Wednesday, Oct 13, 2021 • 34min

The Unsung Heroes of Music: Part 1

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Not everyone who managed to change the world is famous…it is possible to do something absolutely, monumentally world-shaking and not receive any recognition for it… I’ll give you a name: Vasyli Arkipov…it’s possible that this guy is the only reason any of us are still alive…seriously… October 27, 1962…it’s the height of the Cuban missile crisis…the soviets had nukes in Cuba aimed at the u.s. and more were on the way…John Kennedy responded by setting up a blockade around the island… The USS Randolph was one of the ships in charge of enforcing the blockade…they spotted a Soviet sub that was sent to protect the flotilla of Russian ships approaching the island with more missiles on board…this one particular sub—a Foxtrot class b-59—was armed with nuclear missiles…Arkhipov was the second in command… The Randolph began dropping depth charges in an effort to get the sub to surface…b-59 suffered damage…the crew couldn’t breathe…they wanted to fight back…the sub commander tried to raise soviet command for permission to fire—but he couldn’t reach them… Because they’d been cruising submerged for days, they hadn’t heard anything from Soviet high command…but they had been monitoring American civil broadcasts which offered non-stop coverage of the crisis…and now they were under attack…maybe the war had finally begun…if that was the case, shouldn’t they launch their missiles?... Captain Valentín Savitsky was in favour of an attack…so was political officer Ivan Maslennikov…but in order to launch the nukes, Stavisky and Maslennikov also needed agreement from Arkhipov…“what do you say, Vasyli?...do we engage the Americans with our special weapon?”… Vasyli took a breath and replied “nyet…we do not fire…we have no proof that we are at war…what if we’re wrong?...if we launch, we risk starting an all-our nuclear war and wipe out all life on the planet”… The commander wasn’t happy with that, but rules were rules and he ordered that the crew stand down…no nuke would be fired that day…and when the sub did surface, it was confirmed that hostilities had not broken out…this is why Vasyli Arkipov is widely regarded as the man who single-handedly prevented a global nuclear war on October 27, 1962…yet how many people know his name?... Now let’s take a big pivot into music…what kind of unsung heroes might we find there?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talking about

Speakers

(5)

Alan Cross

Jack Mullin

David Bowie

Transcript

Verified

Alan Cross

00:00

Not everyone who managed to change the world is famous. It is possible to do something absolutely, monumentally world-shaking and not receive any recognition whatsoever. In fact, I'll give you a name,

Vasili Arkhipov

. It's possible that this guy is the only reason any of us are still alive. Seriously.

00:21

October 27th, 1962; it's the height of the

Cuban Missile Crisis

. The Soviets had nukes in Cuba, aimed at the US and more were on the way.

John Kennedy

responded by setting up a blockade around the island. The

USS Randolph

was one of the ships in charge of enforcing the blockade.

00:39

They spotted a Soviet sub that was sent to protect the flotilla of Russian ships approaching the island with more missiles on board. This one particular sub, a

Foxtrot-class

B-59

was armed with nukes and

Arkhipov

was the second in command on that sub. The

Randolph

began dropping depth charges in an effort to get the sub to surface. B- 59 suffered damage, the crew couldn't breathe.

01:06

They wanted to fight back. The sub commander tried to raise Soviet command for permission to fire but he couldn't reach them. Because they've been cruising submerged for days, they hadn't heard anything from the Soviet high command but they had been monitoring American civil broadcasts which offered non-stop coverage of the

Cuban Missile Crisis

and now they were under attack.

01:28

Maybe the war had finally begun. If that was the case, shouldn't they be good communists and launch their missiles? Captain Valentin Savitsky was in favour of an attack, so was political officer

Ivan Maslennikov

. But, in order to launch the nukes, Savitsky and

Maslennikov

also needed agreement from

Arkhipov

01:50

"What do you say,

Vasili

? Do we engage the Americans with our special weapon?"

Vasili

took a deep breath and replied: "Yet, we do not fire. We have no proof that we are at war. What if we're wrong? If we launch, we risk starting an all out nuclear war and wiping out all life on planet earth."

02:10

The commander wasn't happy with that, but rules were rules and he ordered that the crew stand down. No nuke would be fired that day. And when the sub did service, it was confirmed that hostilities had not broken out. And, this is why

Vasili Arkhipov

is widely regarded as the man who single-handedly prevented a global nuclear war on October 27, 1962.

02:37

How many people know his name? Now, let's take a big pivot into music. What kind of unsung heroes might we find there?

02:47

This is the

Ongoing History Of New Music

podcast with Alan Cross.

Alan Cross

02:52

Welcome again. I'm Allan Cross. And this program features a list of names from music history that you've probably never heard before. Yet, these people made a tremendous difference in our music. Okay, so they didn't steer us away from nuclear war, but trust me, without them, today's music would be very, very different.

03:13

Our first unsung hero is

Jack Mullin

. Yeah, I know who but without him. Well, you'll see. But first we need some hero music, let's get some from

David Bowie

03:24

Then, we can be heroes, just for one day.

Alan Cross

03:36

Jack Mullin

was a major in the US Army

Signal Corps

during

World War II

. At the end of the war, he stumbled upon a couple of strange

Nazi

machines. They were

reel-to-reel tape recorders

used in radio broadcasts to confuse the allies as to

Hitler's

whereabouts.

03:54

How could he be in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, making different hour long speeches at the same time? Well, the answer was he was on tape, a technology that the

Nazis

had perfected. Here's

Mullin

, talking about what he found:

Jack Mullin

04:08

There was a man there from the British Army at the same time and we walked around together. And somehow, the subject of records and music and recording came up and he asked me if I had heard this machine down at Radio Frankfurt. And I just said, "Is it a tape machine?" And, he said, "Yes." And I said, "What is this, one of those magnetic phones?" And he said, "Yes, that's right." I said, "Sure, fine." I discounted what his raving about it because up to that time, all our experience has been with the low fidelity job. And I thought, well, he just didn't have very good ears. But he said, we ought to go and listen to it.

04:43

And coming down that road afterward, there was at the bottom of the hill, there's a turn off; you turn to the right and it would take you west, then ultimately back to Paris. And if you turn left, you were on your road to Frankfurt or actually Bad Nauheim, which is the town where the broadcast service was coming from then because they had been, they had to get out of Frankfurt because of the bombing. And so, that was probably the greatest decision I ever made in my life was to turn left there and follow the guy's advice instead of just discounting what he said and turning right and probably never would have, could have changed my entire life, and I look back on it.

05:22

So, I turned left and we went to the radio station that afternoon and it was being operated by the American AAFRS, and so, I asked them if they could let me hear one of these machines and so they, spoken German tour, the system who clicked his heels and ran back to a room and came out with a roll of tape and put it on the machine. That's when I really flipped because I'd never heard anything like that. And, as far to my knowledge, there just hadn't been anything like that anywhere and recording before. You couldn't tell whether it was live or playback. There was no background noise. I was thrilled.

Alan Cross

06:01

Because the war invalidated all

Nazi

patents,

Mullin

was able to take the machines home where, after getting out of the army, he started demonstrating this high fidelity technology that was unknown in the West for potential investors. What investor was,

Bing Crosby

. Yeah, him. He hated having to repeat his national radio show for the

West Coast

time zone.

06:25

He really wanted to be out golfing, and this was a solution. He could just pre-tape his

East Coast

broadcast and then call it a day. So, being became an investor in

Ampex

, an electronics firm that had been making

reel-to-reel machines

based on

Mullin'

German booty. So many innovations followed.

06:46

Performances could be started, stopped, re-started and then edited together with a razor blade and some tape. Mistakes could be removed, just excised. If a joke bombed, well then, it could be literally cut out. And there was even more; an early production unit was given to guitarist

Les Paul

who modified the machines to allow for multi-track recording.

07:06

Overdubs were now possible. Entire parts of a recording could be redone without having to redo all the other parts. Special effects, like reverb and echo, could be added after the fact and the volume of each track of each microphone, going to the tape, could be controlled separately.

07:24

Now, none of this has been possible before because performance is needed to be recorded directly to an acetate or to a transcription disc. This meant no edits, no fixing it in the mix. If one person during the take made a mistake, you had to start all over again. In short, Major

Jack Mullin

along with his early believer,

Bing Crosby

and guitarist

Les Paul

gave birth to modern recording studio techniques.

07:50

From the 1950s forward, it became possible to make records that were impossible to reproduce in the real world. The studio became a musical instrument itself with unlimited sonic possibilities. And not only that, this same technology made video tape possible and that completely transformed television and later, home entertainment.

08:12

So yeah, yeah to Major Jack and his recording tape. Here's a song from

XTC

about that reel-to-reel tape, kind of, sort of; it's close anyway.

XTC

08:23

You're documented down like rats. They're catching up on every squeal. On real by reel, real by reel by real by. Oh, real by reel by real by, oh.

Alan Cross

08:36

Our second unsung hero in the history of rock is a character named Moon’Doc. There's a chance that without him, we wouldn't be referring to a certain type of music as rock and roll. Story goes like this: Back in the 1950s,

Alan Freed

was a

disc jockey

in Cleveland, playing black R&B records for white kids; really radical thing to do at the time.

08:57

On the air, he referred to himself as the ’Moondog’ and through these concerts called ’Moondog Balls’ which were insanely successful. This reached the ears of Louis Hardin Jr., a homeless six foot, blind New York street performer who dressed up in a Viking costume and could often be found outside the stage door of

Carnegie Hall,

standing silently and banging a drum.

09:21

He also composed music and made a few records under the name

Moondog.

Naturally,

Moondog

was impossible to miss, and he started attracting attention including from famous composers and conductors who went to

Carnegie Hall

. Eventually, he raised enough money to record a piece called ’Moondog's Symphony’ in 1949 where he performed everything himself.

09:54

That record, Moondog's Symphony, found its way to

Alan Freed

in Cleveland and it became the theme for his radio show. In addition, he began calling himself ’Moondog’. Now, the actual

Moondog

was, as you might guess, incensed. So, with the help of big band-leader

Benny Goodman

, he sued

Alan Freed

and he won $6,000 in damages. But more importantly, he secured a promise that

Freed

would never use the word ’Moondog’ again.

10:29

This was a problem because

Freed

had to revamp his image. He needed a new catchphrase and that's when he decided to use an African-American slang phrase for sex. Now, the kids would knew what he meant. Well, the parents wouldn't have a clue and that's how ’rock and roll’ came to be used to describe this new sort of music in the 1950s.

10:51

Meanwhile,

Moondog

was taken very seriously as a performer and composer, even managing to secure a recording contract under which he released a number of albums. He got married, started a family and returned to

Carnegie Hall

in 1989 to conduct a performance of his own works.

Moondog

eventually found his way to Europe where he died of heart failure in 1999 at the age of 83. His entire life experience was inspirational to everyone, from itinerant hippies to bands like this who cite

Moondog

is very important to the creation of

trip-hop

Portishead

11:25

Give me a reason to love you. Give me a reason to be.

Alan Cross

11:35

So, there are our first two unsung heroes, Major

Jack Mullen

of the US Army

Signal Corps

and the blind New York street musician known as

Moondog

. In just a moment, we'll hear about the guy who accidentally turned the electric guitar's tones away from nice, clean sounds into something much more raunchy and powerful.

11:56

This is a program on the Unsung Heroes of Rock. You may have never heard of these people before, but without them, our music would be very, very, very different. Let's talk about

Grady Martin. Grady

was a session guitarist in Nashville who played on hundreds of recordings for people like

Elvis Presley

and

Johnny Cash

and even

Buddy Holly

12:16

All right, so what does he have to do with rock and roll? As it turns out, a lot. Let's go back to 1961. At this time, the purpose of the electric guitar was to provide clean, clear sounds like an acoustic. You wanted the same tones as an acoustic guitar; just louder so you could be heard over all the other instruments. Well, not having to rely on a microphone.

12:38

There were a few performers who realized that by deliberately over driving the amplifier or actually causing physical damage to the speaker, you could distort the guitar sound into something growly and powerful. But, it was impossible to control those sounds, especially if you were indiscriminately punching holes through speaker cones with a screwdriver or pencil or something.

12:59

Other sounds were found through happy accidents that could be impossible to duplicate. In late 1960,

Grady

was called in to play guitar on a

Marty Robbins

song called

Don't Worry

at the

Quonset Hut Studio

in Nashville. Everything was proceeding normally until

Grady

plugged in his six string baritone guitar directly into the recording console.

13:20

What came out did not sound right. A faulty transformer for one of the pre-amps inside the console, halfway failed, making everything sound all fuzzy. Turns out that the manufacture of the console was in the process of moving operations from New York to California and he had used some faulty transistors and transformers in this particular mixing desk.

13:42

Marty Robbins

hated this sound, he thought it was just vulgar. But,

Grady

thought it sounded cool, so did producer

Owen Bradley

and so did studio engineer

Glenn Snoddy

. And in the end,

Robbins

was overruled and that part was left in the song. Here's the part of the song we need to pay attention to and ’don't worry’, you'll hear it —

14:17

Even after they tracked down that bad transformer, they didn't do anything about it. In fact, they hope that whatever the console was doing, it would keep doing it. And then in the spring of 1961,

Don't Worry

became a big hit for

Marty Robbins

and everybody wanted to know, "How did you get that sound?", that included

Grady Martin

himself, who recorded a song called The Fuzz.

14:50

Gibson

Guitars heard this sound, called

Grady

; "You got something there?", they said. "Is there any way you could help us build something that would make this sound available to anyone on demand?" So, with some help from

Snoddy

and an engineer from Nashville's

WSMV-TV,

named Revis Hobbs,

Grady

designed a circuit that would do just that.

15:10

When the prototype was ready,

Grady

and

Glenn Snoddy

took the contraption which had taken on the form of a foot pedal to

Gibson's

offices in Chicago. They took one listen and said, "This is brilliant, we'll take it." And so, began the manufacturer of the first ever fuzz-pedal for the guitar. The first ever distortion pedal, the

Maestro Fuzz-Tone

. This is from a demonstration record released in 1962.

15:34

A built in foot pedal switch attaches to your amplifier with a handy jack, makes possible all these effects with the touch of a toe. Use it as often as you wish; it will not interfere with your regular guitar or bass when turned off. Has a volume control and an attack control. Completely transistorized, the

Maestro Fuzz-Tone

has its own self-contained power supply. Now, let's listen to some of the unbelievable effects that you can create with the

Fuzz-Tone.

First, let's use an electric bass. This is a sousaphone effect —

16:56

Wasn't that something? Now, we'll use the electric bass again for this, a

tuba

sound.

Alan Cross

17:11

There's more but you get the idea. These sounds caught on. Other manufacturers started coming out with their own pedals. There was the

Tone Bender

, the

Fuzz Face

, the

Big Muff

- stop giggling! But it was the

Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone

that created this sound —

17:38

After

Satisfaction

was a hit for

The Stones

, everybody wanted a

Maestro Fuzz-Tone

, but

Keith Richards

almost didn't use that bit. When

Satisfaction

was being written and recorded, he heard that riff being played by a horn section and he set the pedal to sound like, maybe a saxophone or something close to it.

17:56

The two times

The Stones

recorded this song,

Keith's

guitar was just supposed to be a placeholder for this horn section but the rest of the band loved the guitar sound.

Keith

hated it. He was a blues guy, he wanted a horn section but he was overruled. And four weeks after the final session at

RCA Studios

in Hollywood on May 12th 1965,

Satisfaction

was released and the distorted guitar was forever front and center in rock music. And it all began with that weird equipment failure in Nashville in late 1960.

18:30

When

Kurt Cobain

recorded this song, he ran a Japanese-made

Fender Telecaster

through a

Marshall

amplifier with an important detour through an Electro-Harmonix

Big Muff

18:48

Nirvana making great use of distortion pedal technology invented by accident by

Grady Martin

, thirty years before that recording session.

18:59

We can now segue smoothly into another unsung hero had a lot to do with guitar effects pedals, except that he didn't invent them; he sold them. Unless you shot from music gear in New York City, way back in the day, you'll never have heard of Henry Goldrich, but this guy needs to be credited with having a major impact on rock music. Henry inherited a music store from his father, a saxophone player turned music retailer.

Manny's Music

on West 58th, between 6th and 7th Avenues, was the place everyone in New York City went for their gear.

19:31

Starting in 1935, Manny and then son Henry, made sure the place was stocked with the greatest musical instruments and accessories possible. Didn't matter if you're a beginner or seasoned-pro,

Manny's Music

was your place. Now, this was great for the locals but whenever touring musicians came through New York, they also had to visit because they heard about this place.

19:53

Customers included

The Beatles

and

Pete Townsend

and

Bob Dylan

and literally thousands more. If you remember Guns N' Roses' Paradise City video, there were shots of

Manny's

David Gilmour's

famous

Black Strat

, the legendary guitar used on so many iconic

Pink Floyd

recordings, was purchased at

Manny's

in 1969.

20:12

You can't have that many famous and soon-to-be famous people coming through your store without having an effect on music. And this is what happened; in the middle ’60s, Henry brought in a new Guitar Gizmo called a

wah-wah pedal

, he then convinced to customers to buy one.

20:28

One was, up and coming guitarist named

Jimi Hendrix

, and then there was

Eric Clapton

, a hot new player from the UK. They each, "Okay, this thing sounds cool. Give me one." The pedal not only changed how these guys played, but the whole direction of guitar-based rock and roll. Here's

Jimi

playing through such a pedal that he got at

Manny's

—

20:59

Once you understand that sound, you can hear

wah-wah

was being used in a million different songs.

Kirk Hammett

uses it all the way through Metallica's

Enter Sandman

. You'll hear it on many of

Bob Marley

songs. It's all through

Pink Floyd's

material, courtesy of

David Gilmour

and here's a fantastic example from

Tom Morello

and

Rage Against The Machine

with

Bulls On Parade

—

21:26

Tom Morello

with his

wah-wah pedal,

in full trouble position for the riffs throughout

Bulls On Parade

21:36

One more mention here of

Manny's Music

. This was the store that

Douglas Colvin

and

John Cummings

visited in 1973, after spending the afternoon getting baked on weed. When they were high, they decided that they absolutely needed to form a band. So, they went down to

Manny's

and bought a guitar, a bass and a small amp. A year later,

Douglas

was calling himself ’Dee Dee’ and

John

was ’Johnny’ and together with

Joey

and

Tommy,

they formed the

Ramones

22:09

The

Ramones

, another band made possible by Henry Goldrich, the proprietor of

Manny's Music

in New York. Both Henry and the store gone, place went out of business in 2009 and Henry died at the age of 88, nearly 2021.

22:27

We have time for two more unsung heroes of music, and these guys come as a pair. Hang on, this is Part One of a two-parter on Unsung Heroes of Music. Chances are, you've never heard of any of these people but without them, rock music could have turned out to sound now different and we can honestly say that these people influence and how music was made and recorded.

22:49

All right. What about

Malcolm Cecil

and

Robert Margouleff

? Blank stares, I get that.

22:57

These guys, a British jazz dude working for the BBC and An american record producer, were huge influences on the world of electronic music but they were almost entirely behind the scenes. In the late 1960s, Malcolm and Cecil were fascinated by new machines being made by

Bob Moog

, the synthesizer inventor. They set out to construct the world's biggest modular synth setup. God, this thing was huge.

23:22

It featured gear from

Moog

Oberheim

ARP

EMS

Roland

and

Yamaha

. There were keyboards and

patch bays

and

joysticks

and a bunch of custom made analog synth modules. And if you know how things worked, you could make sounds never, ever, ever heard before and you could run a drum track, a baseline in multiple melodies at the same time. That was brand new too.

23:45

They called their monstrosity, TONTO which was short for The Original New Timbral Orchestra. It was installed in a series of wooden cabinets arranged in a semi-circle, twenty five feet in diameter and six feet tall. All told, it weighed about one ton.

24:02

Hey, have you ever seen the movie

Phantom Of The Paradise

? You know the studio in which poor Winslow Leach slaves away on his cantata? That's what we see in the background, that is the actual TONTO.

Malcolm Cecil

started releasing their own material and the first album was called

Zero Time

. Let's get a taste of that —

24:31

Stevie Wonder

heard TONTO and called up Malcolm and Cecil.

Stevie

was out of his old contract with

Motown Records

and wanted a tutorial on synthesizers, so he could finally start recording the music that he heard in his head.

Malcolm Cecil

and their

TONTO,

setup work with

Stevie

on three albums that make up much of the core of

Stevie Wonder's

greatest period.

24:52

It was

Talking Book

Innervisions

and

Fulfillingness' First Finale

; very, very important records from the 1970s, all which came out over this man of just three and a half years. It's like

Superstition

Living for the City

Boogie on Reggae Woman

Higher Ground

and many others were all composed and recorded using TONTO. From that point on, Malcolm and Cecil were always getting work.

25:15

If you wanted to work with the best synth in the middle ’70s, then you went to Malcolm and

Cecil

and they brought over TONTO. After a while though, TONTO's size was a problem; especially with smaller, cheaper and more powerful synths coming out every day.

25:27

It was shuffled from studio to studio to studio and gradually became unwanted and unloved. And for a while, it was in Los Angeles at the studio of

Mark Mothersbaugh

Devo

, but then, it went up for sale in 2013. It was purchased and then restored by The National Music Center in Calgary and it's now a major, major part of The Center's keyboard collection.

25:50

TONTO

changed the direction of

Stevie Wonder's

career; then he changed what black pop music could be.

Quincy Jones

loved this thing. What he learned, shaped how he produced

Michael Jackson's

albums and it brought all kinds of new attention to the possibilities of electronically generated music.

26:09

TONTO

influenced the shape of rock music and the use of the recording studio. And tonight was a big reason synthesizer manufacturers worked so hard to advance the technology in the 1970s; creating these smaller, faster, cheaper electronic keyboards. And those new machines, led to lots and lots and lots of new music, including all the techno-pop that we got in the wake of punk. Like this —

26:42

On the second part of this program on Unsung Heroes of Music, we're going to expand the power of just a little bit to include someone with an interesting taste in hairstyles. There will be a drummer who should have made a billion dollars and the woman who may have invented punk.

26:58

Meanwhile, feel free to check out all the

Ongoing History

podcast that we have available through the usual platforms. Just download and go. You and I can meet up through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. There's my website, ajournalofmusicalthings. com, which is updated every day.

27:09

Get the free daily newsletter. I mean, why not? It's free. And if you have any questions or comments, drop me a line through alanandalancross. ca. Part Two of the Unsung Heroes of Music, next time. Texaco Productions by

Rob Johnston

. I'm

Alan Cross

27:24

You've been listening to the

Ongoing History Of New Music

podcast with

Alan Cross

. Subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and everywhere you find your favourite podcasts.

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