History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
The cassette tape was still a very new invention in the early '70s and it would be another decade before they rivaled the vinyl LP. This could play ten cassettes, individual sides or whole cassettes.
This video shows the mechanics of this jukebox and while it claims there were cassette singles for this machine, the cassette single was a product of the '80s. More likely, it played entire albums on cassette, as 20 songs is a pretty pathetic selection for any jukebox.
From the early 1900s, these were the very first automatic repeat gadgets for records. The needle would reach the end of a record (give or take a few seconds), then the needle would catch on the repeater and rotate it to the beginning of the record (again, give or take a few seconds)
Never
heard of The Caroleers? You're not alone. Their name isn't even mentioned on some of their own records!
But if you were a kid of the '50s to '70s, you may have had a few of their records.
And they may have sold as many
Christmas records between 1950-1975 as Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and
Burl Ives.
Admittedly, there are no actual sales numbers of these records because the only places you could find them were in racks at drug stores or supermarkets. And the RIAA never calculated music sales outside mainstream retail record stores in those days. But from the sheer numbers of these records I encounter in thrift stores and on eBay, it was likely a few million.
The Caroleers recorded childrens records for Peter Pan Records in the early '50s as The Peter Pan Caroleers. Peter Pan Records was a division of Synthetic Plastics Corporation (SPC). SPC was based in Newark, NJ and started out in the late '20s making other plastic products (buttons, board game and toy pieces, hair combs and whatever other minute miscellanea you could make out of PVC.)
SPC started Peter Pan Records in 1949. They initially made plastic 78 RPM records for children. They knew as the 33 1/3 RPM long playing and 45 RPM record was taking the nation by storm, there would be BIG business in children's records due to the sudden rise in hand-me-down 78 RPM phonographs from their parents who quickly adopted the slower speeds and multiple speed functions of the automatic record changers that were coming into vogue.
By the late '50s, they were making the then standard 45s. You may better remember the Peter Pan childrens 45s from your '60s/'70s childhood. They were the second biggest (behind Disney) producer of children's records in America.
Playhour Records (late '60s): Contrary to popular collector belief, it wasn't SPC, but Pickwick that made Playhour Records, following the SPC/Peter Pan formula perfectly. Playhour records were packaged in tote pack sets of 12 45s and sold for $3.
SPC expanded in the adult market with their budget record labels. They often mixed in their Caroleers recordings for Peter Pan on their Christmas albums marketed for adults. (Under the Yuletide, Spin-O-Rama, Diplomat and Tinkerbell labels.) These albums are regular thrift store/eBay finds.
Where we have this nearly flawless Perry Como impersonator.....
At least, "The Caroleers" was their pseudonym. No one truly
knows who they were, where they came from. Who was their leader, etc.
Nothing. Session information and artistic liner notes do
not exist. As with everything SPC ever produced..
The cold hard truth is "The Caroleers" were just a blanket name for a group of unknown session singers and musicians at SPC who were paid a flat fee for their services and recieved no royalties from their recordings. And this was perhaps the best selling group on a budget label ever.
And guess how much songwriters Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson got in royalties from The Caroleers' recording of their "Frosty The Snowman"? Just guess.....
In an apparent Gene Autry knockoff.....
Most of The Caroleers recordings were made in the 1950s and '60s at a time when music publishing was fraught with copyright loopholes galore, allowing for dozens of knockoff and "tribute" records (much like we see today.) SPC and other budget record labels got away with this by claiming their music was intended for children and thus for play inside homes, not over the radio or publicly. SPC did not service radio stations and most radio stations did not play their product. (Most.) So they actually claimed that they didn't have to owe songwriters royalties in spite of making millions in profit from their songs.
Today, the artists and songwriters are usually in on it too, as these knockoffs are actually a revenue stream, no matter how disingenuous.
However in the early '70s, songwriters were sick of all these cheap record labels whoring their music and collectively put an end to this racket and most budget labels ceased operation or went into other lines.
About this time however, SPC stopped pressing the old Caroleers records and hacked up something even more nefarious for Christmas in the '70s.
However even in the disco era, old habits died hard with SPC (by then known as Peter Pan Industries.) They even cashed in on the Disco Duck craze with "Irwin The Disco Duck"
SPC went back to exclusively childrens records as Peter Pan and later, Power Records which incorporated an action comic book style format targeted to boys.
This album always brings visions of aluminum Christmas trees and this music blasting out of console stereos like these.
The Ray Conniff Singers were essentially the vocal relief between the Mantovani and 101 Strings instrumentals in the Name-That-Tune world of your typical "Beautiful Music" FM radio stations of the '60s and '70s. They were known for making "safe" covers of pop songs your parents could like.
"The smooth Bossa Nova sound somehow gets horribly lost and ends up in
Newark, New Jersey for this low-budget Diplomat release. If you’re
looking for some kind of Stan Getz Verve samba, you’ve come to the wrong
place. This record is best played on a big wood veneer stereo that’s
the size of a small car. It’s one of those records that my parents might
have picked up at the grocery store while they were buying cocktail
weenies for the big “grown up” party Saturday night. There’s a real nice
b-movie vibe going on here......." - The Thrift Store DJ http://www.records.fruityfamily.com/?p=19 (Download on link)
And who were the Brasileros?
They were some pretty notable jazz musicians, brothers Bill Barron (tenor sax) and Kenny Barron (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Charli Persip (drums) They were successful individually and as session players on many classic jazz albums and recorded for Diplomat during a pretty lean time in their careers. This was all I could gather on this particular 1962 album.
"Brasileros....Brazilians....They're all the same....."
But this was never printed on the jacket. Synthetic Plastics Co., like most budget record labels, never printed much in the way of liner notes and nothing on session information (but for some reason, they always made sure you knew the engineering data on the bottom of the back cover!)
I had to research the rest.
Very few albums released under pseudonyms on budget labels have any real stars on them. This group, Lou Reed and a few others are the only ones that come to my mind.....
Radio
stations
are a unique breed. Some
of them sign on the air and gain instant success, some never amount to much. Or until they are bought and transformed by
another entity. And there are those that just simply fall by the
wayside.
Every major city has a few AM radio stations that were once popular 40-50 years ago that have gone through countless ownership/call letter/format changes and now languish as unknown ethnic, religious, Radio Disney, sports or fourth string talk formats. The intentions of the owners were good. A new and untried format. Or a stab at competing with the heritage local station with a different spin on their format. But somehow, fate had other plans.
Let's look at a few of those who somehow just fell apart and their remains still stand.......
WHOW 1520 AM Clinton, IL
Probably the very best (and rare) example of a radio station that
has gone to hell.....and BACK to tell about it.
I don't know what the hell happened in here. But Casey Kasemnever did it this way. Note the ashtray on the console and dig that Radio Shack mixing board .......
Please
note the station had signed off in 2002, about the time these pictures
were taken. Note the lack of computer equipment in the WHOW on-air
studio. Virtually ALL radio stations in 2002 - including most of the smallest, had fully digital computer controlled automation by that time.) Not WHOW.
There is what appears to be an
elderly computer mouse on top of that 1970's vintage automatic record
changer you see in the first picture and it's quite possible all the
computer equipment was taken out from it. But how many stations
played their programming off cassette tapes in 2002? There a LOT of
those you can see there, including cassette player - an ancient 1990s ghetto blaster! Most small stations like WHOW rarely, if ever played
cassettes in 2002. It just wasn't a suitable quality medium for radio programming
In fact, cassettes were rarely used in most
commercial radio stations beyond recording news bites,
occasional public service/religious programs (usually speech), and for DJs to record
"airchecks" (a kind of live sampling of how they sound over the air to
play for radio stations that hire them....or not., with all the
music cut out and just the DJ's monologues and some commercials
recorded.) Even THAT had gone to CD-Rs by the early 2000s in most parts of the
country, as they were recorded onto hard disk and edited digitally by
then.
Today, WHOW is back with modern facilities and runs a News/Talk format with an emphasis on farming news.
There's more....
WISL 1480 AM, Shamokin, PA
Photo by Jim Treese
There's an old gutted tape automation system back there and what appears to be a cart recorder deck and a reel to reel tape deck.
WISL was an Oldies station in central Pennsylvania. It left the air in 2003 after it was sold to Clear Channel and a subsequent sale to another broadcaster who could not afford to keep the station on the air and the station's license expired in 2006. The station was officially deleted from the FCC database in 2008. However WISL remains online as a tribute internet radio station - http://www.wisl1480.com/
KOME in Tulsa was off the air by 1965 (although the Stetson Hats poster in the studio here looks oddly '80s vintage), the KOME call letters were used
a few years later for a rock station in San Jose, CA. However the remains of the KOME station building in Tulsa remain. AM 1300 in Tulsa is now KAKC, an all sports station.
WCHR 94.5 FM Trenton, NJ
WCHR is a religious radio station in Trenton, NJ which currently broadcasts on 920 AM. WCHR originally broadcast on 94.5 FM. But left the FM dial in 1998 and after a number of call letter/format changes 94.5 is now WPST an Adult Contemporary radio station. This is the former WCHR station building.
KSVY 1550 AM, Opportunity, WA
Photo by Bill Harms
KSVY was an Oldies (later Classical) music station located in the Spokane suburb of Opportunity, WA. The photo above is the remains of the trailer that held their transmitter.
Whilst on a visit to my friend's house, he had something in his yard he (and no one else) could identify. Only that it looked like a "typewriter with no keyboard" But what was it?
It was an Ediphone (or what remained of it.)
The Ediphone was an early dictation machine like the Dictaphone that used wax cylinders (cylinder records were considered obsolete by 1912. But Edison made commercial music cylinder records up until 1929.) But beyond that into the '30s and even as far as the early '50s. The wax cylinder was used for office dictation before it was replaced by belt machines and a few years later, tape - even The Edison Company eventually got into tape.
..........until the 2000s when digital took over.
The Ediphone was electrically powered, but strangely recorded acoustically.
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