Co-Star: The Record Acting Game (Co-Star/Roulette, 1957/1977)

In the late 1950s, somebody at Roulette Records got an idea. And Roulette Records had lots of ideas. Being mobster founded and funded and all. If you know what I mean (nudge-wink). 

 

This was also a surprisingly well known secret, even in the scandal-ridden 1950s. But everybody was getting too worked up over phantom communists in Hollywood to bother to notice the corruption going on amongst the mobsters in New York.
But if there was a one-up to Roulette, they were remarkably cutting edge for their time. They gave their artists total creative freedom in their sessions. But there was a price to pay for that. The Mob isn't 100% benevolent, you know....Just a little off the top. (In the case of Tommy James & The Shondells, it was $30,000,000 off a $40,000,000 career.)


They released this awesome series of 15 vinyl LPs in 1957. Each features the named actor reading one part in a two-character scene, and includes a script with both parts so that the listener can play the scene opposite the star. A terrific novelty item, probably more fun now than it was originally. 


Some of the actors were superstars, others were stars who have begun to fade. And even a few of Roulette's own recording artists (who weren't necessarily actors in their own right, such as Jimmie Rodgers and Pearl Bailey.) After all, when you're working for a record company owned by The Mob, who you gonna say no to?


It must have been popular with young boomers, because Roulette Records reissued the entire series in 1977 on it's 20th anniversary. Sadly, it never got a further reissue to CD.

The Fernando Lamas record is close as I can come to a complete package. Here's a Here's a link to the MP3s. But unfortunately. I could not find a script for any of these titles with matching MP3 dialogue life of me. But maybe there's a brand new way of doing this: Create YOUR OWN responses to the dialogue. By the way, Fernando Lamas is the father of eternal chick magnet, Lorenzo Lamas.

Here are a few of the stars you'll be "acting" with.....(You'll ALWAYS sound better than that screechy drama chick in high school drama class you knew, TRUST ME.) 

 

(CLICK ON PHOTO) This is an example of the stock back cover Roulette used for these records. Only the performer and session information are changed from each album.

Oldies: They Aren't What They Used To Be

Every now and then, I would run into a someone over 60 who would grumble about why there's no oldies on the radio.

Actually, there are LOTS of oldies on the radio. But just not OLDIES. Today, the industry lingo for them is "Classic Hits". The change in term dates back to the late 1980s, when Baby Boomers of the late 1960s and early '70s felt uncomfortable with that term "Oldies" applied to their music.

They're pining for the sock-hopping tunes of the 1950s and early '60s. Elvis, Buddy Holly, The Coasters, The Robins, The Orioles, Gene Vincent, et al. And even the fans of late '60s and early '70s pop are finding fewer and fewer choices on the radio. Hardly anyone plays The Beatles or The Monkees anymore either. And they were once mega-superstars.

The sad answer is they have simply been aged out of the demographic spectrum of radio.

They're becoming a victim of what their parents went through a few decades earlier, when the Big Bands of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington began vanishing en masse from the AM radio airwaves in favour of News/Talk and Sports formats.

Your warning sign. Photo: http://www.gaasch.net

But it's not just an age shift. More importantly, it's an economic one. As you get older, your spending becomes more frugal. Fewer people receive pensions and rely on their Social Security checks. When you live on a fixed income, you don't have what is referred to as disposable income. The very words of which seem very alien these days.

You can blame President Obama as much as you want. But radio began to be deregulated and more tightly corporately controlled under Reagan and President Clinton threw gasoline on it by signing the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law, which allowed one corporation to own up to eight radio stations in one market. The bottom line is when people talk about the glories of unfettered capitalism, take it with a grain or two of salt. There are ALWAYS casualties. BAD ones.

It's pointless to complain to your local oldies station (not like they actually care about you anyway.) Most are corporately owned and they get their marching orders from wherever the corporate headquarters may be. They have to make a gross (and I do mean gross) profit to their CEOs and board of directors, as well as the shareholders in the corporation. Otherwise, they change their format completely. That's just how it is in commercial radio these days.

The oldies format began in earnest back in the early 1970s. Oldies radio tends to focus on songs that are 15-20 years old. You can map it out simply like this; in 1972, a 15 year old song was new in 1957.

As the 1980s came, the '60s became all the rage with the economically powerful Baby Boomers, in the 1990s, the '70s experienced a revival and in the 2000's, the '80s were cool again.

Remember this show?

Here we are in the 2010s and today it's the '90s. Another way of looking at it is this, "The Real World" Matchbox Twenty, "Fly" Sugar Ray and "Baby One More Time" Britney Spears are bona-fide oldies now.

Frightening, isn't it?

And it's only going to get worse, kids. One of these days (and following this formula, it's sooner than you think), Nickelback and Justin Bieber are going to get ad nauseum airplay on the local "Classic Hits" station. And you too will get old. By this time, the '90s will be the soundtrack of retirement homes.

So to all my Boomer friends, take it from someone who's been in the radio biz and has seen it all come apart. Outside of some of your VERY few locally owned, operated and programmed radio stations remaining (many of which stream online) finding those awesome '50s and '60s songs are getting harder and harder to find. But that's where good radio has gone - online.

Granted, they're not much more than MP3 jukeboxes with none of the personality and features you remember. But at least some of them have the music. And online, it's an infinite dial and you're closer to finding what you're looking for there than you ever will in most areas locally. But bear in mind most of the online operators are hobbyists who run the stations at a personal level, to offer something you can't hear at all anymore on the terrestrial dial. But it still costs them money. When you find an online-only station you like, please donate what you can to help keep them going. Your record collection is nice, but what REALLY matters is $$$. As computer servers as well as uploading 24/7 is not cheap. Not to mention royalties (they're not immune to this either.)

It's a strange new world we're in these days. But it's one we only have ourselves to blame for not paying attention to radio like we should have. It's like the old saying "Use it or lose it". We've taken radio for granted.

And this is the end result.

The History of Videodiscs

Video disc players of some kind have been around as far back as 1898.

The Spiral Motion Picture Camera (1898)

The Spirograph (1907) Similar to The Spiral (above)

The Phono-Vision (1964) used video recorded on vinyl LPs, a technology that would come into commercial use as the Selectavision CED player (below)

MCA DiscoVision - The unfortunately named, very first practical consumer video disc was invented by the Pioneer Corporation of Japan and first licensed and marketed by American record conglomerate MCA Records, the owners of Universal Studios (MCA Records is known today as Universal Music Group) beginning in 1978. It was the very first laser based consumer medium, predating the CD by four years. These discs were two sided and the video quality was not much better than the best video tapes of that time.

They were also ridiculously expensive. In spite of stereo sound (on some discs) and their cool look, there was no way it could compete with the video tape. Video tapes could be home recorded. Video discs could not.

And then there was that name.

You couldn't sell something with "disco" anything in it in America in the early '80s without creating PTSD flashbacks of mirrored balls, white three piece suits and Bee Gees music. We were a nation still in recovery then and sales began to seriously tank.

They tried renaming it the Video LP (VLP), even CD Video before MCA finally gave up on the format.

Pioneer renamed it the Laserdisc and enjoyed some modest success in the early 1990s. They were still outrageously expensive. But there were many technical improvements. But the VHS video tape still dominated. The final blow came with the introduction of the DVD in 1996. Which also successfully killed off the VHS tape format by 2004 with the introduction of the recordable DVD-R and later by, YouTube, Netflix and cloud sharing.

RCA Selectavision - Also known as the CED video disc. Introduced in 1982. what made these different was instead of a laser, they used a stylus, similar to a vinyl LP record. Which is why you inserted the CED disc into the player through it's case and it is removed with the case to play each side.


However, even with the sturdy plastic case, they were not immune to the same problems that plagued vinyl LPs. Including dust (from inside the machine) minor scratches and if you had a smart toddler, they can physically remove the disc from the case by pressing the tabs on the upper corners of the case. And out falls the actual disc. (I knew one guy who had his entire CED disc collection ruined by his girlfriend's mischievous four year old son one horrifying Saturday morning.) The stylus like any vinyl format also had to be changed. By a professional. Often. Or else, the discs would wear out and skip like any other record. And they were not pleasant to look at.



They were discontinued in 1986.

CD-ROM - Most CD's are pretty much CD-ROMs. Meaning they could only be read and not re-recorded. With the CD-RW, they could. However in the mid '90s, computer software and video games was only available on CD-ROMs including your operating system. So all computers of that time had them. And some low quality music videos began appearing on standard music CDs, meaning you could play this disc in your CD-ROM equipped home computer and watch the video on your monitor. There were also instructional videos on CD-ROM. Remember these commercials?

"Try my product?......"

DVD - The DVD format went on sale in Japan on November 1, 1996, in the United States on March 1, 1997, in Europe on October 1, 1998 and in Australia on February 1, 1999. The DVD became the dominant form of home video distribution in Japan when it first went on sale in 1996, but did not become the dominant form of home video distribution in the United States until June 15, 2003, when weekly DVD rentals began outnumbering weekly VHS cassette rentals. The very first movie ever released on DVD was Twister (1996) The DVD could store 4.7 GB of data per disc.

Blu-Ray - is a format designed to supersede the DVD format, in that it is capable of storing high-definition video resolution (1080p). The Blu-Ray disc could store 25 GB of data.

HD-DVD - HD-DVD was a format designed to compete with the Blu-Ray. But the format failed to get a foothold.

 

Epic Nu-Disks

In 1979, Epic Records introduced the Nu-Disk.

 

The Nu-Disk was a 10" inch extended play mini-album, or EP. It was made mostly as a promotional gimmick for mostly newer rock acts on the label.

However records of a 10" inch size weren't "Nu". In fact, most of the very first 33 1/3 LPs from 1948 to 1955 were 10" inches and that size was actually considered standard and many automatic record changers well into the 1970s had a 10" size selector. But the 12" LP began to overtake the 10" and with the exception of a few rare pressings, the 10" album size was largely retired until Nu-Disk.

Only a handful of titles were released in the Nu-Disk format before CBS retired the format in 1981 due to public indifference. All further EPs were 7" or 12".

 

 

If I Were A Woman - Ira North (Eden Records, circa late 1950s, early 1960s)

You've probably been seeing this record cover circulating around the interwebs lately amongst the world's worst album covers listings. But rarely do we get the chance to hear what one sounds like.

Well, thanks to our friends at Kill Ugly Radio, you can now hear this one.

And it's not really what you might be thinking (female viewers of this blog will be REALLY offended listening to this.) It's one big clueless (and hopelessly dated) misogynistic rant in the guise of a folksy sermon (like on just about every Southern religious sermon record, where if it wasn't white, Protestant, straight and male, it was to be subjugated.)

Ira North sure thinks he's a sweet funny preacher. And perhaps he was considered that in the Deep South of the late 1950s and early '60s before the Civil Rights Act, Women's Liberation and Stonewall. But his screed back then sounds vomit-inducing amongst the more evolved amongst us today.