Minnie the Moocher eats Martha the Goocher.Speaking of "Minnie the Moocher," I listened to an LP compilation of Cab Calloway records, the oldest ones. I made MP3s out of it. Meaning I had to take out a few pops and clicks, which is funny. Why funny? Because the record itself had used old 78 rpm records and the liner notes says the engineers removed "the many ticks and pops which were sometimes present in the original material." Then there were the new ticks and pops on this record. So I have a couple generations of ticks in my hands.
This LP was put out by Bandstand Records, No. 7124. It is called "Cab Calloway and his Famous Band - The Beginning 1930/1934. I like the cover artwork, which is by Kirk De Grazia. Kirk also engineered it with Cecil Spiller. And Kirk wrote the liner notes. Kirk must not like rock 'n' roll, since he says:
[Cab] possessed a voice of remarkable range and his diction was impeccable. That's more than you can say about most of the rotten-roll singers shouting their garbage today.Excuse me? We're that worried about diction? And as cool as Cab Calloway sounds, and he does sound quite cool, I didn't hear anything on these tracks that made me howl at the moon with my best howling diction. He was great, but big deal. A lot of people are great in their own way. So I don't know exactly who Kirk was talking about there, but he obviously went overboard.
But, all that aside, there's some interesting stuff here. I like the discographical information, which is not as complete as it could be. More on that later. One thing I noticed right away, though, there's a problem with the "Minnie the Moocher" track. There's some kind of wavering, a flub on a word. Right where he says "Minnie had a heart as big as a [whale]. Whale has some kind of recording screw-up, I'm assuming on this particular release. Either that or Cab's diction was slightly off that day.
On the discographical information, I said it wasn't as complete as it could be. On my copy the original owner wrote in the original record labels and numbers and, apparently, even the master numbers of his records. That's very cool. On one track, "Got A Darn Good Reason Now," he put "BR 4936 (1st Record)." BR stands for Brunswick.
