In case you're just tuning in, I recently established (last post) that Enoch Light started with the Prom label in December, 1951, and that he split in 1954, forming his own labels, which I collectively call "Waldorf." He had Waldorf Music Hall, 18 Top Hits, Waldorf Record Corp., and Top Hit Tunes. (I think I got those right.) Among others. And this post at Bob's blog appears (note: appears) to verify my theory that Prom was a Synthetic Plastics Co. label from the get-go. (Thanks, Bob.) The piece referenced by Bob notes that Enoch left SPC in 1954 to form "Waldorf." Which is my shorthand for Enoch's labels, which means that the article stole the idea from me. Except it couldn't have, because it was written when I was only eight years old. Yet, somehow, I just know it was my original thought.
So, Enoch leaves SPC in 1954 to form Waldorf. However... a couple problems, and they consist of two discs used in the making of today's playlists: Waldorf Record Corp. EPs which appear to hail from 1952 and 1953! Behold:
And I've found at least one source which claims Enoch Light started Waldorf in 1952. Which is two years before 1954. So, who to believe? What to believe? Where to run and hide? Why are they doing this to me? Why? And who are "they," anyway? They can at least come out in the light where I can see them.
And I had concluded that the "Prom Orchestra" credit on the Prom label marked Enoch Light's exit from the label--namely, that any Prom single which features that generic credit can be presumed to be post-Enoch. Well, it turns out there are, in fact, Enoch-era sides that say "Prom Orchestra." Oh, and this is cute--on some of the Proms, it's the all-caps "PROM Orchestra." Well, whoop-de-doo.
Some questions answered, some new ones raised. Just another day... At the Blog! (Theme music, fade)
So, we start with the ten-inch Parade 78 shown above--a 78 rpm EP containing six Prom releases, two of them MY(P)WHAE reruns--The Darktown Strutters' Ball and There'll Be No Teardrops..., but they sound a bit better than before. We're at a point in record history when 78s were still sounding better than 45s and LPs. Plus, a spirited I Get So Lonely, and a good fake of Till Then--and the latter is a cover of the Hilltoppers, not the Mills Brothers, who had enjoyed great success with the same number a decade before. The 1944 version was practically doo-wop--threw me for a loop when I first heard it. The very lovely Till We Two Are One is very solidly put over by Artie Malvin, and I was suspecting that Tom Glazer had swiped a folk melody for it, as he did with the 1951 Merv Griffin hit, Twenty Three Starlets. (Yes, Merv had early success as a solo singer.) But it turns out Glazer did the words for Till We Two..., not the music. Kills that theory.
Our six bonus tracks include "The Rockets" (Prom's whoever-was-available-to-sing-at-the-time vocal group) doing a quite good version of Oop-Shoop, along with the flip, Papa Loves Mambo, on which Tommy Scott proves he was no Perry Como. Still a fun song. Also, a decent Two Hearts, Two Kisses (Make One Love) a spirited Jambalaya, and okay versions of Pledging My Love and Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me. And here's a cool fact about the Karen Chandler original of Hold Me: its flip, One Dream (Tells Me), was penned by the late Joseph Stefano (as "Jerry Stevens"), the man who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Psycho and produced the first season of The Outer Limits. Now you know.
The first four bonus tracks are from Prom singles (a 78 and two 45s), and the last two come from the Waldorf Record Corp. EPs pictured above. You know--the EPs that couldn't have existed in any logical universe, because their label had yet to be created. But we're in the rack-jobber zone, where anything is possible.
DOWNLOAD: Parade of His A'Poppin' 7802, v. 2, plus bonus tracks
Lee
7 comments:
I'm a bit confused, but that seems to be nature of these things.
Keep in mind that just because a record came out on a label that appears to not have existed at the time, that doesn't mean it did. They could be reissues of things recorded or released earlier on the then-existing labels. And as you said, these labels issued and reissued the same tracks over and over again in infinite combinations. Light could have taken some master with him when he left... I don't know that you could ever be able to build an accurate timeline to match the extant discography, but good luck trying! :)
Haven't they pressed up 'new' singles on labels like Sun of tracks recorded back in the 50's but never released back in the day? 40 years from now, people are going dig those up and claim that they were released back in the day after all. (Although I hope in the future that primary source material from our era is still available, barring the use of an EMP that wipes all digital data...)
Yes, that occurred to me--that's why I worded things carefully ("appear to hail..."). I try to always remember to use qualifying words or phrases, so that I'm not making a universal claim that can shot down with a single counterexample. I didn't want to clutter my essay further, but I had wanted to add that there are a lot of examples of reissued fake hits--I have a big boxed set on Tiara (I think they're SPC) featuring a decade's worth of (fake) hits, and of course this goes with the junk-label bit of getting the maximum mileage out of things--the old re-re-re-repackaging principle. Light may have been without new material to kick off his Waldorf label, so he grabbed older (but still recent) stuff. Another cool possibility is that the Waldorf Record Corp. singles were put out by SPC--that they predate the official Waldorf issues. But the labels don't give me enough info to make a guess with.
Another thing to consider is the chart life of a given hit, circa 1952 or 1953. Back in those days, maybe hits sold for longer periods of time, and maybe the public's short-term memory was longer. With rock and roll, the difference between 1964 and 1962 was epic, but maybe in the 1950s, the difference between 1954 and 1952, hit-wise, didn't seem like such a huge gap. Anyway, I'd wanted to speculate further in my essay, but I opted to keep things (relatively) short. Thanks for chiming in!
Thanks, Lee for posting another winner, at least in my eyes, and to my ears. Very much appreciated. Bryan
My pleasure! Glad you enjoyed. And I've since discovered, after looking through my own early Waldorf singles, that most (or maybe all) of the Prom sides came out on Waldorf Record Corp. EPs. This really presents a mystery....
An intriguing, but not likely, theory is that Waldorf may have started as an SPC sublabel, prior to Enoch making it his own.
I think the shelf-life of a hit back in the Fifties was much longer than it might be today. And that shelf-life was probably extended by the covers/remakes that came out, keeping the hit in the public eye. These days, you'd need to switch out the songs in the jukebox twice a week to try and keep up, but there are still songs that hang around longer than others. What do they call them, 'Summer Anthems', the things that hang around long after the other music released at the same time has faded away. Think about how long that song from Titanic hung around, or Macarena...
I was sort of thinking the same thing. I was a little kid in 1964/65, when the Top 40 moved at lightning speed. And I imagine things moved much more slowly a decade before. And it never occurred to me that the "fake" versions might have prolonged a hit's shelf life, but I can see where it would very possibly have. And, come the late 1950s, RCA and Columbia had figured out there was a "greatest hits" market, and so Perry Como, Guy Mitchell, Doris Day, and Frankie Laine had their biggest hits packaged for (re)sale. Funny how it all came down to $$!
I mean, I can see where they (plural) may very possibly have. It's 5:30, and I'm not fully awake. My sleep med is working far too well. That's not good.
Post a Comment