Making a CD (Part I): What began filled with hope and anticipation ended with a ho-hum! I won’t trace the origins of recorded music here, but I will say the first contact I had with the recorded medium, records that is, was in the early 50’s at the small hall on our street in Westmount. My Father and a few friends had set up a screen and projector to show Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation. With the film reels were a dozen or so large circular disks with holes in the centers; “78 RPM” was written on their brown center labels. While the film played my Dad slipped these records on a large brown machine and when he applied the long arm with the round disk and needle something magical took place. The large speaker boxes up near the screen suddenly came to life. Music, talking, cheering crowds all came from that spinning disk. This was a phenomenon that a 7 year old found hard to fathom. It would confound me for only a few more years, but at the time it would be one of life’s great mysteries…at least for a kid with a vivid imagination. My second encounter with the marvels of the tiny disk filled with music was in the late 50’s when my older brother brought home a borrowed Victrola and 2 records. He played those two 45’s over and over so many times that they were imbedded in my brain. The songs were: Buddy Knox’s, “Party Doll” and Billy Grammer’s, “Gotta Travel On”. And when I began to unlock the marvels of playing rock and roll guitar I learned these two classic songs and still play them today. But when a young person takes up an instrument there’s a good change he’ll do it for personal enjoyment with no ulterior motive in mind. Then there are others that want to immortalize their creative musing into something more permanent. I fell under the second category. During my playing years with the Saints in the 60’s and early 70’s making records was never an option available to us. The next band, Ramblin Band was not good enough to make records but the last band, Medusa, was indeed good enough to record. Medusa was blessed with the talents of former Saints’ keyboard marvel, Paul Dunn. Paul had written two songs for the band: “Radio” and “The Sky’s The Limit”. In the spring of 1978, we traveled to Dartmouth to record in old friend, Russ Brennan’s Solar Studio. Russ offered us 8 hours of studio time, mixing and 1000 singles. I was a gift from an old friend. For all intents and purposes I thought this would be my one and only trip to the recording studio and I would have a record to show that I’d accomplished something musical in my life to that point. Paul left shortly after the record’s release to join the Minglewood Band and continued on, and with Paul’s younger talented brother, Kim, we continued the club circuit in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. By that time I was approaching my mid 30’s and tired of the pressure cooker of a group that size. We officially broke up in mid 1980. I consoled myself with the fact that I had gotten to the recording studio and actually played on one of those revolving disks that was such a great fascination back when I was 7 years old. I never thought that I would see the inside of a recording studio again and happily settled into my new life. But there were others making plans that would draw me back into the Land of Oz… Plans that would be both good and bad. But that’s for the next time.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 05:20:43 +0000
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