“The Voice of _____ Your Man in Service”

Click to zoom...As I’ve mentioned previously, I recently purchased a USB turntable, so I can finally convert some of my more obscure (and generally, as it turns out, justifiably so) vinyl to digital. For the most part this consists of things such as the Hawaii Five-0 soundtrack (probably the most digitization-worthy piece in my collection) or the long-forgotten solo albums of members of Yes from 1975.

But as I was shuffling through my LPs tonight sorting them into three groups (definitely rip, maybe rip, and not a chance in hell), I came across a most curious item. It’s a thick cardboard mailer for a 7-inch record, sent from my grandfather to my grandmother back when he was in the army. The postmark is from Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, August 11, 1944.

The label on the record says “The Voice of _____ Your Man in Service.” (No, his name was not written in the blank; I suspect it was up to him to do that and he forgot. I do recognize his handwriting on the mailer.)

The sound quality is pretty bad. I spent the better part of an hour on multiple attempts at cleaning it up, and this was the best I could get it. Still, it’s pretty interesting to listen to.

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/howard.mp3]

Here’s my best shot at a transcript. Parts I can’t make out are indicated by […].

Introduction: […] the Pepsi-Cola company is proud to bring you this recording of the voice of your husband, located here at Camp Gruber in Oklahoma.

Howard: Hello sweets, hello Tommy. You didn’t expect to hear daddy’s voice […] a package too. […] we were told we could send records of our voices home free. […] I know how much you — it means to you, angel, and of course Tommy. What I would give right now to be near you and see you. How’s everything? Do you really miss me as much as I miss you? How is everything out there? Fine?

As a matter of fact, it couldn’t be better here. Oh, the […] food and kinds of […] just can’t be beaten anywhere. I wish you could see me. I’ve […] as much weight as you’d want me to carry and the muscles are comin’ right through my uniform. The days here pass like lightning and the nights here… well, all I’d need is you and the baby and everything’d be perfect. Give me the next best thing — keep writing. I can’t tell you how much your letters mean to me.

How are the folks back home? Ask them to keep in touch with me; give them all my best regards. Love and kisses. The end, your husband, Howard. So long, angel.

I’m glad to say he came home safe and sound after his time in the service. My mom was born 3 years later. I got to know my grandfather well over the years as I grew up. He left this life in 1996. It’s kind of weird to hear his voice (almost unrecognizable to me given how young he was — I was convinced it was not the right record until I caught a certain cadence in his voice that I just knew was him) in this recording. He’s been gone almost 11 years, and suddenly here’s this artifact from back when he was younger than I am now, and years before my mom was even born! He was a great person and I still think of him often.

A spammer’s story…

Most of the spam aimed at my inbox gets stopped long before it reaches my computer, thanks to my ISP’s spam filter. And what does get to me generally is shunted straight into a “Junk Mail” folder. But today a new spam message managed to confound all of the road blocks in its way, and arrived within my field of vision. Just out of curiosity, I clicked on it.

Of course, it’s trying to sell pills… Viagra, Cialis, Ambien, Valium, Xanax, etc. As is the trend these days, the actual spam portion of the message is contained within a wavy, tilted image. But what I found interesting was the lengthy, nonsensical prose that followed. Clearly this was the key to escaping detection and elimination en route to my computer, but it’s so bizarre as to be amusing, much like the “spam sender pseudonyms” that used to work back in 2004. And since I know you’re dying to read it yourself, here it is…

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Unfortunately the story just abruptly ends there. I need closure!!!

I’m in the “Drool Trough”

Way back in the Bassius-O-Phelius days of the mid-’90s, we started selling our cassettes (well, trying to) over the Internet. Back then it was via Usenet newsgroups. One of our most enthusiastic “fans” (to whom we jokingly referred as “Bassius Fan #001” — we were ambitious, but not too much so) was a guy in Ohio named Jerry Kranitz.

Well, these days Jerry’s the online king of space rock, with his series of streaming Internet radio shows under the banner of Aural Innovations. I sent Jerry a copy of Highway 34 Revisited and he featured “Heavy Water” on the latest episode (#65) of the “anything goes” show “Drool Trough”.

Welcome to the new room34.com!

The new WordPress 2.1-based version of room34.com is here! I’ve been tinkering with this for about a month now so I’m very excited to finally have it online. And I think WordPress has really taken a major leap forward with version 2. (My loyal reader may recall that I had previously moved to an earlier version of WordPress, only to abandon it a short time later. Frankly, looking back I’m just amazed that I actually used it for 8 months; it seems like it was much less than that, but maybe that’s just because I’m thinking about how I only had Drupal running for about three days.)

There are still a few things left to do: some pages have missing content or broken links; I’m still working on a top navigation bar with dropdown menus (for now the navigation is buried below the fold in the right sidebar… look for Points of Interest and the various links that follow); and there are a plethora of WordPress plug-ins I’m eager to implement.

I’m also moving the photo albums of the kids over into Gallery 2. There’s a lot of work left to do on that, so I apologize to family and friends who are looking for photos. They’ll be back online soon, I promise! (I mean, “I hope!”)

And finally… in the time that I’ve been working on this, I’ve written a few other new blog entries (six, to be precise), which I never bothered to post on the old site. But they’re here, below, so read on!

Call it “Rush for Neophytes”

If you’ve been following my recent blog entries (or if you just care to scroll down the list of articles right now!), you’ll know I’ve been going through a bit of a “Rush Renaissance” lately.

I first got into these guys back in high school (of course), almost 18 years ago. My interest in them waned after I moved on to more obscure progressive rock bands, but by the early part of this decade, after I had bored of most prog rock, I actually found myself drawn back to Rush, and I’ve listened to them more than any of the other bands in this nebulous genre over the past five years. But something clicked a month or so ago, and I’ve rekindled an obsession with the band that may in fact be even stronger than it was at its peak when I was a scrawny teenager with a learner’s permit.

On Sunday, much to my surprise, I actually heard “New World Man” on KQRS. While it’s certainly not that unusual for Rush to be on the radio, I don’t believe I’d ever heard this particular track on the airwaves.

Inspired by this radio surprise, I started to think about what might go onto a CD of the band that I could use to introduce new people to their music. Personally, my first exposure was listening to the live A Show of Hands album in its entirety. Even though most prog maniacs generally consider the band’s 1977 to 1981 period (from A Farewell to Kings through Moving Pictures) to be its best, I think the end of that period, overlapping into the next, say, from 1980’s Permanent Waves through 1985’s Power Windows, is best for an introduction. The early ’80s songs are a bit more accessible to an unindoctrinated ear than what preceded, yet they are of higher quality than the weaker material of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

With that in mind, I’ve prepared a track list for a 79-minute CD spanning from 1980 through 1985 (with a nod to the earlier era at the end), that I think would serve as a near-ideal introduction to the band for a new listener. Here we go:

  1. The Spirit of Radio (Permanent Waves, 1980)
  2. Limelight (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  3. Subdivisions (Signals, 1982)
  4. Tom Sawyer (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  5. Distant Early Warning (Grace Under Pressure, 1984)
  6. Marathon (Power Windows, 1985)
  7. New World Man (Signals, 1982)
  8. YYZ (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  9. Freewill (Permanent Waves, 1980)
  10. Natural Science (Permanent Waves, 1980)
  11. The Enemy Within (Part I of ‘Fear’) (Grace Under Pressure, 1984)
  12. The Weapon (Part II of ‘Fear’) (Signals, 1982)
  13. Witch Hunt (Part III of ‘Fear’) (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  14. La Villa Strangiato (Hemispheres, 1978)

We start off with some of the band’s most accessible (and, once upon a time, popular) tracks. I’ve heard all of the first four tracks with some regularity on classic rock radio. Next we move into a few of the great but probably less familiar mid-’80s tracks. After a couple more “fan favorites,” I move into longer pieces that hint at what a new listener will discover if they go back into the extended late ’70s tracks, including the “Fear” trilogy that is rarely heard together in sequence.

OK, Rush fan(s). Let’s hear what you think!