Flying Saucers, TV, and Tricky Dick
Dickie Goodman, 'break-in' records, MAD Magazine, Herbie Hancock, Coachella, Record Store Day, Lost in the Vaults, McCoy Tyner
What with all of the serious news, political and regarding COVID-19 and the cancellation of SXSW, I thought it would be good to have a little fun and at the same time take a look at some records that combined timely news stories and snippets of top-charting songs to create a new genre: the 'break-in' record.
A break-in record is one in which there is a narrator or other character who is frequently some kind of news reporter asking questions of an interviewee. The answers to the questions are snippets taken from hit records of the day. In essence, it's a comedy skit using current headlines and hit songs that most people are familiar with.
The originator of the format was Dickie Goodman, who, along with his songwriting partner Bill Buchanan, created a single they called "Flying Saucer Pt.1 & Pt. 2," with each part taking a side of the 45 RPM record. They created the track using studios to create the sound of a radio broadcast and they spliced the clips from other records the old fashioned way, with a razor blade.
Sure, classical composers were messing around with recording and manipulating magnetic tape in the late 1940s, and Les Paul was deeply investigating the possibilities of overdubbing, delay, and tape effects, but the breakthrough in terms of novelty recordings was Carl Weismann's 'Canine Chorus', which spliced together recordings of random dog barks to create a melody. A year later, in 1956, Goodman and Buchanan came up with the break-in record concept.
The two shopped their first tape, 'The Flying Saucer', to a couple of dozen labels, all of whom tossed them out of the office without the least bit of interest. For one thing, the whole thing seemed kind of juvenile and amateurish to these industry insiders. However, the humor was the same kind of droll yet over the top satire employed by MAD Magazine, which published its first issue in 1952. In 1956 Al Feldman became editor and he hired some of the magazine's best artistic and satirical talent, including Mort Drucker, Don Martin, and Sergio Aragones, and the magazine's popularity increased exponentially.
In other words, there most definitely was a market for the kind of record that Goodman and Buchanan wanted to release. But without a label, they had no way to get it into the hands of the people.
Enter Alan Freed, who played the tape on his WINS program one evening in July. Listeners went nuts for the weird recording, and suddenly our heroes had no difficulty finding a label willing to release 'Flying Saucer.' By the end of August, the record was number three on the Billboard chart.
You can guess how long it took the industry to come back at Goodman and Buchanan with a lawsuit. The Harry Fox agency filed suit on behalf of some clients but Goodman settled the case for a fraction of a penny per song sample multiplied by sales. A few months later they were back in court with Chess & Imperial Records on behalf of artists Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis, who were unsatisfied with the deal that Fox got.
The courts ruled that "The Flying Saucer" was a parody, and as such a complete work in and of itself, and therefore was not in violation of copyright laws for using clips from hit records. In fact, it was noted, the inclusion of a clip on a break-in record of this type was more likely to increase sales of the record, mitigating any loss the artists might try to claim by the inclusion of their song clips.
Buchannan moved on, but Goodman continued to dig in the gold mine of the craze that he had started. "The Flying Saucer" and several subsequent Goodman records ("Flying Saucer Goes West," "Frankenstein '59") were widely imitated by a growing number of comedians and comedy teams. Increasingly break-in records became a commentary on popular culture or on political campaigns: Jim Stag and Jim Mitchell, as Winkly and Nutly released 'Report to the Nation,' and my personal favorite, The Delegates' "Convention '72".
My friend had a 45 rpm copy of this record and we listened to it again and again. We were ten years old and the political implications of the record we understood only from conversations that our parents had, but we loved the irreverent energy of the record, which included clips from songs that we liked--the record leans especially heavily on The Jimmy Castor Bunch's single "Troglodyte (Cave Man)" which was itself a bit of a novelty record, at least to a white audience. The song came from the group's album It's Just Begun, a powerful hunk of early '70s funk that I highly recommend.
And yes, we made our own break-in recordings on home cassette players, utilizing a microphone and a bunch of 45rpm records. It's not at all easy. First, you have to come up with a script, based around clips you want to use, or else you have to write a script and then try to come up with good clips. Then you have to perform the script, reading the question and using the microphone stop/start switch in order to cue up the record and then flip the switch and record that.
Often you could hear the clipped chirp of the mic switch flipping on and off. It was a little like stop motion animation back then: it took a long time to do, the results were less than perfect, but you created something that was pleasing to you, or that made people laugh, and that was where the fun was.
Goodman continued to releases break-in records throughout the '70s and '80s, until the fun eventually ran out in November of 1989, when Goodman took his own life by shooting himself in the head. Reportedly he had a gambling addiction and his wife had recently left him. It's a horribly ironic end to a life dedicated to trying to make people laugh.
Dickie Goodman didn't leave behind a legacy of fame and fortune for himself--his records seldom get played or even discussed except by collectors and nostalgia fans--but he did leave a series of audio time capsules. You can get a sense of what were hot news or political topics or big pop culture events of the day as well as what records were on the charts at the time, and you can get people's take on it at the time as well. That's as much information as you can get from a great infographic or short video.
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Speaking of MAD Magazine, I used to read it pretty regularly when I was younger and there are certain things that have always stuck in my brain--a beatnik version of 'My Fair Lady' entitled 'You're a Pig, Malion", or a babysitter's guide that included cutting the center section out of a layer cake and then smoothing the frosting out or making the kids play "Ed Sullivan Show" which entails making them spin plates or balance chairs. But the one thing that I've never forgotten, down to many of the memorable lines, was an "All in the Family" satire entitled "Gall in the Family Fare." It was made even more special by the fact that MAD included a flexidisc (yeah, remember those?) of the piece being performed by actors and actresses imitating Archie, Edith, and the gang. While I was researching info about Dickie Goodman I came across this digitized version of it on YouTube. The file was digitized from a copy of the flexidisc, and actual scans of the segment in the magazine are included as well.
***NOTE: This is a parody piece of a show whose main character is a racist and a bigot. In order to exaggerate that, "Gall In the Family Fare" uses a lot of racist language that could trigger some readers. However, the intent behind d this is to poke fun at the fact that some conservative viewers didn't get the 'joke' and viewed Archie Bunker as a hero--as "Starchie" says at one point in the MAD recording, "They're not laughing at me, they're laughing with me." ***
On the news front, Coachella is postponed until October. Maybe. That plan is still under consideration but it looks like a possibility. Madonna has also taken the opportunity to cancel the final shows of her Madame X tour, which had turned into something of a catastrophe. So COVID-19 cancellations aren't all bad.
Record Store Day is approaching with its list of exclusive releases (will anyone show up?), which is an excuse for me to recommend this Amy Benfer piece from 2014 on why vinyl doesn't have to be the domain of hipsters. This Reddit post from four years ago finds some poor vinyl collector wondering 'how can you keep from buying too many records?' And while there are plenty of flip and funny answers, there are some attempts at helping this poor denizen of the vinyl underground regain some control over their life. Apparently, if you're Japanese and buy more books than you can read there's a name for it and it's considered kind of sexy. Vinyl junkies need a special name, too.
Daniel Spicer's writing about out of print, lost, and forgotten jazz records for the publication Jazzwise have been collected into a tidy book that's well worth adding to your music bookshelf. Lost In the Vaults is, in the words of Jazzwise Editor-in-chief John Newy “ a long, lingering love letter to the arcane pleasures of record collecting: the thrills, spill and bellyaches of hanging out in record shops, crate-digging at record fairs or trawling through eBay and Discogs and landing another plum from that ever-lengthening ‘wants’ list.”
Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner passed away this week, a tremendous loss in the world of jazz music. Tyner is best known for his extensive work with John Coltrane as part of the classic John Coltrane Quartet that recorded most of Coltrane’s best know records including My Favorite Things and A Love Supreme. Indeed, the sound of the quartet relies as much on Tyner’s piano as it does on Coltrane himself. Tyner also recorded many records as a leader and his recordings are full of his bold playing and intelligent compositions. Here’s “Passion Dance” from his 1967 Blue Note release The Real McCoy
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