated to comedian Robert Benchley in the Disney feature The Reluctant Dragon (June 1941), during a tour of the Disney Studios facility in Burbank. (According to the Time article, Disney wanted to buy the exclusive rights to the Sonovox.) Not surprisingly, the Sonovox was used on several children's records, including a couple issued by Capitol Records in the late 1940s: Rusty in Orchestraville (1946) and Sparky's Magic Piano (1947). It was also used as the voice of the airplane in Whizzer The Talking Airplane (Jackalee Records, 1947). I haven't had the opportunity to confirm the use of the Sonovox in the Forties films The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and A Letter to Three Wives (1949), but a few on-line sources indicate it was used in these films. No doubt it was used in other films for sound effects. Apparently it was employed well into the 1960s by some radio stations around the country as a way of producing aurally distinctive station IDs, which is to say its application became even more specialized. Given that its application was so narrow, it's no wonder it was eventually displaced by the vocoder, and hence became a historic artifact.

The Elfman-Burton Music Box Bonus Disc

I suspect those like me who pre-ordered The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box Collector's Edition (for information, go here) have by now received the bonus disc (#17), sent as a holiday gift to those who've been patiently awaiting the formal release of the delayed Collector's Edition. My copy arrived yesterday in a plain padded envelope postmarked 28 December. Just as the email I received in late November indicated, the bonus disc - apparently limited to 1,000 copies - has been autographed by Danny Elfman (cover pictured). Enclosed in a thin cardboard sleeve with a cover reproducing one of Tim Burton's drawings (a drawing also, incidentally, included in The Art of Tim Burton), essentially it is a compilation disc (50:20) or Music Box "sampler" consisting of the main or end title music from each of the thirteen films that (so far) represent the collaboration between Danny Elfman and Tim Burton. The exception to this pattern is the previously unreleased first track, "The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box Suite" (3:02). For those who may not have yet received the bonus disc, the track listing is as follows:

01. The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box Suite (3:02) (previously unreleased)
02. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure - Main Title/Bike Race 2:55 (previously unreleased)
03. Beetlejuice - Main Title (with Elfman vocal intro) 2:31 (previously unreleased)
04. Batman - The Batman Theme (2:40)
05. Edward Scissorhands - Introduction (Titles) 2:38
06. Batman Returns - End Credits (4:44)
07. Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas - End Title (5:04)
08. Mars Attacks! - Main Titles (2:26)
09. Sleepy Hollow - Main Titles (3:12)
10. Planet of the Apes - Main Titles (3:52)
11. Big Fish - Big Fish (Titles) (4:34)
12. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Main Titles (5:01)
13. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride - End Credits Part 2 - Bonus Tracks from Bonejangles and his Bone Boys (2:33)
14. Alice in Wonderland - Alice's Theme (5:06)

There are no surprises, although as indicated above there are three previously unreleased tracks. (Note that Track 2 was indeed included on the previously released original soundtrack but that release consisted of re-recorded highlights.) Both the disc and sleeve are marked "Promotion Only. Not For Sale." For those who may be wondering why I'm interested in this release, I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce that about three months ago I signed a contract with Scarecrow Press to write THE TIM BURTON ENCYCLOPEDIA. Scarecrow Press has already issued in the series THE RIDLEY SCOTT ENCYCLOPEDIA and, most recently, THE FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA ENCYCLOPEDIA. My own book on Tim Burton will not appear anytime soon, as the manuscript is not due until December 2013. I hope to see THE TIM BURTON ENCYCLOPEDIA appear in 2014.

The Voder

In Chapter Nine of Philip K. Dick's We Can Build You, Sam Barrows dismisses the Lincoln simulacrum's desire to "speechify" as nothing but "the familiar mechanical man gimmick, with this dressed-up historical guise. The same thing was demonstrated at the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair, Pedro the Vodor." A true Cartesian, Barrows distinguishes the human from the animal (which Descartes metaphorically likened to the machine) by the human capacity for language. The Lincoln simulacrum is, in effect, dismissed by Barrows as being as mindless as a parrot imitating human speech.

I suspect Philip Dick was writing from memory, as he (or the book's editor) has made a minor orthographic error, for it's actually spelled voder, not vodor. In all likelihood Dick visited the San Francisco World's Fair (formally, the Golden Gate International Exposition, held 1939 - 1940) and saw, at around the age of 11, Bell Laboratories' demonstration of what he (mis)remembered as "Pedro the Vodor" (pictured above, with operator; Bell's voder exhibit is to the right). Developed by Bell engineer H. W. Dudley, the voder was Bell Laboratories' first demonstration of an electronic speech synthesis device. This early analog system preceded Bell Labs' work in "articulatory synthesis"  conducted by Cecil Coker in the 1960s, and Joe Olive's later work on "concatenate synthesis" in the 1970s (see Mark Tatham and Katherine Morton, Developments in Speech Synthesis, Wiley 2005). I mention this later research in speech synthesis by Bell Labs because it is worth mentioning that a famous milestone in that research was a sample created by John L. Kelly in 1962 using an IBM 704 computer, consisting of Kelly's vocoder synthesizer recreating "A Bicycle Built for Two"  (AKA "Daisy Bell"). Arthur C. Clarke, then visiting his friend John Pierce at the Bell Labs' Murray Hill facility, witnessed the demonstration and later used it in 2001: A Space Odyssey during the scene when the HAL 9000 computer is being dismantled by Dave Bowman. (I recommend the essay by Joe Olive, recognized as one of the leading experts in text-to-speech [TTS] synthesis, titled "'The Talking Computer': Text to Speech Synthesis," in David G. Stork, Ed., HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, MIT Press 1997).

Note that the voder is an electrical speech synthesizer while the vocoder is a speech analyzer coupled with a voder speech synthesizer. Dennis Klatt has posted a historical review of the development of speech synthesizers and has also conveniently posted a short sample of the sound of the voder (which Philip K. Dick undoubtedly heard) which you can hear by clicking this link. For those interested, I note that Wendy Carlos' music for the film Stanley Kubrick made after 2001, A Clockwork Orange, is the earliest work in her ouevre to use the vocodor, but she indicates here that the vocoded portions were done prior to being assigned the film, those vocoded portions being the last movement of Beethoven's Symphony #9 and Timesteps.

Junk Shot

Angelus Novus (1920) by Paul Klee

Theorist and critic Walter Benjamin owned this watercolor for many years. In his essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," he wrote this about Klee's painting:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

If you have followed my blog the past three years, you couldn't fail but notice that beginning in May I stopped posting regularly. I didn't stop out of a lack of interest in blogging, that is, feeling I had nothing to say. The main reason I stopped had to do with what Walter Benjamin describes in the passage above, the catastrophe which has the disorienting effect of propelling us backwards into a future to which our back is turned, while the wreckage in front of us continues to grow higher. That ever-growing pile of wreckage is what we know as history. Beginning in early May, I found that I was increasingly preoccupied by the Gulf oil disaster and its ecological consequences, which so consumed my thoughts that I was simply unable to concentrate on anything significant for any length of time. Since by dint of personality I find it impossible to write about disaster - it is rather like a form of paralysis - I simply wrote nothing at all. And I think, for quite a awhile, longer than I realized, I didn't think about blogging at all. One might say that the theoretical implication concerns the disappearance of selfhood as the defining experience of identity in the postmodern world.

The fact is, as Slavoj Zizek has observed, no private, profit-oriented company, no matter how rich or how powerful, is capable of handling a major ecological catastrophe such as the Gulf oil spill: it doesn't have the reach to both contain the disaster and clean up the mess at the same time, which is why it was so ludicrous when the executives of the companies involved in the Gulf oil disaster - BP, Transocean and Halliburton - started pointing fingers at each other during their testimony before the U. S. Senate. The greater problem, though, is that all the pseudo-scientific statistical blather about "sustainable risks" only promises, as Zizek observes, more catastrophes, that is, an ever-increasing pile of debris.

Speaking of testifying . . . (for the ambiguous etymology of the word testify, go here), the answer to the riddle I posted on New Year's Eve is below.

The fifth man has only one testicle.

An End-Of-The-Year Riddle

I told you about the walrus and me, man. You know that we're as close as can be, man. Well, here's another riddle for you all:

A guy comes to a door that says Singleton's Club. Curious, he opens it and enters the room. Five men are seated around a table. The first has just one arm, the second one leg, the third one ear, and the fourth one eye. The fifth man looks perfectly normal. What's going on?

I will post the answer next year. (Tomorrow.)

Greatest Hits

It is a generally accepted fact that it was Columbia Records' executive Mitch Miller's idea to do the first "greatest hits" album, by Johnny Mathis, appropriately titled Johnny's Greatest Hits (pictured). Released early in 1958, over one million copies of the album have been sold, earning it a "Platinum" designation. According to Joel Whitburn (The Billboard Book of Top 40 Albums, Revised & Enlarged 3rd Edition, 1995) Johnny's Greatest Hits remained on the Billboard album chart for 178 weeks--in other words, for about three and a half years. Sales of the record may, in fact, have been much higher than one million copies, as the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) didn't begin certifying platinum albums until 1976.

I've been thinking about the concept behind the "greatest hits" album as a consequence of my previous post on the reissue. As I indicated yesterday, while Milt Gabler pioneered the reissue in 1934 by licensing from the American Record Company the masters of early jazz records for his independent (as opposed to "major") Commodore label, it was George Avakian at Columbia Records--incidentally, it was he who apparently signed Johnny Mathis to Columbia in the mid-50s--who with a series of reissues beginning in 1940 provided the first outline of a primary jazz canon that influenced the writing and thinking on jazz for the next several decades. Having thought about the idea of the reissue for the past couple of days, I have concluded that the "greatest hits" album is merely another name for a reissue: like the reissue, it is both a retrospective and also promises nothing but the canonical recordings--the proverbial wheat separated from the chaff. In the case of Johnny's Greatest Hits, it cost Columbia Records nothing to (re)issue and had the additional benefit of making the company pots of money. Obviously the music industry is a complex, profit-oriented institution. Executives at Columbia Records learned from the earlier Hot Jazz Classics series of reissues that rather than to ignore its back catalog and lease those masters to indie labels, it should transform its back catalog into yet another revenue stream--but call it "greatest hits" rather than a reissue. True, "greatest hits" suggests a form of endorsement by the tasteless mob ("popular") rather than the "critical" form of endorsement coming from an informed "specialist," but the latter form of approbation suggests the elitist judgment of the snob, to be avoided at all costs. A "greatest hits" album thus has populist appeal. Moreover, a "greatest hits" album has the added advantage of thinking for, and then fulfilling, the desire of the masses for a definitive collection: in a "greatest hits" package, prescience is combined with efficiency. Rather than a disorganized mess of scattered and noisy 45s or a bunch of LPs, the "greatest hits" album collects the canonical songs--all the songs "that matter"--into one slick, convenient, inexpensive bundle.

Ruminating on the "greatest hits" album allows us to conclude the following about the music industry:

1. The past and present catalogs of all of the major music labels are one vast (but hugely intimidating) database. Apple's iTunes recognizes this to be true, and has exploited it for profit. The iTunes database holds the promise of someday being like the mind of God, holding all possible musical tracks within it, the sum total of all music ever recorded, and hence the potential of fulfilling every potential desire. Scarcity (rarity), a sad indicator of corporate inefficiency, shall someday be a thing of the past.

2. We must acknowledge that music, like bricks, is the result of sophisticated technology subjected to human will, an industrial product, and hence is a commodity that is manufactured and sold. Apple's iTunes also recognizes this to be true and holds the promise of (someday) holding the largest possible selection of bricks made, offering all optional colors and textural variations, a veritable cornucopia, the superest of all superstores.

3. All human technologies seek to perfect ("improve on") nature. Bricks, made to be sold, are stone perfected. "Greatest hits" packages improve on the imperfect state of nature, offering the typical (the non-specialized) consumer a basic set of solid, widely-endorsed, time-proven bricks at a reasonable price. Even "Greatest Hits" albums are available on iTunes.

Addendum 12/30/10 5:07 p.m. -- According to Adam White, The Billboard Book of Gold & Platinum Records (1990), Johnny's Greatest Hits was certified " Gold" on 6/1/59, and certified "Platinum" on 11/21/86.

Reissues

According to this site, a reissue is “the repeated issue of a published work,” and is also known as a “re-release” or “re-edition.” But what is the history of the reissue? When did the practice begin? Why? Under what circumstances? Obviously a reissue is one of those special cases when a verb is used as a noun: the action of reissuing creates a reissue. Walter Benjamin (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) might say that the reissue is a consequence of modernity’s many tools for mechanical reproduction, and hence represents the process of the democratization of art.

Bruce Boyd Raeburn (New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History, University of Michigan Press 2009), indicates that the practice of reissuing started during the Great Depression, when in 1934 Milt Gabler negotiated a leasing arrangement with the American Record Company (ARC) — which controlled the masters of the moribund OKeh, Brunswick, and Vocalion labels — and reissued some early jazz recordings on his Commodore label. The next year he formed the United Hot Clubs of America (UHCA) and reissued 57 jazz classics on the label over the next five years.

Then, according to this interesting article, in early 1940, Columbia Records followed Milt Gabler's lead and authorized a 20-year-old Yale student (the Yale campus was a mere 20 miles from Columbia’s Bridgeport factory) from Russia named George Avakian to choose from among hundreds of early jazz records--in effect a database--those that would be rescued from obscurity and reissued. Hence George Avakian, consciously or unconsciously believing in the democratization of art, made many hard-to-find recordings available to a broader listening audience. “In this way,” the author of the aforementioned article astutely observes, “the first outlines of a primary canon emerged that would influence the writing and thinking on jazz history for decades to come.” Thus also began the so-called “New Orleans revival” and the quest for genuine jazz. Not only did the practice of reissuing canonize certain jazz records, it historicized jazz and established standards of proper taste, for these records were reissued in albums consisting of four red label Columbia 10” 78 rpm records under the banner Hot Jazz Classics, “hot jazz” now a distinct, meaningful kind of genuine jazz music. Put in another way, jazz not labeled “hot” was no longer considered authentic jazz. Such is an effect of canonization, but also one of the consequences of the reissue. As Walter Benjamin observed,

One might generalize by saying the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition. . . . Instead of being based on ritual, it [art] begins to be based on another practice--politics.

Or, to use Derridean language, a reissue is a “citation” grafted into a new context and, as an inevitable consequence, refunctioned.

Jazz audiophiles say that many of the reissued records in the Hot Jazz Classics albums were pressed from original stampers, noticeable because there is no lead-in groove but just barely room enough at the edge to drop the stylus (the original records were actually 10 1/4” as opposed to the 10” size of the reissues). As I understand it, there were around 20 albums issued by Columbia Records in the Hot Jazz Classics series, the first four being the following:

Louis Armstrong, King Louis, C-28, #1 (pictured above)
Bix Beiderbecke, Jazz As It Should Be Played, C-29, #2
Fletcher Henderson, Fletcher Henderson, C-30, #3
Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, C-31, #4

When Columbia reissued these four albums beginning the spring of 1940, the cornerstone of the jazz canon was laid. Following the reissues of Bix Beiderbecke, Bessie Smith and Fletcher Henderson were albums on Duke Ellington (#5) Earl Hines, and Frank Teschemacher (#7). Other reissues followed, and so the past became present. The reissue, a consequence of mechanical reproduction and all that it implies, thus gave birth to the audiophile, one who philosophically adheres to the hierarchy of original and copy and who therefore denounces the copy in the name of the original, and the collector, one who exhibits the will to omniscience and has taken up the aural equivalent of the hobby of trainspotting.

All That Jazz

An article in today’s L. A. Times includes the announcement that Edward O. Bland’s 1959 documentary short The Cry of Jazz is among the twenty-five choices made by the Library of Congress to be included in the 2010 National Film Registry. A film about the politics of jazz, the stature of which has grown the past several years, and featuring extremely rare footage of Sun Ra in performance, The Cry of Jazz (34m 14s) has been available on DVD (Region 0) since 2004. Something of a museum piece, the film’s argument is that jazz music is the authentic expression of African-American life (black American culture’s “joy and suffering”), and therefore cannot be properly (that is, authentically) played by white musicians. Hence it was probably among the first such films to explore explicitly the issue of the appropriation of jazz by white musicians. The author of the L. A. Times article writes,

[The film] intercuts scenes of life in Chicago’s black neighborhoods with interviews with interracial artists and intellectuals. ‘[The] Cry of Jazz’ is a historic and fascinating film that comments on racism and the appropriation of jazz by those who fail to understand its artistic and cultural origins.

As has been the case since the Fifties, jazz is once again portrayed as the kind of music that seems to hold a special appeal to snobs and elitists (“intellectuals”), especially so to those preoccupied by “its artistic and cultural origins.” I’m not actually disputing this characterization of the film since the argument of the film relies upon the foundational myth of popular music, the distinction between the authentic and the commercial (or inauthentic) and the various guises this distinction takes: innovation vs. popularization, black vs. white, jazz vs. rock, and so on. The way this opposition works itself out, as Michael Jarrett has written, “Hot jazz turns to swing, bop turns cool, eroticism turns to lassitude, black bleaches to white, the dirty gets laundered, and the uneven is worn smooth: the structure of this apocalyptic sequence reproduces itself any number of times in accounts of American popular music since World War II” (Sound Tracks 191). As Jarrett also observes, this authentic vs. commercial model seems ontologically stable to us “because it explains what Andrew Ross calls ‘the everyday, plagiaristic, commerce between white [“commercial”] and black [“authentic”] musics’; it conceptualizes the history of American popular music as a series of unilateral, commercially driven energy exchanges that everywhere bespeak ‘a racist history of exploitation exclusively weighted to dominant white interests’…” (191).

This argument is attractive, of course, but it also has limitations. For one thing, as Simon Frith has pointed out, the argument is based on a confusion that presumes “music is the starting point of the industrial process—the raw material over which everyone fights—when it is, in fact, the final product” (the contrast between music-as-expression and music-as-commodity). What’s more, the film employs an essentializing strategy avoided by today's cultural critics, and therefore is unable to avoid the limitations of an essentialist understanding of the “African-American experience.” Essentialism, Trina Grillo writes,

is the notion that there is a single woman’s, or Black person’s, or any other group’s experience that can be described independently from other aspects of the person—that there is an “essence” to that experience. An essentialist outlook assumes that the experience of being a member of the group under discussion is a stable one, one with a clear meaning, a meaning constant through time, space, and different historical, social, political, and personal contexts. (qtd. in Sherene H. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, p. 157)

Perhaps the film’s greatest failing, however, is that its provocative declaration “jazz is dead” is actually an admission by the filmmakers that they cannot account for future jazz innovation. Shot largely in 1958, released in 1959, the irony is that about the time the film was released (rather limited, so I understand), Ornette Coleman and his associates began to pioneer harmolodics—a move beyond the lead/rhythm opposition which had structured all jazz improvisation up to that time—with albums such as The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), the title of which uncannily seems like a rejoinder to the "jazz is dead" argument in The Cry of Jazz.

I should note that the Library of Congress admits that the goal of the registry is not to identify the best movies ever made but to preserve films with artistic, cultural or historical significance. Historically considered as a pre-Civil Rights Era documentary, The Cry of Jazz would seem to be an appropriate choice for inclusion in the Registry.

Fame And Fortune

Among the many nice gifts I received for Christmas this year were two Elvis CDs containing rare outtakes, one titled '60-'61 Sessions and the other Elvis Presley - Vol. 3: Blue Hawaii Outtakes. I'll report on the CD containing the Blue Hawaii outtakes later (it's been around awhile, indicating a copyright of 1991), as I haven't yet had a chance to listen to it, being preoccupied by the '60-'61 Sessions disc containing 33 alternate takes from the years 1960 and 1961 that, according to the disc packaging, have not been released on the Follow That Dream (FTD) collector's label. More on this later.

The tracklisting on the '60-'61 Sessions is as follows:


01. Fame And Fortune (take 3)
02. Fame And Fortune (take 5)
03. Blue Suede Shoes (take 1)

04. Summer Kisses, Winter Tears (take 21, 22, and 23)

05. Surrender (take 3, 4)

06. Sentimental Me (take 3)

07. Swing Down Sweet Chariot (take 4)
08. There's Always Me (take 3, 4)

09. Fame And Fortune (take 9)
10. He Knows Just What I Need (take 9)
11. He Knows Just What I Need (take 10)
12. Summer Kisses, Winter Tears (take 24)
13. Put The Blame On Me (take 3, 4 and 5)
14. Starting Today (take 3)

15. Flaming Star (vocal overdub)

16. Summer Kisses, Winter Tears (take 26)

17, In My Father's House (work part, take 1)

18. Fame And Fortune (take 10)

19. Fame And Fortune (take 11)

20. Fame And Fortune (take 12)
The Complete Sessions:
21. - 27. Britches (take 1, 2 & 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, insert 1, take 1)

28. - 30. Milky White Way (take 1, 2, 3, take 4 & 5, take 6 & 7)

29. Wooden Heart (take 1, 2 & 3, 4)

Obviously the majority of the tracks are from 1960, confined to the first RCA Studio B Nashville session from March 20-21, 1960 ("Fame and Fortune"), soundtrack sessions for Paramount's G. I. Blues (April 27-28, 1960) and 20th Century-Fox's Flaming Star (August 8, 1960), and the His Hand In Mine Studio B Nashville session from October 30-31, 1960. The remaining four tracks are from the March 12-13, 1961 Studio B Nashville session that formed the basis of 1961's Something For Everybody ("Sentimental Me," "There's Always Me," "Put the Blame On Me," and "Starting Today"). Hence the contents of the disc are rather nicely confined to material recorded from March 1960 through March 1961, with the emphasis on material recorded March - October 1960. If one were to combine the outtakes on the '60-'61 Sessions with those on the FTD releases Fame and Fortune (2002) and Long Lonely Highway (2000) and those on the FTDs of Elvis Is Back! (2005) and Something For Everybody (2006) (excluding the singles), as well as most of the tracks on Such A Night: Essential Elvis Volume 6 (2000) and the first few tracks found on disc 2 of Collector's Gold (1991), you'd have an excellent representation of the first calendar year (March '60 - March ' 61) of the post-Army Elvis, a very good musical period indeed. To fill out the recordings for this year, one would also have to add the FTD releases of Wild in the Country and Blue Hawaii as well as the 1997 RCA Europe import CD of G. I. Blues, which includes several alternate takes. The unused "Black Star" as well as other soundtrack recordings from this period can be found on disc 1 of the aforementioned 3-CD box Collector's Gold. While the so-called "smoother" sound of Sixties Elvis starts to emerge with songs such as "Fame and Fortune," the excellence of the Elvis Is Back! (produced by Steve Sholes and Chet Atkins) and Something For Everybody (Steve Sholes) sessions is undeniable. (For a discussion of the Chet Atkins' "smooth" or "Nashville sound" emerging at this time which influenced the production of the music Elvis recorded during this period, I'll refer readers to an earlier post found here.) Obviously the "journey" of the Sixties Elvis begins with these fine 1960-61 recordings, but the excellence of his non-soundtrack recordings diminished in the mid-60s as the movies (and their soundtracks) began to take more and more of his time and energy: notice that he made four movies the first year after he was discharged from the Army. However, the worst of the movies Elvis made in the 1960s--in my opinion, Kissin' Cousins, released in 1964--was yet to be made, but unfortunately it was released the month following the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the biggest hit record Elvis had from 1964 to 1967 was "Crying in the Chapel," recorded in 1960.

The Search For John And Yoko’s White Rolls Royce Goes On...

Frequent 60x50 correspondent Eric Roberts provides a year-end update on the continuing saga of John Lennon's white Rolls Royce:

The mystery of the disposition of John Lennon's white Rolls Royce remains unsolved. Despite the recent 30th commemoration of Lennon’s assassination, we still aren’t sure of the exact whereabouts of John and Yoko’s white, 1965 Phantom V, or who owns it. To the best of our knowledge, there are at least three contenders, all of whom are based in the United States. One is doing time in a Californian prison; one is a legal attorney in Pensacola, Florida; and another is a property developer/car enthusiast in Colorado.

Phil Spector has never claimed to be the owner of EUC 100C. As we have seen, he just happens to have in his garage a white Rolls Royce of similar vintage to John & Yoko’s famous limousine. The only evidence in this line of inquiry is Alan White’s widely published recollection of Lennon offering Spector the keys to his white rolls at the end of the Imagine sessions in mid-1971 (see the previous blogs below on this issue). However, as Mick Brown has commented elsewhere in this blog, Spector would not have neglected to mention during the course of Brown’s interviews that his white Rolls was a gift from John Lennon. It would have been a talking point early on in the conversation, which took place in 2003.

This is supported by a short note in The Beatles Years Volume 2: After the Break-Up 1970-2001. December 1977: “On a sad note, Beatles fans in New York are horrified at the sight of John’s famous vintage white Rolls Royce car sitting neglected in an inch-deep pool of oily water in a $100 a month private garage.” (Source: http://www.wingspan.ru/bookseng/diary2/b10_1977.html)

The next “suspect” on the list is equally unverifiable. In a casual discussion between members of the Pensacola Fishing Forum, (http://www.pensacolafishingforum.com/f22/white-rolls-royce-bayfront-61968/) we learn that there is a local urban legend in the city of Pensacola, Florida, that links the vintage white roller that is permanently parked outside the office of attorney, Jim Reeves, to John Lennon. The forum commentary evokes a tangled, impossible to authenticate, “oral history” of a car that someone once claimed belonged to John and Yoko. (No photos available.)

Yet another white Rolls Royce purporting to be Lennon's former limo is featured on Flickr, parked on Main Street, Louisville, Colorado, USA. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/18767293@N00/sets/72157622341089611/detail/).

How bizarre that we know exactly where John Lennon's not-so-famous psychedelic 1956 Bentley is preserved but cannot state with any certainty what happened to the car that John and Yoko are most closely associated with. (See: http://www.sarasotacarmuseum.org/ and http://www.smallplanetbigworld.com/2009/05/john-lennon.html as well as http://www.bentleyspotting.com/2009/03/john-lennons-phantom-v.html)

At this stage, the leading protagonist in the white Roller saga has to be property entrepreneur and philanthropist, Stephen Tebo in Colorado. A recent contributor to this blog supports this hypothesis (see comments on the white Rolls posted on this blog).

Though still inconclusive, little by little, the real “life” of EUC 100C is emerging. Thanks to Rolls Royce historian, Rob Geelen, it is clear that the year and model of John & Yoko’s white Roller are identical to Lennon’s original black Rolls Royce, FJB 111C. And we also note that Performance (1970) was not the first time that EUC 100C had appeared in a motion-picture. (Source: http://imcdb.org/vehicle_317774-Rolls-Royce-Phantom-V-1966.html)

1965 Rolls Royce Phantom V Limousine By H. J. Mulliner, Park Ward design 2003 5VD63, delivered May 65 to to Patrick Barthropp Ltd., registered PPB1, and used in the movie Georgy Girl (UK, 1966), and subsequently by the Beatles. So not ordered new by Lennon.

You can be certain of one thing: whoever the real owner of EUC 100C is, providing they can establish the car’s provenance, they are sitting on a multi-million dollar investment. Its more famous, but by no means more significant black twin, FJB 111C, sold for nearly three million dollars 25 years ago. Ideally, however, John and Yoko’s white Rolls Royce should be on display in a major museum, preserved as an integral part of Beatle history.

Alas, the saga continues.

The Continuing Story of The White Roller

If you’ve been following this blog, then you know that I have been trying to learn what happened to John Lennon’s white Rolls Royce (scroll down to follow the developments, and be sure to check out the comments). It seems that once John Lennon began his life with Yoko Ono, he began wearing white clothes (as you can discern from the famous picture to the left). The interiors of his and Yoko’s home, Tittenhurst Park, were predominantly white, the exterior boldly white. White seems to have taken on a symbolic significance for both John and Yoko, perhaps influencing the minimalist design of the two-record set, The Beatles, released late in 1968, typically referred to as “the white album.” Presumably, Lennon felt that his so-called “psychedelic” Rolls Royce was no longer a true expression of who he was, and he (and perhaps the other members of the Beatles) no longer wanted to be associated with the psychedelic era.

So what, then, happened to John Lennon’s white Rolls Royce (EUC 100C)? Eric Roberts, whose dedicated efforts I have reproduced on this blog, is trying to find the answer. We did get a response from writer Mick Brown, who kindly agreed to do some checking around, specifically asking Tony King what he knew about the disposition of Lennon's vehicle. Although Mr. Brown’s reply was posted in the comments to the original blog (below), I have reproduced them here:

I have spoken with the estimable Tony King, who worked at Apple and was a close friend of John’s. He furnishes the following.

“I wish I could be the source of all information but I have no idea where it ended up, although I did use it when I was at Apple to go to lunch sometimes!

I think Ringo had it down at Tittenhurst Park for a while which is where John and Yoko lived and then Ringo and Maureen took it over after John and Yoko moved to the USA.

It also went very psychedelic for a while and was hand painted by Simon and Marijke also known as The Fool who did the outside of the Apple store on Baker St.

It had a loud speaker on the top so you could ask people to cross the road a bit faster which scared the daylights out of them!”

I thank Mick Brown very much for taking the time to ask Tony King about the matter. However, the fact is, Mr. King’s comments have not, unfortunately, determined the fate of the white Rolls Royce.

Eric Roberts responds:

Mick - Thanks for posting Tony King’s recollections about the vehicle. Unfortunately, there are one or two problems with the text. I suspect that Tony is talking about the white rolls (EUC 100C) in paragraph 3, but then, in the last 2 paragraphs, he is thinking of Lennon’s original black Rolls that he purchased around May 1965. As we know, it was this black Rolls (FJB 111C) that was hand painted with Gypsy (not “psychedelic”) designs. And we also know that in 1966 Lennon had a loud speaker system installed so he could chat with his fans without rolling down the windows, or startle pedestrians with a burst of song.

The reference to Ringo is also interesting (paragraph 3). I remember reading (somewhere) that John Lennon originally acquired the white Roller from Ringo, sometime in 1968, I assume. Ringo may well be able to shed light on the matter. Do you have his contacts? Or do you think it’s a blind alley?

Perhaps Yoko might be open to a short question about their famous car. Was it acquired by Stephen Tebo at auction, or was it a gift to Phil Spector? Are you by any chance thinking of a follow-up interview with Spector? In which case, you might slip it into the conversation…?

I hope this is of some help and that you will discover who is the current owner of this historic white Rolls Royce.

Back From The High Castle

Becky and I, along with our son John and his friend Melody, spent last weekend in the high Rocky Mountains of Colorado where I, at least, thoroughly enjoyed myself at the first Philip K. Dick Festival. I met some friendly and gregarious Philip K. Dick fans, renewed an old friendship with venerable Dickhead John Fairchild, and made some new friends as well, among them David Gill and Erik Davis. I had a wonderful time and found the informal talks and lectures invigorating. My own lecture was on PKD's masterful, Hugo Award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle, but I marveled at the insightful knowledge of the author's many fans, admirers, and scholars present at the festival. Special kudos must be given to Festival organizer Dave Hyde, AKA Lord Running Clam, a devoted and knowledgeable fan and author of the highly recommended Pink Beam: A Philip K. Dick Companion who spent months working on the event. I found myself in awe of his indefatigable energy and dedication to the great SF author, and I'm sure I speak for others when I say he did a great job both organizing and hosting the festival. Thank you Dave for hosting this wonderful event!

Over at his highly recommended Total Dick-Head blogspot (link is available on the right), David Gill has written on the festival and also posted a link reporting on the festival that can be found here or through the link on David's blog. Thanks to festival guests and speakers for a great time, and special thanks to David Gill for posting the pictures and his own take on the event.