Many parallels there, Dan, at least as far as the early recording equipment stuff. I was fortunate as to the music teaching and learning experience, my Dad was a Dental Surgeon who put aside a possible career as a Classical Pianist or Trumpet Player, to go to Dental School, he started me on Piano at somewhere around the age of three, moved to Trumpet at age 8 after the permanent teeth started coming in.

I was born in 1951, in the US there was the race situation in full bloom, when along came Nat King Cole on NBC with his own television show, the first and only person of my race to appear weekly on nationwide TV, though not one business was willing to actually become a sponsor of a show with a black man on it. That show ran from around 5 November 1956 and the last December 17, 1957. Cole had survived for over a year, and it was he, not NBC, who ultimately decided to pull the plug on the show. NBC and Nat had been operating at an extreme financial loss due to the lack of sponsorship his show received.
Cole said shortly after its demise, "Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark."

I was a child, sure, but my family, including Gramma, NEVER missed a show, it was a big thing to many African Americans, I'm sure.

And, at about the age of five or so, we watched a show in which Nat used a sound-on-sound reel-to-reel recorder to sing along with himself.



Somehow, the magic of that tape recorder stuck in my head.

My first tape recorder was a small Silvertone reel-to-reel, longed for as a Christmas present, at around the age of 8 or so. (Actually, I had asked and begged earlier than that, but I think they thought I was too young...) It might have taken a couple of years, but I was persistent and one Christmas morning, there it was! That one was mono, but could run at 7-1/2 ips as well as the slower less fidelity 3-3/4, all tube driven, simple, and actually had fairly good fidelity. But no sound-on-sound or sound-with-sound capability.

One of the other kids in the elementary school orchestra also had a mono reel to reel, it really belonged to his father, but the two of us would do anything we could to get those two decks together in the same room on a Saturday and would proceed to do the old Les Paul thing, dubbing from one recorder to the other while attempting to play a new part in along with the recorder playback. Generational loss be hanged, we tried all sorts of things. Those creations became rather a thing with family and friends, mostly due to our young ages more than our musical skills, I think.

Around the age of 12, a nice gentleman who was a Physics prof at the same university where my dad taught dentistry just handed me a Wollensak stereo reel-to-reel that featured the Sound on Sound thing. Wow. First thing I tried with it was playing both of the two Trumpet parts to the Vivaldi Concerto for two trumpets myself, adding my Dad's piano accompaniment, all on that Wollensak. That tape, unfortunately, is long lost, but it lit the fire, so to speak. Then came an attempt to cover Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass tune that was a big hit at the time, "The Lonely Bull". (and BULL it was, heh!)

The other Big Thing back then, at least to me, was the tape manipulations that could be done by bumping the two speeds such that you could make your voice one octave higher and "spaceman" or "alien" like, or, as became famous in and of itself around the same time, "The Chipmunks". Me and that same friend, now a bit older, did a Chipmunks cover of that famous Christmas tune, our twist was that Alvin was a distinct potty-mouthed and slightly racist little punk chipmunk. My mom never liked that one, but I gotta say that dad seemed to get a kick out of it until he caught mom's frown.

Two rather creative kids, rainy Saturday afternoon, a tape recorder or two, the soldering gun with bits from electronic surplus houses like 1/4" war surplus plugs that were selling 3 for a dollar back then, a Danelectro twinhorn bass and a Sears Silvertone Danelectro guitar with the amp in the case, the parent's Grand Piano, the little "schpinette" home organ, the Trumpets, big sister's nylon string classical geetar, the medieval recorders (the flutes, you see...), kazoos, -- even shaking little packets of sugar from the diner at the mic for percussion.

Man, those were good times.

There was once a time when a kid who knew how to set the drawbars on the Hammond Schpinette Organ, and knew what two notes to play, could bring up the Central Office at Bell Telephone. But that's a different story.


--Mac

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