WACKY STACKS OF WAX!
...remember all the stuff they used to do to records?
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I don't have a whole lot of special pressings of albums in my record collection, but there are a few...such the Clear Yellow (gold if the light hits it just right) edition of Grand Funk's "We're An American Band" album (1973); I have a 1970-ish pressing of Dave Mason's "Alone Together" solo LP, which consists of grayish plastic with random smatterings of yellow, blue and black; it's so ugly that one Record Critic referred to the vinyl as "Vomitone". And, you probably remember Elvis' last studio album, "Moody Blue" that was pressed on, you guessed it, Clear Blue Vinyl. (Only, by that time, Elvis was so ill that half the songs on that record were recorded live on tour, since in those latter days it was very difficult to get Elvis into the recording studio...)
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If you can find a copy of Styx' "Paradise Theater" album from the early 1980's, it has both the Side 1 and Side 2 songs listed on one side; the other side has the Styx logo enlarged and Laser-Engraved right into the black plastic. I guess the etching doesn't go into the grooves, though; I can't hear any scratches when I play that side. And, of course, who can forget Picture Discs; I don't have many of those, but I've got a few...you've seen the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album so I don't have to picture the cover here, but I've got a "Sgt. Pepper" picture disc; the entire album cover is on one side of the disc, while the other features an enlarged picture of the "Sgt. Pepper" drum. Pretty cool. Although, watching those colors spin 'round as the record revolves might make you wanna reach out for the seasick pills...
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But this business of messing around with record pressings is nothing new; heck, there were picture discs made from the 1940's onwards, and waay back when, in the '20s, a pair of record labels, "Pathe" and "Perfect" (which were owned by the same company) released virtually all of its discs up thru 1927 or thereabouts on a weird-looking brick-red plastic; who knows why that ugly color was chosen, although the record labels were red, and maybe they were trying to match that. Well, recently, I 'won' a group of Miss Lee Morse records (according to Ebay, 'winning' means you've earned the right to purchase item(s))...and I didn't know it, but one of the records I 'won' featured weird-looking shellac (or an early plastic known as 'Bakelite'), and it looks Very Trippy Indeed, especially for a record that came out in the mid-1920's. First of all, here's the 'hit' side...allegedly it was a hit; I have no chart information for the 1920's...I don't think there WERE record charts back then...
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Silliness ran rampant back in the "roaring 1920's"; the nation had been dragged through World War I, and once the war was over, America was in a mood to Get Silly. 'Twas the age of Flappers (party girls), the Charleston (a dance that shocked the Elders of that time), right around the time Prohibition was levied (they established the same climate for liquor, then, as presently exists for Marijuana now), so people had to go Underground to Drink, in clubs known as "Speakeasys". I don't know if "Under The Ukelele Tree" burned up the record charts back then, but certainly the title fits the times. It was time to get silly. And believe me, they did back then. When they weren't dodging gangsters' bullets, anyway...
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This is the "B" side (as is spelt out by the "B" on the label's right side), a little tune that I didn't even know existed. I've heard probably 95% of the songs Miss Lee Morse recorded, but I'd never heard this one before. It's called "Waiting", and like many of her other Pathe/Perfect B-sides, she wrote this one and it's a charming little number. I haven't seen this song posted anywhere on the internet, so it's pretty doggone obscure. Now, at this point you might be asking yourself, "what's with all those blotches on the record surface?", and well, I don't really know; it kinda reminds me of those pictures you paint at the County Fair, where they put a piece of paper inside a rotating device that spins ultra-fast, and you then squirt different colors of Ink in there, and you come out with something that looks semi-psychedelic. Well, someone at the Pathe/Perfect record-pressing labs evidently got wacky with the wax back in the 1920's, someone who was goofing around, getting silly, because after all, the '20s was a silly time. So when you get silly with the material that goes into making a record, well, here's the result:
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It's not "vomitone" but it comes pretty doggone close. An old 78 from 1925-27, somewhere in there. It actually sounds pretty good, although recordings made back then were acoustically made, and as a result, there was no "high" fidelity, there was fidelity-only; take it or leave it, I guess. Later on, electricity was applied to the recording and playback processes, the end result being records that sounded quite a lot better, although the record material itself was rather limiting; vinyl hadn't been invented back then, so the old, crusty shellac (or 'Bakelite') whirred around madly on the turntable, and your Steel Phonograph Needle tried to thread the grooves and produce at least some semblance of music. (With the weight of those old tone-arms, I'm surprised the needle didn't cut into the other side of the record!) So anyway, this is a little tidbit from the record collection I thot I'd show ya.
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Someday, when I work up the initiative, I'll get really daring and pull out the Vomitone record (I can barely stand to look at the thing) and picture it here for the world to see. Looking at the record I've pictured here in this post should prepare you for that. Finally, I don't pretend to be any kind of history buff, although I've been reading quite a bit about life and times early in the 20th century, trying to gain some understanding of what we've been through in order to get where we're at now. Kinda makes me wonder what things'll look like in another hundred years...