Making the Scene in the Garden State

Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond

Dewar MacLeod

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813574684
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey's rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. The book includes chapters on the beginnings of musical recording in Thomas Edison's factories in West Orange; early recording and the invention of the Victrola at Victor Records' Camden complex; Rudy Van Gelder's recording studios (for Blue Note, Prestige, and other jazz labels) in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs; Zacherley and the afterschool dance television show Disc-o-Teen, broadcast from Newark in the 1960s; Bruce Springsteen's early years on the Jersey Shore at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park; and, the 1980s indie rock scene centered at Maxwell's in Hoboken. Concluding with a foray into the thriving local music scenes of today, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of the locales where New Jerseyans have gathered to rock, bop, and boogie.

1 • THOMAS EDISON AND THE FIRST RECORDING STUDIO

Humans have always gathered to make and enjoy music, but it was in a laboratory in New Jersey that they first came together to record music. When Thomas Edison spoke the words “Mary had a little lamb” into a tube in 1877, he started the process that would transform the way in which people assembled to make and enjoy music. One of the signal achievements in the creation of modernity started with an act of music. “I was singing to the mouth-piece of a telephone,” Thomas Edison remembered, “when the vibrations of the voice sent the fine steel point into my finger. That set me to thinking. If I could record the actions of the point and send the point over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk.” Thus, by “merest accident,” as he set to work on improving the telephone, Edison ushered the modern age of musical recording.¹ At the same time, Edison never fully grasped the cultural implications of his invention. Always the scientist and technician, he resisted seeing the ways that his innovations transformed the ways people engaged with music and the entertainment marketplace. Although the first scene of recorded music makers developed in New Jersey, it did so under the guidance of a man steadfastly old-fashioned in his tastes and approach to culture.

Already a prolific and famous inventor—dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park that very year—Edison was working on an improvement to the telephone when it struck him that the sound waves he was generating could be made to vibrate a diaphragm that would move a sharp object to engrave the waves onto a surface. He was not the first with this insight—Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had devised a “phonautograph” in 1857, which transcribed sound waves onto paper, and Charles Cros filed a patent remarkably similar to Edison’s at nearly the same time.² But Edison’s original insight was not in the speaking or the recording but in the playing back. He wrote in his notebook on July 18, 1877, “There is no doubt that I shall be able to store up and reproduce accurately at any future time the human voice perfectly.”³ Edison’s phonograph was “wonderfully simple,” without the need for electrical transformation that the phone required.⁴ “I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time,” Edison recalled.⁵ It is fitting that he spoke a nursery rhyme, completing the couplet, “Mary had a little lamb / Its fleece was white as snow.” The words were not quite prose, but not quite music either, fitting because the musical future of the machine was not clear right away.

Edison himself foresaw, as was his nature, the business uses of the phonograph (a name, by the way, that came from a long list Edison drew up, its choice nearly random). When Edison presented his machine to the public, he listed a number of uses for it, among which music came in at number 4. Certainly, recording technology would develop over the years for a variety of uses, but ultimately music made the phonograph’s place in history.

Imagine the strangeness of it all. For all of human history, sound had come out live, right in front of you, in sync with the objects in your vision. Or sound came from a distance, signaling danger approaching or nature at work. Music was enjoyed face-to-face, as humans gathered around the campfire or the piano in the parlor, or on the stage they were viewing. For decades at least, people had begun imagining other possibilities. The music theorist Moritz Hauptmann called for “musical photographs.”⁶ Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had transcribed the musical waves onto paper, “recording” sounds that would not become available until the invention of twenty-first-century technologies. Now, in this age of miraculous technological inventions, the most miraculous inventor himself could make music, singing into the tube and recording his voice on a piece of tinfoil that could then be made to repeat his singing, warts and all, for all to hear.

Music was not the first purpose of the phonograph. Everywhere he went, Edison exhibited its power as a “talking” or “speaking” machine, a wondrous invention of the industrial age that would capture sound, but would also take on a life of its own in talking back at listeners. How could the world not be a different place when such a fundamental rule of physics had now been overthrown? Before the phonograph, according to one historian, “every sonic phenomenon had possessed a unity of time and space; it occurred once, for a certain duration, in one place, and then it was gone forever. By embedding time in objects and making possible what the economist Jacques Attali has called the stockpiling of sound, recording technology destroyed that uniqueness.”⁷

“What would have become of such a man in the days of the Salem witchcraft?” asked a reporter upon viewing Edison’s demonstration of the phonograph in 1878.⁸ Indeed, how magical, maybe more magical than all the others, was this invention, to take an ephemeral sound and capture it? Writers searched for words to describe the process—sounds were “etched” or “imprisoned” or “preserved or bottled up, as it were, and kept for future use”⁹—but none fully conveyed the impossibility of it all. “The New York Sun was fascinated by the metaphysical implications of an invention that could play ‘Echoes from Dead Voices,’ ” according to the historian Randall Stross. And, “The New York Times predicted that a large business would develop in ‘bottled sermons,’ and wealthy connoisseurs would take pride in keeping a ‘well-stocked oratorical cellar.’ ”¹⁰ One writer claimed that the Marine Band was “rendering itself immortal … by having its most harmonious strains bottled in large quantities.”¹¹ The Reverend Horatio Nelson Powers claimed to “hoard music and speech.”¹² Edison himself boldly declared that he had achieved “the captivity of all manner of sound-waves heretofore designated as ‘fugitive’ and their permanent retention.”¹³ In what may have seemed more threat than promise, he told the public:

Your words, for example, are preserved in tin foil, and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same tone of voice you spoke them in.… This tongue-less, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against this thin iron diaphragm.¹⁴

Upon hearing this pronouncement from Edison, the reporter “thought of that passage of Holy Writ which says, ‘every idle thought and every vain word which man thinks or utters are recorded in the Judgment Book.’ Does the Recording Angel sit beside a Celestial Phonograph, against whose spiritual diaphragm some mysterious ether presses the record of a human life?”¹⁵ This was no mere technical achievement. This still-imperfect, this (in Edison’s own words) “poor specimen of a phonograph,” threatened to change not only human history, but the hereafter as well.¹⁶

No wonder the public wrestled with just what manner of man this Edison was, and just what he wrought. “It sounds more like the devil every time,” claimed one listener at Edison’s 1888 demonstration to the National Academy of Sciences.¹⁷ One writer made the connection to Emerson’s thoughts on the invention of the daguerreotype: “We make the sun paint our portraits now, and by-and-by we shall organize the echoes as we now organize the shadows.”¹⁸ Edison wondered if the bigoted and ignorant might not “destroy the machine as an invention of the devil and mob the agents as his regular imps.”¹⁹

Taking full advantage of his proximity to New York and his skyrocketing fame, Edison made the rounds of scientific circles and the publicity accorded by the city’s newspaper and magazine industries. Riding the train from Menlo Park to the city, tinfoil-covered machine in tow, he visited the offices of Scientific American to have his machine vetted, and word of its wonders broadcast to the scientific community and beyond. People came from all over the world to meet the Wizard. Edison welcomed interesting visitors and loved engaging in conversation, often sparring and joking with journalists (whom he loved to fool with his “Wizard” persona).²⁰ Reporters made the trek to the New Jersey hinterlands on special trains arranged by the Pennsylvania Railroad to find the inventor and his crew in the laboratory, tinkering with improvements, Edison harmonizing on “John Brown’s Body” with one of his workmen.²¹

Nearly all stories of Edison from that time begin with the journey out to visit the Wizard. Very quickly, the now-legendary biography of the boy inventor and entrepreneur became a standard part of the story, followed by an investigation into Edison the Man, the Scientist, the Wizard. He loved to put on the “Great Inventor” act for reporters, but all who met and worked with him were genuinely intrigued and charmed by “the happy-hooligan light out of his gray eyes.”²² One visitor recalled, “On meeting him one is first astonished by the extreme buoyancy of his step and his bearing.… His large head and twinkling eyes give the immediate impression of intense vitality.”²³ When the writer George Parsons Lathrop visits Edison in 1890, he finds a man who “is always absolutely himself. He does not present to one’s observation a mixture of superficial manners and concealed inner man.… He has, in a degree which is literally startling, the power of self-concentration.”²⁴ Edison told Lathrop that he invented the phonograph by “logical deduction,” but Lathrop also noticed “mingled abstraction and fire” in Edison’s face and the “imaginative aspect of his mind.”²⁵

Fearing that he would be accused of ventriloquism, or worse, Edison took pains to separate himself from the wizards and magicians and hucksters who trod the stage, especially since charlatans and con men were legion in nineteenth-century popular culture.²⁶ When Kentucky senator James B. Beck spoke into the machine during Edison’s visit to the Senate chamber, he heard back his own words, “I don’t believe in you, I think you are a humbug.”²⁷ One of his chemists later recalled, “Edison himself was generally referred to as The Old Man. He had nicknamed his experimenters ‘Muckers,’ he himself being the chief Mucker.… Edison shrank from the word genius because of its suggestion of a miraculous power of creating by mere inspiration something out of nothing.”²⁸

But at the same time, Edison loved the dramatic demonstration, mixing the cornpone with his “wizard-like air.”²⁹ Another visitor captured the awe of arriving in the middle of the night to find Edison in his element, “a midnight workman with supernal forces whose mysterious phenomena have taught me their largest idea of elemental power; a modern alchemist, who finds the philosopher’s stone to be made of carbon, and with his magnetic wand changes every-day knowledge into the pure gold of new applications and original uses. He is THOMAS A. EDISON, at work in his laboratory, deep in his conjuring of Nature while the world sleeps.”³⁰

The public could not help but embrace with awe the invention’s “moral side, a stirring, optimistic inspiration,” but Edison emphasized the practical and scientific nature of the phonograph, promising its use for business and literature.³¹ He forecast the day when all the musics of the world would be captured and distributed widely, proclaiming, “We will phonograph orchestral concerts by brass and string bands, instrumental and vocal solos and part songs. The sheets bearing the sound impressions of this music will be removed from the phonograph and multiplied to any extent by ele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Making Scenes
• 1. Thomas Edison and the First Recording Studio
• 2. The Victor Talking Machine Company and the Scene at Home
• 3. Jazz at the Cliffside: The Studios of Rud Van Gelder
• 4. Transylvania Bandstand and Rockin’ with the Cool Ghoul
• 5. The Upstage Club and the Asbury Park Scene
• 6. “Drums Along the Hudson”: The Hoboken Sound
• Conclusion: Making the Scene in the Twenty-First Century
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author