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Mr. Shellac and Miss Vinyl
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The world of digital music, amazing as it is, lacks the warmth and intimacy that was the hallmark of LPs. The true aficionado has today gone back to the valves, forsaking the chips. M. BHAKTAVATSALA traces the journey of recorded music.
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WHAT IRVING Wallace writes of in his book The Seven Minutes, is ecstasy of three minutes for music lovers. It began with Edison, who heard a garbled sound on his cylinder. Thus was born recorded sound. But it took an émigré from Germany, appropriately called Berliner, to spread the cylinder into a disk and track the grooves with a needle. Another inventor, Eldridge Johnson, patented a spring motor for the hand-cranking gramophone of Emile Berliner. That's when I woke up to music.
The generation that spurted into its teens in India with the old 78 rpm shellac on the gramophone was a blessed one. Every morning broke with new fresh-minted songs in a divine voice, set to divine music, and singing a divine lyric. There was a surfeit of musical wonders. The film one went to see stayed in the mind in the form of songs. Since there was no replay, most of us bought songbooks and hummed; or, if possessed of a singing voice, sang ourselves.
The well-to-do had by then the gramophone. The gleaming sharp metal needle sat on the plate (as the record was then called in India) and the sound careened out onto the streets. There was no way its sound could be modulated. A crowd would promptly gather in front of the house — avidly soaking in the three-minute joy.
True, radio also had arrived, but so did a man called Keskar as Information Minister who considered film music vulgar, and banned it on the All India Radio. Thus was born the redoubtable Radio Ceylon and the witching hour of 7 a.m. to 8, always commencing with Lata's "Abhee tho mein jawan hoon", and concluding with a K.L. Saigal song.
The shellacs were sturdy and took a long time to wear out despite the heavy sound box-weighted needle grooving into them. One could buy sets of six, if one wanted plays (Danashoora Karna of Kottur Basappa) or sound tracks (Sivaji's Manohara). Each side played three minutes, give or take 15 seconds.
Now, pick any one of the songs of the '50s and analyse it. The sparse instruments were played by masters such as Pannalal Ghosh, Ustad Bismilla Khan, Emani Shankara Sastry, and the like. And they were all there playing on their own instruments inherited down generations. The lyrics were written by great poets. The music was composed by some miracle men, who just happened from nowhere from all corners of the country and did the impossible. They composed a complete musical work equivalent to any in the Western echelon like the symphony, within that limited time of three minutes. There isn't one song composed by these men that one dearly wished had not gone and on. Sadly, it is over before it started. I will quote just two. C. Ramachandra's "Tum Na Jane" from Shinshinaki Boobla Boo and Naushad's "O Bhagawan" from Baiju Bawra. That is just a sample. The miracle repeated thousands of times through the late '40s, all of 50s and some of 60s. I don't know why three minutes were sacrosanct. May be the technological reasons of the platter, stylus arm, and the speed of the 78 RPM.
All that changed with the coming of Miss Vinyl, who was svelte, slim, and flexible, unlike Mr. Stiff Shellac. There were 45 RPMs (holding two songs on either side) and the 33{+1}/{-3} RPMs, which could hold six and more on either side with a running time of 20 minutes. True to the feminine character, everything connected with the LP (as Miss Vinyl came to be called) got to be more and more refined. The gramophone became a turntable, the heavy masculine needle became the wafer thin stylus, which delicately sensed and sent silent signals through wire to an amplifier, which made the woofers and tweeters shake the earth. Typical of a woman. Sly.
I met her first when I sailed from Colombo to Tilbury Docks on a slow boat at the age of 19, an ignoramus at cutlery, culinary protocol, pronunciation of Vs and Ws, and Western music, among many other things. Almost the first thing I heard was Strauss (Johan) on a TK 5 box tape recorder, by which I was instantly smitten. The tape recorder was a revelation, but the long spool tapes were hardly portable. I don't know why, but I went into things — music, pubs, theatre, pubs, college, pubs, cinema, pubs — like someone with a terminal disease. There was music everywhere and it all came from Miss Vinyl in jukeboxes! They were singles, they were everywhere, and everyone made love through them. When one sighted a girl to send a message to, one did it through the juke. If one was hurt and wished to be alone, one did it through the juke. But most of all, if one wished to let one's hair down and dance away, it was "rock around the clock" with Miss Vinyl on the juke. By now, the LPs had come in a big way, opening up big colourful outlets in Tottenham Road and Oxford Street. The sleeves were magnificent multicoloured art. I avidly collected the first Beatles albums. I was hung up on them even before they hit big time and became cult figures. Walking across the Mersey river, which was just behind my digs in Manchester, I had chanced upon a gang of scruffy-looking boys from the backstreets of Liverpool called the Quarrymen at a pub called the Jackson's Boat. They were five of them, including Peter Best (drums) and Stewart Baker (guitar). Ringo came later. That used to be dancing music. Today it is classic, as are the sleeves of their LPs.
It is now old story that the magnetic tape, beginning with the 1/8th cassette marketed by Philips, became an international hit and stayed that way. For a while, the LP held its own on grounds of quality. The invention of high fidelity, followed by the full range "orthophonic" recording, made a great deal of difference. Then came the most enduring stereophonic sound. But then all these were readily incorporated into the CD and DVD, both laser-driven in pitted disks, promising "crystal clear" digital sound.
Slowly a realisation dawned that the digital world, amazing as it was, did lack a certain warmth, a certain intimacy that seemed to be the hallmark of the shellacs and LPs. The real aficionado today has gone back to the valves, forsaking the chips. And to complete the change, s/he has also opted to go back to the LP. Now the top-of-the-line turntable, arm and stylus, cost much more than the digital gizmo. After all they are handcrafted, just like the music that was made those years.
And there are still some eccentrics like me who firmly believe that there was the smell of the earth in Mr. Shellac, which even Miss Vinyl lacked. Remember that the recording studios of yore were intimate little rooms where everyone crowded around the microphone to make music. When one listened to the gems of yesteryears, one heard the souls of real people, the very ambience of the little recording rooms. Today one hears synthetic sounds, even when they recycle the old gems. Little does the present generation realise that the greatest gift of the past is not those gems but those "three minutes". For no ostensible reason, the music composed today is composed also just for three minutes, though there is no limitation on time in the digital world. That, you see, is a great blessing, considering the rubbish that is put out in the name of music today.
Will that old magic ever come back?
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!"
Thank you Mr. Shellac and Miss Vinyl for making our youth so special.
A glorious centenary
WHEN THE young Gauhar Jan, pictured here, a dancing girl with a sweet voice, swept into the makeshift studio in a Calcutta hotel on November 11, 1902, her retinue of accompanists and relatives in tow, history was being made. She made the very first recording in India, under the supervision of Frederick William Gaisberg, for the Gramophone Company. This was just 25 years after Thomas Alva Edison made his first recording. Gauhar, incidentally, died in Mysore State, in 1930.
We've come a long way since then. Here is a tribute to all those whose music and lyrics moulded our thoughts and tastes down these 100 years.
What a wonderful legacy of music they have left us, describing our every feeling, exploring every emotion, tantalising us, tormenting us, making us what we are.
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