Atlantic Russian Hack

I don't know, did Putin "direct" The Atlantic?  Apparently this whole "fake news" thing might have to do with computers writing all the headlines.

Stoned Police News

In today's Google News:

-- !! -- ...I wasn't aware the police were enforcing any laws while stoned.  And as for facing obstacles while doing it, (sputter) -- I would expect so!  Stoned policing may be more of a problem than we thought, if it garners headlines like this!  I'm George Putnam.  

Hendrix restorations

Well, look who's sitting out in the lobby.  Here's an offering for his birthday last Sunday.

Hound Dog was made from a bootleg of his Albert Hall soundcheck.  The scratchy vinyl makes it ancient.

Hound Dog

There's a bootleg of Ezy Ryder that has a couple blank spots, about 45 seconds total, like someone accidentally pulled the line out of the board a couple times.  I patched it up, back in ought-12.

It had a few plays, and may be a rerun on this site (full disclosure).  Is it the only "complete" copy of this take, or is the original out there undamaged?  Who knows.  They're just jammin.  I could leave or I could play on...

Ezy Ryder

3 Shots Rang Out

(4:44) Comments on the JFK murder.  Primarily, the over-use of the phrase "rang out," like it was a manufactured story from one source, and the Washington DC phone lines going down at the same time.

link

Furtwangler and the Magic Brain Guy

Been thinking more about that Magic Brain that Putnam was describing.  I wonder if anyone noticed this at the time...

The "Magic Brain" was an RCA Victor ad concept, a platform touting an exciting new technology that allowed you to listen, hands-free, to over two hours of phonograph music.  (A 78 rpm side maxes out at about 12 minutes.)  Their symbol was this little conductor guy.

(The invention of the airbrush really revolutionized commercial art, didn't it?  This is from 1942.  Look at that impervious plexiglass dome protecting your records, and his expression of stoic confidence, bathed in the honest, unforgiving light of the future.)

Wilhelm Furtwangler was a celebrity conductor back then-- toured the world putting on musical extravaganzas, kind of like a 1930's rock star, very prominent.  Especially in regard to his cranium.  Lots of room for music to bounce around up there.  He started out with a shock of red, bushy hair but after it burned off, he became increasingly gaunt, his great celestial brow a symbol of his look, like Lennie Bernstein's sneakers.










So when RCA's ad agency designed their futuristic jukebox head, this is what I see:

Furtwangler-in-a-box?  Sounds great!  That gaggle of Park Avenue swells seem to think so, too.  Even though they can't quite tell why.  (It's subliminal Madison Avenue mojo, circa 1940's.)  

MacArthur vs the Flying Saucers

(4.44)  What if General Douglas MacArthur used the occasion of his 1962 farewell speech to warn us of an impending war with an intergalactic civilization?  It might have gone something like this here link...

(Version 2-- added music and picked up his speaking pace quite a bit.)

A True Story About Perspective

I was sitting on my front porch with the breeze kicking up.  Way down below me on the pavement, a little slug, maybe just about an inch long, was pressing forward through a small scale windstorm-- keeping its face turned into the wind, braving all the small pieces of smoosh (besides having to fight the headwind)-- when this twig, a teeny piece of straw, blew up and hit him right square between the eyes.  For you and me, like a two-foot-long hunk of wood.  Pow!

I've never seen a slug pass out before.  He verryy sloowwwly teetered over.  And stopped.  And sat there.  Eventually he roused himself and slowly rose to his foot, and carried on.  Because what else was there to do.

And indeed.  So while there might be things dropped here on the site from time to time, there's a few twigs in the wind today.  We'll just do what we can.

George Putnam

(1:57) While it's true that voices and pictures through the air were old news by the time I was a kid in the 60's, announcers in suits and with glistening hair were still expected to appear and make sense of things: let us know what to expect at 9 pm, 8 Central Time.  Preserve us from Dead Air.


George Putnam was born to announce.




While he lacked the euphonious pipes of, say, a Fenneman or a Frees--

(Okay, 

"A Fenneman or a Frees.")

-- he embodied State-of-the-Art professionalism in an age of Magic-Brain record changers.

...of course, 20 years later, by the time I was growing up, it was our parent's world, and serious men were appearing over the CRT in the living room, saying, "You don't have all your marbles!"  (Buy some now!)  The announcer's edge had progressed to self parody--

--so when, it was said, Mary Tyler Moore's own Ted Baxter

was based on George, he attained something of an apotheosis.  And a well-deserved one.

Today's selection is the young scout himself, at a small, 5,000 watt station in Fresno WEAF on the night on Pearl Harbor, holding down the home fires...

link

ReChemical: Donald and Hillary - I've Had The Time of My Life

On YouTube.  The footage is from the second Presidential debate, just last night.  The theme is from Dirty Dancing.  Combined for a moment of sheer magic.

link to YouTube

Public Disservice Messages

Three one-minute items, courtesy of The Ad Council and this station.

Tom Hanks
Stuff

Oblivion Saves You Money

Anne Francis as Tinkerbell

10.09: The spirit of audio sneaking into the workshop.  I re-did the eyes, to make them more cartoony.  Trying to think like Preston Blair.  

Mr. F. Le Mur: Soupman

Mr Le Mur has an extensive collection on the Internet Archive,  His PR Gnus is already on this site.  Soupman is also brilliant.
- Soupman: Good Thing It's Dark

Making a bit by simply removing a syllable is some audio smarts.  Doing it with an Old Radio icon like Superman-- I'm stunned.  Of course-- Soupman!  Tireless fighter for soup and justice!  There's a series of episodes here, along with Andy of Bug Porn, Dragnest, Beave It to Lemur...

Rose Festival 2016

The ships have started to come in.  Here's the SS Dub Taylor, underneath Portland's elegant Boardwalque.

The 1,500-ton barge, named after the beloved character actor, carries its own toilet, and enough whiskey and plug tobacco for the week's festivities.

The Prisoner Theme

Here's  a merge of the opening and closing themes of oddball 1960's TV series The Prisoner.  Mostly the beginning but wraps up with the end of the end, which frankly sounds much more Boss.

Regiment loop

From Eno/Byrne.  Here's a loop you can paste end-to-end and have that great riff chugging along for an hour or two.

link

Suggested For You

...click-bait repurposed at random.

Ever look up on Street View?

Bob and Ray: Voice Exercises

Remember, you can rely on trusted professional broadcasters for handy announcing tips!

From "Bob and Ray present the CBS Radio Network", courtesy of the Internet Archive.

DeepDrumpf: @DeepDrumpf

...aaand, here's the Trump Twitterbot: a computer algorithm that might have made old Burroughs himself crack a smile.

Seriously.
Anyway, the thing generates 1,000-character blocks of script that are then clipped by a person into the best post.  Here's the link to Twitter, and an article about the process.

Trump in the Streets

The "Super Tuesday" presidential primary elections are this week.  Here's my comment on that.

Wild in the Streets (1968, American International Pictures)  An entertainer takes advantage of his celebrity to become elected President of the United States.  Shelley Winters, Richard Pryor.  3 & 1/2 stars.

Al Checco

I noticed Al Checco died last summer.  90-something.

Al's a familiar face to those who follow the old TV scene.  He looked like one of my friend's dads, or a teacher, or the liquor store guy.  Someone who just wandered on to the set.

Al's ability to portray a helpful, anonymous bystander for a moment or two, then disappear in the ultimate flow of the story, gave him lots of work on TV and in the movies.  He was a totally indistinguishable everyman-- a quality which, paradoxically, made him stand out.  I'd always say, "Hey, it's Al Checco!"

Not that he had anything to do with audio, but I thought he was a pretty cool character actor from that era.

Bernie Sanders circular photograph

almost like it's, I don't know, a "button" or something one might print, and attach to their clothing-- perhaps even glued over an old "Tsongas '92" and lovingly covered with clear lacquer, just like it came out of a Union shop.  (Add your own blivet.)

Breakin In a Brand New Overdub test1

...whoa, where did this come from?  Bangin it around before tax season started.  It's just a shred but what the heck-- I might even forget I'm working on it again.

Connie Francis, "Breakin In a Brand New Broken Heart", 1963. Connie's overdubs were a big deal back then.  So why not overdub her overdubs?  Here's verses 1 and 2 of the song played together.

Breakin In a Brand New Overdub test1

Audacity is really easy for this.  Put the tracks side by side, and scoot them around, and compress and stretch, til they line up.

Crowded Cafe Loop

(5:01) 17 seconds of background from an Untouchables episode, looped for 5 minutes, portraying a busy gin dive in the 30's.  In other words, looking back 30 years, in a show that was made over 50 years ago.  But 1961 is more ancient than even that.  Those folks on the right are real people from that era-- not your blow-dry Happy Days clones.  Real people who probably also smell a little odd.

Plus, for us soundheads, the crowd itself has a nice blurry quality; it doesn't sound like real people in a cafe.  Some anonymous sound tinkerer, much like you or me, working for Desilu Studios crafted a singularly amorphous bed of pure crowd whitenoise, as pure as a vista by Eno.

Crowded Cafe Loop

Suggested For You

Another installment of Huffington Post's computer-generated comic strip as it appeared on my monitor today.  Not sure if that means I have the rights or they do.  Anyway, this is a random take on the day's events, created by raising the caption to the next photo.  Nothing's moved or cut, just cropped.

The Tonight Show Band: Sax Alley

(3:29) The audio life's not all cutting and chopping and being a smartass.  Sometimes it's patching up a little treasure that needs only some TLC.

"Sax Alley", the Tonight Show Band tune-- a wild amazing track.  When they were getting ready to go on tour with it, the band graced viewers of The Tonight Show with a beautiful, swinging run-through that's since been posted to YouTube.

Complete with glitches.  A citizens-band radio interrupts it at one point, TV interference and generally lower grade mono sound, circa 1983.  Being, of course, a lover of the Audio, I put Audacity on it: replacing what I had to, compressing, EQing, tweaking, pinching, burping...

If you dig jazz, give it a listen.  Featuring Pete Christlieb and Ernie Watts.  The mid-range is still a little ringy, but what the heck.

Sax Alley

Here's the link to the video on YouTube.

Jetsons

...or Jest-sons, as I now typoed.

My seasonal livelihood has kicked in, so audio lab time's going to be less.  This one bit is going to take some script-building.  It might be up eventually.

The Jetsons were on my mind this morning-- "Offa me!"  "I'll tune in the government information channel!"-- so the first post of the year is something I thought I wouldn't do: put up a bit that's already over at Bandcamp.  But Rich was asking about the fabulous, floating Flood Tape, and I guess I should mention all that old stuff-- which was appearing on this very blog, in its halcyon days-- is up over there.

More blogcleaning: for 2016, I'm going to quit putting "CutUpSound" in the title of posts w/ new stuff.  It's the blog, I'm the blog, the blog is me.  The occasional odd thing by others also (clearly identified).

And I think I'll start putting links into the text, like Jetsons or something like that.