Latest / Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond / Introducing The Last Archive

Transcript

Introducing The Last Archive · Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, we're taking the week off here at
0:22
Speaker 1: Broken Record. But while we're away, I wanted to introduce
0:25
Speaker 1: you to a show from a friend of mine called
0:28
Speaker 1: The Last Archive. The episode from that show that I'm
0:31
Speaker 1: playing for you today is an audio biography of one
0:35
Speaker 1: of the most famous composers of the twentieth century who
0:38
Speaker 1: most people have never heard of, Raymond Scott. Whether you
0:43
Speaker 1: know him or not, you know his music. He wrote
0:46
Speaker 1: tons of hits in the thirties. A lot of them
0:48
Speaker 1: were used in the Looney Tunes cartoons in some really
0:51
Speaker 1: iconic moments. But if you're not a cartoon of fiicionado,
0:55
Speaker 1: you probably know him from being sampled by the likes
0:57
Speaker 1: of Lizzo, j Dilla, Gorillas and more. But what even
1:02
Speaker 1: most fans of Scott don't realize is he wasn't just
1:05
Speaker 1: a songwriter. He was also an inventor, and later in
1:08
Speaker 1: his life he was hired by Motown Records. The Motown
1:12
Speaker 1: Records run by Barry Gordy to create a machine that
1:15
Speaker 1: could help people write songs. He called it the Electronium.
1:20
Speaker 1: It's just one of the crazy histories uncovered in this
1:22
Speaker 1: season of The Last Archive. You can check out all
1:25
Speaker 1: the other episodes from season four. Now there's something for
1:28
Speaker 1: everyone's stuff on time travel, invasive species, panics, freelance wire
1:32
Speaker 1: tappers turned evangelists, and secret science fiction family histories. I'll
1:39
Speaker 1: let you figure that one out for yourself. But this
1:41
Speaker 1: episode is the one that really got me, so I
1:44
Speaker 1: want to play it for you here today. Here's player
1:47
Speaker 1: piano from season four of The Last Archive.
1:56
Speaker 2: The Last Archive, A History of Truth.
2:03
Speaker 3: About thirty years ago, a man named Irwin choose It
2:06
Speaker 3: encountered one of the strangest machines almost nobody had ever
2:09
Speaker 3: heard of.
2:10
Speaker 4: I was forty, I was broke. It was kind of
2:13
Speaker 4: a professional failure.
2:15
Speaker 3: Choose It was a DJ for a small community radio
2:18
Speaker 3: station in New Jersey. A friend of his had put
2:21
Speaker 3: him on to a musician named Raymond Scott, one of
2:24
Speaker 3: the most famous musicians of the early twentieth century who
2:27
Speaker 3: had somehow been completely lost to history.
2:30
Speaker 5: These were records that were twenty five cents of pop
2:33
Speaker 5: and used record stores back then.
2:35
Speaker 4: And you didn't even They didn't even have him in
2:37
Speaker 4: a bin. They had him under the bins.
2:39
Speaker 3: Joos It loved Scott's music, and he began to get
2:42
Speaker 3: drawn into the mystery of it all? Who was this guy?
2:46
Speaker 3: He was obsessed, but his research kept dead ending.
2:50
Speaker 4: I went to a library and went looking through music
2:53
Speaker 4: history books, and there's almost no mention of Raymond Scott.
2:56
Speaker 4: He wasn't in the jazz books, he wasn't in the
2:58
Speaker 4: classical books, he wasn't in the pop books. I was
3:01
Speaker 4: kind of mystify. He was kind of a mystery man.
3:05
Speaker 3: He was stuck until his friend found Scott in a
3:08
Speaker 3: phone book. He was still alive, living in California, Jews.
3:12
Speaker 3: It made a phone call and then he got on
3:14
Speaker 3: a plane and flew across the country. By then, Scott
3:18
Speaker 3: was in his eighties. He'd had a few strokes and
3:21
Speaker 3: he couldn't speak. He would rest in the back of
3:24
Speaker 3: a dingy old ranch house with the heat turned all
3:27
Speaker 3: the way up and a humidifier on full blast, so
3:29
Speaker 3: there was a kind of heavy fog all around. His
3:32
Speaker 3: wife was taking care of him, but she also kept
3:34
Speaker 3: a lot of stray animals. There was a dog with
3:37
Speaker 3: paralyzed hind legs dragging itself around, and a lifetime's worth
3:40
Speaker 3: of stuff piled everywhere.
3:43
Speaker 4: There were old rusted tape decks, There were wires, There
3:46
Speaker 4: were reels of tape. There were seventy eight oar PM discs,
3:50
Speaker 4: many of them broken, some of them on shelves old
3:53
Speaker 4: magazines of electronic industry publications, parts catalogs, some of them
4:01
Speaker 4: dating back to the nineteen forties and fifties.
4:04
Speaker 3: I should say this story spooky as it is, it's
4:08
Speaker 3: kind of my I'm been Thatt of Haffrey, and I've
4:11
Speaker 3: produced this podcast for the last few years, and I'm
4:14
Speaker 3: hosting a season of six episodes now, which more on
4:17
Speaker 3: that later. All my life, I've written about history and
4:21
Speaker 3: made music. To find a secret, hidden archive full of
4:25
Speaker 3: strange musical electronics. I can imagine almost nothing better to
4:29
Speaker 3: know through artifacts what someone else once knew, something lost
4:33
Speaker 3: because the records and papers and magazines that choose had
4:37
Speaker 3: found told a story. Scott had been one of the
4:42
Speaker 3: most famous musicians of the twentieth century. He'd been on
4:45
Speaker 3: TV every week for a long time, in all the
4:48
Speaker 3: big magazines and films with the movie stars, but almost
4:52
Speaker 3: nobody remembered him now and.
4:54
Speaker 5: I saw Raymond's entire life's work spread out between a
5:00
Speaker 5: leaky guest shed, a garage, some outbuildings on the property
5:07
Speaker 5: in Van NY's.
5:09
Speaker 3: And somebody so famous be so forgotten. But something else
5:12
Speaker 3: didn't make sense either. There are all these old machines
5:15
Speaker 3: and tools strewn about with the rusty edges, and in
5:18
Speaker 3: the corner of the guest shed covered in dust, choose
5:22
Speaker 3: It saw a huge hunk of metal encased in wood, a.
5:26
Speaker 5: Large, dusty piece of furniture, a bit like a wooden console.
5:31
Speaker 3: But it wasn't furniture. It was a heavy machine with
5:34
Speaker 3: wires spilling out, hundreds of switches on a black metal front,
5:38
Speaker 3: and wood paneling all around. It looked like the cockpit
5:41
Speaker 3: of an airplane, except that some of the switches and
5:44
Speaker 3: buttons said things like record and power, and others said
5:47
Speaker 3: things like DOA.
5:48
Speaker 4: I didn't know what it was.
5:51
Speaker 3: Later on, someone helping to sort through Scott's files found
5:54
Speaker 3: a contract. It was between Raymond Scott and Motown Records,
5:58
Speaker 3: and it detailed a binding, confidential agreement to build that machine.
6:03
Speaker 3: That Choose. It was staring at a machine that was
6:06
Speaker 3: meant to write songs, the Electronium Choose. It had come
6:12
Speaker 3: out to California because of these twenty five cent records
6:15
Speaker 3: he'd gotten obsessed with. It was honestly pretty random, but
6:19
Speaker 3: somehow he'd stumbled on one of the strangest stories in
6:22
Speaker 3: the history of technology.
6:24
Speaker 6: How did it work?
6:25
Speaker 3: That's the voice of Brian Keihu, one time keyboardist for
6:29
Speaker 3: The Who, Fiona Apple, producer, Beatles historian, and one of
6:33
Speaker 3: the people for whom this machine has become now a
6:35
Speaker 3: kind of holy grail because it makes no sense. Raymond
6:39
Speaker 3: Scott began building this thing in the nineteen fifties, and
6:43
Speaker 3: it was a kind of mechanical early artificial intelligence that
6:46
Speaker 3: actually worked. Were freaked out about chat GPT. Now this
6:50
Speaker 3: thing was built in secret at a major studio in
6:53
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies. Michael Jackson used to watch it work,
6:57
Speaker 3: and nobody now can figure out how to get it
6:59
Speaker 3: to work again. In the years between choose it stumbling
7:03
Speaker 3: upon the electronium in that Rundown ranch house and today
7:07
Speaker 3: a lot of people have gotten involved in preserving the
7:09
Speaker 3: machine or bringing it back to life in some fashion.
7:12
Speaker 3: Brian Keyhu, but also Mark Mothersbaugh, the lead singer of
7:16
Speaker 3: Devo gat Ye the pop star, and teams of engineers
7:19
Speaker 3: and programmers and musicians from all around the world. Because
7:23
Speaker 3: it turns out that the man behind it knew how
7:25
Speaker 3: to make music like no one else and they want
7:28
Speaker 3: to hear it again. Welcome to season four of The
7:34
Speaker 3: Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know,
7:37
Speaker 3: how we used to know things, and why it seems
7:39
Speaker 3: sometimes lately is if we don't know anything at all.
7:44
Speaker 3: This episode is about that machine and its inventor, Raymond Scott,
7:49
Speaker 3: not just because Scott is the most famous composer of
7:51
Speaker 3: the twentieth century that most people have never heard of,
7:54
Speaker 3: but because I think his life traces one of the
7:56
Speaker 3: biggest stories about truth in our world today, the attempt
8:00
Speaker 3: to define the difference between man and machine.
8:13
Speaker 7: Remarks before Harry sits down. He is now setting down.
8:16
Speaker 3: There's another reason I want to spend some time with Scott.
8:19
Speaker 8: He is making himself comfortable.
8:22
Speaker 3: He recorded his whole life and again there he goes,
8:25
Speaker 3: which made for some fun research. Raymond Scott was born
8:38
Speaker 3: in Brooklyn in nineteen oh eight. His parents named him
8:41
Speaker 3: Harry Warno. His father had sailed from Russia to New
8:45
Speaker 3: York two years earlier on a ship called America. Sometime
8:49
Speaker 3: after Scott was born, his parents bought a music store
8:52
Speaker 3: in Brooklyn. In Brownsville, a small Jewish neighborhood. They lived
8:55
Speaker 3: in the two floor apartment above their shop, surrounded by
8:59
Speaker 3: music and sound machines. Scott especially loved the phone. Sometimes
9:03
Speaker 3: he'd make prank calls. Scott was growing up in an
9:16
Speaker 3: in between time, a mismatch of the world we know now,
9:19
Speaker 3: in the world of the nineteenth century. The electrified subway
9:22
Speaker 3: was brand new then. The year Scott was born, it
9:25
Speaker 3: had made its way out to Brooklyn, but the gas
9:27
Speaker 3: street lamps in Brownsville were still lit every night by
9:30
Speaker 3: a lamplighter. There were chickens in the street, the smell
9:33
Speaker 3: of the sea out over Canarsi, candy shops and tenements,
9:37
Speaker 3: hot spiced corn beef in the delis, and briny half
9:40
Speaker 3: sour pickles in the Jewish market, farms in Salt Water.
9:44
Speaker 3: It felt like the old country. It felt like the
9:46
Speaker 3: ends of the earth.
9:50
Speaker 9: It was a lack a little village. It was a neighborhood.
9:54
Speaker 3: Pearls Imny Winters one of the girls from the neighborhood.
9:57
Speaker 3: Later on she and Scott got married, and she's all
10:00
Speaker 3: over Scott's recordings. Jusit, who never got over his obsession
10:04
Speaker 3: with Raymond Scott interviewed her with a colleague just a
10:07
Speaker 3: little before she died.
10:08
Speaker 9: They used go into the music store, you know, to
10:11
Speaker 9: buy music.
10:12
Speaker 3: When I was a kid, that music shop is where
10:16
Speaker 3: I think the dream of the songwriting machine began. It
10:19
Speaker 3: was a snapshot of everything that was changing in music
10:22
Speaker 3: in the early nineteen hundreds. For centuries, if you wanted
10:25
Speaker 3: to hear music in your house, someone in your family
10:28
Speaker 3: needed to know how to play. For a while, buying
10:30
Speaker 3: a song meant buying sheet music bound together in little pamphlets.
10:35
Speaker 3: But later in the nineteenth century, technologies that could capture
10:38
Speaker 3: and reproduce sound were invented, and by the start of
10:41
Speaker 3: the twentieth century, mechanical music was taking off. Suddenly, you
10:46
Speaker 3: didn't need to know somebody who could play to listen
10:47
Speaker 3: to music. You could listen on records, wax cylinders, the radio.
10:52
Speaker 3: Scott was obsessed with these machines and the music that
10:54
Speaker 3: came out of them. He even started an amateur home
10:58
Speaker 3: radio station so he could make broadcasts from his bedroom
11:01
Speaker 3: to the living room.
11:03
Speaker 8: You mean to tell me that's recording now, Oh my god,
11:07
Speaker 8: lot to fuck that.
11:09
Speaker 3: Even as a kid he was always working on something.
11:11
Speaker 3: He dangle microphones out the window to record conversations on
11:15
Speaker 3: the street or the neighbor practicing piano. He would hang
11:18
Speaker 3: around the music shop with his dad, tinkering and watching
11:21
Speaker 3: not just how music was made, but how it was sold,
11:24
Speaker 3: what sold, and how it got reproduced. And there was
11:28
Speaker 3: one machine in particular that he became fascinated by.
11:33
Speaker 9: He told me that he taught himself to play the
11:35
Speaker 9: piano with the player piano, and I guess that's how
11:39
Speaker 9: he first started.
11:42
Speaker 3: The player piano. You've probably seen one before in a
11:46
Speaker 3: saloon in an old Western, you know, when someone gets shot,
11:49
Speaker 3: falls on the piano and it starts playing itself. That's
11:53
Speaker 3: the player piano, a piano that plays as if there
11:55
Speaker 3: were a ghost of the keyboard. Songs were sold as
11:58
Speaker 3: scrolls of paper with little holes punched out for each note,
12:01
Speaker 3: a set of mechanical instructions for the piano. The result
12:05
Speaker 3: you could hear nearly any song in your home, even
12:08
Speaker 3: if you you had no idea how to play it yourself.
12:11
Speaker 3: Scott loved the piano in the shop. He'd take a
12:14
Speaker 3: role and probably play it as slowly as possible, fitting
12:18
Speaker 3: his little fingers to the keys as they press themselves down,
12:21
Speaker 3: learning by machine. Most people these days think of the
12:26
Speaker 3: player piano as a novelty or a gimmick, but I
12:30
Speaker 3: want to spend a minute with it here because it's
12:32
Speaker 3: a big part not just of music history, but of
12:35
Speaker 3: automation history. We tend to think of automation as man
12:39
Speaker 3: versus robot, factory lines and coal mines, but the player
12:42
Speaker 3: piano was a kind of robot too, one we often
12:45
Speaker 3: forget about, but in early, massively influential, one that foreshadowed
12:51
Speaker 3: so much of what was to come. When Scott was
12:55
Speaker 3: a kid, people thought the player piano would be the
12:58
Speaker 3: future of music. There were hundreds of thousands of them
13:01
Speaker 3: sold each year in millions of song roles. By nineteen nineteen,
13:06
Speaker 3: when Scott was eleven, there were more player pianos being
13:09
Speaker 3: sold than regular pianos. It wasn't just sales, though. Copyright
13:14
Speaker 3: laws in the United States were built around the player
13:16
Speaker 3: piano and the record player an equal part. You can
13:19
Speaker 3: draw a straight line from player piano roles to punch
13:23
Speaker 3: cards and the first computer programs, and people made all
13:27
Speaker 3: kinds of player pianos. What you're listening to now is
13:30
Speaker 3: a special kind of player piano role that could capture
13:32
Speaker 3: all the subtleties of a human performance. This one was
13:36
Speaker 3: recorded by the composer w C and reproduced decades after
13:39
Speaker 3: his death. By machine. That's what Scott was learning in
13:43
Speaker 3: his family's music shop, role by role, not just to
13:47
Speaker 3: play like a machine, but to wonder at all the
13:49
Speaker 3: magical things machines suddenly could do. When I was trying
13:58
Speaker 3: to understand how Scott grew up, I read up on
14:00
Speaker 3: his neighborhood, and in one memoir I found a particular
14:04
Speaker 3: detail that snapped it all into view. The drug store
14:07
Speaker 3: just down the street from Scott had a poster in
14:09
Speaker 3: the window. It was titled the Human Factory, and it
14:13
Speaker 3: imagined a person as if they were a kind of
14:15
Speaker 3: complex machine, with all these little engineers inside. Scott must
14:20
Speaker 3: have passed that poster plenty of times. He had dreams
14:23
Speaker 3: of becoming like a machine himself, attaching motors to his
14:26
Speaker 3: hands so he could play the piano faster, the kind
14:28
Speaker 3: of way only a player piano could. Everywhere that line
14:33
Speaker 3: between man and machine was beginning to blur, but there
14:38
Speaker 3: was one place where the difference was unmistakable. A machine
14:42
Speaker 3: never made mistakes. The song sounded the same every single time,
14:47
Speaker 3: and to Scott, that was the ideal.
14:50
Speaker 9: The struggle between being a musician and an engineer was
14:55
Speaker 9: very real for him. He just loved equipment. Mock was
15:01
Speaker 9: the one insisted that he go to Julia. I don't
15:04
Speaker 9: think he wanted to.
15:06
Speaker 3: That choice music or engineer. It set the chorus for
15:10
Speaker 3: Scott's entire life because Scott never could give up on engineering.
15:15
Speaker 3: But his brother, who was a rising star in music,
15:18
Speaker 3: saw that he had a gift for composing that almost
15:20
Speaker 3: no one else did. He got Scott a job as
15:23
Speaker 3: the pianist for the CBS Radio Orchestra, and immediately Scott
15:27
Speaker 3: began to get noticed. He was anxious that people would
15:30
Speaker 3: think he only had the job because of his brother,
15:32
Speaker 3: so Harry Warno flipped through the phone book until he
15:35
Speaker 3: found a name he liked, Raymond Scott, a name he
15:39
Speaker 3: also chose because it sounded less Jewish and he was
15:42
Speaker 3: always anxious about that. He played his piano, he wrote
15:45
Speaker 3: his songs, and he kept his engineering passion more as
15:49
Speaker 3: a hobby. CBS was a good situation except for one thing.
15:54
Speaker 3: He was always playing standards songs that people knew they
15:58
Speaker 3: liked and had heard a million times already.
16:00
Speaker 5: He said that he wanted to write music that people
16:03
Speaker 5: would like the first time they heard it. He asked
16:06
Speaker 5: his brother Mark if he could put together a bit.
16:09
Speaker 5: He wanted to put together a six piece band with
16:11
Speaker 5: himself in it.
16:15
Speaker 3: Mark said yes. Scott started hunting for five musicians who
16:19
Speaker 3: could do exactly what he wanted. What he wanted was
16:22
Speaker 3: music with a spark that could form a connection with
16:25
Speaker 3: a listener immediately out of nowhere. He had a couple
16:28
Speaker 3: songs ready, so he found his guys, rehearsed, and then
16:31
Speaker 3: he got an audience together in CBS's Studio B. They
16:35
Speaker 3: dimmed the lights all the way and they began to play.
16:40
Speaker 3: A journalist wrote about it a year later.
16:43
Speaker 10: Nobody who attended that premiere eighteen months ago was likely
16:47
Speaker 10: to forget it. Out of the darkness, there came a
16:49
Speaker 10: thin wailing note, barely masking a slow, suggestive thumping on
16:55
Speaker 10: the drums. When it was over, the audience rose to
16:57
Speaker 10: its feet and cheered.
16:59
Speaker 7: Fan Mail poured in, Who was this man's Scott?
17:02
Speaker 9: Where was he from? Where had he been all these years?
17:08
Speaker 4: They created.
17:11
Speaker 5: Generated such an amazing listener reaction that they immediately got
17:16
Speaker 5: a recording contract with the Master Label, which was owned
17:20
Speaker 5: by Irving Mills, who was Duke Ellington's manager.
17:25
Speaker 3: The response was unprecedented and.
17:27
Speaker 11: Admitted I'm going to take you right on in, but
17:29
Speaker 11: we're going to have a very entertaining visit with one
17:31
Speaker 11: of the years.
17:31
Speaker 10: Them fational music, good, don't they get in there.
17:34
Speaker 3: Scott was trying to sell a perfect musical package. He
17:37
Speaker 3: said he went out to clubs to track which tempos
17:40
Speaker 3: made people get up and dance. He had a whole
17:42
Speaker 3: thing about names. He called his band of six people
17:45
Speaker 3: a quintet, not a sextet. He even renamed his saxophone player.
17:50
Speaker 12: And he is the youngest of all group.
17:51
Speaker 8: His name was originally Dave Harris, but now it's Eric
17:54
Speaker 8: Hoek Eric Koek.
17:55
Speaker 5: Then it's an interesting name.
17:57
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's Raymond's idea of a name.
17:59
Speaker 3: He wouldn't write his music down. He'd just play it
18:02
Speaker 3: at the piano for his quintet and then have them
18:04
Speaker 3: play their parts back till they could do it right
18:06
Speaker 3: note for note.
18:07
Speaker 13: And they called the pillow that marvel field of memories.
18:10
Speaker 13: They never to get a composition Wednesday've.
18:11
Speaker 3: Done it once they had it down, It rarely changed
18:15
Speaker 3: and that was just how Scott wanted it. If he
18:18
Speaker 3: could have replaced each of his musicians' minds with a
18:20
Speaker 3: scroll of music, he probably would have.
18:23
Speaker 9: He didn't know how to handle human relationships too well.
18:27
Speaker 5: They called him a bully, they called him something, he's bastard.
18:32
Speaker 4: They called him all kinds of names because he was
18:35
Speaker 4: trying to make them play better. One of his musicians
18:38
Speaker 4: once said, nobody worked with Raymond. Everybody worked under Raymond.
18:42
Speaker 5: Johnny Williams, the drummer, said we were we We hated
18:45
Speaker 5: every minute of it because we were being told what
18:47
Speaker 5: to play. He said, at the same time that we
18:49
Speaker 5: hated it, we were making more money than anybody in town.
18:53
Speaker 3: The music was like jazz, but without the improvisation or
18:56
Speaker 3: the looseness. Tightly managed the price of mechanical perfection.
19:01
Speaker 5: Well, he rehearsed, I want to cut that price, and
19:06
Speaker 5: he rehearsed keep on again.
19:08
Speaker 13: Thee from getting accocated by saying, temple to do it
19:12
Speaker 13: that way without thinking about it.
19:13
Speaker 5: And he was driving his musicians crazy because they would say,
19:16
Speaker 5: nobody needs to rehearse this much.
19:21
Speaker 3: Scott held his musicians to an impossible standard. He wanted
19:25
Speaker 3: them to play like machines, but it's hard to argue
19:28
Speaker 3: with the results. His rise was stratospheric. Stravinsky, Cab Calloway
19:33
Speaker 3: Duke Ellington. They were all Raymond Scott fans. In the
19:36
Speaker 3: nineteen forties he had his own radio show, The Raymond
19:39
Speaker 3: Scott Show. He became the music director of CBS Radio,
19:44
Speaker 3: where he led a racially integrated radio orchestra. This, I
19:47
Speaker 3: think not because he was especially progressive, but because all
19:51
Speaker 3: he cared about was the music.
19:53
Speaker 4: This is in so many ways explains why he was
19:56
Speaker 4: working with machines late in life.
19:58
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, he was his best friend.
20:01
Speaker 3: The machines were his best friends. To me, when I
20:05
Speaker 3: heard this story, I kept thinking about Scott as a
20:07
Speaker 3: kid at the player piano. When that machine was invented,
20:11
Speaker 3: it scared people. Two years before Raymond Scott was born,
20:15
Speaker 3: John Phillips Sussa, the famous composer, wrote an essay called
20:19
Speaker 3: the Menace of Mechanical Music. The whole course of music
20:22
Speaker 3: has been the expression of soul, states he wrote. And
20:25
Speaker 3: now in this twentieth century come these talking and playing
20:28
Speaker 3: machines to reduce the expression to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, discs,
20:34
Speaker 3: cylinders in all manner of revolving things. The player piano
20:38
Speaker 3: became a dark symbol of modern life. When Kurt Vonnegut
20:41
Speaker 3: wrote his first novel about a dystopian America run by
20:44
Speaker 3: engineers in their automatic machinery. He called it Player Piano.
20:50
Speaker 3: By the time Raymond Scott was getting famous, those fears
20:53
Speaker 3: about mechanical music were everywhere, same story.
20:57
Speaker 11: Everywhere, new machines, high speed production. Few are jobs, and
21:04
Speaker 11: ten men for every job it can be had.
21:07
Speaker 3: Scott was fighting a classic back mechanical perfection against human error.
21:12
Speaker 3: What was at stake were free will agency the human soul.
21:17
Speaker 3: That conflict was one of the main rhythms of twentieth
21:20
Speaker 3: century history, and Scott was like a leading melody and
21:24
Speaker 3: then he hit a wrong note that story. After the
21:29
Speaker 3: break in the nineteen forties, Raymond Scott was properly famous.
21:37
Speaker 3: He and his wife Pearl, packed up their kids at
21:39
Speaker 3: his equipment and moved to a big house out in Tuckaho,
21:42
Speaker 3: New York.
21:43
Speaker 9: He had a mindful apartment and said he fully moved
21:46
Speaker 9: from there. Of course, he was a ham radio operator.
21:50
Speaker 9: He wanted to be where he'd have good reception.
21:53
Speaker 3: I kind of love that he finally had enough money
21:56
Speaker 3: to buy a big house. But actually the only reason
21:58
Speaker 3: he was moving out of the city was so that
22:00
Speaker 3: he could have better ham radio reception. He was tinkering
22:03
Speaker 3: with his machines again, not just microphones in high fi equipment,
22:07
Speaker 3: but new sorts of instruments. The problem was electronics was
22:11
Speaker 3: not a casual hobby. In the late nineteen thirties and
22:13
Speaker 3: early forties.
22:15
Speaker 2: He saw an electronic parts catalog and he wanted to
22:17
Speaker 2: order every part in the catalog.
22:20
Speaker 3: Stan Warno is Raymond Scott and Pearl's Imni Winter's son.
22:24
Speaker 3: He made a great documentary about his father called Deconstructing Dad.
22:28
Speaker 3: I visited him last winter.
22:30
Speaker 2: And he thought, the only way he's going to make
22:32
Speaker 2: enough money to do that is to form a big band.
22:35
Speaker 2: And so he did form a big band and went
22:37
Speaker 2: out on the road.
22:40
Speaker 11: It's more thirty in New York and time for CBS
22:43
Speaker 11: to present the Raymond Scott Show across the continent and
22:47
Speaker 11: later to the whole world by shortwave come song Hits
22:50
Speaker 11: of the Day, starring America's number one composer with a band.
22:54
Speaker 11: Here he is Raymond Scott.
22:58
Speaker 3: In the nineteen thirties, Scott's hits seem to have been
23:00
Speaker 3: about the music first, but in the forties his focus
23:04
Speaker 3: seems to have shifted from writing great songs to making
23:07
Speaker 3: as much money from his music as possible so he
23:09
Speaker 3: could fuel his mechanical hobby. He was like his own
23:12
Speaker 3: version of his dad's music shop. Music sold any way
23:15
Speaker 3: you like. But a big band needed a singer. He
23:19
Speaker 3: was always churning through them, always on the lookout for
23:21
Speaker 3: someone perfect. And that's how he met Marjorie Chandler.
23:26
Speaker 9: We went in Chicago and we took an apartment there.
23:31
Speaker 3: Scott heard through one of the band's managers that there
23:34
Speaker 3: was a young girl from Canada he should meet. She'd
23:36
Speaker 3: sung in a big radio contest in one first place.
23:40
Speaker 3: She was about thirteen years old and her voice was amazing.
23:43
Speaker 3: Scott decided to take her on as a student full time.
23:47
Speaker 2: He thought she had real potential, and so she came
23:53
Speaker 2: to live with us.
23:55
Speaker 3: Marjorie's family sent her to live at the house in Tuckahoe.
23:59
Speaker 3: According to Pearl, she and Scott were like surrogate parents,
24:02
Speaker 3: except Scott and Marjorie spent endless hours practicing. It was
24:07
Speaker 3: like with his quintet, except Chandler was a kid away
24:11
Speaker 3: from her parents. This tape is likely from later on,
24:15
Speaker 3: but even then you can hear how exacting he isles guys, you.
24:29
Speaker 9: Think the.
24:35
Speaker 3: Scott gave her a new name, Dorothy Collins. She'd go
24:39
Speaker 3: to school, she'd wander around the big House and write
24:42
Speaker 3: her name Marjorie over and over again. Then she'd go
24:46
Speaker 3: back to practicing love. It was a backbreaking regimen, but
24:56
Speaker 3: she was an incredible talent.
24:59
Speaker 2: And as she got older and better she be he
25:04
Speaker 2: began featuring her in his band.
25:07
Speaker 3: She grew up with the family. When she was a
25:10
Speaker 3: bit older, she sang with the band for the first
25:12
Speaker 3: time on the air. After Scott started hosting The Lucky
25:15
Speaker 3: Strike Hit Parade, a popular TV show, she became the
25:19
Speaker 3: featured singer. She was twenty four, and at some point
25:22
Speaker 3: along the way they got romantically involved.
25:25
Speaker 2: And then I have seen some letters where my mother
25:29
Speaker 2: was writing to him saying it's really I'm not really
25:33
Speaker 2: comfortable with her, and who knows what was going on,
25:36
Speaker 2: because again that they eventually got involved with each other
25:41
Speaker 2: and he divorced my mom and married her.
25:46
Speaker 3: Scott and Marjorie now Dorothy Collins, were married when she
25:49
Speaker 3: was twenty five. I don't want to dramatize this or
25:53
Speaker 3: speculate on how and when they got together, because no
25:55
Speaker 3: matter what, it's a dark turn. She had been like
25:58
Speaker 3: an adopted daughter to them, away from her own parents.
26:02
Speaker 3: It was the culmination, I think of the most dangerous
26:05
Speaker 3: strain in Scott's thinking about musicians and people must have
26:09
Speaker 3: seen in Marjorie Chandler. In the beginning. Was Dorothy Collins
26:13
Speaker 3: the chance to make his own musician, his own person,
26:17
Speaker 3: as if he were building a machine. Every week they
26:24
Speaker 3: appeared on TV together, Collins became a kind of American darling,
26:28
Speaker 3: achieving a level of celebrity even Scott had never had
26:32
Speaker 3: a star. The money came pouring in. They moved into
26:36
Speaker 3: a mansion on Long Island.
26:39
Speaker 7: It had thirty two rooms and four stories.
26:43
Speaker 3: That's deb Studebaker, Raymond Scott and Dorothy Collins's daughter. She's
26:48
Speaker 3: a teacher and a poet, which you can hear by
26:51
Speaker 3: the way she describes her childhood home.
26:54
Speaker 7: The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway.
26:58
Speaker 7: It had had a forest behind. It was very grand.
27:03
Speaker 7: There was a library with a secret door you pull
27:08
Speaker 7: it out. There was a through behind it. We would
27:10
Speaker 7: go on these explorations in the forest. There was wisteria
27:15
Speaker 7: hanging over an archway that was always filled with bees.
27:21
Speaker 3: Inside the house, Scott had begun to amass all the
27:24
Speaker 3: electronic parts he wanted. He was at once secretive and
27:27
Speaker 3: proud to show it off.
27:29
Speaker 8: Let me take you downstairs and show you these technical facilities,
27:32
Speaker 8: and I take it we're supposed to have, oh maybe
27:36
Speaker 8: a half a million separate items or so. An electronic
27:39
Speaker 8: music studio wants to grow and grow and grow and grow.
27:42
Speaker 3: The room was full of gear, switches, meters, welders, a furnace.
27:47
Speaker 13: But now I'd like.
27:48
Speaker 8: To take upstairs to show you what we've been building
27:50
Speaker 8: with all this equipment.
27:53
Speaker 3: Upstairs was a thirty foot wall of obscure electronic musical machinery.
27:58
Speaker 3: Alongside his other musical work, Scott had begun writing and
28:01
Speaker 3: recording music for commercials. I have for several months now
28:07
Speaker 3: been unable to get this jingle for Sprite out of
28:09
Speaker 3: my head. Over the course of the nineteen fifties, Scott
28:12
Speaker 3: wrote jingles for a lot of big companies schlitzpier RCA, Victor,
28:16
Speaker 3: vix Ford, Chrysler, and a lot of the time it
28:19
Speaker 3: was Dorothy Collins singing them. He had a plaque over
28:22
Speaker 3: his piano that read, ideally the words should make sense,
28:26
Speaker 3: what makes and Nolan bout dance a melon ballads and
28:30
Speaker 3: then bout.
28:30
Speaker 11: Dance what makes and Nolan bout dance the ice.
28:33
Speaker 9: Dart past the Fight.
28:36
Speaker 3: These companies were selling the future, and they needed a
28:39
Speaker 3: sound to match it. In the nineteen fifties, Americans were
28:42
Speaker 3: drunk on the post war promise of consumer technology. It
28:46
Speaker 3: was the age of automatic, of being able to buy
28:48
Speaker 3: all sorts of machines that would make your life easier, to.
28:52
Speaker 8: Make reality of imagination.
28:55
Speaker 9: This is Bendix the Tomorrow People.
29:01
Speaker 3: Scott and Collins seemed at the time to have a
29:03
Speaker 3: happy life together as the Tomorrow People, throwing parties at
29:07
Speaker 3: their mansion, making music in the machine rooms, and listening
29:10
Speaker 3: to it in the listening room. They were, in many
29:12
Speaker 3: ways the sound of that post war dream world. They
29:15
Speaker 3: made music meant to push the button that sent consumers
29:18
Speaker 3: marching off to make a purchase. During those years, Scott
29:21
Speaker 3: was creating the kinds of machines. His music helped to
29:24
Speaker 3: sell whirling spinning devices that seemed as if they came
29:27
Speaker 3: from the future. Just keep in mind how different what
29:30
Speaker 3: you're hearing is from popular music in the fifties. I mean,
29:33
Speaker 3: this was the top song of nineteen fifty nine.
29:37
Speaker 4: I come send the British cap a company. There wasn't
29:39
Speaker 4: as many as there was.
29:40
Speaker 5: Obamaga refired once more and they began to run it
29:44
Speaker 5: down to Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico.
29:49
Speaker 3: Music like Scott's just didn't exist in the mainstream, but
29:53
Speaker 3: he was sneaking it in there through commercials. He saw
29:56
Speaker 3: his machines as a way to push the envelope and
29:58
Speaker 3: thought that because the sounds they made were new, they'd
30:01
Speaker 3: catch the ear and away jingles made with old instruments couldn't.
30:05
Speaker 3: Scott seems to have created one of the first, if
30:08
Speaker 3: not the first, musical sequencer, a device that is the
30:11
Speaker 3: foundation for much of modern pop. In a weird historical twist,
30:15
Speaker 3: one of the ways he had financed all this experimentation
30:18
Speaker 3: was by selling his early hits to Warner Brothers, where
30:21
Speaker 3: they became a lot of the music soundtracking the Looney Tunes. Literally,
30:25
Speaker 3: this man put the tunes in Looney Tunes. But then
30:30
Speaker 3: he started to get sick. His brother and his father
30:33
Speaker 3: had died of heart disease, and Scott had his first
30:36
Speaker 3: heart attack in nineteen fifty eight. I don't think it's
30:39
Speaker 3: a coincidence that within a year, he began to work
30:43
Speaker 3: on the first version of the Electronium, his songwriting machine.
30:49
Speaker 2: I remember him telling me, you know about this machine.
30:53
Speaker 2: I'm working on a machine that's going to compose and
30:56
Speaker 2: perform at the same time.
30:58
Speaker 3: This was the stuff of science fiction, a dream of
31:01
Speaker 3: few people had had, but nobody went for it quite
31:04
Speaker 3: like Scott. A machine not just for playing music, but
31:07
Speaker 3: for composing it. Scott began to work harder and harder
31:12
Speaker 3: on the machine, and at the same time his marriage
31:15
Speaker 3: to Dorothy Collins unraveled.
31:17
Speaker 7: She discovered that she loved acting in the theater, and
31:21
Speaker 7: my dad didn't travel with her or us. He was
31:25
Speaker 7: always working on his own stuff. But I think there
31:28
Speaker 7: was a certain lightness. I think that she probably found
31:31
Speaker 7: being respected now, you know, for something new that was hers.
31:37
Speaker 7: Acting was hers. He had nothing to do with that.
31:41
Speaker 3: Collins left and then they were divorced. She testified in
31:44
Speaker 3: court that he was such a perfectionist, so intensely critical,
31:49
Speaker 3: that he gave her asthma and she couldn't sing when
31:52
Speaker 3: he was around.
31:53
Speaker 7: So my mother used to say it was like Frankenstein's Monster,
31:57
Speaker 7: and the monster kind of woke up and decided, you
32:00
Speaker 7: know that she could be her own person.
32:04
Speaker 2: But Scott was bereft, and he took a bunch of
32:08
Speaker 2: sleeping pills, thinking he was going to kill himself, but
32:12
Speaker 2: he just went to sleep for a long time.
32:15
Speaker 3: He moved out of the house into an industrial space
32:18
Speaker 3: in a big office park on Long Island. His TV
32:22
Speaker 3: show was off the air, he didn't have a hip
32:24
Speaker 3: band anymore, and he was alone. But he had one
32:29
Speaker 3: thing left, the electronium.
32:46
Speaker 2: I have very clear memories of being out there and
32:50
Speaker 2: the electronium was in the very next room, iterating away,
32:55
Speaker 2: which is what it did. You had to kind of
32:57
Speaker 2: set it up and then it would go through these
33:00
Speaker 2: iterations and we would be listening to it, and he
33:03
Speaker 2: would hear something he really liked and he'd jump up
33:06
Speaker 2: and go in there and record it on the cassette.
33:09
Speaker 3: In the nineteen sixties, Raymond Scott was living in a long, low,
33:13
Speaker 3: white cement warehouse surrounded by machines.
33:17
Speaker 12: He had to seriously downgrade his life.
33:20
Speaker 3: Jeff Winner, he works with Choose It, that radio DJ
33:23
Speaker 3: who went out to visit Scott and together with Scott's family,
33:27
Speaker 3: they're preserving, managing and sharing his archives.
33:30
Speaker 14: He went from a massive mansion of his own design
33:35
Speaker 14: to living on Long Island in a warehouse that wasn't
33:38
Speaker 14: even zoned for residential, that didn't have a kitchen.
33:42
Speaker 12: He was not supposed to be living there.
33:44
Speaker 3: He'd gotten married for the third time, to a woman
33:47
Speaker 3: named Mitzi Curtis, and this time it stuck. But money
33:51
Speaker 3: was tight, popular music was moving on. He was still
33:55
Speaker 3: composing the occasional jingle, but now really it was all
33:59
Speaker 3: machines and not just in his warehouse. The concern over
34:03
Speaker 3: automation was reaching a fever pitch in the United States.
34:07
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty John F. Kennedy even ran for president
34:10
Speaker 3: against the machine threat.
34:12
Speaker 11: Because the problem that West Virginia is facing is the
34:15
Speaker 11: problem that all America is going to face.
34:17
Speaker 15: That is the problem of what happens to man when
34:20
Speaker 15: machines take their place.
34:23
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, Raymond Scott seems to have been trying to replace
34:26
Speaker 3: as much of himself as possible with the machine.
34:29
Speaker 14: Everything he had ever done up until that point, in
34:32
Speaker 14: one way or another, would become part of Electronium, even
34:36
Speaker 14: if he hadn't even declared to himself that that was
34:39
Speaker 14: his goal.
34:39
Speaker 12: Yet it's like everything's under that one roof.
34:43
Speaker 3: His baseline generator his drum pattern generator, the melody sequencer,
34:47
Speaker 3: all of it tied together with thick wires hidden behind
34:50
Speaker 3: the concrete walls of the factory.
34:53
Speaker 15: And when Raymond came to the door, the first thing
34:58
Speaker 15: I encountered was, well, I want you to write sign
35:02
Speaker 15: this disclosure agreement.
35:06
Speaker 3: Tom ray He used to work at Mogue, probably the
35:08
Speaker 3: most famos misynthesizer company of all time. He's taught in
35:11
Speaker 3: electronic music history at the Berkeley College of Music, where
35:14
Speaker 3: he was a professor. But at the time he met
35:16
Speaker 3: Scott in the summer of nineteen seventy, he was a
35:18
Speaker 3: graduate student working on his dissertation for a PhD in music.
35:23
Speaker 15: I mean, I'm not an industrial spy. I'm a graduate student.
35:28
Speaker 3: Ray had heard that Scott was touched with genius, and
35:31
Speaker 3: he wanted to see what he'd been inventing.
35:33
Speaker 15: What did I see? I saw everything. Oh my gosh,
35:36
Speaker 15: you know, what is this thing over here? And I said,
35:40
Speaker 15: doesn't seem to have a keyboard or any kind of
35:42
Speaker 15: an interface. He said, well, it does. It had one
35:46
Speaker 15: little micro switch, and so he goes over and he
35:50
Speaker 15: flips some of these many many knobs and switches and
35:55
Speaker 15: things on the panel. Of the thing, said I'm going
35:58
Speaker 15: to have it suggest a theme, and it gives out
36:01
Speaker 15: with a little melody, and then he says, uh, I
36:04
Speaker 15: think I will ask it to make the intervals, the
36:08
Speaker 15: musical intervals wider, and he flips a couple of switches
36:11
Speaker 15: and they're wider, you know, And he put together, as
36:17
Speaker 15: I sat there, a rather lush uh composition with not
36:25
Speaker 15: only accompaniment but counterpoint, and you know, the whole thing.
36:32
Speaker 3: Scott was inventing madly during those years. The electronium combined
36:36
Speaker 3: a lot of different gizmos he'd created, and it was
36:39
Speaker 3: a constantly changing set of modules. You controlled the music
36:42
Speaker 3: the machine made by means of switches he called the
36:45
Speaker 3: composer guidance control. One of the major X factors of
36:49
Speaker 3: the electronium is that it seems to have had some
36:51
Speaker 3: way of generating randomness within the preset patterns. They would
36:54
Speaker 3: change on their own over time. But it's not clear
36:57
Speaker 3: to anyone how this was a crazy idea. But you
37:01
Speaker 3: can get a clue to why Scott was after it
37:03
Speaker 3: from an ad he made around then with Jim Henson,
37:06
Speaker 3: the Muppets guy for IBM. They were pitching new word processor,
37:10
Speaker 3: but the ad is all about modern life. It's a
37:13
Speaker 3: kind of crazy montage of vacant looking people, machines and explosions.
37:18
Speaker 7: There always seemed to be enough time to do the paperwork.
37:23
Speaker 7: What today there is today?
37:26
Speaker 4: There isn't enough time.
37:27
Speaker 3: Today, there aren't enough people.
37:29
Speaker 7: Machines should do the work, that's what their best bet.
37:33
Speaker 12: People should do the thinking.
37:35
Speaker 15: That's what their best bet.
37:37
Speaker 3: But what about a machine that did the work and
37:39
Speaker 3: the thinking. When Scott was born, machines were being created
37:43
Speaker 3: mostly to help people do roat physical labor. In the
37:46
Speaker 3: first half of the twentieth century, they began to do
37:48
Speaker 3: those things automatically at the push of a button, and
37:52
Speaker 3: by the age of the electronium, machines began automatically to
37:55
Speaker 3: do things that looked a lot like intellectual labor.
38:00
Speaker 6: This rulebot manipulator can be easily taught because of its
38:03
Speaker 6: electronic brains.
38:05
Speaker 3: Can this type of control be applied to other types
38:08
Speaker 3: of machines? Certainly in that light, Scott was reaching for
38:13
Speaker 3: the brass ring, a machine capable of making art, of
38:18
Speaker 3: helping people make art that expressed a human soul and
38:21
Speaker 3: stirred human emotions. But he needed money to do it,
38:25
Speaker 3: so he started doing a little press, small articles here
38:28
Speaker 3: and there. It's like inventing the typewriter, he told a journalist.
38:32
Speaker 3: Only the typewriter furnishes the plot and reads the result.
38:36
Speaker 15: I've always told people that I consider Raymond Scott one
38:40
Speaker 15: of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and music.
38:43
Speaker 3: But if you wanted to buy an electronium from Raymond Scott,
38:46
Speaker 3: it was going to cost you an arm and a leg,
38:49
Speaker 3: and it was a crazy idea. So it was by
38:51
Speaker 3: a stroke of luck that the head of Motown Records,
38:54
Speaker 3: Barry Gordy, heard about it.
38:56
Speaker 4: It was not a one man organization or a two
38:58
Speaker 4: man organization, but it is an organization of teamwork, you know.
39:02
Speaker 9: I mean, it's the unseeing hero, so to speak.
39:05
Speaker 3: Barry Gordy founded Motown in nineteen fifty nine in Detroit.
39:09
Speaker 3: Before founding the company, he had worked at a car
39:12
Speaker 3: factory during the years when there was lots of hubbub
39:14
Speaker 3: over plants that had achieved near full automation. It was
39:17
Speaker 3: on the assembly line that Gordy started to think about
39:20
Speaker 3: doing music differently. In his autobiography, he wrote, at the plant,
39:25
Speaker 3: the cars started out as just a frame pulled along
39:28
Speaker 3: on conveyor belts until they emerged at the end of
39:30
Speaker 3: the line. I wanted the same concept for my company,
39:34
Speaker 3: only with artists and songs and records.
39:37
Speaker 9: It would it had gone any year without Hit Records,
39:39
Speaker 9: we would out of a business.
39:41
Speaker 3: Motown was a black owned business selling music by black
39:44
Speaker 3: artists to everyone in America. Like everything in the music business,
39:48
Speaker 3: it was precarious economically because Hit Records deal in matters
39:52
Speaker 3: of taste, and taste is subject to bia sees and whims. Gordy,
39:56
Speaker 3: with his assembly line pasted, wasn't having that. He wanted
40:00
Speaker 3: to systematize as much as possible. They'd ab test songs
40:03
Speaker 3: with different artists until something stuck. Like R and D.
40:07
Speaker 3: They had a house band, the Funk Brothers, providing ironclad
40:10
Speaker 3: rhythm section arrangements across Motown songs. Is if they were
40:14
Speaker 3: the engine department. The only thing missing was the automation.
40:20
Speaker 3: And that's why it makes sense to me that one
40:22
Speaker 3: day in the early nineteen seventies, Barry Gordy pulled up
40:27
Speaker 3: to Raymond Scott's warehouse with a string of limos to
40:30
Speaker 3: see the automatic songwriting machine for himself.
40:33
Speaker 14: And by the way, Barry Gordy knew who Raymond Scott
40:36
Speaker 14: was like anybody of his generation. Raymond Scott was a
40:38
Speaker 14: famous person, so Gordy also knew he was getting that
40:42
Speaker 14: in the deal, someone who is a musical mind, who
40:46
Speaker 14: has already written hits.
40:48
Speaker 3: Scott showed Gordy and his crew the warehouse and then
40:51
Speaker 3: he fired up the electronium, just like he did with
40:53
Speaker 3: ray He must have shown Gordy how you flipped the
40:57
Speaker 3: switches to set a pattern, then watched as the machine iterated,
41:01
Speaker 3: changing notes, repeating phrases, rifling through ideas semi randomly.
41:07
Speaker 13: And during the last couple of moment to Patta, generator
41:10
Speaker 13: was only one four or five.
41:17
Speaker 3: Scott was selling an idea at that point, the potential
41:20
Speaker 3: of a songwriting machine that could hit on, an idea
41:23
Speaker 3: that a person alone never would. If it came up
41:26
Speaker 3: with a hook that sparked in the way a hit does,
41:28
Speaker 3: you'd know it when you heard it, and you could
41:30
Speaker 3: bottle it up and sell it to millions of people.
41:34
Speaker 3: This idea, I think came straight from Scott's quintetes finding
41:39
Speaker 3: that sound that you liked the first time you hear it.
41:42
Speaker 3: It's a tricky balancing act because it has to be
41:45
Speaker 3: new enough that it catches your attention. But a hit
41:47
Speaker 3: also has to sound familiar enough that you kind of
41:50
Speaker 3: know what you're going to get as soon as you
41:51
Speaker 3: hear it. It's like an elevator pitch to the listener.
41:54
Speaker 3: And Gordie was uncompromising about it. Here's Smokey Robinson in
41:58
Speaker 3: a twenty nineteen documentary remembering that process.
42:01
Speaker 6: You used to say that all tied.
42:02
Speaker 3: We got to get him in first ten seconds.
42:04
Speaker 9: We had to grab company's fabulous intros.
42:07
Speaker 3: You know, something that would get your digit. And so
42:10
Speaker 3: in that light, the electronium makes perfect sense to me.
42:13
Speaker 3: What if you could take a machine that had baked
42:15
Speaker 3: into it all of the patterns, an intuitive musical sense
42:18
Speaker 3: of a proven hit maker like Scott, but then this
42:21
Speaker 3: crazy X factor of proto artificially intelligent randomness. That dream
42:26
Speaker 3: was Scott's life's work. He needed it to work. Everything
42:30
Speaker 3: was writing on it.
42:36
Speaker 14: So Gordy was so impressed that you wrote a check
42:39
Speaker 14: on the spot for ten thousand dollars to get started,
42:42
Speaker 14: and that was a lot of money back then.
42:47
Speaker 3: It was a huge windfall. Scott was overjoyed. Gordy wanted
42:51
Speaker 3: the instrument remade to suit Motown's needs, so Scott began
42:55
Speaker 3: work immediately. The machine would be a culmination of everything
42:59
Speaker 3: he'd worked on up to that point, including the player
43:02
Speaker 3: piano from his childhood. Here's a call from a couple
43:06
Speaker 3: of years earlier between Scott and Bob Mogue, the the
43:09
Speaker 3: sizer legend who'd worked with him, And this knocked me
43:12
Speaker 3: out when I first heard it in the archives. But
43:14
Speaker 3: he was still thinking about the player piano. You can
43:16
Speaker 3: hear the ideas just bursting out of him.
43:19
Speaker 13: I have some things that I think would lest we
43:21
Speaker 13: slip you, and this is how the secret stuff. But well,
43:27
Speaker 13: I'll have to explain with you when I see when
43:29
Speaker 13: I see. Okay, but the the programming isn't evitable. I mean,
43:33
Speaker 13: you know, the computing machine into programming things and was
43:36
Speaker 13: programming things and all them a major tools of programming things. Yeah,
43:40
Speaker 13: and so the programming it's going to be the way
43:43
Speaker 13: it's done.
43:45
Speaker 3: A player piano for the space age. Scott, of course,
43:50
Speaker 3: quickly blew through the Motown down payment and ran out
43:53
Speaker 3: of time, but Gordy didn't seem to mind. Scott moved
43:56
Speaker 3: out to Motown's offices in Los Angeles to work on
43:59
Speaker 3: the electronium in a room above Barry Gordy's garage. He
44:03
Speaker 3: became the director of electronic music research and development. Eventually
44:08
Speaker 3: he started to work on the machine in the Motown studios.
44:11
Speaker 7: People were in awe of him. I'm thinking of a
44:14
Speaker 7: couple different engineers who were up there who would just
44:17
Speaker 7: come out and be like shaking their heads, kind of
44:19
Speaker 7: like like you know, what is going on kind of thing.
44:22
Speaker 3: Scott's daughter deb Studa Baker Again, according to a former
44:25
Speaker 3: engineer at Motown, Michael Jackson, would come by Scott's studio,
44:29
Speaker 3: a small room on the second floor and watch the
44:32
Speaker 3: electronium work. It made music unlike anything they'd heard. The
44:37
Speaker 3: idea wasn't that the machine would write a complete song
44:39
Speaker 3: structure versus chorus bridge, but that it would iterate on
44:43
Speaker 3: combinations of rhythm, chord and melody in search of that spark.
44:47
Speaker 3: It was a way of automating the part of songwriting.
44:49
Speaker 3: Scott excelled at the thing that caught your ear and
44:52
Speaker 3: made you like something the first time you heard it.
44:56
Speaker 3: It was meant as a collaboration between man and machine,
44:59
Speaker 3: one that took the hard work out of the most
45:00
Speaker 3: crucial part of the songwriting process. The inspiration but over time,
45:08
Speaker 3: the the extreme cost weighed the project down. Also the
45:11
Speaker 3: fact that Scott was never satisfied, refused to be finished.
45:16
Speaker 3: The electronium worked, it just was always opened up, being redesigned, refined, changed.
45:22
Speaker 3: At one point, that same engineer tried to get Motown's
45:25
Speaker 3: famous session musicians to play along with the machine as
45:28
Speaker 3: part of a drive to use the instrument on a recording,
45:31
Speaker 3: but they revolted.
45:32
Speaker 12: They didn't like it.
45:34
Speaker 14: They didn't like the idea of it, they didn't like
45:36
Speaker 14: the concept, they didn't like what it theoretically represented.
45:40
Speaker 12: And these guys were great musicians. They didn't want to
45:43
Speaker 12: be replaced by a machine.
45:47
Speaker 3: It's not known whether the electronium ever suggested an idea
45:50
Speaker 3: that made it into a Motown song, but I think
45:53
Speaker 3: it's unlikely. Gordy let Scott take the electronium home with
45:57
Speaker 3: him eventually to tinker with it around the house. He'd
46:00
Speaker 3: stay up all night and work on it all day
46:02
Speaker 3: in his pajamas, building new bits and pieces, taking it apart,
46:06
Speaker 3: and building it again. Then his health got worse, the
46:09
Speaker 3: music industry moved on started to forget about him. He
46:13
Speaker 3: had several strokes, and the electronium sat and the guests
46:16
Speaker 3: shed out back gathering dust, waiting to be found.
46:20
Speaker 6: Well, it's doctor Frankenstein's monster, isn't it.
46:23
Speaker 3: Brian Keihue again synthesizer wizard, former keyboardist for The Who,
46:28
Speaker 3: Fiona Apple, producer and the second person this episode to
46:31
Speaker 3: bring up Frankenstein's monster more happily, in this case about
46:34
Speaker 3: a machine rather than a person. He's working now to
46:38
Speaker 3: bring the electronium back to life. We spoke last winter.
46:42
Speaker 6: And so electronium might be literally just a piece of inspiration.
46:47
Speaker 6: If I play piano or if I play guitar and
46:49
Speaker 6: write songs, my fingers are even limiting because I tend
46:52
Speaker 6: to play a certain chord shape where I'm jazzier and
46:55
Speaker 6: he's more country. But if the electronium was not confined
46:59
Speaker 6: by those things, it might come up with ideas that
47:02
Speaker 6: are beautiful hybrids. Maybe little jazzy, but little polka, and
47:06
Speaker 6: who knows what it would come up with. That It's
47:09
Speaker 6: an idea to say that the human creativity is limited.
47:13
Speaker 6: It's a beautiful thing when it works, but as we know,
47:16
Speaker 6: you can't just write great music all day, otherwise everybody would.
47:19
Speaker 3: I guess part of the problem is like in a
47:21
Speaker 3: creative line of work. Your business, especially when you're a motown,
47:25
Speaker 3: which is an empire at that point, is totally dependent
47:28
Speaker 3: on this fundamentally unknowable, unreliable thing, which is human creativity.
47:31
Speaker 3: Like you never really know when the music is going
47:33
Speaker 3: to strike, and so especially with the kind of assembly
47:36
Speaker 3: line motown idea, if you could just make that predictable
47:42
Speaker 3: and automate it the aha moment, then that would take
47:48
Speaker 3: a lot of the uncertainty out of the business.
47:50
Speaker 6: I think you pointed out something that most people don't
47:52
Speaker 6: want to ever mention, which is that creativity is unreliable.
47:57
Speaker 6: You might be Paul McCartney and able to write some
48:00
Speaker 6: of the world's greatest songs. But if I brought him
48:02
Speaker 6: in the room right now and gave him an hour,
48:03
Speaker 6: said write me a great song, it doesn't work that way.
48:09
Speaker 3: It doesn't work that way. But you can understand why
48:12
Speaker 3: someone who devoted his whole life to making perfect music
48:16
Speaker 3: wish that it did it. Raymond Scott died in nineteen
48:45
Speaker 3: ninety four in obscurity and relative poverty in a nursing
48:49
Speaker 3: home near that faded house and Van nuys Jo's a Winner.
48:53
Speaker 3: A slew of fellow enthusiasts, and the Scott family started
48:57
Speaker 3: to comb through his archives to piece the whole crazy
48:59
Speaker 3: story together. They shipped boxes and boxes of tapes and
49:03
Speaker 3: records and papers to the Mars Sound Archives at the
49:05
Speaker 3: University of Missouri, Kansas City. Then they released his music
49:09
Speaker 3: and compilations. Scott had always kept his machines mostly secret
49:14
Speaker 3: in case anyone wanted to steal them, but when they
49:16
Speaker 3: finally released Scott's electronic music in the early two thousands,
49:20
Speaker 3: he suddenly had a new set of posthumous hits. You
49:22
Speaker 3: probably don't even realize you've heard a Raymond Scott's song before,
49:26
Speaker 3: but he's been sampled all over the place. Gorillas, Jay Dilla, Lizzo,
49:30
Speaker 3: They've all sampled Scott. His music is in the Simpsons,
49:33
Speaker 3: ren and Stimpy HBO shows. The song you're hearing now
49:37
Speaker 3: is called port Afino, and it was unreleased in his lifetime,
49:41
Speaker 3: but there are all these recordings of it, each trying
49:44
Speaker 3: it a different way, all electronics, with vocals, with saxophone.
49:49
Speaker 3: When the archivists found it, choose it thought the melody
49:52
Speaker 3: was so classic it must have been a cover.
49:54
Speaker 5: And I went into various databases looking for a port Afino.
49:58
Speaker 5: There's like eighty or one hundred things called port Afino,
50:02
Speaker 5: and I would go through iTunes listen to every goddamn
50:04
Speaker 5: one of them, and not one of them was Raymond's melody.
50:07
Speaker 5: But to this date, I mean, that thing's been out
50:09
Speaker 5: for twenty one years, no one has come to us
50:11
Speaker 5: and said, h that's cover version, or someone else wrote that,
50:15
Speaker 5: or it's a traditional melody.
50:17
Speaker 3: A true original. Meanwhile, Mark Mothersbaugh, the lead singer of Devo,
50:22
Speaker 3: bought the Electronium and dragged it from the shed to
50:25
Speaker 3: his studios. Brian key Hugh is trying now to assemble
50:28
Speaker 3: a team of engineers to bring it back online in
50:31
Speaker 3: digital or physical form. Even with all the schematics, they're
50:35
Speaker 3: still mystified.
50:36
Speaker 6: You know. Somebody said it's still a black box, and
50:38
Speaker 6: that's true. We still don't know what it did. And
50:41
Speaker 6: I feel like we're looking through a keyhole at a
50:44
Speaker 6: room and we can barely see it until we get
50:47
Speaker 6: through the door a bit more.
50:49
Speaker 3: There are Scott cover bands and Scott festivals. Somehow his
50:53
Speaker 3: music still resonates. Whatever spark he caught is still catching.
50:57
Speaker 3: What I think is strange, as most of the musicians
50:59
Speaker 3: who knew Scott earlier in his life seemed to have
51:01
Speaker 3: hated him, but the engineers who knew him at the
51:04
Speaker 3: end of his life loved him. A lot of his
51:06
Speaker 3: early jazz hits were aggressive, frantic firecrackers of song, but
51:11
Speaker 3: the electronic stuff is often sweet, guileless innocent. Some of
51:15
Speaker 3: that stuff was written in partnership with the electronium. His melody,
51:19
Speaker 3: its patterns, and it sounds like a songwriter at peace
51:22
Speaker 3: with himself.
51:23
Speaker 6: At one point he'd resisted human control of it, but
51:27
Speaker 6: then he took one of the voice cards and adapted
51:29
Speaker 6: it to a keyboard input. As he found before when
51:32
Speaker 6: he would put a Hammond organ or mostly an ondulan
51:35
Speaker 6: on top of the electronium, it really needed somebody doing
51:38
Speaker 6: a nice melody in order to sell the package.
51:46
Speaker 3: There is, I think a lesson in Scott's life, one
51:50
Speaker 3: that's kind of a morality tale for our own AI
51:53
Speaker 3: adult chat GPT world. He walked from automatic pianos to
51:57
Speaker 3: the first computers. He sought perfection, he sought industrial scale creativity,
52:04
Speaker 3: but the trade offs he made were the relationships around him,
52:07
Speaker 3: the failure to see the humanity of the people he
52:10
Speaker 3: was trying to control. People would sometimes talk about Scott
52:13
Speaker 3: as if he were a machine. But I think there's
52:16
Speaker 3: something in his music that testifies to a soul, that
52:19
Speaker 3: ghost at the keys of the player piano, those recorded
52:22
Speaker 3: phone calls to his family, that early string of hits,
52:26
Speaker 3: All the musical machines, what they have in common is
52:30
Speaker 3: the goal of each song to connect people through sound.
52:35
Speaker 3: Scott prized perfection in that end above everything else, and
52:40
Speaker 3: it ruined him. Someday soon someone might be able to
52:44
Speaker 3: bring the electronium back to life. And here again the
52:46
Speaker 3: inside of Scott's mind. But still I think he must
52:50
Speaker 3: have known the electronium could never write a Raymond Scott song.
52:55
Speaker 3: For that you needed Raymond Scott on the Last Archive
53:14
Speaker 3: is written and hosted by Me, Ben Nattaphaffrey. It's produced
53:18
Speaker 3: by Me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by Sophie Crane.
53:22
Speaker 3: Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on this episode
53:26
Speaker 3: by Arthur Gompertz and Lucy Sullivan. Sound design by Jake
53:30
Speaker 3: Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive producers are Sophie Crane
53:34
Speaker 3: and Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton Pushkin's executive editor.
53:39
Speaker 3: Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell
53:43
Speaker 3: Wagon Symphonet. Additional music by Quarantooth. Our foolproof player is
53:48
Speaker 3: Becca A. Lewis. Many of our sound effects are from
53:51
Speaker 3: Harry Jannette Junior in the Star Ganette Foundation. Special thanks
53:55
Speaker 3: on this episode to Alan w and Tenman, Jack Hurtz,
53:59
Speaker 3: Carl Miller and the Pierian Recording Society, and Byron Werner
54:03
Speaker 3: for a bibliography. Further reading and a transcript and teaching
54:06
Speaker 3: guide to this episode, head to the Last Archive dot org.
54:10
Speaker 3: The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
54:13
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Speaker 3: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
54:37
Speaker 3: I'm Ben Nattafhaffrey.