If Music be the Food of Love (again)

(from 2018)

We are currently in the process of slimming down. Not our figures but our possessions. But it seems never ending and no matter how much disappears on eBay, what is left still seems to overfill available space. But in my attic this week I came across some sizeable remnants of my record collection.

What were the first discs I bought?

They were on 78 rpm. It was a format usually produced on shellac that replaced cylinders and lasted for around sixty years.

Showing my penchant for high art from a tender age, my very first purchase from a piggy bank full of pocket money was the 78 rpm recording of Mel Blanc singing (?) “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat.” I read somewhere that he once mused that he wished he had done something worthwhile with his life, but being the voice of Sylvester and Bugs Bunny is not a bad epitaph.

Blanc was followed by such delights as “The Singing Dogs” and “The Runaway Train” – Vernon Dalhart’s version. When pop music started to intrude there was Buddy Holly burping and gargling his way through “Peggy Sue.”

But my real musical discovery with millions of other teenagers and pre-teens was the joys of skiffle.

In Britain skiffle sort of started with Ken Colyer. Colyer was a jazz musician who went to the States to play with the New Orleans greats, and promptly got arrested and then deported over visa problems. This gave him enormous street cred in the miserable monochrome Britain of the day. He started the trend for Jazz musicians to use a show’s interval for a brief foray into a very limited type of folk music which they called skiffle. It was usually borrowed from old American singers like Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) and optimistically it involved all of three chords, a washboard and thimbles for percussion and a one-stringed tea chest for bass. If I were writing a thesis on skiffle I would hark back to the American jug bands of the early 20^th century. But I’m not. So I won’t.

I bought Colyer’s “Streamline Train”, then Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line.” Donegan was an anachronism – he was old, nearly 30, and he wore a suit and a bow tie, but he did have a voice. Before he morphed into that most dreaded of performers (the-all-round-entertainer) he did some good stuff. Skiffle paved the way for the British pop invasion a few years later; the Beatles started out as the Quarrymen Skiffle Group. But coupled with hearing the Weavers on Radio Luxembourg during their McCarthy era blacklist, and then the Kingston Trio on the Capitol radio show – I was to be hooked forever on folk music in its various incarnations.

78s were phased out very quickly for vinyl 45s (although I seem to remember that Woolworth still briefly used shellac for the new speed) – so there was a very young Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” Buddy Holly again, “Learning the Game,” Gene Vincent with “My Heart…” I was now in the era of having more of my own money and that is where it went. O the joys of teenage love songs and punk pop.

And of course vinyl Long Playing Discs at 33 rpm.

I still have my very first vinyl LP. Four Rossini overtures played by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Eduard van Beinum. It was on a reissue cheapo label.

I liked Rossini. Most classical composers seemed to be so po-faced, so very serious, dying for their art and all that. Rossini was a hack. He pinched the best pieces from one opera and recycled them at the next place he went to. His overtures were regularly reused although they had no bearing on the new opera.

 I remember as a small child at school they showed us a short film of an orchestra playing the overture to “The Thieving Magpie.” It started sort of slow and ordinary, then built up a bit, and finally went ballistic at the end. I learned how Rossini wrote arias that certain singers couldn’t sing, just to annoy them. I almost added here that he was obviously a man after my own heart but actually I’m a pussy cat by comparison. Or as Mel would say – a puddy tat. When fashions started to change and he’d made his money he virtually retired and lived the sort of life for his last 40 years that you really wonder how on earth he managed to last that long.

So yes, my first LP, which is still there in the attic. I wouldn’t part with it. When I pop my clogs and they pore over my collection of junk this is going to be the Occasional version of Rosebud. If you have seen the film Citizen Kane that was Kane’s first prized possession, a wooden sled called Rosebud - the first word in the movie and also the final shot in the film as it goes up in flames.  (Orson Welles would later define this as an unkind joke at the expense of William Randolph Hurst but we will tiptoe away from that).

It all gets dead boring after that. Later were cassettes where you could make up your own playlists for the first time – I still have wall to wall radio drama preserved in this format – and then CDs. Our new car doesn’t even have a CD slot so that’s the start of a death knell for that format, so now it’s  a trusty iPod and streaming and downloads and all that.

But even now, nothing can replace the sound of bacon frying on a scratchy old 78 shellac record played with steel needles on a genuine wind-up phonograph.