Will Miner wrote:
>
> I'll vote for that (not knowing whether a Gracey rampage might be too
> dangerous to the locals).
>
> Sigh. I try not to get too sentimental for olden days but it's hard not
> to wish for such things. Too many of my favorite records are from those
> days when music was locally owned and made as were the records and the
> radio, when saying "that's a band from Memphis" would have meant
> something. And too many of my other favorite records seem to be trying
> to recapture the feel of the music of those times. Ah well.
I'm in the process of writing some things down, and I remembered an "old
days" situation that relates to this. When I was in Jr. High I used to
hang out at the local recording studio in Ft. Worth where Maj. Bill
Smith had his headquarters (I got to watch some of them records being
made) and the thing was, he would cut a single, make an acetate of it on
the studio lathe, and walk upstairs with it to KXOL radio (where I
eventually was a kid DJ) and if the PD liked it, he'd stick it into the
night rotation to see how the kids responded to it. If it did anything,
Major Bill would press it up and put it in the stores and the rest would
be history. Sam Phillips used to do the same thing in Memphis with Dewey
Phillips. These were major, mass-market radio outlets.
I daresay you could not walk into your local A3 outlet with a DAT of
your latest single and be taken very seriously, and HNC would look at
you like you were a dangerous lunatic.
The practical effect of this was to remove the layers and layers of
bullshit a record has to go through now in order to even make it to a
programmer's hands. It really is no wonder that records sound so watery
and wimpy- there are about 500 non-musical opinions between it and the
air.
--
Joe Gracey
President-For-Life, Jackalope Records
http://www.kimmierhodes.com
