Standing Hidden in the Shadows
Martha has a madman
Standing hidden in the shadows
He's got a long curved Turkish dagger
With a bejewelled handle
Some things run in families. One of the first major things my father did after starting to earn a regular salary was to buy a serious music system. It featured a Garrard turntable, Altec Lansing speakers, a Sony receiver, and this.
I never expected to find a picture of this machine on the web, but what do you know. It's a tape player, playing 8 1/2 inch spool tapes that are available no more ("Sahab, yeh to absolute ho gaya.") My father kept this rig running for almost thirty eventful years, including a move back from the US to India, where there were no professionals, leave alone service centers, to maintain anything like this. Instead, what he had was two hobbyists, laboratory technicians who worked at a government science center nearby, and liked to tinker around with electronics in their spare time. These two gents ~ quickly nicknamed Changu-Mangu by my father's set ~ spent a substantial part of the 80s and 90s ferrying various components of this rig (and other equipment from our house, and similar other houses) to one of their houses and back, patching together by bandaiding over various assorted ailments, keeping the music going. But I digress.
He's tellin' her the world is full of freaks and geeks and simples and he's
Hiding like a leprechaun under stones and in the ripples
In the pool of time she thought she knew it - but someone threw a stone into it
Which breaks up the surface and it's making her nervous and it's true
What can she do --- yes it's true
Changu-Mangu kept the system going, but it was my father's fanaticism that got it started in the first place. He had 52 of those 8 1/2 inch tapes, loaded with music on each side, plus a few hundred LPs. That's what I grew up with. Each tape was wound round one spool. To identify the side ("A" or "B" in cassette terminology), the end of the tape was cut either perpendicular ("straight side"), or slanted. When you wanted to play a tape, you'd load it onto the left reel of the player, and load a blank spool onto the right reel. Then you'd take the end of the tape, from the left reel, between your fingers, and carry it under the playing head and across to the other side, wrap it round the hub of the empty reel on the right a couple of times, and tighten it. Then you'd grip the rewind / play / fast forward knob (just below the right reel in the picture) and turn it clockwise to the right. It was a mechanical system -- a fair amount of force was required. If you didn't twist hard enough, the tape wouldn't start. But if you did, it would go wwwWWWOOAAA as the head caught the sound as it accelerated up to the pace at which it would be recognizable as music. And your heart skipped a little beat when you recognized the piece for all your troubles. It was great.
Even better, as a child, was to watch it fast forward or rewind. I am pretty sure I drove my parents wild with my demands to fast forward or rewind, forget about the music. Because that was a true visual treat. No startup music sound effects, just the sight of a large spool of tape on one side dwindling imperceptibly while on the other side what was nothing gained dramatically in volume with every blink of an eye. Within seconds the two sides were equally matched, the new overtaking the old. Then in an instant the sedate exchange of position was transcended and replaced by a manic acceleration as the old went faster and faster, shredding shredding shredding spinning down to nothingness in a frenzied blur of invisible rotation UNTIL! Phatash! One side was blown off the spool as at the same instant the control knob SNAPPED back to the stop position while the newly filled spool spun round with its momentum slapping the edge of the tape against the various protruding parts. It was an awesome spectacle. I loved it. I called it tashminimini. I could watch that for hours. Tashminimini. Just the memory of that sound brings a thrill to my heart, even today.
But I digress again. The few hundred LPs were mainly Western and Hindustani classical. It was a great collection. Almost everything you could think of was there. (The only systematic omission that I detected later on was Wagner. I wonder why.) The 52 tapes, on the other hand, were a wild, totally eclectic mixture. Some of them had backups of the LPs, especially my parents' favorites (such as a bunch of Bach's solo violin sonatas, performed by Grumiaux. One of the most rewarding things I ever did in my life was last year, when I discovered a DVD of some of these pieces... for my parents to enjoy on their new system -- the one that's replaced the old rig; the one that my mother says is too complicated for her to play.) Some of the other tapes had traces of evidence of my father's fanaticism -- all the Beatles albums, copied from who knows where. (I spent a few hours as a teenager trying to get the right names onto the tracks.) Some of the tapes had copies of FM broadcasts, again, a complete mixture. And there were some traces of random bootlegging. Two songs here, three more there, sometimes as filler, with nary a note to trace.
One such random item was a pair of songs labeled as "Earth Band", the two tracks being called "Martha's Madman" and "Quinn the Eskimo". For once, my father got it almost right. Till date, these remain the only two tracks played by the group that was actually known as "Manfred Mann's Earth Band", that I have heard. The Internet tells me that these two tracks appeared consecutively as the last two tracks on an album released in 1978, which means my father flicked them off someone well after he left America. Back then, I wasn't even sure of the difference between The Earth Band and Rare Earth, another odd entry in their collection. I loved both bands, but seriously, back then I don't think I even made the distinction between the two, because for all you knew they might just be the same band labeled differently, and anyway all that mattered was that I really liked both bands and as for the Earth Band, I liked both tracks. The Mighty Quinn, of course, is a Dylan special so that justified my liking it once I had turned sixteenish. Martha's Madman grew to be one of those childhood memories that I the young adult wasn't ashamed of.
Martha's gettin' nervous as she wanders through his valley
Where the shadows always frightening
And the whispers tell her stories
Check out Rare Earth if you can and if you haven't. Two tracks especially: Ma and Smiling Faces.
All that was, of course, many long years ago. The rig, painstakingly maintained by Changu and Mangu, finally croaked when my parents' house got flooded in 1996. My father kept it around for several years afterwards, (sentimentally? stubbornly?) but today all that remains are the two beautiful speakers, unused. The tapes and LPs also lay around collecting dust -- I'm not sure if we still have them or not. I hadn't heard either of those two tracks in ages (although I had a Rare Earth cassette when I was in Bangalore, wonder what happened to it?) until I read this entirely unexpected op-ed piece in the New York Times earlier this week. It was by this guy Verlyn Klinkenborg, who usually writes these lightweight faff-arounds better-suited to the average populist blog. I usually don't even click on links to his articles. The words "Martha's Madman" must have been in the blurb.
This gent had an entire article written on the song and how he'd loved it. Apparently, it first came out on an album by The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, the sole published release of that group. I hadn't heard of them until then. Klinkenborg's article talked about his love for that song, and for that album, and about how he suddenly felt the urge to listen to the song one day except he couldn't find his LP, and it had never been released as a CD. Thankfully, someone else had loved the album so much he'd ripped the entire thing and posted it, with commentary, online.
The commentary is pretty good. It's definitely passionate. Here's an extract.
The larger point of Klinkenborg's article, this album aside, is a lament about things that get left in the slipstream as technology advances. One may argue about the merits or demerits of CDs versus LPs, or the advantages of MP3 compression versus the loss in sound quality, but it's sad that my kids will encounter the playing of music as a sanitized experience popping in their CDs or what-have-you, never pulling the tape tight across the head, never feeling the thrill of the tashminimini. It's sad that Martha's Madman should have to get left hidden in the shadows.
Play it once and see. If you like it, play the album.
If you really like it, chase down the Earth Band version for me.
******
Update.
Standing hidden in the shadows
He's got a long curved Turkish dagger
With a bejewelled handle
Some things run in families. One of the first major things my father did after starting to earn a regular salary was to buy a serious music system. It featured a Garrard turntable, Altec Lansing speakers, a Sony receiver, and this.I never expected to find a picture of this machine on the web, but what do you know. It's a tape player, playing 8 1/2 inch spool tapes that are available no more ("Sahab, yeh to absolute ho gaya.") My father kept this rig running for almost thirty eventful years, including a move back from the US to India, where there were no professionals, leave alone service centers, to maintain anything like this. Instead, what he had was two hobbyists, laboratory technicians who worked at a government science center nearby, and liked to tinker around with electronics in their spare time. These two gents ~ quickly nicknamed Changu-Mangu by my father's set ~ spent a substantial part of the 80s and 90s ferrying various components of this rig (and other equipment from our house, and similar other houses) to one of their houses and back, patching together by bandaiding over various assorted ailments, keeping the music going. But I digress.
He's tellin' her the world is full of freaks and geeks and simples and he's
Hiding like a leprechaun under stones and in the ripples
In the pool of time she thought she knew it - but someone threw a stone into it
Which breaks up the surface and it's making her nervous and it's true
What can she do --- yes it's true
Changu-Mangu kept the system going, but it was my father's fanaticism that got it started in the first place. He had 52 of those 8 1/2 inch tapes, loaded with music on each side, plus a few hundred LPs. That's what I grew up with. Each tape was wound round one spool. To identify the side ("A" or "B" in cassette terminology), the end of the tape was cut either perpendicular ("straight side"), or slanted. When you wanted to play a tape, you'd load it onto the left reel of the player, and load a blank spool onto the right reel. Then you'd take the end of the tape, from the left reel, between your fingers, and carry it under the playing head and across to the other side, wrap it round the hub of the empty reel on the right a couple of times, and tighten it. Then you'd grip the rewind / play / fast forward knob (just below the right reel in the picture) and turn it clockwise to the right. It was a mechanical system -- a fair amount of force was required. If you didn't twist hard enough, the tape wouldn't start. But if you did, it would go wwwWWWOOAAA as the head caught the sound as it accelerated up to the pace at which it would be recognizable as music. And your heart skipped a little beat when you recognized the piece for all your troubles. It was great.
Even better, as a child, was to watch it fast forward or rewind. I am pretty sure I drove my parents wild with my demands to fast forward or rewind, forget about the music. Because that was a true visual treat. No startup music sound effects, just the sight of a large spool of tape on one side dwindling imperceptibly while on the other side what was nothing gained dramatically in volume with every blink of an eye. Within seconds the two sides were equally matched, the new overtaking the old. Then in an instant the sedate exchange of position was transcended and replaced by a manic acceleration as the old went faster and faster, shredding shredding shredding spinning down to nothingness in a frenzied blur of invisible rotation UNTIL! Phatash! One side was blown off the spool as at the same instant the control knob SNAPPED back to the stop position while the newly filled spool spun round with its momentum slapping the edge of the tape against the various protruding parts. It was an awesome spectacle. I loved it. I called it tashminimini. I could watch that for hours. Tashminimini. Just the memory of that sound brings a thrill to my heart, even today.
But I digress again. The few hundred LPs were mainly Western and Hindustani classical. It was a great collection. Almost everything you could think of was there. (The only systematic omission that I detected later on was Wagner. I wonder why.) The 52 tapes, on the other hand, were a wild, totally eclectic mixture. Some of them had backups of the LPs, especially my parents' favorites (such as a bunch of Bach's solo violin sonatas, performed by Grumiaux. One of the most rewarding things I ever did in my life was last year, when I discovered a DVD of some of these pieces... for my parents to enjoy on their new system -- the one that's replaced the old rig; the one that my mother says is too complicated for her to play.) Some of the other tapes had traces of evidence of my father's fanaticism -- all the Beatles albums, copied from who knows where. (I spent a few hours as a teenager trying to get the right names onto the tracks.) Some of the tapes had copies of FM broadcasts, again, a complete mixture. And there were some traces of random bootlegging. Two songs here, three more there, sometimes as filler, with nary a note to trace.
One such random item was a pair of songs labeled as "Earth Band", the two tracks being called "Martha's Madman" and "Quinn the Eskimo". For once, my father got it almost right. Till date, these remain the only two tracks played by the group that was actually known as "Manfred Mann's Earth Band", that I have heard. The Internet tells me that these two tracks appeared consecutively as the last two tracks on an album released in 1978, which means my father flicked them off someone well after he left America. Back then, I wasn't even sure of the difference between The Earth Band and Rare Earth, another odd entry in their collection. I loved both bands, but seriously, back then I don't think I even made the distinction between the two, because for all you knew they might just be the same band labeled differently, and anyway all that mattered was that I really liked both bands and as for the Earth Band, I liked both tracks. The Mighty Quinn, of course, is a Dylan special so that justified my liking it once I had turned sixteenish. Martha's Madman grew to be one of those childhood memories that I the young adult wasn't ashamed of.
Martha's gettin' nervous as she wanders through his valley
Where the shadows always frightening
And the whispers tell her stories
Check out Rare Earth if you can and if you haven't. Two tracks especially: Ma and Smiling Faces.
All that was, of course, many long years ago. The rig, painstakingly maintained by Changu and Mangu, finally croaked when my parents' house got flooded in 1996. My father kept it around for several years afterwards, (sentimentally? stubbornly?) but today all that remains are the two beautiful speakers, unused. The tapes and LPs also lay around collecting dust -- I'm not sure if we still have them or not. I hadn't heard either of those two tracks in ages (although I had a Rare Earth cassette when I was in Bangalore, wonder what happened to it?) until I read this entirely unexpected op-ed piece in the New York Times earlier this week. It was by this guy Verlyn Klinkenborg, who usually writes these lightweight faff-arounds better-suited to the average populist blog. I usually don't even click on links to his articles. The words "Martha's Madman" must have been in the blurb.
This gent had an entire article written on the song and how he'd loved it. Apparently, it first came out on an album by The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, the sole published release of that group. I hadn't heard of them until then. Klinkenborg's article talked about his love for that song, and for that album, and about how he suddenly felt the urge to listen to the song one day except he couldn't find his LP, and it had never been released as a CD. Thankfully, someone else had loved the album so much he'd ripped the entire thing and posted it, with commentary, online.
The commentary is pretty good. It's definitely passionate. Here's an extract.
To furthermore explore into the jazz/fusion sound of the album, the Brotherhood tackles an instrumental tune called Ramblin’ by the great Ornette Coleman. Its very interesting how each instrument plays both a part in the rhythm section as well as being very up front in the mix as independent entities. To me, it is pure genius the way this is arranged. I just love the intro section where Jerry and Mike are playing the lead simultaneously and then break down into George’s outstanding drum fills. While George is playing his fills in this section, each of the other band members, most notably Jerry’s guitar, play little incidental notes on their instruments to create a wonderful chaotic effect. When the band slips into the head (or verse) of the tune, it might appear to the casual listener to be playing a free-form non-tempo passage. If you listen to the rhythm section, George Marsh especially, you will hear a distinct tempo. Once you find the tempo, you can easily follow exactly where the song is going. The complex parts played by George on drums and Clyde on bass to keep the tempo steady and driving is stunning. When Mike joins those two to form the rhythm section under Jerry’s guitar solo, the song really comes together well. Also, notice Clyde’s ascending bass line at certain times within this section. After the guitar solo, the band goes into a brief organ-led bridge and then back into a shorter guitar solo. During the re-intro after the bridge, the drum fills are accompanied by some fabulous organ fills instead of mainly guitar fills as before. This is really a tight song which may require a few listens before you actually get it. It reminds me of the album by John Coltrane titled Ascension from 1967. Definitely give that album a spin if you’re interested in this type of music.
The larger point of Klinkenborg's article, this album aside, is a lament about things that get left in the slipstream as technology advances. One may argue about the merits or demerits of CDs versus LPs, or the advantages of MP3 compression versus the loss in sound quality, but it's sad that my kids will encounter the playing of music as a sanitized experience popping in their CDs or what-have-you, never pulling the tape tight across the head, never feeling the thrill of the tashminimini. It's sad that Martha's Madman should have to get left hidden in the shadows.
Play it once and see. If you like it, play the album.
If you really like it, chase down the Earth Band version for me.
******
Update.
posted by Tabula Rasa | 8/25/2006 11:51:00 PM
30 Comments:
Wonderfully written! I can just picture the decades old tape player, creaking under the weight of the spool and churning out Bach's sonatas.
Back in the early eighties we had a huge old HMV gramaphone. My grandfather had bought it from a British naval officer and given it to my mother when she got married.
It had intricate carvings within the horn and a little wooden box for extra needles. Our first Sony tape deck looked crass and unromantic sitting besides it.
When CDs first came to India, HMV came out with this big billboard ad in Bangalore comparing digital music to wearing a condom. It reminded me of that old gramaphone.
-MT
i loved this entry.. it was total nostalgia reading about the spools. it sort of brought to mind the millions of broken cassettes that used to lay around my uncle's house with the unwounded, tangled reels of tape ..all bundled up in a box that was our favourite occupation on lazy afternoons during our summer vacations.
Very nice post. I used to have one of those brought to Bombay from New york in 1970. Had some Bob Dylan, Beatles and others' songs. Though I always liked simple music and was never in to technicalities, I too feel that sound was better. My first impression of Bob Dylan was that he was a very good poet but singing was strange. Did not understand the context of his songs and I still do'nt understand it that much. They gave some gadet to accomodate for the change of cycles in India and I remember it took some effort to play; possibly going to 'fast forward' and then come back to 'play'. I took it Shillong with me in 77. The box containg it fell from the top of the truck and it still worked. I left Shillong in 78 and I do not remember what happenned to it. Probably left some of my stuff with friends to send me later. I found some of my books in Delhi after a few years. May be it is in some second hand shop in Delhi now.
Coming back to memories of music recollected from early childhood, my experience is slightly different. Around 47-48, I think that there was only one radio in the village park maintained by the Panchayat Board. That is where we listened to most of the songs. Once in a while, we would be allowed to go to see films in a Touring Talkis about two miles away. The older kids could go to a small town 5 miles away and watch Hindi movies. They would tease us with the wonderful new tunes that they heard. By 52, my luck changed. We used to spend the nights in some teacher's house for tution. One night, we let the teacher sleep and ran 6 miles to watch Awara and came back. That is still one of the highlights of my life. Some of the tunes kept haunting me and the Hindi ones I was not even sure whether there were such songs or whether I imagined them. Then in 64 I went to Bombay and one of the new friends, Amit Roy, not only remembered those songs but sang them too. We met again last year and as soon as he saw me he said that he felt like singing again and started singing some of those songs. May be I will meet Amit in Kolkata, he too is planning to help in Mahan's programme.
That is a lot of rubbish but your post brought back some of those memories.
Marvellous. Mind if I nominate this to DesiPundit?
Oh, and "Tashminimini" is just the right word for that sound.
Sanitised experience of the CDs...just what we were discussing on KM's blog the other day. How I long to play my LPs :-(
Way back, I once borrowed a Rare Earth album from someone...can't remember anything about it except that it had a blue jacket and this lovely (I think) 17-minute long piece, with a percussion instrument (I think it may have been the bongo) dominating a large chunk of the song. It was such a lovely piece that I still remember the beat and can play it very well in my head and just about okay on the table :-)
all: wow, such long comments. thanks! sorry for the delay in responding - it was a busy weekend :-|
mt:
that gramophone sounds grand. you wouldn't have any photos of it, would you? (and what's with the hmv ad? i couldn't make sense of it.)
s:
thanks, and welcome! i always thought that cassettes having the tape spooling out were a horrible thing to have happened...
graduate:
welcome back! done with thesis writing, i see, but the traces still remain :-D i agree that the cheaper dvd players are often more robust. across the border from hk is shenzhen, haven of pirated dvds. people who frequent the place all have a second dvd player - an unknown chinese brand, bought for a couple of hundred rmb (i.e., a couple of dozen us dollars). most brand name dvd players refuse to play these disks :-D
about the itrip - yes, i'll have to do some such thing when back in the states. one can't live without a car there except in parts of the east coast :-( about the whole cd vs. lp thing, see my response to ghostoftomjoad, below. what i *will* say is that you're not really treating your music fairly if you play it on a bose. about the kids, thanks in advance, but that was just me indulging in a spot of clairvoyance. and thanks for the link (i'd read it, but missed most of the point i guess).
swarup:
not "rubbish" at all -- that was a wonderful memory and totally worthy of a post all to itself. i loved reading it - thanks! (yes, dylan takes some getting used to, in voice certainly, and also in his whimsy / wordplay / context at times. but he's *very* rewarding. :-)
km:
thanks :-) and yeah, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, eh? ;-D
ghost:
YESS! that was the rare earth cassette i had, and the track you're talking about is called Ma, it's the one i mentioned in the post. it's a 17 minute long journey based on this simple bass progression that goes: ta-Dhum ta-Dhum ta-Dhum-dhum-dhum. right?!
i think that throwaway line in my post was indeed due to your exchange with km about the sound of lp's vs. cd's. i actually don't think cd's sounds worse, tinnier, colder, or less warm than lp's. it all depends on the system you hear it on. diffferent combinations of player - receiver - speakers - environment, in combination with your own two ears, lend these qualities to the sounds that you hear. and the sad truth is that most of today's electronics manufacturers bias their systems towards producing (a) more bass, and (b) "cleaner" sounds (this is especially true for those who produce all-in-one off-the-shelf units). i discovered this with stunning clarity one day when i was shopping around for a rig for myself, and in a showroom i popped the same disk (herbie hancock's headhunters) into a series of different player-receiver-speaker combinations. there was *such* a huge range of sounds!
"Manfred Mann's Earth Band" had a hit with a remake of the springsteen song from the boss's first album (that "flopped"). I dont recall the name, but I hrd it on Y! launch.
and thanks for the link. I liked "martha's madman" and "ramblin". So, my evenig's set now w/ these songs and the rest! :)
yes. gave a quick src and name of the song is 'blinded by the light', from the boss's album: Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.
No pictures unfortunately. It's a conversation piece in an uncle's house now.
The ad in question was part of a series of billboards in Bangalore taking a dig at digital music (Early-Mid 90's if I remember right). The theme was 'nothing like the real thing'.
was reading the comments on this post...your response to GhostOfTomJoad about the varying sounds on different systems and how they incorporate bass more into the sound o/p might be a reason that sax sounds more sweeter during a live performance than on one of those systems (ofcourse, it goes for most of the instruments, but more for sax, i feel)...i was thinking abt this just 2day, until i saw your post!
I suppose you saw Dylan's recent comments on how all modern recordings sound atrocious, and even his new CD sounded 10 times better in the studio than it does in the recorded product.
I agree with Dylan that all recent rock/pop CDs sound atrocious but disagree that remastered old CDs, or new jazz or classical CDs, sound bad -- I think they often sound wonderful. Played on a good system it's the next best thing to being there.
I read a comment on some other blog (can't find the link now) that the problem is the mastering process that rock studios use -- they flatten the dynamic range, boost the soft tones and reduce the loud ones, so that it all fits in a narrow window. So even though a CD is capable of a much better dynamic range than an LP, you actually get a worse sound. This is done for the benefit of headphone users and people with cheap music systems. Dylan should simply get some clueful producers and he'd be much happier.
I recently picked up George Harrison's "All things must pass" on CD (remastered) and two things struck me: how good some of the songs are, and how awful the overall sound is. Not having heard it on LP, I can't be sure whether the fault is the CD remastering or Phil Spector's original production, but given Spector's history, I would suspect the latter. McCartney too hated what Spector did with "Let it be", and Leonard Cohen virtually disowned his Spector-produced "Death of a ladies' man".
The problem with these 1970s recordings is exactly what Dylan complains of in modern CDs: "sound all over them.. no definition."
So I wouldn't go overboard on the nostalgia. Some good things have happened, like Phil Spector ceasing production.
arun:
hope you had a good evening :-) thanks for the detective work. i remember hearing 'blinded by the light' on the classic rock radio channels. quite underwhelming, really. re: the sax issue, one big problem is also that manufacturers of these lower quality systems try and compensate for timbre with pitch. these two are not the same, and it's sad that the vast majority of listeners around the world now can't do without their bass-boost buttons. that's not how the music was meant to sound!
mt:
ah i see. thanks...
rahul;
finally i squeeeze a comment out of you! :-D you're right, of course, a lot of it is in the production. given a decent job of production, there's no reason why a digital recording cannot sound just about the same as the original (if one could play it at the venue thereby replicating the acoustics, etc.), and if that can happen, then i can't see how one can say digital recordings aren't "good enough". or that LPs are "better" somehow. after all, the ultimate aim should be to live up to the claim of "high fidelity", imho.
finally i squeeeze a comment out of you!
Well I thought of commenting earlier but felt out-of-place in this anonymous crowd :->
I have to say that I don't find digital recordings better than old analogue recordings, though not worse. The main thing, to me, is that digital quality doesn't degrade gradually and can be copied perfectly.
I wish live recording technology had come to India sooner... it's not funny that a 1957 Monk-Coltrane live recording (the recent "Carnegie Hall" release) is better quality than most Indian classical studio recordings (much less live ones) up until the 1990s.
So that song IS 17 minutes long!! :-) Unless Rare Earth has many such long pieces, I guess we're talking about the same song. However, it's a little difficult to tell from your "ta-Dhum ta-Dhum ta-Dhum-dhum-dhum" description :-)
About what Rahul has said, in relation to the quality of Indian recordings, I wonder if it has anything to do with technology. I think it has more to do with our mindset. I'm no expert on this but going by the dozens of jingle and other sound recordings I've been on, and from what the music directors used to say, in India, we rely on a completely differet way of mixing the music.
rahul:
anonymity is just a few clicks away. you can have it too! agree on the recording technology bit. i have however seen recently remastered b&w films look way better than they'd looked when i'd seen them first (the inner eye's apu trilogy release, for instance).
ghost:
it's probably both technology and mindset / approach / attitude, right? and we're definitely talking about the same song - if you can't recognize it from that you probably don't remember it that well :-D
tr - anonymity is just a few clicks away. you can have it too!
Yes but why? It's not like the whole world knows who I am. I know some corporate employers don't like blogs and some bloggers have said dumb things about their employers and got into trouble, but neither seems to apply here...
Besides, if someone really wanted to identify you or me from our postings they probably could. There's your location, your interests, your holidays, etc. Moreover, blogspot is owned by Google, who (like everyone else) genuflects before the Chinese government.
so there u go..u hv hrd one more of the earth band! ;) yeah, i know what u mean...they kinda overdid the song there i think, wat with all the chorus and jangling, as much i can recall! butit stuck in my noggin as it was the boss's song!
thnx for the info...need to know more abt the teminologies there, b4 i can comment heh heh
and yes, a nice eveing, ty!
such a nice sooooong... I feel slightly embarrassed about saying it - but it reminded me of Christy Lane. My dad loved Christy Lane. And Kenny Rogers. And the people who sang 'stoney, happy all the time.'
My childhood consisted of nirvana, country and a whole lotta muddy waters. no wonder I turned out the way I did. :D
rahul:
i'm not worried about someone identifying the "real" me from this front. (heck, thalassa_mikra did so just a few weeks ago, with some very nifty detective work.) i'm also not so concerned about the chinese government's interest in me - they already have access to all they might need to know :-) the reason i prefer to not have my name or any other immediately identifiable information available is that i'd rather not have someone google the real me and stumble across this. in my field people google each other all the time (my university webpage gets at least one person per day searching my name), and i'd rather keep this separate. if you google me, apart from all the official stuff about me, you'll find three other people with the same name, junk about a couple of them, and a *lot* of junk that i posted to sites such as rsc and the bbc's weekly enter a funny caption thing. irreversible, and avoidable.
arun:
exactly -- not a good specimen at all :-D
scout:
your parents listened to nirvana?! you've got to be kidding.
sure they did... but this is 1993 I'm talking about - I was seven, my dad was 36... a tad old for Nirvana, but oh well, whatever, nevermind :D
always good to be young at heart ;-)
Glad I found this blog and thanks for stopping by at the flying monkeys. We have linked to you, without asking :)
I'll be back and hope you continue to visit.
Regards
fm:
cool! welcome, and thanks :-)
i think most of you guys were not even born or conceived when the gramaphone ruled the day. they were made of shellac and broke when dropped to the ground. you replaced the needle after using it only over half a dozen discs. the disc wore out after about 25 uses. one then had to apply kerosine over the disc before playing, to revive the sound.
movie songs with long durations were on both sides of the disc. one had to stop, and then turn over. we used to have bhakta prahlada & nandanar, whole dramas on a series of 12 to 15 discs. the discs weighed a ton.
all this was played on a gramophone. we had to crank the key to wind up the springs, before each 78 rpm was played. every six months, the springs had to be replaced. the sound came over a gloriously huge speaker. there was no volume control.
this was my grandparents' entertainment system.
phantom:
cool. thanks for visiting and commenting. that's a very vivid description -- makes me glad for scientific progress (going boink).
great post. reminded me of the decrepit collection my grandparents had lying around somewhere. the odd thing is, i had a visual recollection but i never managed to hear one until halfway through school. i just loved those boxes and the miles of useless, knottable magnet.
i'm waiting for when they'll say that about the ipod
socket:
thanks, and great point about the poodle! i'll wait for the day :-D
Growing up in the small mill town of Camas WA...I was lucky enough to be close to Portland OR where I consumed most or all of my music. At an early age, after diggin the usuals at the time, Grand Funk, James Gang, Zeppelin, those types...I stumbled on a funk station in Portland and heard James Brown. That was pretty much it for me. Not too soon after that I went to see Blood Sweat & Tears at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland 1971. There was no billed opening act but it was in fact the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood. Now there are two bands that have changed my musical direction. One is..was The Sons Of Champlin and Jerry Hahn. Let me fast forward 39 years to last night. Last night I went and heard David Grisman at Jazz Alley in Seattle. His drummer is George Marsh formerly with Jerry Hahn. I got a chance to talk to George and share my Jerry Hahn story. These are the things life is made of for me. To keep living to meet and run into situations like that is just everything. Dave Raynor www.daveraynor.com
dave:
thanks for the comment!
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