A BETTER LIFE - The Collectors
Interview of Collectors
A BETTER LIFE - The Collectors
Preserving History: One Record at a Time: Our Conversation with DJ Mac!
Time travel exists—and it sounds like a needle dropping on shellac. DJ Mac (Michael Cumella) transports us into the world of antique phonograph collecting, where century-old machines breathe life into forgotten voices from the past.
As administrator of the Facebook group "Antique Phonograph Enthusiasts," Mac has created a haven where veteran collectors and wide-eyed newcomers alike can share knowledge about these remarkable machines. His philosophy is refreshingly inclusive: whether you've acquired your first Victrola or are hunting for a $9,000 Edison Concert phonograph with original horns, this hobby has room for everyone. "This is a place for people who are advanced collectors who've been doing it for many decades, and also for those who come on the internet and say 'I just found this in my grandmother's attic.'"
What began as curiosity about old-time music referenced in Bugs Bunny cartoons evolved into a 20-year radio show career and a unique business. Mac now travels nationwide as a "phonograph DJ," bringing his meticulously restored machines to weddings and themed events. Dressed in period attire with authentic equipment, he creates immersive experiences where guests encounter music exactly as it would have sounded a century ago. "People are hearing it more with their eyes than their ears," he explains about these performances that bridge entertainment and education.
The conversation reveals how these artifacts connect us to forgotten cultural moments—from the evolution of "jass" to jazz, society's moral panic over ragtime's "dangerous" syncopated rhythms, and pioneering artists like Broadway powerhouse Nora Bayes, whose unmarked grave Mac helped memorialize after nearly a century. His cemetery tours at Woodlawn combine history with live performances on portable machines at the gravesites of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and other musical legends.
Whether you're a seasoned collector or simply curious about how our ancestors experienced music, this episode invites you to slow down, wind up a spring motor, and let history sing through a brass horn. What forgotten treasures are waiting in your family's attic?
First words I spoke in the original phonograph and it was a piece of bright, deep poetry. Mary had a name which speaks for quite a soul, and everywhere that she went the name would sure go.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody and welcome back to A Better Life, the collector series. And keeping with the original intent, here I have with me today DJ Mack. As some of you collectors may have known, he is the administrator, curator, the head honcho of the Facebook group Antique Phonograph Enthusiasts that's the name right and I mean he keeps us all from killing ourselves and he keeps the critical people in line and hopefully makes it open for a younger audience, because that seems to be that certainly is my goal and I haven't been collecting that long, certainly nowhere near as long as Mr Mack. Dj Mack, as Michael, has been. So welcome to A Better Life.
Speaker 3:Thank you, stephen. Just to clear up your confusion, anyone else this is by Michael Cam been so welcome to A Better Life. Thank you, stephen. Just to clear up your confusion, anyone else this is by Michael Camilla. I adopted the moniker Phonograph DJ Mac and used Mac as my radio name because I didn't want to be Michael on the radio. I needed something to differentiate myself, and that all started from me being at a job many years ago where there were five Michaels and no one knew how to address anybody. I was like call me by my initials.
Speaker 2:You can call me Mac. Okay, I will. Mr Mac, you run this group and you seem to do a great job at it. When I was, every once in a while, the ornery group I torture, and you're the only one that figured out that I wasn't stupid, that I wasn't that I remember once I play, I put the needle, somebody was giving me a hard time I'll leave that nameless and told me that I, in a private text or a private thing, said that he would love if I had more intelligence than phonographs. Or I didn't. I have more knowledge than phonographs. And I was like, yeah, okay, and so I think those people that say things like that scare away younger collectors in this, and you've been, and I know I could tell by your behavior on the Facebook group that that's very important to you as it is to me.
Speaker 3:I want it to be an open forum. I've always said from the very beginning, this is a place for people who are advanced collectors, who've been doing it for many decades, and also for those who come on the internet and say I just found this in my grandmother's attic. What is it, how do I work it, what do I do? Or someone says oh, I've been playing this machine, I just got it a month ago and it just sounds really weird. I don't know. Should I get a new needle for it? Maybe that what I should do, okay, that's a great one right there's you get people going oh no, another newbie man.
Speaker 3:Why don't you search the internet for that? I'll like back off. This is the internet. This is what I'm doing. This is their research place, so let them do it. And if you don't want to answer with an open mind and help them, then just please refrain from answering.
Speaker 2:Or you get. I found this in my father, my grandfather's attic. What is it worth? Or you'll get the opposite. I saw this. I want to buy it. What is it worth? And those are great questions because I in a minute I'll ask you about that.
Speaker 2:But myself I'm new at this, I am a fast learner, but there's so much and we all say that there's always something to know. And, matter of fact, I was just researching Amarillo 5s there's a few up in an auction and I was just looking at the differences and as I read I learned that the oak models were only built in the first year before the infamous Edison fire in the factory, so that makes them much more rare than the mahogany ones. But that doesn't. I don't know if it affects their value or it doesn't affect their value. Sometimes it doesn't, but there's always a new fact and circumstances and it really is an oral tradition.
Speaker 2:There are a few books out there. They never seem to have the thing you want to learn and if they do, you can't find it without reading the entire thing. But we all have these books, we all refer to those books Every night before I go to bed. I have a couple of books that Fabrizio, Tim Fabrizio had written and along with George Paul, and they're just all different photographs, more by year than by type. So there's always something to learn about and you may have read it before, but it doesn't make sense until you have something to attach to. So I tell everyone, and anyone that's listening, as a new collector, buy the books and look at them and look at it and walk around, go to shows, go on and look at the auctions and see things and read about them, and there is so much to learn and every step is more interesting than the next, but it is an oral tradition.
Speaker 2:It still is and thanks to mac here he really keeps the going. He artists and whatever. He has a vast knowledge. You could see some of the music behind him. I feel in awe of that music collection there at the moment, but I feel a little bit better because he told me he doesn't collect diamond discs. So my first question is tell me how you originally got into this. What was it? A record, a record? Listen to me. Was it a disc? Was it a machine? Were you somewhere?
Speaker 3:I'm the youngest of four kids. I always grew up around records with my siblings, so there's always LPs around and there were a few 78s in the basement that I would put on 33 and think they sound so funny. Why do they sound so funny? And I think that, like a lot of people, I was influenced by Carl Stalling and early Bugs Bunny cartoons, looney Tunes, where they would drop references in not only to opera but lots of old timey songs. I remember when Elmer Fudd sang, sang.
Speaker 2:I was floating to the park one day absolutely so much the blue danube all the time and it's so funny that my friends who I grew up with, who are all over the country now and they and I'll post the recording and they'll go bugs so there were little things like that, and you know we see references to horn phonographs.
Speaker 3:They were mysterious things that I had really no sense of what they were. What is that? And as I continued to collect music and I'm a musician also so I was playing and I became very interested in the history of pop music. I'm a musician also, so I was playing and I became very interested in the history of pop music, I started going back and finding all the pop music from earlier, before my childhood, of the 70s, of the 60s, of the 50s, of the 40s and in the 80s. When I was doing this there was a certain wall you hit Like reissues from the 30s were scant, reissues from the 20s and 10s and aughts, no, not really much at all. So I remember reading books but not being able to find this music and thinking, wow, how do you find this music? And I started to realize, oh, it's got to be on those 78s. Again, this is pre-CD days and, just again, pre-reissuing of a lot of this stuff. So then one day at a yard sale I saw a typical Victrola upright Victrola for sale with a bunch of records. I bought it home and started playing the records in it and man, I wore out that one needle so bad for about probably a year or more. I just use that. Why does it sound so weird? Hey, if I turn the needle a little bit it sounds a little better, but it still sounds bad. I wonder, maybe I need a new needle or something. I don't know, but it played around.
Speaker 3:I think I found one of my first books, but I went to a phonograph show at the Newark Airport Hilton. It was one of these early phonograph shows and I met a gentleman who became my mentor, who's still very active in the phonograph show world, mr Michael DeVecca. He's the one who runs the music antique music extravaganza in Wayne, new Jersey, also known as the Wind Show. But he was very open. He started inviting me over to his place, taught me so much about restorations, working on machines, about records, just pointing me in the directions of books, and I just became fascinated with finding this music and it felt like time travel. It felt like listening to a record on a Victrola was a form of tapping into another period because the sound is so different, and then, as I got into Cylinders, it even felt more magical. I started that way is the beginning really and pre-internet days, started going to the library, getting books, finding records at antique shops and yard sales and that really launched me.
Speaker 2:So I love the Wayne Show. You go there on Saturday. Everybody's in the parking lot the day before. You try not to buy too much then if you're not going to buy stuff on the next day, but you do anyway and that's it, and you'll find people who are not really gonna spend the money to get a table at a time and they'll just pull up in the back of their pickup truck and have boxes of lint I have mixed feelings about all that, because they should really get a table and support the show, because if everyone, I think the show is full, you're right.
Speaker 3:So I have mixed feelings about it. I hope that most people who are even buying there go to the show as well.
Speaker 2:I go to the. I do both. I've actually thought about having a table too. There are a few machines that I would like to move to people that were more focused on them at the time, but I have a hard time parting, and as everyone does. I think it's the first machine you sell is the toughest I've done so many.
Speaker 2:At this point that yeah, you're, I'm still a sad case for that stuff, but I enjoy the parking lot, I enjoy the show. Last year I spent a long time there and there are deals to be had and you don't. It's a misconception that everything is expensive and costs a lot. First of all, the prices of Edison's. I just saw an Edison standard four clip go sell for $250. And those used to be hard to find.
Speaker 3:It's amazing how the prices have come so far down from the 80s.
Speaker 2:It's amazing far down from the 80s. It's amazing for me and that's actually how I got my first interest. It was after the 80s, so I want to say it must have been around 1990. I was working in the. I used to be a buyer for nordstrom's ladies high fashion shoes okay, we'll leave that alone and I was working in short hills mall at nordstrom's and one of the stores went out. Fancy what? Yeah, I worked on fifth avenue when I was 18 for charles rodan. That's a whole nother story. I can't get into those stories in recording. We, I, one of the stores went out and somebody, somebody rented it and sold it full of antique photographs and I remember seeing an Edison for like thousands of dollars. I don't know what it was, I don't recall and my mind just saying wow.
Speaker 2:I got to have that I really need to have it and then my girlfriend at the time said you're absolutely not going to buy that. Wow, that you're not going to spend. So I blew it off and I probably told the story before on the podcast. But then I want to say almost two years ago and I've always read I was always an Edison fanatic, grew up in New Jersey, I remember going to Edison's lab when it was totally in shambles and but it isn't that way anymore. But I was always enamored and my friend's father was one of the boy pages or whatever they called them, that worked with edison and he was so. He used to tell me stories of edison coming in his big limousine and he would talk to you and not be able to hear you and just very personal things, but that he was scary. It was a scary guy because of who he was and he ended up becoming an engineer because of that exposure to Edison. He was a little boy.
Speaker 3:But you asked about how I got started in this hobby, so picking up where I left off before I was getting into machines and records, I met Deveca and I was always a listener to WFMU, which is a radio station now in Jersey City who opened my mind up to tremendous different kinds of music as I was growing up, all sorts of stuff, and I thought, hey, I've got an idea for a show. I want to go on the air with disc and cylinder machines and stick a mic in the horn and play those. And so they gave me a show and I remember my first show doing it was a disaster Deveca, michael Deveca was there. He said, michael, you're not ready for this. It was like you're right and I realized. But I realized that my weakness was now going to be my strength, because my thought was okay, I'm going to learn about this music on the air with everyone, because everyone knows less about it. Who's listening to this show? Probably than I do, except for a few that were listening.
Speaker 3:But I did that for over 20 years and I learned a lot about the music, about the machines, and I had a lot of different collectors on with me. I always had an open door about anybody who collected records could come on and be a guest and just share their music. Because it was about just sharing with folks. I would literally go to the Wayne show on a Sunday and then on a Tuesday I got a pile of records that I bought this week. Let's listen to them, let's see what I got, and I would know some of the artists didn't know some of them, but it was a journey of discovery for me and a lot of the listeners.
Speaker 3:I think those 20 years were, I call, my 10,000 hours. I became somewhat of an expert on the music and maybe the machines too, but also on the note you said before, you never stop learning. I'm always finding, when I'm working on a machine there's something I can't figure out, that I'll go to the antique phonographs enthusiast page pose a question, and so it's a never ending process. But doing a radio show for a long time was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:I bet, I bet, I bet. When I was in high school that's what I wanted to be a radio disc jockey. But my taste in music was always different than everybody else's. It was a little bit more esoteric and I think nobody would listen. It wasn't my issue.
Speaker 3:At least that's what people in the high school radio station would say I was fortunate that they gave me sort of an open hour to do whatever I wanted and just playing the records and I got great response from people because there was never really anything like it on the radio and I started 95 pre-internet days and then when it started streaming, I was among the first shows streaming because they weren't worried about copyright issues and email started. I would get some great inquiries and feedback from people. Oh my, my grandfather, you played Nat Wills. That was my great, my great uncle and I never heard any of his records. I felt great to hear them so awesome.
Speaker 3:Oh hey, you played the Mitchell brothers. They were my great aunt's brother, whatever who they were. Look at all this promotional material I have from their vaudeville days. I wanted to share it with you Stuff that you'd never be able to even see in books, and other more interesting stories too. But yeah, and those archives still exist.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's pretty amazing. I remember the radio station it was WFMU, right, and I remember it being on. I remember sometimes hearing things that I was really interested in and sometimes I wasn't, as a young adult. There were the things your parents played that you never wanted to hear again, and then there were things that you learned about I was at 18.
Speaker 2:I was working in the city. I was a big punk guy. I hung out at Shibby Jibby's every night and I represent I fake managed two punk bands and in other words, they needed somebody to wear a suit but pretend they were their manager because they couldn't get gigs. So I would do that and that befriended me. To the guy I don't know if you've ever went there, but he had a construction helmet on. He used to go and I cannot remember his name for the life of me. I've been thinking about it for some time and I would see him and he oh, come on in, so I always could come and go as I wanted down there and it was a real music experience because bands would come, you I'd go in there in the day and I'd sit at the bar with my friends and there'd be somebody from stiff records or somebody like that who was not mainstream, wasn't really, didn't really make any money at writing articles in a in an obscure magazine, and the Hells Angels would be sitting there I don't know if they were, I can't remember.
Speaker 2:They played pool, they played chess or both and they'd all be sitting there. It was just a surreal thing and as a kid, 18 years old, you don't realize that this is a cool thing going on around you. And then bands would come in and they would play and Haley, who owned the place, would listen and he would give them a thumbs up and thumbs down. I still remember when the talking heads came in. They lived in a in the Bowery and in a burnt out like apartment altogether, and they came in and did psycho killer and everybody just went, wow, what is? So? There were a whole.
Speaker 2:We saw, we saw my friends and I saw a whole bunch and I was a dumb kid from Nowheresville, new Jersey. I had no business being in New York City at the cutting edge of what was about to become mainstream punk rock, and it was. It's one of the great experiences of my life where you, I still refer, people still ask me about it. I still run into people that used to hang out there at the same time and we were both in the audience together and some nico came and I don't know. The nico came and like velvet underground and you're like not even realizing it's going on, but it went on, so it was a great thing and that's that's. That's the whole part of it, that's the whole part. We're seeing. We look back and we play these records or I never was into opera, never into opera.
Speaker 3:I play Caruso all the time. It's great on acoustic machine. His voices sense and what I?
Speaker 2:what people can't believe that they'll say why does it sound so great? And or you could feel the emotion of it. I said here's a guy standing in front of a cardboard cone or whatever. They were singing into a machine that's carving into a master or maybe a cylinder or something, and then it gets made mass produced in a way, and so there are no microphones and they're like what do you mean? How did they record without any microphones?
Speaker 2:I said the same way it plays the way it works is the way I describe it to people right yeah, that's right, that's true, I never, thought of saying that and you listen, and I listen to opera all the time now, because this music has an immediacy of it, has an intimacy about it and it really is different and you're learning especially the the pop stuff. It's funny you brought that up because I never really thought of it but it's teaching you how people, what was important to them, what they listened to, but not we're not talking about history books where you're learning about land deals and whatever. We're talking about what regular people listen to, what regular people did, and it's amazing.
Speaker 3:What I referred to earlier was I became interested in pop music and realizing how pop music affects culture, how culture affects pop, and you can't really tell the difference sometimes and when I was getting into especially 20s and teen stuff and earlier, wow, they're talking about things like oh, the Scopes trial, what is the Scopes trial? Oh, wow, it's a whole thing. Oh, that's what that is. Little references to. If the tables at Rector's could talk by Nat Wills, what was Rectors? Oh, that was the Sardis of the teens where all the stars would hang out in New York City. It was a big social. So it would lead you off into learning about history. Just these little lines and little references. So, yeah, you learn a lot about history from listening to these records and also reflecting on what you said the immediacy of the acoustic process, where everyone's accustomed say it records this much bandwidth, as opposed to a stereo which records something modern, a microphone records this much. In there is the human voice and there's something unchanged, very much in the human voice. It's a little thinner, but I think it's more analogous to a human voice talking to you, speaking to you. There's something about it that speaks to our inner being.
Speaker 3:I was talking about the immediacy of the acoustic recordings and people will be at my events and I see them here. They'll see me across the room and they're here and they're coming over and they're looking. What is that? Is that some of those phonographies or what is that a thing I'm like oh yeah, this is what it is. Oh, but it's not real. You got like some USB computer going through it or something, right? No, but it sounds so good.
Speaker 3:What year is this machine from? It's from 1905. The record's from 1918. But it sounds so good, it sounds so real. What is why? Because it's an acoustic recording, it's a direct to disc transfer and now the disc is coming directly to you. There's very little in between what that person did in 1918 and now, between that transfer. So I think there's this immediacy to the voice and there's something almost I don't know how to define it in science why that's the case, but people feel it sounds so real. It sounds they're more emphatic about it than they are about listening to a CD or something Hi-fi. It hits people inside somehow.
Speaker 2:I think it's closer to seeing a live performance than anything else.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, it is I agree.
Speaker 2:It has that, like I said, immediacy, intimacy about it and it's hard to explain it to people, very hard, and I always say that and something I always say, and I would say it to new collectors as we were speaking before you could get by and collect all the music you want by one 78 machine, one cylinder machine maybe if it played both two and four minute that is and one diamond disc machine. That's all you need to experience everything from that era, and it really is. That's why that's what I think. Another thing that's great about the hobby is that you could be in for any amount of money and enjoy it completely. You could buy all your music from going to antique stores, buying a box for $10 of records. You can do all those things. Or you could do what the heavy hitters do and that's go to every auction and buy the. I just saw an old Edison concert that was in amazing shape. The horns weren't in great shape, but they came with the original box and it went for $9,000. Whoa.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if you say levels, I would love to own a Burt Williams record on a 7-inch Victor which would cost thousands of dollars. I probably wouldn't buy it if someone said to me oh yeah, here it is $3,000. I probably wouldn't even buy it. I'm hoping one day I'll find one in a pile. But there's very advanced things we're looking for and they're high value. But as a result of being involved in this hobby, people contact me all the time about machines and record collections. So hence I'm always buying machines. And if you get into this hobby, you get into restoring machines for the most part. Some don't, but if you Not, me.
Speaker 3:A lot of people do get into tinkering with the motor. So I completely restore the motors and reproducers. I'll buy collections, sometimes individual machines, whatever, and I'll resell them. And many times I'm selling into someone who's got a hi-fi and they're into records and I'm like, okay, here, they're looking for Victrola. They contact me yeah, here's this one. And I ask them why are you on? I just love the idea of having one of these old record players and having some records to play sometimes. It's just very appealing to me. They're not looking to get any further than that. They love the idea of having a Victrola and playing some records sometimes and playing them for their friends and that turns them on and that's as far as they're going to go. One machine records in the bottom of the Victrola. They don't want to go any further than that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, but it really is. It's really the recordings. I won't say the music, it's really the recordings. I won't say the music, it's really the recordings that drive it. You saw this month's I'm guessing you did or this quarter's magazine from the Antique Phonograph Society, where Wyatt Marcus had found a record in an antique shop in a box, and it turns out it's the oldest known recording. So it really is ridiculous. He doesn't even know what to do with it and, being Wyatt, he was kind enough to record it, like he loves to do. And if you have a copy of the magazine, you just click on it with your phone. It goes to a drop box and it's like an mp3 or whatever. However, it was recorded there and you could play it back and now you can listen to it anytime you want. Obviously, the record's going to end up being auctioned or whatever.
Speaker 3:Some private, some big time private collector out there yeah, is going to buy it All sorts of levels to this hobby, right. And again, it's another reason why I have that page to let people participate on whatever level they want. You'll find high level, collector, super minutia filled conversations going on, others saying I would like to get into cylinders. How do I do that?
Speaker 2:others saying I would like to get into cylinders, what? How do I do that things? So what I find more recently is a lot of people that started out like I did and bought everything in sight for a little while and then sold down to five or six machines and really worked on their music collection and recording collection or whatever it was. To me that is the more interesting part of it. Like I'm really into voice recordings, speeches, teddy Roosevelt, you really find some great stuff around, but I love the early jazz stuff. I have a cotton club recording of louis armstrong that I played too much and people tell me that I shouldn't play some recordings on antique photographs. But if you don't do that, what the heck is the fun of it all? If we're not going to do that, if I'm going to use a regular, newer photograph to play these records, to protect them, I'm not doing it.
Speaker 3:Again, that's a big subject when someone shows their Victrola and they're playing an electric record.
Speaker 1:How dare.
Speaker 3:you are destroying history and you shame.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you've handled a lot of those and we know the one person that flips out more than others. That'll go nameless.
Speaker 3:But I stopped those people. They're playing a Benny Goodman record. Who cares if it's destroyed? There's so many of those that people don't even want that they're throwing away that they can't pose for. Leave them alone, yeah, and then we'll have people come on Sometimes. I have these five boxes of columbia red labels. I don't know, does anyone want them? And then no one's saying anything. All those people like hey, you want to save every record, why don't you go take those five boxes? Oh, I can't take them, it's too many, I don't really collect them. They're gonna go in the garbage. You talk about wanting to save every record. Go save those. And actually I have five other people who can't get rid of their 40s collection that don't. I can't even know what to tell them to do with them. Go take theirs also, because they're going to be trashed. You can't save every record and I know the very nature of everything on this plan is it's going to be destroyed eventually I always buy the red labels only because there may be a couple in there.
Speaker 2:I don't have. So if you can get them cheap and you know what it is and I have doubles and triples and new collectors, if I meet, I'll give them a copy of something that I have.
Speaker 3:For example, when you get into stuff like let's pawn something out here, yeah, where is it, where is it?
Speaker 1:That's not it yeah.
Speaker 3:No, that's not it, sorry. You find sets like these, these Louis Armstrong sets, right, yes, I have them, yeah, and they're on Columbia Records and they're Columbia Red Label and you'll find these individually sometimes out there. Now, the thing about these is these are pressed from the original masters, so you're better shellac, but you're usually clean and not played and you can't find these things on the original, whatever they might've been OK or Columbia labels. So these are great to find when you find a lot of this stuff, and it's usually marked Bessie Smith, originally recorded 1921, but it's a release. Again, it's the original master, they're clean, they sound great on an acoustic machine and so there's a lot of reasons to pick those up when you see them.
Speaker 2:I try anything. Louis Armstrong I really love Jelly Roll, morton and that kind of stuff. There are some represses of Jelly Roll and other people doing some of his things and his story. If anybody ever watched jazz documentary they talk about jelly roll, morton and how he was a womanizer and had only people that weren't womanizers for lack of a better explanation played the piano or women played the piano. So for him he part of his part of this whole thing and just to think about that, his idea of playing the piano was that he heard the New Orleans bands at funeral funerals and that he said I wonder if I could play all the parts on the piano at the same time. And jazz is born. Maybe it was him, maybe it was somebody else, but he's certainly one of the early people who starts to experiment with this thing that becomes jazz.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and speaking of piano, just we're talking about pop music, no-transcript performers doing this rhythmic stuff, so you can see the progression, how things move in incremental steps towards today, and I love tracing back and finding those little steps, going back as far as you can until it's not recorded, until you're just talking about people writing about it.
Speaker 2:It's funny. I remember my dad. We listened listening to something from Cab Calloway and my dad, who didn't really listen to anything, said to me oh, when I was a kid he was like really young, like 10, I used to deliver ice to the Cotton Club. We worked on the back of a horse-drawn ice truck and I was like, are you kidding me, dad? That's like saying I used to hang out at CBGB's in the early 1970s.
Speaker 3:He's going in with a chunk of ice on his back as a kid Practicing in there. Go ahead and be ice mods as a kid Practicing in there. Go on the ice mats. Oh, let me get some ice there. Can you imagine Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was there and he had to be that young because he joined the Navy when he was 14. Mind about his age, so it had to be before that. Yeah, so that's the year it was. Definitely it had to be in the mid-30s, 35, 37. That's how old he was, I think Ellington's time there he lived in Harlem, which at that point he did anyway. Then they moved to the Bronx, but they were still in Harlem at that point. Cold water flat Things we can't imagine. It's illegal to have a cold water flat today.
Speaker 3:So let's see. One other thing I wanted to mention to you was I was doing my radio show. I would be playing these records and around 2000 someone said to me hey, we're having a party. Would you come and bring the phonographs and play some music at our party? You really want me to do that? I was like, okay, I think I'll do it and we'll pay you and you can eat and drink. I I was like, oh sure, I get invited to a party and I get paid and eat and drink, sure, and then I sort of thought that was a one-off. And then maybe it was a year or so later, someone asked me again to do it and I was telling a friend after I did it I was like, oh, I did another one of these parties. She was, and I was already.
Speaker 3:I had been a DJ in the eighties with two turntables and doing weddings and all sorts of events. I was like, oh, I DJed another party the other night with my phonographs. Wow, she's like. That's such a cool thing you've created. I was like, what did I create? She's like you're DJing with your phonographs, your horn phonographs. Yeah, she's like I think people would like that if you got some cards made and started talking about it. I bet you would get a lot of people booking you, I think. And then I started yeah, I did that. I got cards made and started getting out there and it came to me. It's like when they say declare it and that's the first step. And so I've had tremendous opportunities to play all sorts of parties, weddings, speakeasy events. I've been flown around the world, around the country.
Speaker 2:I had flight cases made for my machines to be able to do that and it's been a great way to turn the hobby, which is a money hole, into a bit of a moneymaker and a tax write-off. Yeah, great point, especially in April. So just out of curiosity, at least in the beginning or any time else, what machines did you bring with you to play like a party?
Speaker 3:It was always the same ones. I have a Victor II and a Columbia BI Sturdle, so two horn machines, and I put a microphone inside the horns and run it through a sound system to get some amplification. So always using those machines for these parties.
Speaker 2:So the amplification really helped. You put like a microphone in it.
Speaker 3:The sound gets eaten up by a crowd immediately if you don't have any amplification. Really helped you put like a microphone in it. The sound gets eaten up by a crowd immediately if you don't have any amplification, but it's never really super loud. I always make sure to tell people. I call it an experiential thing because if it's a really large room I'm not trying to blast it because I'm getting. There's a fine line between it being there and being annoying to compete with crowd noise. So I say it's going to be something like I'm in a corner and if you're across the room you're going to hear it and see it and you're going to come to it. And that's the experience and the sound. It's not like a typical DJ where the sound's all around you don't even know where it's coming from. It's coming from over there. People come to it. We talk about it. They see them in action. I show them the motors. So I call it edutainment.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's interesting. Is there some recordings that get the most excitement? Or people ask you about when you go to these things?
Speaker 3:I think people mostly don't know.
Speaker 3:They don't really know who the artists are. For example, I'll get to come to a party and we want you to play some Glenn Miller. No, it's too new for what I do. Okay, how about some Billie Holiday? Not really, no, she's a little new. What are you playing? I'll name the artists, like I really don't know them. I say, listen, I'm playing the period music and I can send you some MP3s of some things I've recorded if you like. But it's really not that important. It's the atmosphere that's being created. But I just play a lot of dance band stuff.
Speaker 1:I know what sounds best.
Speaker 3:Harmonies sound great in these situations. 20s Victors, 20s Columbia sound fantastic. I know the records that just have the presence and the best sound to match with the machine. At this point and again it's just about the atmosphere I say people are hearing it more with their eyes than they are with their ears. That's the way I like to describe it. Me, I'm dressed in a period suit, I've got the machines. They're like are you for real? I'm like. Do I look like? I'm not for real.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, it's a great thing to have at a party because, first of all, you hire a regular DJ. They're just going to blow you out. They never listen, they never turn it down, they never and they play what they want to play, not what you want to play anyway.
Speaker 3:So if you're going to do that, you might as well play something. That's interesting. I do especially wedding cocktail hours. I just there for an hour did one recently where their theme was antiques. They're both antiques dealers. Oh my God, we found you, we've got to have you at our wedding. I was like absolutely, and they had their whole wedding venue stacked with all sorts of weird antiques and I was in the middle of it. It was really hard to think for them.
Speaker 2:So you just go with two and you just keep changing the records back and forth. How many records do you have to bring with you?
Speaker 3:You figure about three minutes a side. So about 20 records is really all I need. That's going to cover it.
Speaker 2:Sounds rather hectic to me.
Speaker 3:It is because I am changing the needle every time, changing the record every three minutes, going from one to the other, talking to people in between, adjusting the sound a little bit. So it's very active, but that's just like it is when you're home too. When you put on a record, okay, I got to change it again, change the needle, put on another one.
Speaker 2:It's a very hands-on process. Yeah, I love to cylinders especially. I love to just reach in and grab one and not know what it is and put it on, because sometimes you reach into the discs and you pull out, like you said, a Glenn Miller and you're looking at it and you're like how did this get in here? And you go put it back and get something else. How do you organize your records? They're all pretty much alphabetical order Everything Well, by artist.
Speaker 3:What do you do when you have a Victor record that has artists on different sides, different artists?
Speaker 2:Side A. I use Side A.
Speaker 3:But then how do you find the side B?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I don't know if I do.
Speaker 3:I do by category. I do by category Jazz and blues bands. Yeah, but how do you?
Speaker 2:get to the ones that are jazz and blues and dead. Yeah well, that must be a big section, Bums.
Speaker 3:And my favorite section, laughing record. I probably got about 30 laughing records.
Speaker 2:So yeah, there are some and they get on my cylinder machines. There's a lot of old Vaudeville slapstick even though it's now slapstick for us, but it was then always stories about marriage, with the husband and wife singing or talking back and forth.
Speaker 3:Yeah, or I could do a section of marriage batching my wife's gone to the country, Hooray or you know if you talk in your sleep. Please don't tell my wife, or not, if I talk in my sleep, or what is it again, If I talk in my sleep, what is something like that? I hope I don't mention something to my wife. There's all sorts of those marriage bashing records. Can you tame wild women? Is Billy Murray talking about his wife becoming emancipated and him not liking it, not liking it?
Speaker 2:So what was there? One piece of music or record that you purchased or found in the beginning that really you said, wow, this is awesome.
Speaker 3:It still happened. I think, talking about the cartoon relationship, there was the OK Laughing record. There was a Fritz Freeling cartoon built around that I remember seeing it as a child. It was called was the name of the cartoon. It's basically about this guy who's in a band Doctor says you got to go for a rest and relaxation to this place where everything is quiet and he goes and he's in the room but he keeps hearing laughing. Next door People party. They're using the OK Laughing record, basically. And then when I found that years later, I was like oh wow, that was based on this. It was a really that's where it came from. That was based on this. It was a really that's where it came from.
Speaker 3:And then realizing laughing records was a thing, it had a. We talked about trends in music, whatever the twist, the Macarena rap, whatever you want to talk about, there was a period where laughing records were big. And then I found a coughing record, a sneezing record and the crying record. Wow, these are what a weird idea to just have this kind of stuff going on, tracing back the early days of jazz on record, seeing as it started to appear on record and also again, as we said before, it prompts you to read and look into it, and reading how the majors were resisting playing jazz, recording jazz, because it was music made by black people and they didn't think any of their mostly they don't want to offend their white audiences by putting out bands that were black until they realized they could make money from it.
Speaker 3:That's okay, until they realized they could make money from it, then it was okay. So that's an interesting history when you start to get records like by Collins and Harlan. When I Hear a Jazz Band Play which is just a pop song and they do this caricature of jazz in the middle which is people beating on trash cans and stuff. The way they viewed jazz was viewed early as noise. The way they viewed jazz.
Speaker 2:Jazz was viewed early as noise. I know I have a cylinder where they refer to as before it was J-A-Z-Z, it was J-A-S-S. Yes, a jazz band, my favorite jazz band, or something like that. And I was like wow, that's weird. Maybe they made a mistake when they wrote it in. And then I looked at the cylinder and I was like wow. And then I saw they explained that on a documentary on jazz.
Speaker 3:The thing happened with ragtime. Oh my God, ragtime, this syncopated music, is going to drive the kids crazy. It's making them go out and dance. It's making them shake their hips. Oh, we don't, we can't have that. And then, a few years later, oh, now it's being integrated. One of the things I've been able to do which I love, is I do a tour of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Speaker 3:I know you do and where I go to different artists and I bring one of their records and play it on a portable machine. Visit George M Cohan, duke Ellington, burt Williams is there, king Oliver is there. We visit Irving Berlin. There's also I mentioned George M Cohan, fritz Kreisler is there. There's many, but another one who are buried.
Speaker 3:There are Irene and Vernon Castle, who basically, again, this ragtime music is happening and people are starting to go out dancing and so on, and society is decrying this. Oh, girls are going out by themselves or in pairs and dancing with strange men at these places that are open late and drinking. This is going to destroy the fabric of society. We can't have this. And again it's got its black roots, so they're talking about that in more overt racist terms of the time. But then here comes Irene and Vernon Castle, who are all white and clean, and they start doing social dancing. No, social dancing is very nice, it's a way to socialize, it's a way to meet people, it's good exercise. And suddenly, oh, hey, you know what you're right, hey, it's great sanctioned by some white people. So then it's okay to do it. And I use the blueberry hill example fat stop, that record was a marginal hit. But pat boones, what?
Speaker 2:it's funny. It's funny, how that works same kind of thing.
Speaker 3:So anyway, they're at what I? They're dancers, but I play the music of james reese europe there, because he was a really important early proto-jazz artist, really was pushing, taking the music from ragtime, integrating syncopation more and jazz, and he was the first king of jazz, definitely before Paul Whiteman declared himself the king of jazz. But unfortunately he died and was murdered by his drummer in 1919. And he would have been a name that people knew, just like Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, but his life was cut way short. Discovering about his music and his legacy was amazing, and him leading the Harlem Hellfighters as one of the first black regiments to actually fight in World War I not on the American side, they wouldn't have it, they were able to fight with the French. But all sorts of tidbits by Furecake from the music and from the machines and the history.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. It's an amazing thing Woodlawn Cemetery. There's all kinds of famous people buried there.
Speaker 3:And it's a beautiful space. It's an arboretum.
Speaker 2:Miles Davis there.
Speaker 3:Yes, miles Davis is there. Miles Davis is there, right, it's a arboretum miles davis there.
Speaker 2:Yes, miles davis is there, miles davis is there right, it's a beautiful stone with just uh, I think, a trumpet on it or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's got a staff of a few notes. I think it's yeah might be a few notes from lou on there, yeah that's a great thing.
Speaker 2:You you get a lot.
Speaker 3:You do that often, that tour, or I used to do it more often but they seem to have slowed it down. They only have me booked once this year to do it. Actually, it's two sessions in a day. I was doing it more. Nora Bays is also buried there and that's also another interesting story I'll tell you.
Speaker 3:The reason this tour came about is because, basically, me and a couple friends started going there and doing this on our own. Let's go to, let's go play Nobody at Burt Williams' grave, he's in Woodlawn, let's go to play a George M Cohen record at his mausoleum. We did it on our own. We took some friends and Woodlawn saw me there and they're like, what are you doing? And I told him like, oh, we want to do a tour around this. And I knew Nora Bays was buried there, but she was in an unmarked grave and so I was like, why is she unmarked? And that's a whole story which I'm not going to get into right now. I'll let you or any of the folks watching this get into it later. That by she died in 1928 and was not buried until 1946. He was kept in a holding mausoleum in an unmarked grave.
Speaker 2:Is she African-American?
Speaker 3:No, she's white.
Speaker 2:I don't know who she is.
Speaker 3:She was the Madonna of her day.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 3:She was a Broadway headliner, vaudeville headliner, married five times. She was a huge manizer. She had all these men always to treat, play things. She was in huge manizer. She had all these men always those to treat, play things. She was in control of her own business. She demanded what and got everything she wanted anytime. She was a powerhouse.
Speaker 3:I was like why doesn't she get a? Why doesn't she have a gravestone? It's complicated the way she was buried by her last husband's ex-wife who put her in the ground. So we were never able to do it and I said she deserves a headstone or a footstone or some marker. We can't do it.
Speaker 3:And I remember going out to the spot where she was and thinking about it and I feel like her spirit jumped up and told me you have to make this happen, you have to get my marker done, because she had this tremendous influence on men and even in death she was like my succubus. She made me go back to Woodlawn and say we got to do this. We're not sure we can. Yeah, we're going to find a way. So I basically was on them every month Like we're going to do it, what's the progress? What's the progress? So they finally said okay, we found a way to do it, and so we did an unveiling of her grave marker in 2018. And that's a whole new. You can find that story in the New York Times. By the way, it's like New York Times, nora Bays, you'll find it.
Speaker 2:Sounds like that's a whole podcast on its own, to be honest. Oh, sounds like that's a whole podcast on its own, to be honest.
Speaker 3:Oh, about Nora Bays, I don't know. There should be a story, there should be a movie about her life. Again, I say she lived her life like a man in the 20s, the way she treated men as playthings, the way she made men bow to her, to all her demands for business. And she was the top-selling, always headliner, first woman to have a theater named after her in New York. She was a powerhouse entertainer. George M Cohen chose her to sing over there his big song that he wrote for World War I.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, start thinking about that. We could do a podcast on her all alone. If you have photographs and things, we can implement them in Absolutely so start thinking about that, because we're definitely going to do that. I love that idea Anytime, especially at somebody like that. I remember reading things you had posted and looking and reading, but I don't have a memory I'm actually working on. I've been working for some time. I've been working for some time. I get distracted on a documentary about a Civil War African-American burial ground in Rockland County that has been treated unfairly at best, and so I'm always interested in those burial stories, because they're always. They always reveal how we really thought at that time and how we looked upon people and this has got some good twists to it.
Speaker 2:And it definitely sounds again that Mae West kind of person is not always remembered from that era.
Speaker 3:I. We're talking about artists that we have records of, so they're living on. But my feeling is for the rest of us, maybe two generations we're forgotten Laura Baze. There's no books about her. There's her recordings. You have to dig for the information A lot of these people. You have to do your own research, come up with the stories. I was in touch with her grandchildren at one point. We were discussing it. They're like we're gonna do a book. We're gonna do, but it's a great. I'll help you any way I can.
Speaker 2:They never did it, so there's a lot to her wow, that sounds like a a script, more than a book yes me, oh, absolutely is so you should keep that in mind you let me know when all right, I somewhat thinks that I we should end it there for now, unless there's something else in particular you wanted to talk about was there anything else that we talked that we mentioned?
Speaker 3:I'm thinking really, no, okay, just thank you for doing this.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I'm looking forward to do it again. I'd like to do one on her. Let's do a podcast on her whenever you're ready.
Speaker 3:Like I said from my radio show to the Antique Phonograph Enthusiasts Facebook page this I'm all in favor of sharing our knowledge and passing it on to folks.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. Let's talk about the radio show as a good way to lay it. So where is that available and how does that go forward?
Speaker 3:If you look up the Antique Phonograph Music Program, you'll find all the archives. I stopped doing it. You did. Yeah, because after 20 years it's like a lot of this stuff, all the archives. I stopped doing it. You did yeah, because after 20 years it's like a lot of this stuff. No one's paying you for it, so that was enough.
Speaker 2:It's so funny because you see people recording on YouTube. They'll record. There's a handful of people that record and publish almost daily, some of them. Yeah, I did. I don't know if you saw that I did a couple of podcasts with brett dyslexic genius, dyslexic genius, and he's a catalog on how to fix things.
Speaker 3:I've consulted with him many times on many times, things that I've been working on so we did one on his collection.
Speaker 2:And you know what? He is the perfect guy to build an amazing collection because he could buy no matter what it is, and he could restore it perfectly and then display it in his house, where guys like me are lost and confused. So we did do one of his entire collection. But I have some fancy photograph equipment. I'm going to go down and film his collection so he can be free with both hands and walking around and I can use my fancy cameras to record it, because it really is a collection that all of us wish we had.
Speaker 3:You talk about Jack Stanley. He was on my radio show in the teens.
Speaker 2:He told me to say hello. By the way, I was talking to him this morning.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I'll reach out to him and tell him I did this. But yeah, sometimes I would go in the field and do things and I remember going to his home and recording at his home when he was in New Jersey at that point and seeing his collection, and I always like including a lot of. When I would have a guest on, it would be about half conversation and half music. When I would do it myself, it'd be just mostly about music, saying the songs, moving on, a little bit of conversation with myself, but always good to talk with folks about the hobby, as it is with you, stephen. Thank you for having me. Thank you.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad to have you. You're absolutely, as far as I'm concerned, one of the bright lights that reflect the importance of this hobby, that keeps the tradition going, that opens the world to younger audience. The reason we all do it at least most of us do it is to preserve it for other generations, and I can't say enough that I appreciate you coming on and telling us a little bit about your story.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Stephen. I really appreciate that. Thank you All right.
Speaker 2:All right, thank you all. This will be another podcast in the New York, I'm sorry. A Better Life for the Collectors on YouTube and also available audio-wise on all the major podcasts services. All right, thank you again, cheers, and I look forward to seeing you soon. Are you going to the Wayne show? Yes, I'll be there.
Speaker 3:All right, I hope to seeing you soon. Are you going to the Wayne?
Speaker 2:show. Yes, I'll be there. All right, I hope to see you there. I'll see you there. Thank you again. Thank you, goodbye everybody.
Speaker 1:The first word I saw be late, the original phonograph and a little piece of bright teen poetry. Mary had a game hammered split with white of low, and everywhere that she went, the lamb was sure to go.