Granted, the Paramount case is a perfect storm, but I think there was also a
minor American label issue of "Stormy Weather" from about 1952 which has
similarly vanished - Peter Copeland gave details in his book "Sound
Recordings."
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
> Thanks Roger, and Ted. This is interesting reading. I still can't believe
> that if a record was actually sold at retail and made it "out into the
> wild" that it just disappeared without a trace, no copies exist anywhere
> and none ever existed to be dubbed to another medium. So I'm wondering if
> these lost Willie Brown sides were never put into the retail distribution
> system, and died in that Chair Factory #2 pile?
>
> -- Tom Fine
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Roger Kulp" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 6:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
>
>
>>From the article on the Mainspring Press site:
> The metal
> masters, thousands of records, record sleeves, and recording ledgers
> laid dormant in Chair Factory # 2 for almost a decade, until the summer
> of 1942. The United States had declared war on Japan after the Pearl
> Harbor attack in December 1941. Now, with shellac, metal, copper, and
> paper drives being organized by the war department, WCC president Otto
> Moeser realized there was some money to be made.Brian Wilburn, June 2002:
> “When
> we were kids, Chair Factory # 2 was closed and all they used it for
> was storage. Of course we found our way into it. Kids were going in and
> out all the time, we weren’t supposed to be, but we were. Empty
> buildings are a magnet for kids. There was no security at all. In those
> days Port Washington had a police force of three cops. Nobody knew the
> meaning of the word security in those days. We were in that plant all
> the time and I probably destroyed two to three thousand records. We made
> frisbees out of them, we sailed them off the roof. And when we got a
> little older we used a shotgun. You could get away with it, using a
> shotgun in city limits. The building was right next to the railroad
> tracks. There was nothing around it so it was not dangerous.” [Close to
> the Chair Factory # 2 there was a small garage-like building next to the
> railroad tracks that was used to store records, and these were shipped
> from this building after orders came in. In the 1960s collector Dennis
> Klopp saw a wood eagle-on-a-globe on top of this building which
> resembled the Paramount logo. It was one foot high and orange in color.
> Klopp took it off the building and still owns it.]“They
> had all the masters, the castings, the bronze and brass, stuff to
> produce records, stored in Plant # 2 on the west side. It was all in one
> great big room. After the war started they started scrap metal drives,
> find bronze and brass, that kind of stuff, for the war. They suddenly
> realized they had a load of that stuff they didn’t need. So it all got
> loaded in a couple of freight cars [and was] shipped off. I am sure it
> got sold to some scrap dealer. That was the end of that. This was during
> the summer of 1942.
> http://www.mainspringpress.com/nyrl.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --- On Sun, 1/23/11, Ted Kendall <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Ted Kendall <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Sunday, January 23, 2011, 3:54 PM
>
> In the specific case of Paramount, the reasons are not too far to seek.
> The company was a small scale operation, selling to very local, poor
> audiences, hence small sales, especially after the crash. The change to
> electrical recording had already devastated Paramount's finances to the
> extent that its hitherto fine pressing materials were abandoned in favour
> of something that looks and plays like a cinder track. The repertoire was
> Gebrauchsmusik, and ephemeral Gebrauchsmusik at that, played with brads or
> thrice-turned needles (economic pressure again), so the survival rate is
> depressingly low from the original market. When the company collapsed, its
> repertoire did not pass to one of the majors, and most of the remaining
> stock got Frisbeed over a marshalling yard one boring summer. Collectors
> have dug, combed and cajoled for nigh on fifty years to find some of this
> stuff, with an intensity which frightens me. Although one should never say
> "never", I wonder
> whether some of the rarer Paramounts will ever surface. The Charlie Patten
> canon is still incomplete, too, I believe...
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Fine"
> <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 4:35 PM
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
>
>
>> Sorry if this post has been received in other forms, I hadn't received it
>> yet so I assumed it was killed off by the ARSC server for some reason.
>>
>> I have a question along these lines.
>>
>> There was a recent article in Goldmine magazine about Willie Brown blues
>> 78's on Paramount that no
>> copies exist anymore:
>> http://www.goldminemag.com/features/willie-brown-where-are-you
>>
>> How is this possible? How many copies of these records were pressed? Were
>> they only sold in a small
>> region? And no one saved any of them, not in attics or old general stores
>> or old jukeboxes? If so
>> few were pressed, how was that commercially viable? It seems to me like
>> once you make a stamper you
>> just as soon press more copies than you expect to sell and then hope you
>> get lucky. The business
>> model I always understood for records is that extra copies are cheap,
>> what's expensive is the
>> recording, mastering, plating, etc.
>>
>> -- Tom Fine
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 10:02 AM
>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
>>
>>
>>> Excellent question. Why not photo-admittance? Well, they don't call it
>>> that, but they do use it, too...
>>> Wiki has a page on CD glass mastering and explains that there are two
>>> kinds of photoresist (positive or negative) that can be washed away,
>>> after laser developing, but there is also
>>> NPR (non-photoresist) glass mastering, which uses an organic polymer dye
>>> as the laser-beam target layer. This dye layer is deeper than a pit,
>>> much the same as the lacquer layer, on a blank destined for vertical or
>>> stereo cutting, is deeper than the most deep, intentional embossing
>>> (gouge?). The pitch on a CompuDisk or Zuma is set to avoid hitting the
>>> bedrock of the supporting layer, whereas I believe that the photoresist
>>> layer, in the former-mentioned CD glass mastering method, is washed away
>>> clean down to the substrate - unlike a well-cut lacquer. Fortunately,
>>> the CD player is only trying to make a variable strobe light display,
>>> rather than musical wiggles... at that point in the chain.
>>>
>>>
>>> Andrew
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jan 23, 2011, at 7:49 AM, George Brock-Nannestad wrote:
>>>
>>>> From: Patent Tactics, George Brock-Nannestad
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ----- are they not etched into the glass afterwards? What is the
>>>> photoresist
>>>> resistant against?
>>>>
>>>> George
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Regarding CDs, the pits are in a thin photoresist layer that is spun
>>>>> onto
>>>>> the glass substrate.
>>>>>
>>>>> Jerry
>>>>> Media Sciences, Inc.
>>>>>
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
>>>>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of George Brock-
>>>>>> Nannestad
>>>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2011 6:09 PM
>>>>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
>>>>>>
>>>>>> From: Patent Tactics, George Brock-Nannestad
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Stewart Goodeman wrote [quote]:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I know in 1943, when they recorded the Rodgers and Hart
>>>>>>> revival of "A Connecticut Yankee" they actually used glass.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ----- just to avert any confusion: glass means that the disc that
>>>>>> supported
>>>>>> the layer that the cut was made in was made of glass. The layer could
>>>>> have
>>>>>> been lacquer, or it could have been wax, both were used. It has been
>>>>>> thought
>>>>>> that glass was a cheap substitute for aluminum that was the most used
>>>>>> material for lacquer mastering discs, due to other uses for aluminum
>>>>>> during
>>>>>> the war. But in fact, the quality of the cut in glass-based discs was
>>>>>> better
>>>>>> than for aluminum, because the surface of glass was much smoother.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This is very different from the use of glass in the manufacture of
>>>>>> CDs;
>>>>>> here
>>>>>> the pits are really represented in the glass as a stage of
>>>>>> manufacture.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Kind regards,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> George
>>>
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