May the 30th...

When I was young, May 30th was Memorial Day. It was a special day; businesses closed, children visited local cemeteries to decorate with flowers the graves of family members and folks who had given their lives in service to their country. It was a time to reflect on the meaning of sacrifice, and give thanks. The U.S. Congress decided to float the day to the last Monday of the month, providing workers a three day weekend. The extra day was immediately coopted by retail "white sales" of sheets, towels, and blankets. The extra shopping day quickly grew in size to the point that retail stores stayed open, as did food emporiums. Those on the lower rungs of the economic scale did not get the day off. These days, the three day weekend is the marker for the official start of the summer season, celebrated with barbeques, the latest sci-fi special effects mutant hero spectacular, and other sundry commercial extravaganzas. There is usually a playing of terrible anthemic "glad to be an American" songs composed in corporate aligned country western pop; folks on social media attempt to outdo each other showing their support for our troops. Needless to say, this annoys me to no end.

Memorial Day is not veterans day, not 'show your pride in the military' day. There are people who died in the service of their fellow men and women in this country who deserve ot be remembered - including many who did not lose their lives in military excursions who, in my opinion, should also be remembered and honored; people like the Haymarket martyrs, hung for organizing a demonstration for the 40 hour workday; or Joe Hill, executed on trumped up charges for organizing dock workers and writing union songs. I'm no nationalist - every country has its honored dead, not just victors. No one should owe years of their lives, or their very lives, to the government of the real estate upon which they were born. In our world, a military is necessary; if a country doesn't have conscription where everyone serves, volunteers fill the bill. In our day, this has led to military families, some serving out of patriotism, but many, from lower economic classes, because it's a way to a decent living and leg up in the world - if you don't get killed, the benefits are good. Unless you need healthcare. Every time I think of professional soldiering as a job, I think of Rome or other such empires. Nowadays, we not only have professional military families, but special insurance, special retail programs, special homeowners programs, and etc. for military families and their descendants  - except, of course, proper care for the wounded of body and spirit. Hmmm, I think this this little diatribe has gone on longer than the couple of songs I played for the real Memorial Day.

 

The rest of the program is given to a celebration of Benny Goodman's birthday, also May 30th. Goodman was a poor 10 year old kid in Chicago when his father enrolled him in music classes at a local synagogue. By the age of 12, he was playing professionally. By this mid teens, he was playing with some of the best musicians in the country. At 18,he was recording with a band under his own name. He moved to New York and played as a session musician and in orchestras for a couple of Gershwin Brothers shows (also in the pit - Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Gene Krupa. It was a band put together by Goodman that played on Billie Holiday's first two recordings.

Goodman put his first big band together to audition for a Billy Rose show. They got hired. When the show closed, they successfully auditioned for the "Let's Dance' radio program. Benny's outfit was one of three bands on the show - their segment started at 12:30am. Most of what they played were arrangements in the new "swing" style of jazz, done by Fletcher Henderson, and African American whose own band hadn't been able to stay financially afloat. Benny even hired members of Henderson's band to teach his guys how to play swing. After 6 months, the sponsor pulled the plug on the radio show due to a strike at their plant. Goodman went on tour. It was a disaster. No one wanted to hear this 'new' music.

 

The last stop on the tour was a three week engagement at the Palomar, the largest ballroom on the West Coast, capable of holding 4,000 dancing couples. The first set was so poorly received that word went out that the rest of the engagement would be cancelled. It was August, 1935 and Benny was ready to call it quits. The band's drummer, Gene Krupa, spoke up. If the band was going to go out of business, at least they could go out playing the music they liked. Benny called for the Henderson arrangements. 8,000 kids went berserk. What no one had realized was that while their radio segment was on at 12:30am on the East Coast, it was only 9:30pm on the West Coast. The kids knew Goodman's band, they knew his music. It's regarded as the night that put swing over, the start of an era. And it was a lesson in the power of radio.

 

 

I hope listeners enjoy the show.

Last week's show - clipped.

Hello.
As previously noted, my radio show from last week(May 23rd,) was put into limbo by Soundcloud after their computers decided that I used a track they identified as ""Medley (NBC On Air Studio Recording)" by Fats Waller & His Rhythm, owned by RCA Bluebird". I did open the show with an excerpt form a Fats Waller radio show that had appeared on NBC in 1938 - it had an announcer introducing a Saturday night of 'rhythmic hot-cha' and Fats Waller singing "Hold My Hand" for a total of just under 3 minutes including my opening sound effects. I filed a protest. I have yet to hear word one from Soundcloud. I thought the show went fairy well even though I didn't have enough time to prepare it properly, and I would like those interested to be able to hear it. I have clipped that sequence from the opening. If the show as aired is freed from Soundcloud's seizure vaults (which must rival Jack Benny's), I will post it. This episode of the show celebrated the birthdays of Fats Waller, Rosemary Clooney, and Artie Show. I hope listeners enjoy it. Tonight's show will note today's birthday of Benny Goodman. I hope I'll be able to post that one.

Another Copyright claim...

Dear Friends,

I usually post my radio shows (broadcast on Saturday nights) on Sunday mornings, posting here as well as both my radio show's Facebook page, and on my personal Facebook page.  I'm afraid I can't post last night's show at this time - a copyright claim has been made, and access to my file has been blocked by Soundcloud, the service I pay to make my shows available for web streaming.

The claim is for a track I did not use. I did use a short (about 2 minutes?) excerpt from a 1938 broadcast with the same artist, which to the best of my knowledge is in the public domain. (Broadcasts from that era were not usually copyrighted, the few that were have copyrights that have expired.)

The radio station pays all of it's royalty fees for using recorded music to ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC.

I have decided to file a protest, which required my agreeing to indemnify Soundcloud against legal fees. I realize that they are only trying to protect themselves, but that's required in order to dispute the claim. Soundcloud can terminate my account, and I can now be sued by the company making the claim, and Soundcloud if the claimant decides to bring suit against them.

Needless to say, I am not passing anyone else's work off as my own.

I have no idea how this will turn out, nor any idea how long this process may take. In the last 7 days, of all of the various shows I have made available online, my files have been played a total of 8 times.

Just think, I could become a convicted felon for excerpting 2 minutes or so of a 1938 radio broadcast. What a wonderful world we live in. 

Pax Vobisum.

 

It is Spring again...

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems...”

                                                                                       - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

Spring has been lurking about. It always starts slowly, generally arriving here about a month or so after the vernal equinox. It used to unfold like a flower filmed in slow motion. When I wrote a garden column many years ago, I remember musing that Spring in New England was so spectacular I suspected God vacationed here in May and June. Now-a-days most Springs seem to last for a few minutes. Perhaps that perception is colored by my advancing years. When I was young life was a summer of exuberance. In my 40's, autumnal changes revealing true colors assumed the status of favorite season. Now I seem to have a distinct preference for the impatient headlong rush of Spring; renewal and stunning beauty too briefly expressed, a seasonal touch of the poet.

 

These last few years, Spring has arrived and passed into early summer with undue haste. Last year Spring seemed more like her old self, allowing one time to luxuriate in blossoms and scents wafting upon the breeze. This year we are back to the 21st century Spring explosion and action extravaganza.  Just as the magnolias blossomed, a wave of early heat wiped them out before cooling down again. Just as the apple trees turned the landscape into billow white clouds, the heat returned and the blossoms faded and fell.

 

It is in Spring that I miss living in Boston. The residential area known as the Back Bay is comprised of Victorian era row house mini mansions built on landfill. The Boston Horticulture Society was involved in selecting the plantings. Frederick Law Olmstead planned the park system, known as the Emerald Necklace. Walking down Marlborough Street on a sunny day when the magnolias are in bloom is a heady experience. I dare say to the Victorian upper crust the overwhelming fragrance and visuals were as close to decadence as could be reasonably handled.

 

I've been scanning a few of my old photos - I'm fairly sure this is one side of Commonwealth Avenue.

Ah, now this is one corner of Marlborough Street.

A 'cup and saucer' magnolia. This one was in front of my landlord Ralph's home in the South End.
I'd never seen them before, and later showed this very picture to family. My aunt, born and raised in Georgia, sternly rebuked me, "That is not a magnolia, it's a tulip tree". Now, my landlord was a scientist, one of his degrees was in horticulture, and I had no reason to doubt him on the matter. As a member of the Horticultural Society, I used their library to do more research and it is indeed a magnolia, "Magnolia × soulangeana" to be exact. I knew better than to say anything to my aunt. Over 25 years later, living in Brattleboro, I became friends with a Ralph from the radio station who had lived for many years in Boston. I mentioned missing Spring in Boston with all the magnolia trees. "Tulip Trees", he corrected.

The Public Garden, which borders the Common.

Tulips in the Public Garden.

There is a lagoon and suspension bridge in the Public Garden. An entrepreneur, back in the day, was entranced by a scene in Wagner's Lohengrin in which the hero was transported in a boat pulled by a swan. The swan boats have been a seasonal fixture of the Public Garden ever since.

(One year, I was passing through the Public Garden just as the Swan Boats were being returned from their winter storage... )

On the Esplanade, a strip of greenway which separates the Back Bay and the Charles River.

Of course, before Spring arrived here this year, as I was reminiscing about missing Spring in Boston, two different friends announced they were going to Boston and asked what to see. A third friend, who lives in Boston, called.  Luckily, just at that time, Spring arrived here in Brattleboro.

 

Two weeks ago, early heat provided an explosion of bud and color just as prom goers wandered through the Common.

 

Last Saturday the temperatures soared into the 80's. Another riot of color appeared in a day's time.

Up by my garden at Solar Hill, the sweet violets bloomed in Elaine's mandala.

In my garden, the 'back 40' was originally shaded by trees no longer with us. I worked to create a 20 foot long woodland walk. Now that one portion gets lots of sun, the Solomon's Seal has spread like crazy. The bloodroot has gone wandering, popping up here and there. The Jacobs Ladder is currently a wave of blue, the Virginia Bluebells are gone, as is the native columbine. But the English bluebells will bloom soon, and all will be right with the woodland walk.  

With the high heat, the crab apples bloomed and faded within three days...

but the walk home from the garden was still pretty nice

 

The lilacs have been blooming all week. This picture of the Common was taken two weeks to the day from the 'prom night' picture above. Spring passes so quickly now. But then again, at my age, it would.

 

This week's radio program took note of the birthdays of Irving Berlin, Bobby Darin, and Woody Herman. Like Spring, I must rush through to other things. I hope listeners enjoy the show.

   

Best Wishes.

Welcome Hill and just another day.

It's been another busy week full of sturm und drang, various vicissitudes of life, and a few blessed moments of pleasure. The pleasure part involved not one, but two trips to Welcome Hill. And this year, I got to talk to the son of the man who started it.

A short jaunt across the river into New Hampshire brings one to a small cemetery started in the late 1770's. It is on the corner of a highway and Welcome Hill Road. The area is hilly and was home to hard scrabble farms going back into the colonial days. Occasionally, the farms would change hands. One family finally gave up and decided to sell; their land was bought by Leslie Hadlock not long before he went off to the war, the "big one'. He was stationed somewhere around the Netherlands.

As the story has it, as Mr. Hadlock returned after the war, the family in whose home he had been billeted gave him a gift - daffodil bulbs. Mr. Hadlock and his wife Marjorie began a garden. Every year they added more daffodils. On one side of the road there is a hill. On the other there is an outcropping with two benches, and a small path leading down into a dell. The woodland floor is covered in daffodils. Forsythia appears around the glade, as do a few varieties of magnolia. It is a magical place.

Mr. Hadlock passed some years ago. His wife passed a couple of years back, at the age of 102. (The obituaries had her age as 101, but her son said she was 102.) The son is now in his 70's, and has difficulty maintaining the garden; with the rest of the family farm and land there is too much to do. His children have moved away. If I had a car, I'd volunteer to help. He still has the hand painted sign that welcomed visitors, requesting they not pick the flowers - but it doesn't get put out anymore. Also gone is the tradition of putting out guest books for visitors to sign. I recall that one year the table they always used for the guest book was stolen. The younger Mr. Hadlock mentioned that his father used to greet visitors who came from around the world, and would talk with them for hours. During the war he'd seen enough of the world; after returning home, he and the Mrs. never left the farm again.

When I was a kid, May the 8th was marked in red on the calendar. Underneath the date, text used to read "VE Day". Over the years, as I grew up, the date stopped being marked and May the 8th became just another day. Once, it celebrated what was arguably the world's greatest accomplishment. On May the 7th, 1945 what was left of the German government surrendered unconditionally. Most of the nations of the world had banded together to put an end to the madness that had engulfed Europe for six years of total war. They formed the United Nations, and drew up a Declaration of Human Rights. This week's radio show took note of that day 70 years ago, still within the lifetime of people who lived it. Listen in - after a couple of songs du jour, to the music and news of a remarkable week, and a day that used to be marked in red on the calendar.

Bing Crosby's birthday and...

By the time  Bing Crosby was three years of age, his family had moved from Tacoma to Spokane, Washington. Whether the family misplaced his birth records in the move, or if they simply didn't record the date, I don't know. I have read that his family sat down to figure it out, and the agreed upon date emerged as May the 2nd, 1904. During his lifetime, Bing's birthday was always celebrated on the 2nd. Several years after he passed in 1977, his baptismal record turned up, which prodded a biographer to do a bit of checking in a Tacoma's newspaper's archive. It turned out that Crosby's actual birthdate was May 3rd, 1903.

Before so many  1940's radio shows became available, one of my personal favorites of all the shows I'd done was a show I called "Bing and...", which featured duets with other performers. I think that show may have started my birthday tributes. At any rate, for several years now I've usually done an all Bing show for his birthday, but this year, since I'd just done an all Ella Fitzgerald birthday tribute, I decided not to devote the whole show to Mr. Crosby. If I did, it would mean ignoring a favorite chant-hussy Blossom Dearie, whose birthday was April 28th, and lyricist Larry Hart, whose birthday is May 2nd.

Blossom Dearie (and yes, that's her real name)
 

Composer Richard Rodgers (left) and lyricist Larry Hart (right)

This week's featured broadcast was a Kraft Music Hall, originally heard on May 3rd, 1945. The Music Hall started in 1933 with Paul Whiteman, 'the king of jazz', as host. Crosby had started performing in 1925 as part of a duo which favored 'hot' jazz. Mr. Whiteman had hired them, and was responsible for expanding them into a trio known as 'The Rhythm Boys'. By the time the Kraft shows started, Crosby had gone solo and had his own radio show. In 1936, Crosby replaced his former boss as the host of the Music Hall.
He continued in that role (while adding 'Academy Award winning movie star' to his list of accomplishments) until 1946. Back then, the big networks (NBC Red, NBC Blue, and CBS) required their programs to be broadcast live, as the sound was of higher quality than the transcriptions independent stations and the Mutual Broadcasting stations used. This meant that shows had to be performed twice for each broadcast - once for each coast to overcome the three hour time difference. The first to rebel was Jack Benny, who simply did his show once. Crosby wanted to prerecord, but the network and sponsors refused. He'd taken note of a captured German technology, and became a principal financer of the Ampex tape recorder company. When the government forced NBC to give up one of its networks, the Blue was spun off and became ABC. They agreed to let Crosby prerecord and edit his shows for broadcast; Philco signed on as the sponsor. Oh, by the way, Crosby introduced his friend Les Paul to the magnetic recording device. It was Les Paul who started multi-track recording.

During the week of the Kraft broadcast, there was incredible wonderful news. There wasn't time to include any news broadcasts in this week's show, so I've already started work on a way to present them next week. After all, May the 8th (a Friday this year) is the 75th anniversary of VE Day. If anyone would like a preview, check out the newspaper stories, advertisements & etc. posted on my show's Facebook page for the news of the week I didn't get to use. Here's a link which should give access to anyone without a Facebook account: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Recycled-Radio/621059471269529

As always, I hope any listeners like the show.

Chase the blues away

Sometimes one just has one of those weeks. I'm at the age where I can be cranky in a cute curmudgeonly way. For much of the week, I didn't feel my crankiness was anywhere near cute, but I think I managed to cover it up most of the time. I will say that by the end of the week, I found myself expending a lot of energy just trying to be nice to my fellow human beings. This week, my radio show fell on Ella Fitzgerald's birthday. Two hours of the 'First Lady of Song' was just what the doctor ordered.

If anyone reading this page is feeling cranky or out of sorts,

or if you're enjoying moments of inner sunshine peace,

I do hope you enjoy the show.

  

Four-twenty and so on and so forth...

Back in the 1970's, there was a group of teenage high school friends who were known as The Waldos. And it came to pass that they heard tell of a secret abandoned field of marijuana. It was determined that a search for this pot of gold might provide an efficacious result, so they determined to set out upon such task by congregating by a local statue at 4:20 in the PM. The meeting time became a slang term which eventually found its way into the general population. For many years now, April the 20th has been the date of "smoke ins", celebrations of stoner age culture, and protest marches seeking legalization of cannabis sativa and various things hemp.

Smoking pot used to be one of those things that was just there somewhere in the background of the culture, often found in the circles of hot jazz and swing musicians. Hemp had many uses and was an excellent (and renewable) source for making everything from paper to rope and clothing.

In 1917, a young man by the name of Harry Anslinger married the niece of Andrew Mellon. His connections helped him acquire employment from military and police organizations, traveling the world with a mission of shaping international drug polices. In 1929, he became an assistant commissioner in the US Bureau of Prohibition.  In 1930, he became the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a position he held for 32 years, until 1962. He immediately began a campaign to destroy hemp as a feasible crop. Publisher William Randolph Hearst had invested heavily in the timber industry to support his newspaper chain. Hearst lost 800,000 acres of timberland to the Mexican Revolution, and needed to protect the rest of his investment. Hearst pushed the anti-hemp crusade. Both men hated Mexicans and African Americans; they began spreading the worst kind of lies and distortions to create negative stereotypes of our neighbors. They were soon joined by the Dupont company, which was about to release synthetics such as nylon. Pharmaceutical companies joined the fight. Hemp production had to go. Marijuana was portrayed as an evil, connected to the dastardly poor Mexican rabble. In 1937, a tax act was used to effectively prohibit hemp/pot. To pass it, Anslinger and Co. distorted and lied about the position of the American Medical Association. Their friends in Hollywood were pressed to join the crusade, and the "Reefer Madness" era began.

 

 

By July 1939, the local paper here in Vermont carried a few stories like this one:

 

 

From the late 1920's through to about 1939, jazz musicians created quite a few songs about the joys of pot smoking, the 'reefer man' and etc. Soon such recordings were outlawed, as was their use in the movies. For my radio show of April 18th, I played some of my collection of such songs.

Also in this week's radio show was a too short nod to the events which started late in the evening of... well, as a poet once put it, " 'Twas the 18th of April in '75, hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year." It's part of a poem we once knew as kids. It starts, "Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere...."  The poet, Mr. Longfellow, writing close to 100 years after the fact got a lot of it wrong. An earlier poem by Mr. Emerson started:

 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

 

One of these days I should really get back to regular posting and tell that story. There's parts of it elsewhere in the blog, but suffice it to say that on April the 19th the colonists fought back and really did change the world.

 

It was another fight that was the underpinning of the rest of the radio show. It was April, 1945. President Roosevelt had died (see last week's show post). The Allies were descending on Berlin. Here in Brattleboro, it was time to start the yearly Victory Garden. On the radio the night of April 21st, the Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands featured Johnny Long and His Orchestra....

 

The organization which registers and tracks the breeding of Holsteins is located in Brattleboro.

  

 

 

 

  

As always, I hope anyone who listens enjoys the show.