Recording Muzzles and Razors in the air--early stories from Fred Gaisberg

Yes indeed, Fred Gaisberg, the teenager dropped into the wild and woolly recording business in its earliest days. 

Many of us have had the opportunity to read from his diaries of trekking through Europe and Asia with Sinkler Darby, and have thoroughly enjoyed his vivid and witty descriptions of Madrid and the French countryside. Before all of that across the pond, he had a well-established life and recording career in the U.S. Someone in my immediate record collecting community has yet to buy a copy of Gaisberg's memoir written in the 1930's. Any time an original copy of his original book comes up somewhere, it is always sold for an extreme amount of money, an amount that no record collector in reality could afford to pay on a single item. Some of the information in his book(that is quoted everywhere), reminds us that the book is certainly worth the 2,000 or more of any currency it's worth. The amount of fantastic stories and anecdotes that Gaisberg told in his books are certainly worth the money paid. 

When speaking with Charlie Judkins last weekend, it seems that he finally got a hold of one of the books about Gaisberg(The one called A Voice in Time). It's not the infamously rare and valuable one, but it's the one that was about his life and travels in America, to Europe, and Asia. Of course, the "good stuff" to the two of us was certainly the tales he told from 1890's Washington. According to all sources(including him) he began working at the Columbia Phonograph company in 1889, which would have made him their first official studio pianist. Also, keep in mind that he was 16 when they hired him. He had no idea what he was getting himself into, and this is clear by the way that he described the very beginning. The thing that really got us hooked was of course his tales of Len Spencer from the very beginning. Amid his early days working there, it didn't take long for him to run into all of the limited amount of talent Columbia employed at the time. One of the first figures he met with was of course "the handsome Len Spencer"(hmm?Okay...) as he once stated. This story reveals a whole lot about Spencer, what we have often expected from him, and what turned out to be true. 

Gaisberg did not specify the office of Columbia, but he stated that he was at Pennsylvania Avenue(obviously Columbia's old headquarters), so it's hard to not know what he meant by that. He stated that the first time he met Spencer, Spencer was signing autographs for a group of "admiring darkies"(black kids) for a few cents each. Wow. Didn't really expect Spencer to have a black fan base. The image of him doing that really is kind of heart-warming, yet a little unexpected so early on in his recording. This is the sort of thing that we'd expect from Spencer in the exhibition days of Columbia in the late-90's. The fact that he was doing this so early on says a lot not only about him, but early Columbia. This was when Columbia had very slim management, and when those passing by the studio would gather outside the steps and essentially get a free concert. So with this, it seems groups of black kids built admiration for Spencer's singing, convinced he was black until they saw him. That really is somewhat surprising, since we wouldn't normally expect such offensive and stereotypical songs as Spencer's repertoire to be at all appreciated by the black community. Well, apparently we were wrong. This is one of those occasions that could very well change our viewpoint of what blacks thought of their own culture and society in the U.S. Makes me wonder what the black people who came to exhibitions thought of meeting with Spencer. Like any time encountering him, it must have been interesting, and slightly shocking. Again, our understanding of Spencer's relationship with black people has officially been changed with this new information. 

With all of this, we also have learned that Spencer not only had a black fan base, but also embodied many of the black stereotypes he spoke of so often on records. Other than just enough looking the part with his mess of curly brown hair and gaudy gold chains, he was a dedicated gambler. 

Of course, now that I know this, it seems I think now that Spencer dragged Hylands into gambling all their profits and such during the publishing firm. Yes, it seems likely that Hylands already had a taste for gambling, but after Spencer came along, that seemed to have inevitably been boosted. 
We know of Spencer as a rough-and-tumble sort of figure, more so than any of the early recording stars, with that scar on his face at whatnot. Contrary to what I have written previously on this matter regarding Spencer, it seems Gaisberg told the story of his scar differently. 

It's a little different than I had previously been told, but it's actually better the way Gaisberg told it. 
Here's how he spoke about Spencer, including the razor fight, and everything else:

Perhaps because of his unsavory reputation, my particular pet and hero of mine was the handsome Len Spencer. His father, the originator of the florid Spencerian handwriting, was the chief bugbear of thousands of schoolboys, myself included. The son had many and varied gifts. As a popular baritone, I accompanied him at concerts and for record-making. I first saw him seated at a small table in Pennsylvania Avenue, surrounded by admiring darkies, writing out visiting cards at six for a dime. His beautiful, ornate Spencerian writing, ending up with two doves, looked like engraving. Later I was always to remember his handsome face disfigured by a scar, the result of a razor-slash in an up-river gambling brawl. He was said to have been an adroit poker-player. His records of "Anchored", "Sailing", "The Palms", and "Nancy Lee" were important items of our repertoire. 

Well, there ya have it, Spencer in a nutshell. It's really surprising how much admiration he had for him, despite his certainly wild nature. Also, the way that he words his relationship with Spencer in the studio is also particularly interesting, "my particular pet and hero", especially since he's referring to recording for Columbia so early on. If we had a description of Spencer's relation with Issler or Hylands from a little later, I have the feeling that we'd hear something dramatically different. Issler would think of Spencer like an assistant and engineer, much like how Gaisberg was to Berliner. Hylands would have thought of Spencer like a sidekick to his rough-and-tumble antics(though Spencer was what stabilized their friendship). 
Without a doubt, Gaisberg understood how to best describe Spencer's beautiful script.

It certainly was like an engraving. 

Before all of that was written in the book, Gaisberg told his story of being with Sousa as a child:
I also sung in Sousa's choir, which was organised for Sunday evening concerts, and I attended rehearsals in his then modest home in the Navy Yard in south Washington. He patted me on the head and made quite a pet of me... I can still see the small room that one entered direct from the street, and a very old "tin-panny" square piano from which he conducted rehearsals. In hot weather the front door used to be left open and a circle of negro children would surround the entrance, silently enjoying the music we made. 
...
On Saturday afternoons in the spring and summer, the Marine Band formerly gave concerts on the lawn in the grounds of the White House... I was one of those music-mad youngsters who hovered by his podium and never missed a concert. On windy days his music used to become unmanageable, and he would turn round and beckon to me. It was then my pride to stand beside him to turn over and hold down the music. 

How great is that? Imagine little Gaisberg tagging along behind Sousa and the Marine Band. Everything about that is heartwarming and comical. It's funny that Gaisberg was accompanist to Quinn, who was also a choir boy until about age 12. Quinn probably told him that early on, and caused some surprise to Gaisberg. Imagining Sousa bitching at ten-year-old Gaisberg about his music not co-operating  at a concert is fantastic to the highest degree. It doesn't get much better than that, in terms of stories relating to early recording stars. 
His first time hearing of and meeting Berliner is also fantastic:

It was Billy Golden who asked me one day... If I would go with him to see a funny German who had started experimenting with a flat-disc talking machine records and wanted to make some trials. I was only too eager to see him at work. 
We found Emile Berliner in his small laboratory on New York avenue and received a warm welcome from the inventor. Billy was right, Berliner certainly did make me smile. Dressed in a monkish frock he paced up and down the small studio buzzing on a diaphragm[nice pun there Fred].
"Hello! Hello!" he recited in guttural, broken English. "Tvinkle, tvinkle, little star, how I vonder vot you are."

Hmm. How unexpected of Billy Golden. Normally, we wouldn't expect such a thing from him, but certainly he was well aware of everything that was going on in the early business. Being at Columbia meant for that in the first place, since they were the ones who invented the dubbing/pantographing process. Even for a hick, Golden knew his way around in the business. 
Here's how Gaisberg described his first session with Berliner(on the day that he and Golden called):

Berliner placed a muzzle over Golden's mouth and connected this up by a rubber hose to a diaphragm. I was at the piano, the sounding-board of which was also boxed up and connected to the diaphragm by a hose resembling an elephant's trunk. Berliner said "Are you ready?" and upon our answering "Yes", he began to crank like a barrel-organ, and said "Go." 
The song finished, Berliner stopped cranking. He took from the machine a bright zinc disc and plunged it into an acid bath for a few minutes. Then, taking it out of the acid, he washed and cleaned the disc. Placing it on the reproducing machine, also operated by hand like a coffee-grinder, he played back the the resulting record from the etched groove. 
To our astonished ears cam Billy Golden's voice. Berliner proudly explained to us just how this method was superior to the phonograph. He said that in his process the recording stylus was vibrated laterally on a flat surface, thus always encountering an even resistance, and this accounted for a more natural tone. 
Acquainted as I was with the unnatural reproduction of the old cylinder-playing phonographs, I was spell-bound by the beautiful round tone of the flat gramophone disc. Before I departed that day I exacted a promise from Berliner that he would let me work for him when his machine was ready for development. 

And a few months later, he received a card from Berliner asking him to come along to his lab once again, to officially make some records. Well, it seems we know why early Berliner records sounded to great now. This strange and horrific sounding method of using muzzles and all of these tubes was the ticket to the signature Berliner sound, which as we know, was clear and full in the beginning. This is why we get fantastic records like Quinn's 1895 Berliner of "The Streets of Cairo". Now that we know all of that, we can all picture this strange method being done with those earliest Berliners. Another with this, not with piano though, is one of George Graham's first records, his "Street Fakir" from 1896. That muzzle was right there, and this is why it sounds like the speaker and piano were right in front of the diaphragm. 

Also! Here's his description of getting Graham to record for Berliner:

Then there was George Graham... a member of and Indian Medicine Troupe doing one-night stands in the spring and summer and in winter selling quack medicines at the street corners. His tall, lanky figure, draped in a threadbare Prince Albert coat and adorned with a flowing tie, his wide-brimmed Stetson hat and his ready stream of wit combined to extract the dimes and nickels from his simple audience in exchange for a bottle of coloured water. 
I discovered him one day on the corner of Seventh and Pennsylvania Avenue selling a liver cure to a crowd of spell-bound negroes. He was assisted by John O'Terrell, who strummed the banjo and sang songs to draw the crowd. I brought this pair to Emile Berliner. Always a student of humanity, he was delighted... George recorded...his famous talk on "Liver Cure" in which he cited the instance of a sick man taking one bottle of his liver cure, and when he died the liver was so strong that they had to take it out kill it with a club.

Yep, that was this guy:

The image that Gaisberg pieces together with Graham is really very vivid, and puts us right there at where he found him. Of course, this is ever more tangible by seeing the two picture we have of him. It's all fitting together. 

His description of Charlie Tainter is also one of the best articulated of his character descriptions in this early portion. Here's a picture before the description:

That's him in the late-1870's. 

Charles Sumner Tainter was a scientist as well as mechanical genius. I can see him now working at a watch-makers lathe with a glass to his eye; he had a touch as delicate as a woman's. I never knew anyone who lived so abstemiously...
Tainter was an Englishman an a confirmed tea-drinker. Indeed, he taught me how to brew and enjoy it. The perfume of that special China blend of his haunts me still. Between the cups he would mount the diaphragm and adjust the angle of the cutting stylus. In his clear Yorkshire voice he would test them with:
"Caesar, Caesar, can you hear what I say---this, which; s-ss-sss."
The stress was alway laid on the sibilants, these being the most difficult sounds to record. In playing back the test, at the slightest indication of the "s" sound, he would smile with joy and treat himself to another cup. 

Certainly one of the best characters who Gaisberg truly admired, more than most of us would think, since Tainter hadn't much to do with Gaisberg early on. 

Before I finish, here's his full description of AtLee, who turned out to be his very first project while employed at Columbia in 1889:

[AtLee's]pompous announcements which introduced each performance in tones that made the listener visualise a giant. In reality he was a mere shrimp of a man, about five feet in his socks, that little government clerk with a, deep powerful voice.Of this and his fine flowing moustache he was mighty proud. After his office hours, from nine to four, as a wage-slave of the U. S. Government, he would return to his modest home where I would join him. In the parlour stood an old upright piano and a row of three phonographs lent to him by the Columbia Phonograph Company. Together we would turn out, in threes, countless records of performances of "Whistling Coon", "The Mocking bird" and "The Laughing song". I can still hear that reverberating announcement:

"THE MOCKINGBIRD" BY JOHN YORKE ATLEE, ARTISTIC WHISTLER, ACCOMPANIED BY PROFESSOR GIASBERG.

I was then only sixteen, some professor...

AtLee has pretty much seemed exactly the same in other descriptions of him out there, not much is different from what we've already heard, but of course, Gaisberg's diction is priceless. It seems as though working for AtLee was horrid for him, though it must have secretly been a joy. 

There were more stories, but that will make this post just as unmanageable as Sousa's music blowing in the wind, so I'll stop here. 

Hope you enjoyed this! 

Fascinating new Theories

After conversing with Ryan Wishner last evening, we came to some interesting conclusions and notions that had not previously been discussed. Before I get into all that, I must revise some of what I said in the last post, and add to it. It seems that with a little help, we've been able to find some more on these two:

 Dana 

and

All-right, so it seems that we've figured out the birthdates for everyone in Issler's orchestra! Now that's better than collectors have known for many a decade! So, lets list them in chronological order, birthdate and deathdate:

David Brown Dana(1850-c.1914)

Edward Issler(1856-1943)

George Schweinfest(1862-1949)

William Tuson(1864-1943)

Got it! It seemed really surprising to Charlie Judkins and I to find that not only was Dana older than the others, but he was older than everyone had expected, and than all the old recording sources gu-estimated. With his birthdate being 1850, Dana would have been 39 when he began recording with Issler. He would have been in his 40's when recording regularly with Issler which is very unusual for the time, and really puts it in to an interesting perspective. Also, something to correct from the last post, Dana was not originally from Patterson New Jersey, that's where he was in the 1880's, he was originally from Rhode Island. Something interesting to note, Dana's father John was a machinist. This fact further cements the strange connections of machinery/engineering and musicians in general. If there's an engineering mindset in a family, there's going to inevitably be a musician in the family somewhere, it's just how it happens. 

Think about it,

Ben Harney was a fantastic mathematician before he found music.

Hylands' father was a Locomotive engineer. 

Dana's father was a machinist.

Banta tuned and repaired pianos as a child

It's all starting to fit together. Finally was have somewhere to start with Dana, though we don't know when he died. The guesses that many sources online state are actually not too inaccurate, since from what we can find, he certainly died in the mid-1910's, but the exact year is what we can't find. Either way, he was in his sixties when he died, which was certainly better than average in the era. We found Tuson's dates, which were much more exact than expected, since these Issler members seem to be a real project in terms of piecing together. Tuson lived a long life like Schweinfest, at almost 80 when he died, that's nearing Issler and Schweinfest's age(they were both 87 when they died). Not much else was found on Tuson, though the dates were really what we needed to start, since no one seemed to have found them before then. 

Now that we got that out of the way...

Now back to the beginning of the post. 

So last evening, many of these new theories we discussed were some that need to be shared. Most of these seem as though they were completely wild and outrageous. To begin, we go back to that strange connection in the last post between Thomas Hindley and the Issler crew. 

It's likely that the only reason this piece was recorded so many times in the 1890's is because Hindley was a close friend of the studio musicians. By that, I mean the first studio musicians, Issler and his orchestra. The sole fact that Hindley was mentioned in a single section working in the same pit orchestra as Dana and Tuson suggests a direct connection between "Patrol Comique" and the earliest recording stars. It does seem a little strange that such a somewhat obscure piece like that was recorded so many times in a short period, by essentially all the popular studio musicians. 

This brings me to another theory, what about Hindley directly? What if...he  was in the recording studios? It wouldn't come as a shock if Hindley just happened to be one of those studio pianists for the more obscure record companies early on(1889-1894). Really think about this, what is the composition of "Patrol Comique" like? Well, if you were to ask me, I would say it sounds an awful lot like the style that was associate with Fred Hylands, and only Hylands in this matter, because it doesn't really sound like Issler as much as it does Hylands. Okay, here's the piece as written:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKKOMK4may4

Not only do we see well founded syncopation, we see alternating an ever-interesting left hand playing. Hmm...

I'm not saying that Hindley is on any of those dozen or so takes of "Patrol Comique" out there, but with all of this being said, there's a slight possibility of this being so. Of course, the likelihood of this is so slight that it shouldn't be well-noted. However, the possibility of such a pianist as Hindley being a studio star is a little more than just a coincidence. After doing some digging on Hindley, he appears to have been the music director of the famous fifth avenue theater in New York in the 1880 in to the later-1890's. 

Here's a not-so-great drawing of him from a New York Theatrical Paper, dated 1891(though the picture's probably from c.1887)

It was stated that oddly enough, Hindley was from Manchester England, and he emigrated to the U. S. in 1870. Okay, so it seems he was probably around Dana's age, because it says that he got work in orchestras out in the U. S. by 1871. It seems that he was a cornet and piano player, which is an odd combination, but makes sense since he was mentioned as working with Dana, who was also a cornetist. He seemed to be mentioned in theatrical papers similarly to Hylands, since they were both music directors, and worked in various popular orchestra pits in vaudeville. Funny to think that Hindley was likely connected to the recording studios, as well as being a pit rival and director of Hylands, and even a musical writer! Wow. Seems we've kind of found a Hylands double! Well, he was doing all of this a little earlier than Hylands was, but the amount of parallels seem to be surprising. 

Wow! The similarities between Hindley and Hylands are astonishing!

It must be noted that Dana was in Newark NJ in the 1870's, as well as Issler, and Hindley just the same. So without a doubt it seems that these characters knew each other, and were likely friends from working in similar pits and with similar companies. While more unfolds about Hindley, I will report in coming blog posts, since this strange connection of him maybe being a studio pianist is not just a small crazy thing. We need to keep this in mind when listening to brown wax. There's not much we can do with this information as of now, but we need to save it for when more unfolds. 

Okay, now to another fantastic theory. 

We certainly know that freaky chap. Yes indeed, Len Spencer. So, his beginnings in recording may seem pretty clear on the surface, but in reality, they're missing a lot of the essential pieces of information. First of all, the dates are often a little fuzzy, some people say 1889, 1888, and even 1887. Why the hell does this matter? It's just a date.

Well, I'll tell you why it matters. 

This may seem a little outlandish, but think about this. I firmly stand on 1887 as the date he began working with the phonograph. Only because he must have started having to run errands for his father to fix the new-fangled machine(phonograph) owned by the college. The local company in Washington at the time(1887) was Bell and Tainter. Of course, during this time, the boys(Bell and Tainter) were working on all sorts of strange sound devices, though their latest triumph over Edison was the Graphophone. They also invented the idea of wax cylinders(Ha! take that Edison!). 

With this being said, young busy teacher Len Spencer had to run some errands for his old dad. Think of it like how young people now have to often help old people with their cell phones. Same thing. Len's curiosity soon boiled over for this graphophone thingy. But of course, since Len was curious, he soon got to a different idea. Doing something different from office dictation(what it was intended for). Spencer recorded sound effects like tapping a pen on a table, hitting a wine glass with a spoon, and soon wondered, "What do I sound like?"

There you go folks. In 1887, Len Spencer was likely one of the first to ever think that recording music was a good idea, and had public potential(NOT JUST AS EXPERIMENTS!!!) and therefore likely made the first commercial recordings of popular music. This is Len Spencer folks. Just before Columbia  was formed, he was already pitching the idea to Bell and Tainter that the future of the graphophone was music! Oddly enough, it was around 1888 that Bell and Tainter began experimenting with recording music for their contraption. Well, there you go, because of Spencer, Bell and Tainter(who in 1889 fell into Columbia) became the first commercial recording company. We know that Spencer recorded commercially by 1889, but it's likely that in 1888, he was doing the same he did for Columbia, for Bell and Tainter. Thanks to Frank Dorian, we know how Spencer started, at Columbia that is. 

See there's your issue. Dorian didn't know about his association with Bell and Tainter, which would HAVE  to have been what he was using if he was conducting all of those experiments in 1887 and 1888. Columbia was not selling their own machines under patent until 1889(ish). Spencer likely made trips to the Volta Lab several times in 1887 and 1888, until he learned of Columbia getting set up at their famous Lab on Pennsylvania Avenue:

Thinking of dandy Spencer, he probably rode a fancy bicycle to the Volta and early Columbia labs to buy and steal parts and pieces from them for his experiments. Of course sooner than later Master Easton took to the young man and allowed him to record and conduct his experiments under their roof rather than awkwardly doing so at the business college. It also must have been out of the fact that the slim management Columbia hired at the time were well-interested in Spencer's curious desire to promote recording music. We know that in 1889, that was when recording music took off for all the record companies. Spencer's influence was no longer present after that. 

We also know that 1889 was when studio musicians were hired for the first time, since recording music was the future at that point. In about early March of 1889, Ed Issler became the first studio pianist, and around the same time, Issler brought in his newly-formed parlor orchestra.

Whew! With all of that being said, I'll save the Rag-time theories for the next post. Those were just as important as these listed above, but will make this post too long. 

Hope you enjoyed this!