Thrift Store Archives: Inside Track Rerecording (78 rpm): Side 1

I have not visited thrift stores in quite awhile and I'm sure someone is assuming "damn John, if you're not going to thrift stores you must be broke". Well, it's not so much that I am or am not broke, but gas is high, I don't have a bike to ride around but it's getting to that. Conservation more than "buy records in semi-moderation". But soon, I'll be heading out to a few stores again.

In the meantime, I pulled this record out of the "archives". It's an old 12" 78rpm record that someone made for themselves, similar to Recordios. In this case it was one made on RCA's "Instantaneous Recording Machine", where you would place the record on the record player, turn it on, and it would record you or whatever you were feeding into the microphone. You had one chance and one chance only, and of course these records were one-of-a-kind items. The best ones are those that are personal letters to family members or friends, or where a group of friends decided to go into their basement, have a few drinks, and sing.

Sometimes it was nothing more than someone making a "safety" record of another record, not unlike someone burning a copy of a CD to play in the car (so that the original wasn't ruined). I believe this is the case here, a record with handwriting which says Inside Track Rerecording August 14, 1945 and in red pencil the initials T.V. - ATOMIC BOMB. I decided to create MP3's for the two tracks on side 1. The first one is a song playing straight through, the second song goes almost to the end before it is interrupted by a radio broadcast about the bomb and the threat of Japan. By looking at the thickness of the grooves, it seems there was room at the end to put more content, so you can hear the music and the radio broadcast slightly mixing in, possibly due to the grooves mixing in with each other. It's unusual to hear a jazzy melody play and then lead to a discussion about how the powers that be are playing with the elements of the universe to cause destruction.

With a 78 there will be a lot of pops and crackle, so there was a good amount of editing involved. No noise reduction was used, I prefer to hear surface noise than to have something sound super clean, resulting in taking away elements of the recording itself. Outside of fixing one or two skips, the MP3's represent the recording of both tracks "as is".

If anyone knows what these songs are, or the source of the radio (or perhaps television) broadcast, please send an e-mail.

Side 1 - Track 1 (320kbps)
Side 1 - Track 2 (320kbps)