studio stories no.1, the studio door and the cable car bout

Above is shown a rugged and queer-looking picture of Len Spencer. Most of you probably wonder why I made him look so rough and why one of him eyes is off. It's a very realistic view of Mr. Spencer, that is what I had intended.

If you're a very minute early record collector, you probably know of the story of Len Spencer losing the sight in his right eye around 1905-1906. So as the story goes, Spencer's height was an advantage, and also, a very outweighing disadvantage. At one of the many recording studios, they had a rather short(to Spencer's height) swinging door, and as Spencer was leaving that room, it must have smacked him...HARD! As you would think that that door had quite the momentum to impact him so hard to have Spencer wear a comical-looking eye-patch for a few months and eventually having no sight whatsoever in that eye. Some door, huh?

Anyhow, the second part of this post is dedicated to this event, fully described in the article from The Phonoscope below:

Not much has to be explained here.

The only thing that really surprised me is that last sentence. That fact really proves how all of his sketches and songs were inspired by things that he experienced,even things as extreme and wild as this one. He wrote hundreds of sketches, and dozens of songs that relate not just to minstrelsy, but pure oddity Vaudeville. They are a really unique view on the world in this time period, so most of the time when you're hearing a Spencer tune or sketch, you're seeing it in his perspective. 

Remember that...

(I will be doing more of these studio stories as a series after this! stay updated for more!)

I hope you enjoyed this!