Confusing Grace With Outer Space

It goes without saying that certain rock stars have the same mysterious allure as movie stars. One lesson these rock stars learned from movie stars is to seldom grant interviews, that is, they learned early on that the secret to success is to make it impossible to determine the fictive from the real. In the same way that "star power" often overcomes the dullness of a bad movie, there's more to great rock 'n' roll than actual music. The allure of The Residents, it seems to me, has always been in the way they went about establishing themselves as different. Like all those who have gone about forming counter-discourses, they exaggerated the power of their antagonist. Taking a cue from The Mothers of Invention's We're Only In It For the Money (1968), they challenged the legitimacy of rock 'n' roll by casting themselves as the dark double of the Beatles, as the anti-Beatles, as the cover of their first album reveals. At the beginning of their career, economics dictated they commit themselves to the medium of music (the manufacture and distribution of records), but as their later career has demonstrated, they were really interested in pursuing the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art," an assemblage of music, painting, theater, poetry, and primitive architecture (Vileness Fats). In fact, "primitive" is the sound they sought: they went about making music that rendered the idea of influence extremely difficult to determine. They made records as if in a cultural vacuum and in total isolation, which is why their records sounded like nothing else. The very few live shows they did in the 1970s (they didn't begin to tour until the early 80s after the introduction of the Emulator) were short, cacophonous, and outrageous bursts of Guerilla Theatre, evoking nothing so much as Babel.

I'd never heard of The Residents until the fall of 1979, in October or November of that year when Eskimo (1979) was getting a good deal of play on the stereo system at the record store I often visited. (Gone are the days spent in record stores listening to new music, at least for me.) An employee there who bought and and sold used records highly recommended the album to me. Not having a whole lot of money in my pocket at the time, I begged off, so he sold me instead a used copy of Not Available (released the previous year) for, if I remember correctly, the bargain price of $2.50. Although narratives of personal experience have become commonplace in cultural studies, I'm not convinced they are a particularly good idea, as they have always seemed to me to be too confessional, sounding too much like a religious conversion. So I'll stop there except to say that I began to listen, and to collect, The Residents, and have done so for over three decades now. I cannot speak for others, but for me it seems that the record that first prompted my interest in a band is the record I shall always hold in the highest regard. So it is with Not Available. Had The Residents, say, stopped recording after The Commercial Album (1980), the lukewarm critical response to which, as legend has it anyway, disappointed the band, Not Available would have assured their lasting fame, for in the history of popular music nothing like it has been recorded before or since. It is, as we once used to say, totally off the wall. Personally, I think Not Available and "Walter Westinghouse" are among their very finest moments.

Hence I was very keen to put on the headphones and give a close listen to the latest re-issue of Not Available, released earlier this week on CD through MVDaudio, a version of the album which promised the restoration of 7 minutes edited out of the original (1978) version. In order to find out whether this claim were true, I selected at random three previous releases of the album on CD (those CD issues without any bonus tracks, of course) in order to assemble a representative sample from which to determine the album's running time. The results are as follows:

	Label	Cat. No.	Year	No. Tracks	Time
	East Side Digital	ESD 81232	1997	5	35:35
	Bomba	BOM 22011	1997	5	35:35
	Euro Ralph	CD O34	2005	5	35:27
	MVDaudio	MVD5122A	2011	5	42:28

The MVDaudio CD reissue is indeed 7m longer, give or take a few seconds. Conveniently, each of the various CD releases has five tracks corresponding to the five parts or movements on the album, which makes it rather easy to determine in which parts material has been restored. The differences in track length are as follows, taken from the iTunes player on my MacBook Pro:

	Track	ESD 81232	MVD5122A
	1	9:34	10:56
	2	10:02	10:04
	3	6:36	10:11
	4	7:01	8:54
	5	2:22	2:22

The restored version indicates that in its original form, Not Available was composed of four parts all of roughly equally length, between ten and eleven minutes long, with the fourth part eventually cut down with the additional fifth part forming the Epilogue. As can be seen, for the original LP release--reiterated on all CD reissues up to this time--most of the material was cut from tracks 3 ("Ship's A'Going Down") and 4 ("Never Known Questions"). The bulk of the material edited out is at the ending of Part Three and the beginning of Part Four, lyrical instrumental passages performed on a synthesizer (is that a Moog or Buchla synth?). Having listened to the MVDaudio release several times now, I think I prefer the longer version to the original (edited) release. After all, it's hard to listen to the previous versions knowing that material has been edited out, and I like the additional music.

Happily, the Residents' website promises an April re-release by MVDaudio of the digitally enhanced stereo mix (43:44) of Meet the Residents from about twenty years ago. If time permits (things for me are pretty busy at that time) I'll post a blog on that reissue, but in the meantime I will continue to enjoy the gloriously restored version of Not Available.

The Ring Modulator

For well over a century, music composers have allied themselves with engineers. For an example, consider German engineer Harald Bode, whose groundbreaking work in electronic sound modification was inspired, in whole or part, by the innovations of songwriter and guitarist Les Paul. Bode observed:

Les Paul . . . stimulated many innovators, and due to his success encouraged them to work in the field of new sound effects. His influence in many areas is felt to this day. The author [Bode himself] was so impressed by his work that he later developed a sound modification system consisting of a number of electronic modules, assigned to two separate outputs through a multiple-head tape loop device. These modules also included a ring modulator.

Note that Bode indicates he was interested in the development of sound modification by means of a device with several modules, research which would later influence both Robert Moog and Don Buchla in their development of the modular synthesizer. Bode did not invent the ring modulator, however, which was a device developed for applications in single-sideband (SSB) modulation. (SSB modulation was used early on with long distance telephone lines as part of a technique known as “frequency-division multiplexing” which allowed several voice channels to be sent along a single circuit.) Back then, though, in the early 1930s when long distance telephone service was being developed, it wasn't known as a ring modulator:

The ring modulator was at the time [ca. 1959-60] relatively little known sound modification device, mainly used in single-sideband communication systems. The main reason was that up to the mid- or late 1950s it was known as a switching circuit, which would have sounded too harsh to be usable for sound modification. It was only after ring modulators were built with diodes, which operate in the square law region of their transfer function (as was the case with certain germanium diodes), that they started to perform as four-quadrant multipliers and became musically interesting.

In technical terms, a ring modulator (named as such because the electronic circuit is shaped like a ring) is an analog sound modification system that takes two inputs, one a signal and the other a carrier frequency, and produces a single output. The signal is normally a wave form produced by the output from a microphone (e.g., a voice), while the carrier signal is normally a sine wave. The function of the ring modulator is to produce the sum and difference frequencies of the signal and carrier. In layman's terms, a ring modulator produces a spectrum of noise, or what Karlheinz Stockhausen, here, refers to as “colored noise.”

It was probably electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s use of the ring modulator that inspired an entire generation of rock musicians. Stockhausen’s Mixture (1964), for example, was written for a ring modulated symphony orchestra. In this electronic composition, the orchestra is divided into five groups (wind, brass, two groups of strings, percussion) and individually mic’ed, each group fed to a separate ring modulator. Stockhausen’s next work using the ring modulator was Mikrophonie II (1965; 14:52), composed “for choir, Hammond organ and ring modulators.” In the liner notes to the Columbia Masterworks LP containing Mikrophonie I and Mikrophonie II (MS7355), the composer wrote:

Mikrophonie II offered the possibilities, as does purely electronic music, to compose with a scale of sounds ranging from natural to synthetic, from familiar (nameable) to unfamiliar (unnamable) ones. The ‘what’ (the material) is not separable from the ‘how’ (the forming). I would never have composed as I did, had the ‘what’ of this process not had very specific characteristics which lead to a specific ‘how.’ For example, when one uses ring modulation, one must compose particular kinds of structures - simple superimpositions, many tones of long duration, not-too-rapidly moving layers - since ring modulators create dense symmetrical spectra from simple material, and this can easily lead to an overweight of noise or a stereotyped coloring of the sounds. . . . the transformation of the choral sound in Mikrophonie II has many gradations, that often untransformed layers are found mixed with more or less transformed layer, and that there is a transition from natural to synthetic sound, and vice versa.

Hence, for Stockhausen, live performance was a form of engineering, a process by which sounds were made, not “captured.” Although the ring modulator is often associated with the synthetic voice of the Daleks in the long-running Dr. Who television series (in which the ring modulator, in other words, is used to simulate the synthesized voice of the robot, the simulation of a simulation) there have been some memorable uses of the device by rock musicians following Stockhausen’s rule regarding the inseparability of the what from the how.

Sonic Samples Of The Ring Modulator:

Jeff Beck - With The Jan Hammer Group Live (1977)
Billy Cobham - “Snoopy's Search/Red Baron” Spectrum (1973)
Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead) - “That’s It For the Other One” Anthem of the Sun (1968)
Jan Hammer (The Mahavishnu Orchestra) - “Vital Transformation” The Inner Mounting Flame (1971)
Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) - “Paranoid” Paranoid (1970)
Jon Lord (Deep Purple) - Machine Head (1972)
Gordon Marron (The United States of America) - “The Garden of Earthly Delights” The United States of America (1968)
Bob Mothersbaugh (Devo) - “Too Much Paranoias” Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978)
Bob Mothersbaugh (Devo) - “Mechanical Man (Booji Boy Version)” Mechanical Man EP (1978)
Ozzy Osbourne (Black Sabbath) - “Planet Caravan” Paranoid (1970)

Clues and Contradictions: Where's John Lennon's White Rolls Royce? Part Two

In the second of two parts, guest blogger Eric Roberts continues his summary of the search for the whereabouts of John Lennon's White Rolls Royce (EUC 100C) that has taken much of our time the past few months.



2: NEW LEADS

A few days before Christmas just last month, Stephen Tebo kindly furnished the following information about the Phantom V Rolls Royce in his collection of classic cars:

I purchased the car on January 24, 1999 at the Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was lot #694. Hope this helps.

Seeking confirmation, I found an article published in the New York Times' Automobiles section in mid-February 1999 which shed some light on the matter:

An enormous 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V limousine - with a rare left-hand-drive configuration - brought $115,500, more than twice what these behemoths normally fetch. The car's providence [sic] was extraordinary, however, in that it had a double-Beatle history. John Lennon, the original owner, sold it to Richard Starkey - better known as Ringo Starr.

At the bottom of the page was the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 1999,  Monday A picture caption with the Collecting column on the Automobiles page on Jan. 29, about an auction of cars once owned by celebrities, referred incorrectly to one of two Rolls-Royce limousines associated with the Beatles. The car to the left of the caption was indeed once sold to Ringo Starr by John Lennon, and was sold last month for $115,500. But the one shown beneath the caption, with all four Beatles standing in front of it, was a different car. A former manager of the Beatles, Allen Klein, says he bought that car from John Lennon and still owns it.

Find the complete article about the 1999 car auction here. The picture referred to in the news article correction, of the Rolls with all four Beatles standing in front of it, is shown below.

So where does this bombshell leave us? The suggestion is that Stephen Tebo does indeed own John Lennon's (left-hand drive) white 1965 Phantom V. However . . . EUC 100C was right-hand drive, and appears to be the property of the late Alan Klein, or was in the late-1990s. Below are detailed views of Stephen Tebo's '65 Phantom V. Notice that it is left-hand drive. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Detailed views of Stephen Tebo's '65 Phantom V

Another piece of the puzzle came to light when I found a downloadable clip of EUC 100C on ITN's news archive site (Clip 63 of 65 / Ref:  S17051001 2 65013). The short video is accompanied by an explanatory note which reads as follows:

19.12.1985 - UK: A white Phantom Five Rolls Royce which once belonged to the late rock star, John Lennon, is expected to fetch half a million pounds when it goes on sale at Christie's tonight.

Subsequently, I learned that the bidding failed to meet the reserve price and Lennon's white Rolls Royce was withdrawn from auction. This raises the question: if John & Yoko's Phantom V was captured on television in London in December 1985, what are we to make of the reported sighting of EUC 100C in a New York garage in 1977? (See The Beatles Diary Volume 2: After the Break-Up 1970-2001)

One possible scenario is that when John and Yoko moved to New York in the early-70s, rather than ship EUC 100C over from England and have it converted to left-hand drive, they bought an identical 1965 Rolls Royce already modified for American roads. It may have been this second, left-hand drive Phantom V that was sighted in New York in late-1977 and, in January 1999, purchased by Stephen Tebo.

Then, a few days ago, Sam received an unexpected email from someone claiming to know who the current owner is. Tantalizingly, the message assured Sam that John & Yoko's famous Roller is “alive and well” and “still in England." Perhaps, in the next post, we may be able to reveal the true whereabouts of EUC 100C. In the meantime, we eagerly await further communication.

For a list of previous threads on this topic, click here.

PART TWO OF TWO PARTS

Clues And Contradictions: Where's John Lennon's White Rolls Royce? Part One

Guest blogger Eric Roberts provides a summary of the search for the whereabouts of John Lennon's White Rolls Royce (EUC 100C) that has taken much of our time the past few months.

1. THE STORY SO FAR

There have been unexpected twists, revelations and red herrings in this collaborative search for the current owner of John & Yoko's famous white Rolls Royce and its whereabouts.

The trail began with Sam & Rebecca Umland's original research for their book, Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side (FAB Press, 2006), in which they mentioned that it was John Lennon's white Rolls Royce (EUC 100C) used in the final sequence of Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg's Performance (filmed 1968; released 1970). After reading Sam's blog entry The Ballad of John & Yoko's Rolls, I was intrigued and immediately commenced digging for any relevant data.

Suspicion first fell on Phil Spector, due to a statement by Plastic Ono Band drummer, Alan White, that in 1970, Lennon handed Spector the keys to EUC 100C at the conclusion of the Imagine sessions. The fact that Lennon's friend and producer still owns a vintage white Rolls Royce added weight to White's recollections. However, Telegraph journalist Mick Brown cast doubt on this theory by commenting that Spector never indicated during the course of several interviews that his white Roller once belonged to John Lennon. On the contrary, Mick was specifically told that the limousine that ferried him from his hotel to Phil Spector's mansion in Los Angeles was a "1965 Silver Cloud III," not a Phantom V. On closer inspection, Spector's 1965 Rolls Royce appears smaller and less spacious  than a top-of-the-range Phantom V.

Phil Spector's 1965 Silver Cloud III

1965 Phantom V

You'll notice the more rakish lines of the Silver Cloud, as if intended for younger, sportier members of the aristocracy. By contrast, the Phantom V is like a ship on wheels. Speed isn't the main priority: it's all about gracefulness, stability, and spectatorship. Solid, reassuring and very British, the 1965 Rolls Royce Phantom V was the epitome of English craftsmanship, a special state of refinement, one perhaps no longer permissible or possible in the 21st Century. Only 500 were ever made.

Moreover, EUC 100C has several features that distinguish it from Spector's Roller.  As Sam has pointed out, early on, Lennon had a communications antenna installed on the roof above the windshield. Later, a pair of vents were added. These were not present when the car appeared in Performance, shot in 1968, but do appear in the Apple Records promotional video, "The Ballad of John & Yoko," released the following year. Also, if you look closely at the downshot below, you can just make out the outlines of what appears to be a sunroof. (Click on image to enlarge.)

These modifications are not apparent in the photo of the white Rolls Royce in Phil Spector's driveway. Likewise, they are lacking in shots of the white '65 Phantom V in the Tebo Auto Collection in Colorado which is unambiguously attributed to Lennon. So the question remains: Where is EUC 100C?

For a list of previous threads on this topic, click here.

PART ONE OF TWO PARTS

Larynx

This past week I happened to see two movies from different decades and noticed that the electronic novelty, the SONOVOX, serendipitously appeared in each. The first was the Kay Kyser horror comedy You'll Find Out (1940), the second the Australian SF action-adventure film released almost forty years later, Mad Max (1979). In the latter film, a character who seems to have suffered some sort of trauma to his throat uses the then anachronistic Sonovox as a voice prosthesis, unavoidably lending his speech that hollow metallic ring that makes the sound created by the Sonovox so distinctive, if slightly chilling. (Indeed, the makers of the films featuring "Mad Max" seem compelled to portray a vast array of prosthetic devices throughout the trilogy.)

The Sonovox was an electronic novelty used exclusively to create vocal effects. Hence, it was a device of extremely narrow application (unlike the vocoder), which eventually led to its demise and its interest to us now as a museum piece. A couple of posts back I wrote about Bell Labs' voder, an electronic speech synthesis device. What's unusual about the Sonovox is that it uses two biscuit-sized microphones placed on either side of a person's throat to simulate electronically synthesized speech: thus, it was used to simulate a simulation. An easy way to simulate the artificiality of mechanically created speech, the invention quickly led to anthropomorphized trains, steam shovels, pianos, and vacuum cleaners, that is, to its application in the field of children's entertainment. In yet another serendipity, the voder and the Sonovox were introduced to the general public the same year, 1939 (see my earlier post on the voder for historical information). According to this article from Time (24 July 1939), the Sonovox was invented by Gilbert Wright (the son of the hugely popular early twentieth-century novelist Harold Bell Wright) around January 1939. During a meditative moment while Wright was scratching the whiskers on his Adam's Apple (that is, his laryngeal prominence), he noticed the unusual sounds emanating from his mouth. If you've ever seen Bruce McGill ("D-Day") in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) play the William Tell "Overture" by drumming his fingers on his windpipe, you get the same general idea.

In this clip, actress Lucille Ball is shown demonstrating the Sonovox in a British Pathé newsreel dated 25 September 1939,  although the apparatus isn't referred to as such, the newsreel instead being titled Machine Made Voices! So far as I've been able to discover, the Sonovox made its first appearance in the aforementioned Kay Kyser haunted house comedy You'll Find Out (November 1940). In this film (which also starred Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre), Lugosi employs the ethereal vocal effect of the Sonovox to simulate the voice of a revenant spirit during a seance, and it is later used by the Kyser Orchestra singer Harry Babbitt during a song, as shown in this clip from the film available on YouTube. The apparatus was perhaps most famously used as the anthropomorphized voice of the train, Casey Junior, in Dumbo (October 1941) but was demonstrated to comedian Robert Benchley in the Disney feature The Reluctant Dragon (June 1941), during a tour of the Disney Studios facility in Burbank. (According to the Time article, Disney wanted to buy the exclusive rights to the Sonovox.) Not surprisingly, the Sonovox was used on several children's records, including a couple issued by Capitol Records in the late 1940s: Rusty in Orchestraville (1946) and Sparky's Magic Piano (1947). It was also used as the voice of the airplane in Whizzer The Talking Airplane (Jackalee Records, 1947). I haven't had the opportunity to confirm the use of the Sonovox in the Forties films The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and A Letter to Three Wives (1949), but a few on-line sources indicate it was used in these films. No doubt it was used in other films for sound effects. Apparently it was employed well into the 1960s by some radio stations around the country as a way of producing aurally distinctive station IDs, which is to say its application became even more specialized. Given that its application was so narrow, it's no wonder it was eventually displaced by the vocoder, and hence became a historic artifact.

The Elfman-Burton Music Box Bonus Disc

I suspect those like me who pre-ordered The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box Collector's Edition (for information, go here) have by now received the bonus disc (#17), sent as a holiday gift to those who've been patiently awaiting the formal release of the delayed Collector's Edition. My copy arrived yesterday in a plain padded envelope postmarked 28 December. Just as the email I received in late November indicated, the bonus disc - apparently limited to 1,000 copies - has been autographed by Danny Elfman (cover pictured). Enclosed in a thin cardboard sleeve with a cover reproducing one of Tim Burton's drawings (a drawing also, incidentally, included in The Art of Tim Burton), essentially it is a compilation disc (50:20) or Music Box "sampler" consisting of the main or end title music from each of the thirteen films that (so far) represent the collaboration between Danny Elfman and Tim Burton. The exception to this pattern is the previously unreleased first track, "The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box Suite" (3:02). For those who may not have yet received the bonus disc, the track listing is as follows:

01. The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box Suite (3:02) (previously unreleased)
02. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure - Main Title/Bike Race 2:55 (previously unreleased)
03. Beetlejuice - Main Title (with Elfman vocal intro) 2:31 (previously unreleased)
04. Batman - The Batman Theme (2:40)
05. Edward Scissorhands - Introduction (Titles) 2:38
06. Batman Returns - End Credits (4:44)
07. Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas - End Title (5:04)
08. Mars Attacks! - Main Titles (2:26)
09. Sleepy Hollow - Main Titles (3:12)
10. Planet of the Apes - Main Titles (3:52)
11. Big Fish - Big Fish (Titles) (4:34)
12. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Main Titles (5:01)
13. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride - End Credits Part 2 - Bonus Tracks from Bonejangles and his Bone Boys (2:33)
14. Alice in Wonderland - Alice's Theme (5:06)

There are no surprises, although as indicated above there are three previously unreleased tracks. (Note that Track 2 was indeed included on the previously released original soundtrack but that release consisted of re-recorded highlights.) Both the disc and sleeve are marked "Promotion Only. Not For Sale." For those who may be wondering why I'm interested in this release, I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce that about three months ago I signed a contract with Scarecrow Press to write THE TIM BURTON ENCYCLOPEDIA. Scarecrow Press has already issued in the series THE RIDLEY SCOTT ENCYCLOPEDIA and, most recently, THE FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA ENCYCLOPEDIA. My own book on Tim Burton will not appear anytime soon, as the manuscript is not due until December 2013. I hope to see THE TIM BURTON ENCYCLOPEDIA appear in 2014.