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Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording PDF

282 Pages·2006·14.912 MB·English
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MAKINGEASYLISTENING Commerce and Mass Culture Series JUSTIN WYATT, SERIES EDITO R Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording Tim J. Anderson Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture Michael Kackman Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913-1934 Anne Morey Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality Robert T. Self Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media Eileen R. Meehan and Ellen Riordan, Editors Directed by Allen Smithee Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock, Editors Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema Barbara Wilinsky Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent Matthew Bernstein Hollywood Goes Shopping David Desser and Garth S. Jowett, Editors Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood Sarah Berry Active Radio: Pacifica's Brash Experiment Jeff Land MAKING Easy Listening Material Culture and Pstwar American Recording Tim J. Anderson Commerce and Mass Culture Series UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS MINNEAPOLIS • LONDON Lyrics from "There's a New Sound" (BMI Work #1489069) as coauthored by Tony Burrello and Tom Murray are reprinted courtesy of DBA Omnibus Music Co. Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were originally published as "Buried under the Fecundity of His Own Creations: Rethinking the Stockpile, the Standing Reserve, and the Recording Bans of the American Federation of Musicians, 1942 to 1944 and 1948", American Music, Summer 2004. Portions of chapters 3 and 4 were originally published as "Which Voice Best Becomes the Property? Tie-Ups, Intertexts, and Versioning in the Production of My Fair Lady," Spectator: The University of California Journal of Film and Television Criticism 17, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1997). Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu LIBRARY OF CONGRES S CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Anderson, Tim J. Making easy listening: material culture and postwar American recording / Tim J. Anderson. p. cm. — (Commerce and mass culture series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 13:978-0-8166-4517-6 (he) — ISBN 13:978-0-8166-4518-3 (pb) ISBN 10:0-8166-4517-5 (he : alk. paper) — ISBN 10:0-8166-4518-3 (pb: alk. paper) 1. Sound recording industry—United States—History. 2. Sound recordings—Production and direction—United States. 3. Popular culture— United States—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. ML3790.A63 2006 781.490973—dc22 2005035679 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beer- mats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied in school, including music. —NICK HORNBY, High Fidelity This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Opening Tracks xiii Part I. Managing the Recording Process and Rethinking the Recording Bans 1. Buried under the Fecundity of His Own Creations: The First Strike of the American Federation of Musicians 3 2. Counterreform and Resignation: The Second Strike of the American Federation of Musicians 27 Part II. Production, Reproduction, and the Case of My Fair Lady 3. Which Voice Best Becomes the Property? Stitching the Intertext of My Fair Lady 51 4. Listening to My My Fair Lady: Versioning and the Recorded Music Object 77 Part III Stereo, Hi-Fi, and the Modern Pleasures of Easy Listening 5. A Tale of Two Ears: The Concert Hall Aesthetic and Stereo 105 6. Space, the Pliable Frontier: Stereo as the New Spatial Palette of Audio 251 Conclusion: The Flip Side (and a Few Concluding Thoughts) 179 Notes 189 Works Cited 217 Index 233 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IN MANY WAYS THIS BOO K BEGINS IN THE RECORD STORES OF Arizona, particularly Circles, Roads to Moscow, Zias, Zips, Locos, East- side Records, PDQs, and Dab Nabbit's. Some of these have folded, others grown, but my research began in the aisles and beside the counters of these stores. Like all good record stores, they provided me with a new way to imagine what the world was. Through imports, novelties, rarities, used catalogues, healthy debates, and heartfelt laughter, the people I met and worked with in these stores—people like Mike Cejka, Mike Pawlicki, Ned Simonson, Bruce Williams, Anne Cavness, and Jon Lauer—laid the foundation for this book. Even though I have lost touch with some of them, I consider them among my first serious teachers of why popular music matters. My intellectual preparation for this work began when I was an under- graduate at the University of Arizona under the tutelage of Mary Beth Haralovich and Eileen Meehan. Each challenged me to think through media history and theory in a manner that kept audiences, artists, art, and social context in a vibrant dialogue where—while everything mattered— the writing should be focused on one specific problem at a time. They also encouraged me to ask the same questions at the graduate level and supported me as I often stumbled through my midtwenties, wondering whether I should be spending a significant chunk of my life in a city as cold as Chicago trying to answer questions few seemed to care about. Luckily, I received gracious support from Northwestern University's Department of Radio/Television/Film, a department whose intellectual engagement was matched only by enthusiasm for study and the chal- lenges of research. Here I learned how to become a scholar whose inten- sity would at least begin to match the demands of the objects and artists ix

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