I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.
ART NOTES— the exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 will be at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, originally scheduled to Jan 21st.
HAIL and FAREWELL to the last person to draw a VA military pension as the child of a soldier from serving in the Civil War, who has died at the age of ninety. Irene Triplett was born in 1930 to an eighty-three year-old Mose Triplett (whose wife was age thirty-four) and Irene had been drawing $73.13/month in a North Carolina nursing home.
LANGUAGE NOTES— gay and transgender citizens of Myanmar often take to using a dialect of Burmese called bansaka— in order to conceal their identities.
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Mishka the Cat— an Australian kitteh who went missing ten years ago, was brought to a shelter by a construction worker, identified via microchip and with the help of a GoFundMe campaign is recovering.
YOUR WEEKEND READ ...is this rather lengthy essay by Anne Applebaum about Trump’s collaborators — with all sorts of historical comparisons. The one thing I would add to her comparison of Lindsey Graham vis-a-vis Mitt Romney: is that Graham boosted his popularity at home by becoming a lackey. Mitt may have lost some popularity at home but only so much (due to Utah’s complicated politics, which do not appreciate anti-immigrant and anti-refugee actions) and as he is not up for re-election until 2024, he runs much less political risk.
FASHION NOTES— true-to-form, Parisians are ditching the light-blue face masks in favor of bolder patterns (sometimes matching their outfits), with the designer Jean-Paul Gaultier describing it by saying, “It’s the new statement T-shirt”.
RELIEF that the supreme court of Taiwan has ruled that a portion of its criminal code declaring that adultery is a criminal offense— and often used to target women — is unconstitutional.
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Marcus the Guard Cat— who has just been “retired” from his post as the ‘guard cat’ (and mouser) at the British Columbia Aviation Museum the past ten years ... due to loneliness at being in an empty building during the pandemic.
THE OTHER NIGHT yours truly hosted the Top Comments diary with a round-up of Random Thoughts— including musings on an infamous baseball game in Toronto, an old British politics humorous essay, my hope that the NY State attorney general will achieve what her disgraced predecessor had sought to achieve and the latest GOP individual working diligently on a project, only to be undercut … by a Tweet.
BRAIN TEASER - try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC, as well as the weekly NY Times quiz (much easier, and with one question in common).
SEPARATED at BIRTH—
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… when one thinks of noted recording studios, it's usually in places like Manhattan, LA, San Francisco, New Orleans, Memphis and Muscle Shoals (for R&B) or Nashville. But when I reached my mid-twenties, I learned that some famous recordings (in the 60's and 70's) had been made just five minutes from my family's house on suburban Long Island, New York. And not only had the studio closed by the end of the 70's, but as one self-described 'music-gear-slut' observed: almost nothing about Ultrasonic Studios has been documented. Hence, this profile will be incomplete .... but the joint at least deserves some mention.
Early in the 1960's, a fellow named Bill Stahl opened this studio in Hempstead, New York (some twenty miles east of Manhattan and just five minutes away from our home in West Hempstead). In 1965, a young man from Queens made a wrong turn while driving in the area, and saw the sign. Deciding to stop in, he hit it off with Bill Stahl, and thus the career of noted recording engineer (and later producer) Don Casale began .... all due to a wrong turn. The studio has two main claims to fame: some of the albums recorded there, and also live radio show recordings from many star bands.
One example of the former were recordings (in the late 60's) by a band called The Hassles - one of whose members went on to stardom. Although he wound up recording most of his solo albums at much larger studios: disagreements with his producer led Billy Joel to finish recording his debut album as well as his 1976 album Turnstiles at Ultrasonic.
The first three albums by Vanilla Fudge - who managed to combine blue-eyed soul, psychedelia and hard rock seamlessly - were produced at Ultrasonic by George 'Shadow' Morton (who died in 2013).
After the band's break-up, its rhythm section - bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice (L-to-R, photo below) recorded with their new band Cactus before they joined the legendary Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck in Beck, Bogert & Appice two years later. They were an ordered pair, a nonpareil rhythm section to have recorded with three accomplished bands.
But easily the most noteworthy album to come from Ultrasonic was recorded in May, 1968. Most recordings there were from bands in the greater New York area, but somehow a band from San Diego wound up recording there. The official producer Jim Hilton was not present (claiming to have been stuck in a monster traffic jam).
To pass the time, the aforementioned recording engineer Don Casale asked the band to run through a song, so that he could set sound levels. He had pushed the "Record" button as a matter of course, and after making all of his adjustments .... heard something unusual, and so just let the band run through the song.
It was only after they finished (seventeen minutes later) that Casale told the members of Iron Butterfly that they had in fact, unknowingly, just recorded In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida so well ... that another take was not needed.
The song has become iconic fifty-plus years later ... and Don Casale is not even credited on the album. The (absent) Jim Hilton later mixed the album at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood and was credited as its only recording engineer, as well as its producer. Atlantic later gave Casale a gold record, but to this day, it seems like a well-kept secret that his name is associated with the mammoth success of the recording that he was largely, if inadvertently, responsible for. "After that," Casale hastened to add, "Atlantic credited me for everything, even a tambourine overdub on someone's record."
Most of the above I was too young to know about at the time. But I did recall being able to listen to the radio (during the 1970's) for recordings of live studio performances of numerous bands who were visiting the NY area. Radio station WLIR (92.7) offered them a chance to have a live performance that could be heard throughout the NY metro area - and thus entice ticket sales - without having to bring extensive equipment.
And so if you type into your search engine the phrases "Ultrasonic Studios" plus "WLIR" or live recordings .... you will find links to numerous shows by the likes of:
Little Feat, Marshall Tucker, Jackson Browne, Peter Frampton, Tower of Power, Fleetwood Mac, Lou Reed, Freddie King, Steve Miller, the Doobie Brothers, Herbie Hancock, The Band, Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Dr. John, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w/John Hartford, Jonathan Edwards, Dickey Betts, Todd Rundgren, Hall & Oates .... and more.
Many were issued as bootleg recordings, but with much better sound quality (due to the studio setting, as well as later editing for radio broadcast) than your typical bootleg of the era.
Perhaps someday a full account of this studio will be forthcoming ... for now, just a chance to see a time-and-place we likely won't see again.
As they recorded three albums there, it might do well to feature a Vanilla Fudge song to complete this profile. They have performed on-and-off since 1967, and tour today with three of its four original members in the line-up: Mark Stein on keyboards, Vince Martell on guitar and Carmine Appice on drums. (Bassist Tim Bogert had to retire from performing in 2010, due to lingering injuries from a motorcycle accident).
Here is their cover of a 1965 Junior Walker hit, Shotgun— representative of their covers of R&B tunes with a more hard rock/psychedelia edge — which reached #68 on the pop charts in 1969.
Shotgun ... shoot 'em before he runs now Do the jerk baby, do the jerk now Put on your red dress and then you go downtown I said buy yourself a shotgun now, were gonna break it down