Reputation

What if you had a song stuck in your head, but had no way to find out anything about the artist? The mystery of an unlabelled record unravels year-over-year. Featuring an interview with reel-to-reel tape collector Bob Purse of the Inches Per Second blog. Learn more at www.ephemeral.show

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
A centeral is the protection of I heard radio. When
a song just hits you, it's a powerful thing. But
what if this song that you just discovered and can't
get enough of it was a mystery. You don't know

(00:24):
who wrote it, you don't know who performed it, and
you have no evidence to go on. You just have
the music looping endlessly, asking questions but answering none. That's
the plot of this episode of the Nickelodeon show Pete
and Pete. Sometimes you don't find a favorite song, sometimes

(00:46):
it finds you. And it's also what happened to master
collector Bob Purse at Chicago's Mammoth Music Mart sale. The
Mammoth Music Mark started sometime in the late seventies and
ran for years to two thousand and two. It was
run by a charity that was seeking funds for a

(01:08):
Luke Garritter's these Als research. There's a history of having
these Mammoth tent sales in Chicago. I don't know what
they do elsewhere, But if you can imagine a tent
the size of a good sized Catholic church inside filled
with nothing but recorded music music related things like instruments,

(01:28):
sheet music, any format of music that's been released. They
would have records, cassetts, a track, and real real tape.
In the vastness of the mammoth tent, there was no
telling what you might find. Everything at the A L
S Sale was something somebody donated for resale at this sale.
So if somebody had a pile of home recorded seventy

(01:52):
eights from Grandma that nobody had played in thirty years,
they might all just get donated. I started going there
in eight five or nine, and that was right around
the time that I was starting to develop a real
interest in real real tapes that might contain people's home
recordings or other if emra are vengeance recordings and things

(02:12):
that weren't regularly available. For Bob, this was like being
a kid in a candy store. It's one of the
biggest portion of my collection real real tapes has come from,
with the exception of the last few years when I've
been able to get things on eBay in large parcels.
But on eBay, I'm not able to pick and choose

(02:32):
what I want based on what I see on the tapes.
I have to just get the parcels if they look good.
At the Man of Music Market, they were there on
the shelf. You could look at each one of them
and they were a bucket piece. Bob narrowed has searched
down by a few criteria. First of all, they had
to be old. I don't know whether it's just me
because I grew up in the sixties that nothing after

(02:53):
about the mid sixties is that much of interest to me,
or if it's because after the mid sixties there's so
much that you can hear. There's TV shows from the
late sixties and seventies. Radio is not that rare, but
getting recordings of things from prior to that period is
often something rare, and its terms of personal life families.
I know what that was like in the sixties and seventies.

(03:14):
I didn't go through it earlier. So for whatever reason,
I tend to look for stuff that I can tell
is probably from before the at least nineteen seventy or
the mid sixties. And I learned how to do that
by learning which tapes and which designs on which tape
boxes come from which different eras. So the first thing
I was looking for was something that was probably at
that point in the mid eighties, at least twenty years old,

(03:36):
and I could I could most of the time figure
that out one major category it could be eliminated off
the bat. I was discarding anything that indicated that it
had somebody's record collection on it, or had classical music,
or had some sort of radio recording that would not
be of interest to me. And then he'd scoured the

(03:56):
labels for what was or wasn't written on them. If
something was particularly old and had no writing on it,
that would snap that up. If something had someone's personal
writing on it that indicated there might be family recordings
on it, I would always get that. If something indicated
that it had some sort of top forty or talk
radio or old time radio on it from the golden age,

(04:19):
I would get that. And if something just looked intriguing
because of something unusual about it, I might get that.
Systematic as this was, Bob was still looking for needles
and haystacks. The majority of the tapes I did not get,
and probably at least a third of the tapes that

(04:39):
I would buy it turned out to be nothing of interest.
With eBay. Now, when I do the same thing, that
way a good percentage and then turn not to be
things that I'm not interested in. But going back to
a l S. I could look at each tape individually,
and it wasn't that much of a crapshoot because they
were a bucket piece. And I could easily walk out
of there with year sixty tapes and potentially go back

(05:00):
of the LFCL lasted ten days, go back four days
later and there'd be a completely new selection, and I'll
get more. In addition to tapes, he would look for
acetate seventy eight, and one faithful day he came across
an inconspicuous selection. It said nothing on it, and it
clearly had been recorded, which intrigued me. That's something I

(05:21):
would get every time I listened to it. Probably within
a couple of weeks. Have got a reputation that ain't good.
Just seemed to think that arts are made. Would he

(05:43):
can't seem just like to a love never good? You
have got to change that reputation. From that day has

(06:09):
I could tell that the one side must be called reputations,
because you've heard the song and there's no other possible
name for that song. The other side had sort of
a jump blues rock and roll to comparently the same
guitarists and all men singing. I dream I gave you
it just blue like any fire. The title of the

(06:35):
song was not apparent to me. That could have been
several things. You didn't really grab me that much, but
it was. It was still interesting. It was clearly a
a group of guys that were used to singing together.
You be that kind of At the time, I wrote
on the label what did I dream of? Which is

(06:56):
the first line of the song, and put a question
mark next to it because I had no idea, And
then I wrote reputation on the on the other side.
And I listened to it and I enjoyed it. Um.
I was not fully intrigued by it at that point.
I was like, oh, that's kind of neat. I listened
to it several times this, by the way, and the
avenues for sharing his findings were limited. This is shortly

(07:18):
before I went online, and certainly before I was making
MP three's of anything, So I probably played it for
those friends who I thought would also dig it. Yeah,
that's a neat little song here. You want to hear
something I found at the l sale. Cool, So I
probably had it out for a little while. But yeah,
it eventually ended up in a been in some sort

(07:38):
with other seventy eight. That's kind of the end of
that piece of the story. The first home recording technology
dates back to the nineteen thirties, before there was home
real for real, and for several years after there was,

(07:58):
people had machines of home that would record seventy eight
on ascetate to keep things straight, and acetate is quite
a bit different than your standard seventy eight is going
to be usually a big hard piece of shellac, But
that's got a pre printed label on it and was
produced by a record jumping right, and if you drop it,

(08:19):
it's gonna shatter. An ascetate it's more often than not
a little bit flexible, very thin, and would probably bounce
off the carpet. They're not necessarily fragile. The name is
in fact a total misnomber, as ascetates contain no actual ascetate.
Most commonly, it's an aluminum core coated with a special lacquer.

(08:39):
These were blank discs manufactured for instantaneous recording and playback.
They were cutting all different sizes thirty three and manufactured
in a range of qualities. You could put one on
your turntable and play it like a regular record, but
not too many times On the other hand, the coding
of them, the actual recording, if they're not taking care of,

(09:00):
could easily flake off in your left with a blank
piece or whatever was underneath it. That seems to depend
on the quality of the material used and how well
it's been stored. When ascetate definitely has a life on it,
that might be forty plays, might be might be a
hundred plays, but it's not gonna last as long as
ascetates for us to document speeches, aid in transcription, make

(09:23):
test recordings, and dubbed demos, it was studio specific technology
until the first home recorders were released. Around people were
able to get essentially a disc cutting machine, and you
could buy blank ascetates. There was one setting you put
it onto record, another one you put it onto play,
and when you push record and you put the stylus down,

(09:45):
it recorded direct to just the same way it might
in a regular studio. You find the same thing on
ascetates that you find unreal the real You find people's
recordings off the radio, You find people talking around the house,
you hear people playing music for it. That was the
only way people had to record at home. Home recording

(10:06):
is likely to take the country by storm as soon
as the public awakens to its possibilities. Parents would like
to preserve the voices of their children, and children, in
turn will be anxious to preserve the voices of their
parents and grandparents, so that the spoken word will remain
after the little folks have grown up or the old
have gone. Presenting the new r C A radio La only,

(10:28):
this technology was hardly accessible to all, only two five
dollars just two round four grand in today's money. With
the economic crash of the Great Depression and the material
shortages of the Second World War, home recording was limited
to those who could afford it. But as the thirties
moved into the forties, products like the recordio and the
voice agraph crept into the middle class. The next format

(10:51):
to enjoy a brief heyday in home recording worked by
magnetizing wire. Wire recorders recorded the sense of the same
way the real The real tree of wire wire recording
is one of the most first, still and fascinating methods
that found recording instructions. Before operating your model lady wire recorded,
read the following general instructions. But both technologies would be

(11:14):
eclipsed by a wartime discovery real the real tape was
discovered by the Allies after World War Two. The German
b As Corporation is the is the current name of
the company that developed it. That's right. Early tape recorders,
like the magnetophone were Nazi technology. During the war. Allied

(11:35):
soldiers listening in to German a M radio broadcasts marveled
at the lengthy musical selections. Seventy eight could only go
for three to four minutes, and a reel of tape
could go at that time for about fifteen minutes. Either
these were around the clock live performances, or the Nazis
had invented a better technology. Real to Real was brought

(11:57):
to the United States, where it caught the eye if
none other than bing Cross, populists, or even a songwriter.
Impressed with the possibilities, Crosby invested seed money in Ampex,
a California electronics company which pioneered tape devices for commercial use.
One of the world's most astonishing and first of all devices,

(12:18):
an Ampex tape bid with early adopters like Crosby and
guitarist Les Paul. Tape would become the standard for studio recording,
but in home recording they were again available to a
very limited audience, mostly real. The real recorders became popular,
i want to say, among the wealthy and the well

(12:39):
to do in the early the mid fifties fifty four,
and exploded in that population in six with the introduction
of stereo, which was two full years before it was vinyl.
If you look at how much they cost them and
do an inflation calculator, a single tape was been like

(13:00):
seventy five dollars in today's money, so you get an
idea of who was buying these things. Hence the rarity
of home recordings from this period and Bob's fascination with
them when I was little. Nobody else had their families
earlier recordings on tape. But it's just it wasn't the thing.
It got to be a thing that machines got smaller

(13:21):
and smaller, and more and more people had them. But
I never have known anybody that had recordings from their
family in which is where our capes started. Well, the
other those last they any comber Jackson. My family bought

(14:02):
a real to real machine. My dad got one at
what must have been an exorbitant price for you know,
he would have been married for four years. He was
he was still early in his career, and it must
have cost quite a bit of money. It was a
former studio model made by the Concert Tone Company. As
the decades moved on, the technology did what you might expect,

(14:25):
it got smaller and cheaper. The concert tone machine I
talked about was about fifty pounds and measures about two
ft by three feet, but when we got to replace
that was about a foot square and probably weighed five pounds.
And at that point home recording was quite common. I

(14:45):
have hundreds of tapes in my collections from probably maybe
around fifty eight onwards. I would say fifty seven or
fifty eight is the point at which I suddenly have
found a lot of tapes of lectures of people around
the house, of things off the TV, things like that.
Three years after he found that mysterious ascetape, Bob and

(15:06):
his friends Stu were again visiting the A. L. S Sale,
as they did every year, this time a real, too
real tape cop Bob's eye. I actually found a tape
box that said head Cheese in all capital letters on it,
and there's no way I'm not picking that up. Also,
it's on a tape box of a company that I
know did not make tapes after the So this is

(15:28):
This is an ancient tape, and it says head cheese
on it, and I'm intrigued. Looking around it appeared to
be only one of a batch of tapes. I find
other tapes on the same brand, with the same handwriting,
and one of them says reputation. I'm like, okay, could
this be the same thing. Unlike the unlabeled ascetape, these

(15:50):
tapes were hands scribbled with information. It's got Marrigeal Moreland,
Don Morland, and several other names on it. It's got
the name Mary Gale written two different ways. And I
have actually found at least a half a dozen, if
not eight or nine tapes that all had what appeared
to be the same handwriting, some of which said head cheese,
some of which had Don Morland's name on them. My

(16:11):
friends still brought one of them and I bought the rest.
I was certainly intrigued. I was like, what is this
going to be? It wasn't even so much about reputation.
It was like, what what is this going to be?
I hear a lot of things. I hear I hear
a radio show hosted by someone named Don Morlands, Welcome
Everybody to another song and Tomorrow program in which he

(16:33):
sang potential hits of the future wild. I heard a
young girl singing acapella a couple of hits of the
early fifties. I heard the song head Cheese, which is

(16:54):
incredibly goofy House who so much to day day? Who
do please? House? Will Way? And I found a different
version of reputation, which I liked as much as I'd

(17:16):
like the original one. I liked twenty times better to
do wow or do wow or do wow? I've got
a reputation very good. It just seemed to think that
our made You can't seem to have got to change
that aputation. The earlier one, Very Gill is about ten

(17:40):
and it's very peppious, very fast, and she sounds like
a ten year old. This reputation, but that's the one
where there's a million rehearsals of it. You could be
a big sensation bills. If you don't really make it best,
what do? A botch of pickled hat won't let you.

(18:03):
But you have got to change that reputation. Lag somebody
tried to do a solo on harmonica. They keep working
on the ending with the centricate court at the end, Danny,
then you know this you were sure on another tape,

(18:31):
and this is the one my friends still bought that
has the version that was on the ascetate, which is David.
Now she's fourteen. It's slower, it's much more professional and
have a little less life to it, but it's still
really good. Recuation. Reputation, reputation, Danny evening. You see, I'm

(19:03):
worked with kids, and I love to listen to kids singing.
I don't like to listen necessarily to train kids singing,
like like Annie Tomorrow, that sort of thing. As much
as I like the later Marrigael stuff. That nineteen fifty
three recording where she's ten is just it just captures me,
but not everything could be a hit. Mommy, Daddy, Bye bye?

(19:24):
Did I put that on the site? Familiar? Yeah? I see,
I don't like that at all. It's a weird one. Yeah,
bye bye, Daddy'll be good? Can go this time? I listen, Mommy,

(19:50):
say by Mommy. There's also a series of tapes labeled

(20:16):
the Tallest Rock Like. A very amateuristic band rehearses in
various styles a song about the Sears Tower. They're awful,
They're they're just awful. They start talking about doing it

(20:40):
in a more rock beat, and one of the guys mentioned, no,
you know, I wrote that song back in the fifties, Backsfire,
which is a song on the flip side of the
Reputation tape. When I looked it up, I did find
a story about how some electricians that helped build the
Sears Tower performed a song called the Tallest Rock at
its opening ceremonies. So I'm figuring this is Don Morland
and musically was just a hobby and that he was actually,

(21:03):
you know, a guy that worked in construction. But the
good stuff here was absolutely golden. The LS sale was
usually in late October. By the end of the year,
I was very much listening to the material on these tapes.
It do my my musical life, probably for a good

(21:23):
three or four months. At that point I was. I
was very obsessed with that, the whole batch of tapes,
mostly of the new version of Reputation and head Cheese
at Home and who was And yet this legendary find

(21:51):
had only widened the musical mystery. Who were these people
and what were these songs? It was definitely intrigued, had
no way to do anything about it. Partially because I
didn't know what I was spelling her name wrong. My
guess is that whoever did on these tapes donated them
to a l S and had donated the athentate a

(22:14):
few years prior. I think it was probably somebody who
lived in that area who maybe died of the family
donated his stuff. In two thousand three, the media archives
site ubu webb invited contributors to share their cool, strange,
and often obscure audio selections each day of the year.

(22:35):
The three sixty five Days project would feature a different
oral treasure on the ubu webb homepage that was being
run by a guy I knew online. And when I
found out about it, it was already two months underway,
and I wrote, and I said, you know, I'd have
a bunch of stuff that you would probably like to
share on there. So immediately I sent him, by far

(22:56):
my best find ever, which is the musical memories of
Camper and of an album that will have to be
a story for another time. And then I thought, the
next best thing I have is Mary Gale. It wasn't
a broadband thing yet. The three six five Days project
that year was only allowing up to about six minutes
of material, so I just put the two songs up

(23:16):
the fifty three and fifty eight versions of reputation. In
his May fift post the HUT four selection that year,
Bob details the whole affair. He describes the Mammoth Music
mart sale, the excitement of finding these lost works, the
exuberancy heres, and the joy he finds in the performances.
Bob ruminates on the mystery of it all, writing fucking

(23:40):
d you This fascinates me on so many levels. It's
hard to explain. Sometimes I listen to these tracks and
wonder who were these people? Do they remember making these
tapes and songs? Do they have any suspicion that their
voices are out there being heard by strangers? Didn't anyone

(24:00):
want these tapes? If you had real to reels that
are clearly marked as having your brother, father or sisters
musical work on them, would you? Could you donate it
to a music sale? I couldn't. I hold on to
it for dear life, and beyond that, where are these people?
Some of them might still be alive. Certainly Marigael Moreland

(24:23):
must be about fifty eight or sixty years old or so.
Sometimes I wish I could let miss Morland, whatever her
name may be, today, I know that I adore her song.
If you were to hear the series of tapes made
of rehearsals of this song, you'd know, as I do,
that those involved thought it was special. I kind of

(24:43):
wish I could let the singer know that others think
so too, and that the song won't be forgotten for
many years. I want you to know that you think
go on and fading, uncolick of I show I'm walking.

(25:22):
I just want to share this stuff. I know there's
other people out there that would enjoy what I do
and what I collect, and I was overjoyed at having
the opportunity to share what I had there. Even though
I got involved in that project later, I think I
had the second most days dedicated to my stuff when
the year was over. I just wanted to be out there.
I was. I was really happy to have somebody that

(25:44):
wanted to help the publicize what I found. I doubt
Bob can imagine at the time just how far that
message would resonate. Two years after Bob shared his findings online,
he received a surprising correspondence. In two thousand's five, I

(26:06):
heard from a relative a cousin I believe of Mary
Gale who gave me the entire backstory. Who do wow,
wow Wow. Mary Gale's family lived in Rolling Meadows, less
than two miles from where I'm sitting talking to you
right now, really really close. The cousin was able to

(26:26):
answer most of the questions in his blog posting. She
told me the right way to spell Mary Gale, and
she also told me how much she had loved her
cousin and admired her and ended her for her talent
and her beauty. Didn't tell me that Don was a
professional musician and had been part of a local group
that did a lot of commercials in the Chicago area

(26:47):
called the Motables, so not an electrician working on the
Sears Tower. She assured me that done more than worked
in nothing but music is entirely adult life. The cousin

(27:09):
also told me that Mary Gael had gone off to
college somewhere in Wisconsin I or correctly, and had landed
in Georgia, where she became a nightclub entertainer and developed
lupus and died very young. Tragically. Mary Guel died shortly
after her forty seventh birthday, only shortly before Bob found

(27:32):
that first unmarked acetape, but the cousin did offer one
small piece of consolation. There were other recordings that had
been released, including a Christmas single in the mid fifties
and at least two records made when she was still
in high school for Chicago label, and promised to send
me a tape of everything that she had from that era,

(27:53):
and that she also could tract on some later recordings
that she had somewhere on a cassette. So she and
me sent me the recordings she had. He didn't like
the Christmas song at all, but it was amazed that
it was a fourteen year old singing I want my

(28:14):
Mom and Daddy together like lessness, and found one of
the two singles from the Chicago label to be absolutely otherworldly.

(28:38):
I think the song Julie Papa Is is her best
work ever and probably one of my top sixty's favorite
records ever made. Marigale was just seventeen when she made
these recordings. You Oh soul, when day standing the waiting

(29:12):
caught in the people have written me and say, are
you sure when this came out? And you can. You
can do a search for that labels discography and figure
it out. Based on other releases when they were in
business and when that record came out, and it came
out in nineteen sixty she was born in Armed with

(29:33):
all this new information, Bob was able to track down
some local references to Mariguel. The local paper here is
called the Daily Herald, is the super Aber. It's it's
out of origin Heights Covers Rolling Meadows, where she lives.
It only twelve years old, Marigel Moreland of Rolling Meadows
has accumulated an impressive list of accomplishment. The record I
Want My Mommy and Daddy Together for Christmas is now

(29:53):
on jukeboxes and being played by local disc JOCT. Marigael
learned most of what she knows about singing from her father,
Donovan Scott Moreland, who it is quite the singer in
his own Wreck was Blood. She hosted an American bandstand

(30:19):
style show, which I've been absolutely unable to get any
more information about. I've written to the station that ran
it and they said they don't have any information on it.
Some time after that, somebody who was in love with
her in high school wrote to me and sent me
a picture that he had of her that has folded
it from more He kept it in his wallet for problems.
Five years of her sitting on a couch reading a paper,

(30:41):
looking at the camera when she's probably about sixteen or seventeen. Oh,
there are things I wonder about her, you know, as
a musician in that era and a singer. I would

(31:03):
love to know what she liked, what her taste was like,
what she would have done, because I think I think
she's a great lost artist that could have been huge,
depending on what direction you want to go, she could
have been head of talent in that era. You know,
Connie Francis or Brenda Lee, who were essentially in the
same demographic and age range. Were you kind of hoping

(31:43):
that you would have had that you were going to
have the opportunity to meet her at some point? Absolutely,
I would have loved to or at least have a
correspondence with her. Hey, you know your your stuff makes
a difference in my life. You know you've brought joy
to my to my ears and my brain. I love
your singing, I love what you've chosen to do. Blah
blah blah. Yeah. As it turns out, there's one more

(32:07):
version of reputation that's worth mentioning. My daughter had enjoyed
the song a lot too, and when she was nine,
she sang it at my fortieth birthday party with me
and the aforementioned too. To change that reputation. She was

(32:36):
essentially the same age as Barry Gail had been at
the recording of the first one, maybe a year and
a half younger. So we just we just did it.
It was a natural to have my daughter, who was
musical herself, sing a song that we both loved you,

(33:08):
Holy living living down the monkeys are made to live
in a soul, and I was meant to love you,
Lily living die Li didn't die, love me holdly some

(33:35):
tender true, But I was said to love you. Don't
be bullaby to aweve me should I was a made
to be bound to always me. Who but one may
to love you if Ehemeral is written and assembled by

(33:59):
Well and produced by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil,
with additional mixing from Josh Thain and technical assistance from
Sherry Larson. Bob Purse is a well of inspiration, and
this is just one of his innumerable audio mysteries. Visit
his website inches dash per dash second dot blogspot dot com.

(34:20):
And visit ours at Ephemeral dot shew, but I wasn't
to love you, Love you Special. Thanks to Ian Nagaski

(35:19):
for letting us use this track, which is an untraced
Eastation pop song. Learn more at Canary Dash Records dot
band camp dot com. Next time on Ephemeral. When you're

(35:41):
sitting there and it's it's anonymous, and the human brain
can't count how many books are sitting on the self
around you, it all blends together. They're all the same
color basically, so it's sort of just one mass if
you do the math. I think there are two million
plus spreads of art work in the collection. I don't
even think a brain can hold that many. It's tough

(36:04):
to comprehend it. And we got four thousand every year.
I didn't really enjoy seeming as much of those at
the BA students. I had two intellectual passions as a teenager,
and they were cross for puzzles and chest so I
thought I would love to be able to be a
professional chess player or a crossword writer for a living.

(36:25):
I tried chess, but by h fifteen or so, it
was clear I was not gonna be the next Bobby Fisher.
So I thought, well, okay, maybe maybe I'll be the
Bobby Fisher of cross Works. Visit this in the Worldwide
Room and INACUS and social media. Sho podcast media I

(36:59):
need up. Apple podcasts are wiever use in your favorite
chills