The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

Steve E.

Len Horowitz of History of Recorded Sound has just given me the scoop that Sunday Oct 14's episode of "Cold Case" has a plot aimed squarely at the hypothalamus of us lathe trolls: A murder mystery where the clues are contained in the grooves of a record.

I don't know the details, but Len and/or Apollo were somehow involved in the production of the episode, and it depicts records being made. Sounds fun! someone tape it, please. Smile

Sunday, October 14, 9pm et/pt

Devil Music

The team re-opens a 1953 murder case of a 19-year-old aspiring rock 'n roll star when new evidence comes to light. TVPG-DLV

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/cold_case/

http://www.hrsrecords.com/

JayDC · Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 5:04 am Post subject:

I'll get it..

cuttercollector · Joined: 11 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: San Jose, CA

Oh well...

See, this is why I don't bother much with network TV
any more...

They apparently borrowed one of Len's portable Presto
cutters and told him that it, records and record
making would be prominently featured in the episode.
They said it would be something about the clues to the
murder being hidden in the grooves of an old record.
NOT!
The show's description in the TV listings is
"Devil Music"
Episode Description -
"The team re-opens the 1953 murder case of a
19-year-old aspiring rock 'n roll star when new
evidence suggests that he was killed in his uncle's
five & dime shop and not behind the blues club where
his body was found."

The plot was full of holes and they managed to show
exactly NO records in the show, let alone one being
recorded or played back in any detail. There was a
pretty fake mock-up of a record recording booth in the
5&10 cent store and we eventually find out (I don't
care if I give it away, it was so bad) that the
aspiring rock n roll star was shot there while making
a clandestine demo disc in the middle of the night.
You can see something that looks like a fake mock-up
of some sort of turntable with an overhead - something
behind the kid. I might add that I remember pretty
well what those booths were like, having made 5 or so
records (which I still have) at the Santa Cruz
boardwalk between the age of 5 and 10 and this looked
NOTHING like that. In the real ones you could see
about as much of the actual mechanism as you could the
camera in those photo booths, which is to say, none.
This resembled a cross between one of those record
listening booths they did have in some record stores
and a very small "studio". Yeah, there was one of
those in every corner drug store (I wish).
So all though they have THE EVIDENCE of THE CRIME
being recorded ON A RECORD as it is happening, they do
NOTHING with that plot wise. The only record-related
"breakthrough" in the plot is that they find the
victim had nitro-cellulose on his shirt, which
mistakenly leads them to an employee who worked at the
5 & dime as well as an auto body shop, but then they
"discover" it was also used in making records, find
the bullet buried 2 layers deep in the wall of the
building and get a confession on the 2nd interview of
the jealous cousin.
I stayed up till 1 AM after church last night to watch
this turkey.

JayDC · Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2007 11:45 am Post subject:

umm...

well at any rate, I have this episode in DIVX format, so if anyone wants it, and I can try to send it. This is sort of a gray area, since it is free TV, but I'm sure my DIVX copy could be construed as piracy.

cuttercollector · Joined: 11 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: San Jose, CA

So, did anybody else watch it?
What did you think of it?
I have not been able to talk with Len yet to see what he thinks.
After watching it over again off DVD (I used a stand alone DVD recorder and a VCR on timer record off of my average to poor cable) and skipping through the commercial breaks, and pausing the DVD, there is probably a real disc lathe or a fair mock up of one behind the kid in the "recording booth". Perhaps an RCA piece. I'm pretty sure the vintage mic hanging in there was an RCA.
As I said previously, the real automated record booths were nothing like this. Smaller than a photo booth (which they also showed one of in the episode), more like an oversized telephone booth. They had a door. When you went in there was a wall just in front of you with a microphone mounted in it, some sort of mechanical display of recording time, a coin slot (50 cent pieces as I recall) and it was probably a dollar in the early 60s, a slot where it dispensed the finished record and another coin slot where you could pay another quarter or so for a mailing envelope that dispensed from it's own slot.
You put in the coins, pushed the coin thing in and you could hear a vacuum start (for chip suction presumably) , the record light came on and the counter hand started moving down. You had perhaps a minute to a minute and a half of recording time (at 78 RPM). When it got to the end, the record light went off, and after a couple of seconds it played back the record through a speaker mounted in the wall, then there was a mechanical noise, the little 5" or 6" record fell out the slot and the machine turned off.
Nobody could have operated the kind of thing they portrayed on the show.
I only wish that there was something like that available.
I can barely remember listening booths somewhat the size of the show's mock-up with playback turntables for listening to records, but never recording them. I think there were places where you could walk into an actual small studio and make a record for a few bucks ( still a lot back then) but it was someone actually operating the lathe, not an automated vending machine in a store.
Two more pieces of "dramatic license" from the episode. First scene, the quartet is shown in the booth singing. One of them tells his father, the store owner, they have just made their own record. He replies something like - "Fine son, you can pop it in the juke box whenever it's ready" - implying it took some time like the photo processing in the photo booth. It would have been ready instantly but if like the ones I have seen or made, not a 10" one compatable with even 78 juke boxes, and not of very good quality. Second, although there were so called "five and dime" or 5 and ten cent stores in the 50s, they were more like the dollar stores of today. This store had a soda fountain and a women's makeup counter according to the story, so it would have been much more like a corner drug store. Not the same as a five and dime and not likely to have it's own photo booth or record recording booth. A jukebox perhaps but that would have more likely been in a malt shop or hamburger stand than a drugstore.
BTW, I was born in '54, the year after this episode was supposed to have happened., so I am almost old enough to remember these things.

cuttercollector · Joined: 11 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: San Jose, CA

Here is a link to the real thing, much as I remembered it.
The name was Voice-O-Graph from the International Mutascope Co.

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/voice.htm

JayDC · Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:57 pm Post subject:

thats neeto.. not sure why no one did that with CD's.. Wish I would have thought of that 10 years ago.. Razz

cuttercollector · Joined: 11 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: San Jose, CA

I think someone did do that with cds - sort of. Again, not vending machines, but a place where you could go make a recording. I think it was sort of like karaoke. You could go in and pick a track to sing with, record it, and get it on a cd. Don't know if you could just make a talking letter home to mom or not.
It is interesting to watch the ups and downs of amature or home recording. There were not many places to make a recording to send in the days before tape. Few people could afford a home disc cutter like we play with on this forum. They were somewhat for the wealthy or at least upper middle class.
For a while, in the days before WWII but after the mid 20s radio was a lot more popular than records so not everybody had something to play recorded media on. Shortly after the war home tape started to come down in price. By the late 50s or early 60s most people had a tape recorder of some sort. Those little 3" reels became a popular way to send voice letters. Later cassettes became far more popular than reel to reel ever was. Of course, all voice recordings were sent via snail mail and in competition with written letters and the telephone. Now we can email, voip, web-cam etc. But sadly, fewer people today have some sort of stand alone media based audio recording device. You have to be a bit of a geek to do it with your computer, especialy to hook up a mic and make voice recordings. They are trying to make it easier with software and USB microphones etc. The cost of the hand held card memory recorder is still a little high so they are not as popular as cassette recorders once were. Perhaps the most common thing at this point is the camcorder. That was science fiction even as late as the mid 60s!