British documentary director Bernard MacMahon has created something really special in his superb AMERICAN EPIC series. It's something almost as amazing as the studio engineer who has lovingly re-assembled and restored the only existing Western Electric lathe. This machine is a kind of massive mechanical piece of brilliance, in which a musician plays into a microphone and the sound is amplified and cut into a record right there and then. The whole thing is operated by a pulley with a 105 pound weight on it, when the weight hits the floor the record stops. The weight takes around three minutes to hit the ground, and that's why we have three minute pop songs.
Back in the early years of the last century, records were sold to rich people in the big cities. Then radio came and the record companies got scared. So they decided to take this amazing massive machine, created by the geniuses at AT&T, around the country to record real people playing real American music. This was a period when if you were a great blues guitarist in Memphis you probably hadn't heard music from another part of the country, so there was a kind of purity to the genres of music that were coming out of different parts of America. There was also a kind of purity to the technology. Three minutes, straight to disc, no post-production, no re-takes. You position the people around the mike, rather than the other way round. That can be enlivening for some musicians, and scary to others.
Back in the early years of the last century, records were sold to rich people in the big cities. Then radio came and the record companies got scared. So they decided to take this amazing massive machine, created by the geniuses at AT&T, around the country to record real people playing real American music. This was a period when if you were a great blues guitarist in Memphis you probably hadn't heard music from another part of the country, so there was a kind of purity to the genres of music that were coming out of different parts of America. There was also a kind of purity to the technology. Three minutes, straight to disc, no post-production, no re-takes. You position the people around the mike, rather than the other way round. That can be enlivening for some musicians, and scary to others.
