PIECES: WHY LPs?

They take up a huge amount of space, and it has cost me many dollars to house them – shelves specially built both at Durham Road and at Chinkapook.  There will be those, including family members, who seriously wonder why I bother to keep long-playing records (a.k.a. vinyl), indeed continue to add to their number.  Fortunately for me, Annie (as I have said elsewhere) is prepared to “cut me the slack”; and, indeed, she encourages me to prowl the opp shops in search of new treasures.  In a sense I’m a “collector”, looking out for some particular disc to complete a set or a series, but my typical inclination these days is just to look for things that are “different”, or simply discs that are “old” – more than 50 years old.  No doubt I’m a “completist”, and I can, and have, achieved complete works of some composers or performers through CDs, but I recognise that it’s too late to achieve complete LP sets. 

I recently bought three albums of LPs that were certainly different  They were pressed somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and had no word of text that I could understand - or could ever have understood - because of the Cyrillic writing.  They were not only “different” but also “old”, pre-stereo.  It turned out that two of them were Soviet compilations of opera arias, and not just by Russian singers, but by world-famous singers of the 1930s and earlier.  I recognised the voices of some singers, but couldn’t confirm their names from the sleeve notes.  The other album – I subsequently figured – was a Latvian stage play.  Not enthralling, but certainly unique.  One thing that really attracted me to these three albums is that they are 10 inch LPs, not the 12 inch diameter typically used for albums in Australia.

Wearing my “collector” hat, I do have an eye for Decca recordings of the 1950s, not only for the music but for their stylish covers.  The first Decca LPs were plain, one background colour, simple geometric designs.  The full-coloured covers that next appeared had emotive painted illustrations and subtle tonings.  And since Decca was positioned at the quality end of the market, and had a contracted stable of major orchestras and other artists, the performances aren’t bad either!

My principal obsession, though, is to acquire every record released by the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra.  These were cut from around the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s by Capitol Records (and later reissued by World Record Club).  Capitol Records was founded in 1942 by the songwriters Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva, and I get the sense that a dozen years on they wanted a light classical catalogue to complement their rapidly burgeoning popular artist line-up.

The music bowl in Hollywood dates from 1922.  First it was merely a natural amphitheatre, then from 1929 to 2003 there was the sound shell that illustrates the cover of so many of the HBSO recordings - still open-air for the audience (more than 17000 seats!), but cover for the artists.  A replacement sound shell was constructed in 2003.

In the mid-1940s there was indeed an orchestra  named after the Hollywood Bowl, but from 1947 to 1990 the summer symphonic concerts at the Hollywood Bowl were performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.  On the Capitol label, the HBSO is really the Los Angeles Philharmonic in disguise.  It’s the Capitol discs, dating from 1954,  that I collect……..and also those of the Roger Wagner Chorale, many of which have accompaniment by the HBSO, and those of the Capitol Symphony Orchestra – another ensemble invented for the record trade, and doubtless the same players as the HBSO.  I have more than 70 of these discs, but since I’ve never been able to find a definitive listing, I don’t know how incomplete my collection is.  Amazon.com lists a number of HBSO CDs that are unknown to me, but some are clearly compilations.  Note: I have not transformed my hunt for the missing LPs into a desire to acquire a duplicate set on CDs.

My interest in the HBSO dates from 1955, and from the fact that the HBSO’s Echoes of Spain album was the first recording I ever bought……although it wasn’t the first recording I ever owned. Read on.

The premises at 294/296 Bridge Road, Richmond were huge. At ground level there were the two shops – 294 was a delicatessen and 296 was a cake shop.  The delicatessen was run by my aunt, Kath Napier (nee Andrews, subsequently Warren), and the cake shop had my mum and dad - Gloria behind the counter, and Gordon in the bakehouse out back.  There were half-a-dozen other staff, plus family helpers. The two shops were large, and the wall between them had been pierced by two archways, hence two separate types of shop in one.  An inventive marketing idea for 1946, although invented before we took over the lease.  Running across the whole premises, directly behind the two shops, was a substantial work space.  On the delicatessen side there was the cool-room, and sink and washing facilities, plus a long workbench where food was prepared for the shop.  For instance, sides of bacon were de-boned prior to being placed on the industrial-sized bacon-slicing machine (which was in the shop for all to see).  The equivalent work space behind the cake shop was a bakehouse, with two work benches (one marble-topped) and the main cake oven.  Moving further to the rear, next were the two sets of stairs to the upstairs living quarters.  The stairs behind the delicatessen were the ones we habitually used.  The two upstairs premises, like the shops, had been opened into one, with a single connecting doorway.  An idea of the generous proportions of the building can be had by imagining the staircases – they had three rises and two landings.  A lightweight door had been installed at the bottom of the number 296 stairs, to keep the bakehouse flour from drifting up; and this was the main reason why these stairs were virtually unused…….but they were a great place to take school-friends, especially from the bottom through the mysterious door.  There were also unlit and strange cupboards under the bottom landing of each staircase, so there was plenty of opportunity to play tricks on the unwary.

And quite apart from the eight spacious rooms of residential quarters upstairs, downstairs there were four further rooms behind each shop.  On the cake shop side the next room was a second bakehouse with a second oven; then a room that when the premises were built (in the 1880s I think) was a kitchen but was now a storeroom for flour and other bakehouse supplies; then a scullery; and then the family laundry.  On the delicatessen side the next room beyond the staircase area was used as an office; then the former kitchen (which still had its wood stove) had been turned into a storeroom; and then there was a two-roomed kitchen and scullery.  In this space there was an industrial-sized gas oven whose main function was to cook large deep trays of rabbits. 

Baked rabbits were something of a house specialty, and this was the particular way in which Pa Andrews was useful.  The rabbits were delivered skinned beheaded and gutted, but there was often a bit of further cleaning to be done – bits of guts still adhering, feet to be cut off, necks to be trimmed.  Pa then filled the body cavities with bread stuffing, sewed the carcasses into a circular shape, and placed bacon rashers on top.  Although the mixture of water and dripping in which the rabbits were partially immersed for baking was not always pristine, and cholesterol-watching hadn’t yet been invented, and Pa Andrews always had a pipe in his mouth, let me tell you that the rabbits were delicious. 

This rear kitchen area was also the home of the dreadnought.  According to the dictionaries a dreadnought is a heavily-armed battleship, or a person who fears nothing, or an outer garment of heavy woollen cloth – none of these meanings coming close to our dreadnought.  How we came to call it the dreadnought I don’t know: it was a huge vat in which we boiled hams and corned beef.  At some stage during our fifteen years at Bridge Road the original dreadnought burned out, and was replaced by an even larger version – an insulated structure on legs, about a meter and a half across, with a heavy-gauge metal insert like a household copper but with a capacity of 20 gallons or more.  It was fired by a gas ring about half a metre in diameter.  Into the vat of water were loaded about a dozen legs of ham plus two or three hunks of corned beef.  They were boiled for about 20 minutes only, then the wooden lid was put in place, and the whole apparatus was covered with empty flour bags to keep in the heat overnight, with the removal of the fully-cooked meat next morning.

Gordon cooked the hams himself.  Undercooking was impossible to redress; and overcooking was a disaster.  (It happened once – resulting in a vat full of shredded meat!)  So not a task to be entrusted to Pa Andrews.  Pa was, shall we say, unreliable.  One time we were off to the Royal Show - Aunt Kath with cousin Graeme, Gloria with me and sister Margaret, and Pa.  Margaret was young enough to be in her pusher.  We took the tram along Bridge Road to Flinders Street in the city (thence by train to the Showgrounds), and all of us except Pa went into the closed compartment of the tram.  Pa stayed in the open-aired smokers’ compartment.  As we were alighting at Swanston Street Gloria noticed with alarm that the pusher was missing.  Where is Margaret’s pusher?  It had fallen out the open doorway several stops back, and Pa hadn’t thought to raise the alarm.  As I say, he wasn’t reliable.  In truth, the city was not his preferred environment, and when he returned with Kath and Bill Warren to his old farm in 1951 he was happily back in familiar territory.

Pa used to play cribbage several afternoons a week with a group of old people at a pavilion at the nearby Richmond Oval; and he went a lot to the Victoria Market.  He got some cheap bananas one day, I recall.  They were a bit brown and spotted, but quite sound inside, at least for a couple more days. But he arrived home with a full crate.  Even though we were many, there was no way we could eat such a supply in the days remaining.

Another day – and this is where I’ve been heading since I mentioned that the Echoes of Spain LP wasn't  the first record I possessed – Pa arrived home with a present for me, an HMV table-top wind-up gramophone, plus a pile of 78 r.p.m. records.  (There were furniture auction rooms down the road from our shop, and Pa was a dedicated onlooker at each week’s sale.)  We’re talking late 1940s, and the discs were already old by then, shellac and breakable.  Example:  Home in Pasadena, a Harry Warren song recorded by Al Jolson in 1923.  I guess that these discs were my first exposure to popular music of a generation or two prior to my own, an interest that has never left me.

I played that gramophone and those records literally to death.  Eventually I vandalised the gramophone, breaking it up, discarding the wood and the turntable and the pickup arm, but keeping the motor and handle…..for what reason I can’t imagine.  Years later I threw them away too.  And I remember throwing what remained of the records into the incinerator in the back yard – lovely black smoke before we had a consciousness of pollution.  On reflection, being a self-confessed hoarder, I cannot conceive of how I disposed of such a significant part of my childhood with such brutality and finality.

For years thereafter my experience of music was solely via the radio.  There was the weekly hit parade, Sunday evenings at 6.00 p.m., or was it 6.30?  – the top eight pop records, the list presumably compiled from the sales statistics of one of the major music shops; or maybe, given that there were relatively few labels at the time, “the industry” was trusted to compile the list.  The hit parade was essential listening; and there was hardly a hit song of the late ‘40s/early ‘50s that I didn’t know. 

And there were programmes of  classical music on most non-Government radio stations, but usually presenting "popular" classics only.  A half hour of “world famous tenors” was typical of what the commercial radio stations would stretch to; and the broadcasting of serious music was in effect left to the ABC (then named the Australian Broadcasting Commission). 

In those days there was no FM radio, only AM, and there were only the two ABC stations servicing Melbourne.  3LO (now 774, Local Radio) - named, in 1924, after 2LO in LO-ndon, although I prefer “hello”, get it? - was the generalist broadcaster while 3AR (now 621, Radio National) was the serious music station.  One function of 3AR was to broadcast symphony concerts, which it readily did, given that all the capital-city-based symphony orchestras were owned and run by the ABC (and still are – thank you ABC).  I absorbed all the classical music I could hear.  Ironically, I took piano lessons, but was not inspired, and did not practise; and I was somewhat relieved when Kath and Bill moved to the Mallee and took the piano with them.  That was the end of my career in music, something about which (once I came to my senses) I have had a lifetime of regret.

While through the hit parade programme I knew all the popular tunes of the day, I knew just as much of the ‘30s and the early ’40s too.  This was because Bill Warren had entered my life, and when he became part of the Bridge Road family he brought with him his radiogram (radio and record player combined) and hundreds of 78s.  Before he was called up for war service Bill had been an avid fan of 1930s popular music, jazz in particular, and had built up quite a collection of 78s – Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and all the leading swing bands of the day.  These he played incessantly at Bridge Road, and I sat at the feet of the master and his musical heroes.  (Years later, Bill gave his 78 r.p.m. records to me, and I have them still.)

Then came the quantum leap in 1955.  Although the first 33 1/3^rd r.p.m. records (vinyl LPs) were released in the USA as early as 1949, they didn’t really “arrive” in Australia for some years after.  I have a 120 page publication - 1952-3 Recorded Music – of all the records available in Australia under the EMI labels, and there is no mention at all of long-playing records at that time. But the flood of long-playing records, once uncorked, was relentless; and when in August 1955 I returned from the Sun Youth Travel tour of the UK I was amazed and delighted to find that the family now had an HMV radiogram, and a bunch of LPs.  The proprietor of the radio shop was a friend of a friend, and Gordon had been persuaded to buy the top of the range model.  It was a fine instrument.  The LPs, however, were a motley lot, and I never figured whether Gordon had been conned into buying discs that weren’t selling well, or whether they were thrown in to sweeten the deal.  Nevertheless, those records took a substantial pounding over the years.  They were nearly all 10 inch, by the way.  In the early 1950s the record companies had determined that the 10 inch format was “standard”, and that the 12 inch format would be reserved for classical music and for cast recordings of musical comedies.

There had been no record player at Bridge Road since Bill took his radiogram to the Mallee in 1951, so the new radiogram meant that not only was there a collection of new LPs, but that I was able to borrow and play classical records from the Melbourne High School music department. 

It also meant that I could buy records of my own, although it didn’t quite work out that way.  Sure I bought Echoes of Spain, but Gordon reprimanded me for wasting my pocket money, and the next disc I bought I kept hidden in my bedroom and played it only when the rest of the family was out for the day.  Even a couple of years later, when I was at university, I was still reluctant to buy records. 

As I said, although slow to kick-off, the rise of the LP in Australia had been rapid and comprehensive.  At first the classical LPs were simply re-releases of performances already in the 78 r.p.m. catalogues.  Then pre-existing performances were re-recorded; and then came new versions by different performers.  Competition was fierce, and soon there were tens of versions of the more popular classics, and the older versions were being deleted.  But while there was obvious product competition the industry remained a very effective cartel, and there was no price competition – for years 12” discs were 52/6 ($5.25) and 10” LPs were 31/6 ($3.15), regardless of the label.  But by 1957, my first year at Melbourne University, there was already a remaindering system in Melbourne.  The slow-moving and discontinued classical records were not discounted in record stores, but were available from one outlet, John Clements, through his premises upstairs in Collins Street. Clements had literally been allowed to corner the market, and his shop had bin after bin of less-than-full-price classical LPs.  I frequently dropped in on my way home from lectures.  I thumbed through the racks, lusting after juicy works and performances, always looking, never buying.  I remembered many of the record covers for decades, and then managed to buy them from opp shops.

There was a great time for me, late in the 1950s, when the ABC mounted a series of stereo broadcasts.  Stereo LPs, and stereo playing equipment, had hit the market; but the radio stations could broadcast in mono only.  So, as an experiment, the ABC commenced “stereo broadcasting”, by transmitting one channel over 3AR and the other channel over 3LO.  In order to achieve stereo listening it was necessary to have two radios, one tuned to each station.  The stereo programme was for half an hour a week, at 10.30 on Monday nights.  A big slice of the programming was of stereo demonstration discs – steam trains, jet planes, ping-pong and the like; but there was enough music to convince any listener that stereo was a remarkable advance in technology.  We had the big console radio (sister Kate has it now), and I “matched” it with our little kitchen (“mantle”) radio – quite unmatched, in fact, but we got the idea.  I was totally overwhelmed by stereo, but Gloria and Gordon, despite being forced to listen each week, really couldn’t have cared less.  Doubtless I was hoping that the new medium might find its way into our household, but to no avail.  The radiogram was too recent an acquisition, and the folks had no interest in upgrading.  The ABC's experimental stereo broadcasting went on for a few months only, and we didn’t have true stereo radio until the frequency modulation band was licensed by the Government nearly 20 years later, and ABCFM commenced in 1976.

Marriage in 1969 transformed my relationship with LPs and with listening to music, because not only did Annie have a modest collection of records, but she had a portable record player, and it was equipped to play stereo recordings.  Moreover, when we settled into our first home in Bonnyview Street, Burwood, we were close to the then headquarters – and shop – of the World Record Club.  Remember that I was 30 years old, had had a passion for classical music for damned near 20 years, and possessed a mere handful of recordings.  I remember attending my cousin Howard Carter’s 21^st birthday, and being envious of all the LPs he received as gifts; at my party a few months earlier I had received not one.  So the early years at Bonnyview Street were special listening years, with their steady flow of World Record Club pressings of performances that a few years earlier had been in the mainstream HMV, Columbia, etc. catalogues.

Having the stereo player broadened the options, no doubt, but just because the recordings I was buying were stereo and hi-fi it didn’t mean that I was listening to high fidelity reproduction.  And earlier, although I said that the HMV radiogram was a fine instrument, and it was, it couldn’t compete in fidelity with a system made up of individually-selected high-quality component units.  Since my late teens I had been carrying in my head the extraordinary sound of music being reproduced in high fidelity. 

After they returned from the Mallee in 1954, Kath and Bill Warren bought a Victorian-era mansion on the corner of Hanby and Dendy Streets, Brighton.  The building had, some years before, been converted into five separate living areas, so Kath and Bill became “godparents” to a procession of tenants.  Well, not really a procession, I suppose, because it was a lovely place – almost a community – and people tended to stay for years.  (One such was Judy Wines.)  One of the apartments was rented by CRA, the mining company; and four or five of the staff geologists made the upstairs front their home.  They were all in their late 20s or early 30s, I guess, and continually coming and going as assignments took them away from company headquarters in Melbourne for exploratory stints in remote parts.  One of their number was a hi-fi enthusiast, with state-of-the-art equipment.  I shall never forget the (mono) sound filling the large living room - in particular the Procession of the Sardar from Ippolitoff-Ivanoff’s Caucasian Sketches…….this great sound emanating from the Collaro turntable, the Quad amplifier, and the Leak speaker - not set in a speaker column but mounted in a five-feet square slab of wood, standing in the corner.  I determined that one day I would possess equipment of equivalent brilliance, and reasoned that it would be pointless ever to buy inferior stuff that would just disappoint me.

That moment took more than 15 years to arrive.  The final step in the consummation of my listening pleasure came at Christmas 1974 when I received a $750 bonus from my employers………and on 16^th January 1975 (with Annie’s blessing and encouragement) I bought a Thorens TD160 turntable with Ortofon stylus, and a Marantz 2015 receiver/amplifier.  That just about took all the $750, so I completed the set with a pair of second-hand Wharfedale speakers for $95.  I have them still – well, sort of.  The Ortofon stylus was misplaced at a shop where I was having it seen to, and there have been a couple of upgrades since then culminating in the Garrot K1 in 2003; and the Wharfedales died a little, and I was never able to get the spare parts necessary to repair them.  Sadly, the Thorens runs backwards and cannot be fixed – but it does it only sometimes.  I am prepared to put up with the foibles of an old friend.

As I write I am home alone, and I have succumbed to nostalgia and played the HBSO version of the Procession of the Sardar, in mono, and at considerable volume.  The performance was recorded in 1957, so it’s more or less the vintage of the recording I heard all those years ago at Brighton, when the Leak speaker and its baffle board seemed to lift off the floor in time with the music.  Nostalgia has won – the music today doesn't sound as exciting as the music in my memory.

So I think we can say that part of the reason for the vastness of my LP collection is a reaction to the early frustrations I suffered and the postponements I endured; and if the psychologists say that I have spent a lifetime in compensating and in catching up, they would also have to say that, with more than 5000 LPs, I’ve been quite successful at it.

Gary Andrews

2 June, 2011