Circa ’72 pre-recording notes. Some additions and corrections: 10/16, 10/20,
12/4/03, 2/21/04, 8/15/04, and 6/20/05.
The 1972 CD is still a work in progress. I tried several times during the summer and fall of 2002 to put a meaningful mix together, but it didn't happen. The idea I have in mind is expressed by a sign on a display in the downtown Austin library, where I'm writing this. The display is a photographic history of the library called "Where the past meets the future."
Anyway, I realize now some of the songs I originally wanted to use are from 1973, so the CD will be a Circa '72 recording, with songs from both '72 and '73 on it.
The photo of me shown above was taken in '72 or '73 by Carl Bell in his bedroom at 2105 Oak Street in Pine Bluff, where he had his equipment for recording albums onto 7’’ reel tapes and then onto 3’’ reels and cassette tapes to send to military hospitals in Vietnam starting in 1969, when his son Rick became an army surgeon in Danang.
My brothers and I and friends of ours, along with many other people, including the Raley brothers who owned Raley's House of Music, loaned albums to Mr. Bell. Later on some of us helped him with the taping. I started doing that when I got my Sony cassette deck and other good hi-fi equipment in the fall of '72 when I was starting classes at Hendrix College. TAPES of Pine Bluff, as Mr. Bell (a friend of my Trulock grandparents) called his group, also sent tapes to other places during and after the Vietnam War—to Guam, Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, and other overseas locations where there were U.S. military bases with large hospitals.
U.S. soldiers, by the way, quit fighting in Vietnam after the Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973. American POWs came home; very heavy B-52 bombing of Cambodia took place from then until about August 1973 (helping inadvertently to set up the beginning of the Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge terror and genocide in Cambodia from '75 through '79); and the South Vietnamese were left to fight on their own, which continued until April 1975, when the emergency U.S. embassy evacuation took place as the North Vietnamese Army finally took over Saigon and won the war.
(Corruption--mainly various illegal methods of keeping a lot of money in the hands of the people in power-- was widespread in the South Vietnamese government both before and during the war. When the U.S increased its spending in Vietnam, this problem was only worsened. In this respect, the people of South Vietnam were losing the war before it even started.)
Late in the summer of 1972, Rick Bell returned to Pine Bluff with his wife Lee, a nurse from Taiwan. (He was divorced from his first wife, Julie, while he was serving in Vietnam.) He works in Pine Bluff now as an emergency room physician at Jefferson Regional Medical Center.
Another historical note concerning this taping project is related to my semester-long tenure as a DJ at the campus radio station at Hendrix in the fall of 1973, which is when the radio station was first established. I called my once-a-week, two-hour show Pat's Fish Market, which was the name of a fish market on Blake Street in Pine Bluff (they had some neat looking house plants in the window) but which I also chose because my best male friend during Jr High and high school was Pat Calkins (as of this March 2003 writing, he's still working on the restoration of the Pioneer Inn in Maui).
As a DJ I learned to cue up a song on an album, an essential skill for starting a song on an LP at the moment you want it to start. It's done by putting the needle on the groove at the beginning of the track you want to play, letting the song start and then immediately turning off the power to the turntable (automatic turntables are not made for doing this, but it can be done; DJ turntables have a simple on/off switch). Then you rotate the turntable platter and album backwards until the needle is just at the beginning of the song, plus about half a turn so the turntable can come up to speed before the song starts.
So, in putting songs onto the reel-to-reel tapes from albums during this taping project of mine, I was cuing up one song as another one was playing--which is what makes it fun and challenging to make the master tapes because if I messed up the timing of the start of a song or didn't have it ready to go when the previous song was ending, I'd have to go back and start recording all the songs over again (or go back to wherever I'd left a gap between songs). On Blowin' In the Wind, on the '71 tape/CD, I forgot to keep the fader positioned correctly and near the end of the song, you can hear me cueing up The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
In order to be able to create these segues ("segways") between songs recorded directly from LPs, I bought a second turntable in the spring of 2001. The 1969 and 1970 tapes were made using one turntable, a CD player, and, for a couple of songs, a cassette deck.
Okay, time for me to shut up and get back to work on the Circa 1972 CD. The next thing you'll be seeing on this page is the list of songs in the order they'll appear. I also have two comedy albums I'll be using some excerpts from: Firesign Theater's Dear Friends album, from '72, and a Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner album called 2000 & 13, recorded in August 1973. (Mel Brooks is "the 2,013 year old man," interviewed by Carl Reiner.)
Adagio Cantabile
from Pathetique piano sonata (excerpt) Beethoven
Live from the Senate Bar Firesign Theater
(If you call that living!)
IF THE SHOE FITS LEON RUSSELL
A CHILD IN THESE HILLS JACKSON BROWNE
VENTURA HIGHWAY AMERICA
TIME IS PASSING PETE TOWNSHEND
LISTEN, LISTEN SANDY DENNY (FAIRPORT CONVENTION)
HYPNOTIZED FLEETWOOD MAC
SUPERSTITION STEVIE WONDER
BIG BROTHER " "
FREDDIE'S DEAD CURTIS MAYFIELD
THE DIRTY JOBS THE WHO
HELPLESS DANCER " "
A couple of conversations from
2000 and 13 MEL BROOKS AND CARL REINER
RIGHT PLACE, WRONG TIME DR. JOHN
AMERICAN TUNE PAUL SIMON
TIGHTROPE LEON RUSSELL
SEND IN THE CLOWNS from cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music"
EVERYBODY PLAYS THE FOOL THE MAIN INGREDIENT
WAS A SUNNY DAY PAUL SIMON
ROCK ME ON THE WATER JACKSON BROWNE
More from 2000 & 13 MEL BROOKS AND CARL REINER
MAGIC MIRROR LEON RUSSELL
TOAD AWAY FIRESIGN THEATER
Adagio Cantabile
from Pathetique piano sonata (NO. 8, OPUS 13) Beethoven
Well, that's a possible line up, anyway, and there may still be some room left to squeeze in a few more songs. If you yourself want to make a suggestion for a song you want included, anonymous or not (as far as the notes and the CD are concerned), be my guest. To help you make a choice, here's a link to a website with the top 100 songs of each year and their lyrics: (see the previous page for this link)
And, of course, you know my e-mail address. So you like "Brandy" or "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia"? Not a problem. Make your request.
Okay, thanks for the requests. I’m not sure about the request for “My Ding-A-Ling,” which wasn’t Chuck Berry’s finest moment. But as Bob Dylan said about being so much older then and younger than that now, I have to admit I find it more humorous today than I did in 1972. And that line about “future Parliament out there singing” has no doubt come true, so maybe it’ll fit in nicely after all. And yes, it could be dedicated to Bill Clinton (for what was not his finest moment). Anyway, time to wrap up these pre-notes and get to the taping, now that I’m getting settled in at a new/old place and am feeling like doing some recording again. Best wishes, DWT, 9/11/03.
(The above notes were mostly written in the first half of 2003, with a pause
of several months between the next-to-last and last paragraphs.)
10/16/03. The never ending pre-notes continue. . . I’ve
been having problems with my CD recorder for almost a year. I sent it to the Philips factory service
center in Houston during the summer and it came back with only one of the
problems fixed. Since I didn’t get it
returned to them within the 30-day labor warranty period, it’ll cost a minimum
of $200 to have it repaired there now. So the recording project is currently on
hold because of technical difficulties. But I’ve gotten some advice from my
contact at Matthews Electronics in Pine Bluff (chief subcontractor on NASA’s Orbiting
Spunklab project) on what the problem might be, so I’m going to look into it
and will be giving an update here soon. Also,
I’m still searching for a ’72 or ’73 recording of Beethoven’s “Pathetique”
piano sonata, with the University of Texas music library being my best bet at
the moment. I do have a deadline in mind for finishing
this project, by the way. I’m planning
on having the CD’s in the mail by Thanksgiving.
10/20/03. Nothin’
new to report, except to say that the recording is not really on hold, since I
can go ahead and make the master reels anytime.
I even have a 1972 recording of the Pathetique piano sonata checked out
from the Austin public library, but it becomes too scratchy sounding about
halfway through, so I’m still looking for a cleaner copy of that (part of the
“Beethoven Bicentennial” collection) or a BBC recording from ’72 with Stephen
Bishop playing piano, which the UT music library has but which I have to go back
during M-F business hours to find out if I can check out. Check back later.
12/4/03. I didn’t finish the recording
as I’d planned to, but it keeps changing as I keep trying to record something I
really like. The UT library’s copy of
Stephen Bishop playing the Pathetique is all I hoped for, except for one thing.
It can’t be checked out! That’s why it’s in near perfect condition. They have dubbing booths in the Fine Arts
library, and I was able to take my CD recorder there and hook it up to the
headphone jack of the built-in cassette recorder. I’ll leave out the details of how I did that,
but the problem now is that the recording’s dynamic range is so good that it
overloaded the input circuit of the cassette recorder (a Sony) and the loudest
split second of my CD recording is distorted. AUUUGH! But, this is a hobby, so even the setbacks are
part of the enjoyment. A very small part
as far as enjoyment is concerned, but if the result is good enough, it’s worth
the effort. I now plan to have the
project finished on or by the 17th, so I can mail out the recordings
in time for Christmas. And just a side
note on a recent music release, namely The Best of R.E.M. 1988-whatever. By far the best of R.E.M was what they did
before 1988, when they were on IRS rather than Warner Brothers or whichever label
they’re on now, so if you’re not familiar with their earlier songs, I recommend
a Web search and listening. Gardening at
Night, Driver 8, Begin the Begin, Cayuhoga, etc.
(2/21/04: there is the album REM Eponymous, a sort-of
greatest hits of their IRS albums, but it has way too little on it.) 6/20/05: Okay, let me belatedly thank Steve Holcombe,
who made two 60 minute REM compilation cassette tapes for me in March 1989, a
few weeks before he and I went to see REM at the Erwin Center in Austin; and
also let me say that I do like Green, REM’s first Warner Brothers album, which
came out not long before the REM ’89 tour.
2/21/04. I said a
while back that I’d shut up and get to work on the tape. Well, okay, time to do that. No more will be written here until the tape
is done, after I say these two things:
Thanks to David Potter for the Stephen Bishop album, which David’s son
Geoffrey delivered to me on Christmas day; and, one of the physics professors I
had at Hendrix College, Laymont Woodruff, an ex-military guy who nevertheless
had a high-pitched, sing-song voice (and only a master’s degree, not a PhD)
would occasionally when I was leaving his office raise his right hand as if in
greeting and would say, “peace!” I think
he got that from Dave Garraway, the original host, in the 1950s, of the Today
show, so that expression did not originate with the peace movement or hippies
of the 1960s. Peace!
August 15, 2004.
The never-ending pre-notes are now officially ending. I recorded the two reel-to-reel tapes on July
17-18, then made the master Circa ’72 CD on July 31-August 1. Not to say there won’t be more stuff added, such
as this page of PBHS 1972 "Class Announcements." (not added yet)
