How To Make a Bone Record (In 1950s America)

I was delighted to come across this little guide in a US magazine called Popular Mechanics. Publications with variations on this name proliferated across the world from the 1930s onwards, reflecting a huge growing fascination with radio, telecommunications and science amongst so-called amateurs (often extremely ingenious, skilled and technically innovative enthusiasts).

Unlike many of the super nerdy instructions for DIY science accompanied by complex technical diagrams, this guide is cool - you can do it in your living room, with your boyfriend girlfriend, whilst looking stylish.

A comparison would be the instructions from Radiofront - the very popular Soviet magazine, which also occasionally had useful intstructions on how to turn a balalaika into an electic guitar and how to build your own theremin (alongside some pretty heavy duty technical projects)

The first guide on the process of making a record on an x-ray I have come across is in a wonderful little book self-published by the Hungarian audio enginner and innovator Istvhan Makai in the late 1930s.

I have speculated that Makai may have been the ‘inventor’, (or at least the discoverer) of the technique - he certainly experimented with a lot of different materials when the commercially produced Decelith discs he had previously used became difficult to obtain - but it may be that, like many innovations, the idea arose simultaneously in several places when the time was right.

A few years back, when we held an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in Tel Aviv (in happier times), we produced our own guide

Nazi Era Flexi Discs

A few months ago I was contacted by American record collector in connection with a strange set of discs he had come by. He has since very generously allowed us to take them into our archive. Although they are not x-ray records, they are of the same family and are interesting for several reasons.

Firstly they are made of Decelith - this was a proprietary pvc based material produced by a German Company ECW that was used to make commercial flexible blanks for recording on before the war (the company still exists). The recording would have been done by using a recording lathe (see THIS POST for more details on how); they are examples of what we call ‘self-made discs’, recorded one by one in real time. They would have been recorded on Neuman or Telefunken lathes - the very machines that were brought back to the USSR after the war and were copied by Soviet bootleggers.

The lathe recording technique was used from the 1930s onwards in various ways: in recording studios to make test records and one-off recordings; in radio studios to make archive transcriptions of programs; in coin-operated booths to make souvenir recordings for the public; by journalists to make reports in the field; by amateurs to make home recordings - and of course by Soviet bootleggers to make x-ray discs.

The bootleggers and sound engineers in places like Hungary turned to x-ray as a recording medium because they could not obtain the Decelith blanks used by professionals.

The content of the discs Gregory found is also interesting. They were manufactured in the Third Reich during the early 1940s by the SONDERDIENST SEEHAUS, a communications hub used by the Germans during the war to monitor foreigh broadcasts. They are mainly recordings of American AM radio broadcasts of speeches by leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt but there are also some German broadcasts with speeches by Goebbels for instance. The discs are 10 inches in diameter, some are single, some are double sided and they play at 78rpm. All in good condition.

The story of how the collector came by the records is curious too. For three years around 2010, he managed all of the donations coming into a Brooklyn Goodwill thrift store where he got first chance at buying the books and records that came in.:

“One night, a couple came by with a van full of boxes. The husband's father had died and he was a true hoarder. He collected everything: toys, books, records, papers, magazines, and junk, Lots and lots of junk. So the couple were tasked with emptying the house. The first time, they dropped off maybe 35 boxes. I remember taking all the boxes in and starting the process of opening and investigating. Somewhere in the middle of my work, I find the first 10" German disc buried in a box. Just one. I was fascinated. I had no idea what it was but I knew it was something special. By the end of the night, I found two more. 

The couple came back two nights later with another 40 boxes. I asked them if there was any rhyme or reason to how they packed the boxes and they said no. they were literally just putting anything in and sealing it when it was full. That night, I found another 4 discs. Over the course of the next 2 weeks, I believe I acquired them all. (around 25) I would even come in on my nights off just in case the couple came back with more boxes. I never asked them about the discs because they both had such disdain for the father's hoarding that they treated it all as garbage and unwanted.”

As I found my first x-ray recording in a flea market (in St Petersburg) you can imagine that i enjoyed this story very much.

Thanks so much for this contribution

Roosevelt speech on Decelith

Dancing Around The Censor

Ingenious Soviets always found ways of circumventing the control of their cultural warders - either directly via illegal means such such making and playing x-ray bootlegs or indirectly by ‘hiding in plain sight’. The banned film maker Mikhail Khalik told me that he would place very obvious controversial elements in the screenplays he submitted to the film censor knowing they would draw attention and be rejected, allowing more subtle things to sneak though unnoticed. Even mainstream movies such as The Irony of Fate took subtle ironical pokes as the oppressive uniformity of the the Brezhnev era - the plot revolves around the drunk protagonist mistaking Leningrad for Moscow because each city has an identical apartment in an identical block with exactly the same street address, number and door key. The audiences got these references though the censor might not. Even Shostakovich was able to insert jazz and cabaret music into his scores on the basis of parodying what ‘the bad guys’ were listening to in underground speakeasies.

Stilyagi dancing in Krokodil magazine

Censorship didn’t just apply to movies, music and literature. Dancing always drew the attention of the authorities - especially if it was wild and western. Dancing at official youth events was supervised and patrolled by Komsomol members to stop infringements. Various propaganda news reels and satirical magazines like Krokodil regularly lampooned the Stilyagi and other kids who wanted to spend their nights boogieing to swing and rock’n’roll. Even Khruschev, who was credited with ushering in an era of relative liberality, was withering about The Twist:

”What is this dance called? The Whistle? the Whist? The Twist? Well, what is it? They say they dance to a frenzy, you know. Then they fall down. And this is a dance? Why should we give up our folk dances? I’m not just talking about Russian and Ukrainian dances; take Uzbek, Kazakh, any peoples’ dance - it is smooth and beautiful. And this, this is indecent! Such gestures with certain parts of the body. It is offensive to society… think, comrades, let’s stand up for the old days. Yes, for the old days and not to succumb to this decadence..”

But disapproval by the old men of the revolution didn’t work. Nureyev claimed he danced to jazz on bone records and the stilyagi kids met to twist and and to jive to rock’n’roll on x-rays in private - there were even some establishment figures who managed to get away with jazzy dance moves in public - again on the pretence of parody.

In the early 60s, the choreographer Igor Moiseev took his celebrated folk dance ensemble on an international tour - part of the culture exchange of the Khruschev years. To show off their versatility - and in the spirit of detente - they prepared a dance specific to the music of each country they visited - and what could be more American in America but rock’n’roll? After returning from the tour, they performed the very same rock’n’roll routine at the end of their program in the Tchaikovsky Hall. It was now called "Back to the Monkey” (a title with pretty obvious racist overtones) and described as a parody to illustrate the complete cultural decay of the West.

Needless to say Audiences loved it.

Lev Golovanov and the Moiseev Ensemble on the stage of the Concert Hall. Tchaikovsky. Courtesy Nikita Golovanov

A recent conversation prompted me to reflect on how significant the authorities fear of uncontrolled dancing really was. One aspect of the prohibition of the emigre singers was the flamboyant Russian or ‘Gypsy’ tango they performed and I wrote HERE about Gorky’s inflamed condemnation of Jazz as the music of the degenerate - much of which appear to be based upon its ability to make ‘fleshy hips sway’

Then there was the ‘affair of the foxtrot’, a purge which swept a whole group of young people into prison on the basis of their affection for what seems to us a very old-fashioned, harmless dance form. But the significant thing about the foxtrot is that it has a couple dancing ‘cheek to cheek’ - in this intimate private space, the state is excluded, ideology is absent - it is a kind of proto ‘sex crime’ in Orwellian terms.

In the ultimate totalitarian mindset, it is not just the mind and the emotions which must be policed but the autonomy of the individual body. It is not that the minutely choreographed official displays of co-ordinated collective folk dancing and gymnastics didn’t have a power and a beauty of their own - they did - but wild dancing, the joyful outward physical expression of inner individuality was a threat, just as the spontaneous improvisation of jazz soloists was.

Slava's Story

Dushenko Nikolay Ivanovich

I have recently been in dialogue with Slava (Dushenko Vyacheslav Nikolaevich), a Ukrainian whose father built himself a recording lathe to cut x-ray records in the 1960s. Below is Slava’s story together with a film he made of his father’s beautiful machine in action - an absolute perfect tutorial of how to cut bone music.

“I live in the village of Shcherbinovka near Toretsk (the old name is Dzerzhinsk) in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. My father, Dushenko Nikolay Ivanovich, was born in 1938 and lived here all his life and worked as a precision machinist in a factory. He had a hobby of radio electronics and engineering and in 1961 when he was 23, he made an apparatus for making records on x-rays (a recording lathe).

It has two motors, an arm with a thread and a recording head with a cutting needle, I still have some needles -they looks like they have diamond heads (possibly sapphire) and there are home-made ones made of metal. The turntable rotates at 78rpm. The case is homemade, made by my grandfather, who was a carpenter.

My father made many records on x-ray with this hand made machine. Maybe some residents of the village still have records that he wrote. The machine is in excellent condition and has always been kept in our house.  We treat such things with extreme care. 

This is memory

At first father recorded music from the radio but then he began to seek out music that was forbidden and  played on the radio at night by the so called 'radio hooligans’ - people who made home-made radio transmitters, and were broadcasting illegally on the short wave (See below).

I have been fond of radio electronics since childhood and was always interested in such things so my father showed me how it was done, and told me how it used to be in the old days when a lot of music was banned and they could put you in jail for recording. You had to record in secret.

He didn’t do it for money, but for pleasure. Before he and my mother were married, he would make records for her and for friends. Schoolchildren would come before the holidays to order make greetings for their teachers on a record. First he would wash the surface of the x-ray film with acid to remove the image of bones then glue a picture or a photo that the children brought him under the film and punch a hole in the centre (for the spindle. People like my father, recorded either straight to x-ray film or first on a tape recorder, and then copy it onto x-ray (Note: this is how the ’sound letters' were made).

In those days, there was a shortage of tape on a tape recorder, so he made a lot of records for people in a department store, and they gave him reels of tape.

I started working with him at the age of 8 and we made several records together. He liked the songs of Leonid Utyosov like Mishka or The Black Cat, and some foreign songs. I don’t remember which forbidden songs we recorded but I was born in 1970 so I was interested to record new music. We recorded with a tape recorder, and then I made it into a record with his machine.”

The song Slava copied is ‘The Old Drivers Song’ by Leonid Utyesov (Песня старого извозчика - Леонид Утесов). He played it back on a Soviet blue Jubilee portable record player - a very popular model in the 1960s.

Slava went onto to tell me more about the ‘Radio Hooligans’ - we have written about these intrepid souls before:

“The so called ’radio hooligans’ were young people who broadcast on the radio without permission. I would tune into such broadcasts, I remember listening to the music they played and hear them talking -  they joked about what kind of music they would play - and they paid for it .. some were put in jail. 

Most of these hooligans are no longer alive, though one, Vasily, a friend of my father,  also lives in in our village. He is now a legitimate radio amateur but very old, and probably doesn’t go on the air now there is a war.

He had a very funny story about broadcasting songs on the air:
Patrols had been created to catch such ‘radio hooligans’ - they drove through the streets of the village in special cars equipped with a receiverand to track the house from where the transmission was being made. Vasily, who had the call sign “Solokha”, was broadcasting songs, and saw through the window that the patrol was entering his yard. He quickly disconnected the transmitter from his radio and ..... he threw it into a pot of borscht, which his wife was cooking on the stove. The patrol came in, searched the entire house, but no one  thought to look into the pot on the hot stove..”

Thank you so much Slava - it is absolutely wonderful to hear your story

Check out the gallery below for images of the recording lathe.

Digging up the Bones of Cultural Censorship

Cultural censorship is very much back on the menu in Russia and has intensified since the invasion of Ukraine.

What, if anything, has the history of Bone Music to say about it?

Back in the bad old days, songs and whole genres were forbidden for ideological reasons - because they were from the west, because the people who sang them were regarded as traitors, because of their lyrical content, or just because of their rhythms and style. Control of recorded and broadcast music was almost absolute.

In the bad new days, there doesn't appear to have been much attempt by President Putin to repeat the methods of his Soviet predecessors, although it is unlikely that any songs with critical content will be broadcast on official state media. Back in 2015. during my interview with a well-known Russian broadcaster and Putin critic, the phone rang. It was the boss of his radio station stating that they would no longer be playing any pro-Ukrainian bands. My interviewee was sacked from his radio show and University teaching post shortly afterwards and now lives in virtual exile in Lithuania.

Distributing forbidden tunes on x-ray was difficult, dangerous and time consuming, but sharing music online is easy, impossible to police and instantaneous. Though it is monitored, there has been no attempt yet to implement complete control over internet access - possibly because of the risk of inflaming the largely passive Russian youth who have grown up with it as their birthright.

Or perhaps Putin enjoys such popularity, that he does not believe he will have a problem with the country’s youth. In 2009, he handed out awards in the rap contest “Battle for Respect” saying that, even if rap, graffiti and break dancing, were not actually Russian, they should be appreciated regardless of their country of origin - if of course they were of "constructive content.” That last caveat may have been a harbinger of things to come - increasingly Russian hip-hop and rap concerts have been cancelled for being ‘immoral’.

But even rappers who have been pro government have been changing sides, and some who were previously apolitical, have started to voice protest. In the track ’12', by the hugely popular Morgenshtern, the voice of a Ukrainian woman (the mother of the rapper’s producer friend Palagin who had suffered Russian strikes in Odessa), is heard: ‘My dear son, here, right here, in the morning the roof was almost blown away / Right now we are sitting in the cellar, we have prepared a bomb shelter.”

“The big bosses will send you to the slaughterhouse,” Morgenshtern raps elsewhere in the song.

The track is not played on state controlled Russian radio, but millions have listened on YouTube.

FACE, another rapper and a vocal critic of the Russian invasion, told Rolling Stone:“If democracy can win in Ukraine, then our people can fight for our own freedom, that’s one of the reasons right now that Russia invades Ukraine”

Both artists now live outside Russia and face designation as 'foreign agents’ along with many others - and it’s not just the young. Veteran Russian pop star Alla Pugacheva, 73, who has sold more than 250 million records, took a stand after her husband denounced the conflict:

“I am asking you to include me on the foreign agents list of my beloved country.

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and chief conductor Kirill Petrenko has issued statements condemning the invasion; opera star Anna Netrebko, who has past ties with Putin, has withdrawn from all engagements, stating: ’This is not a time for me to make music and perform.

Rock star Yury Shevchuk, the frontman of 1980s band DDT, already known for his verbal confrontations with the governing power, opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for anti-Kremlin activist collective Pussy Riot, was recently arrested after he criticized the Russian President at a concert:

“The motherland, my friends, is not the president’s ass that has to be slobbered and kissed all the time, the motherland is an impoverished babushka at the train station selling potatoes.”

He now stands charged with “discrediting” the Russian military. Russian authorities have launched more than 2,000 such cases. Over a hundred others face up to 15 years in prison under tougher criminal legislation that bans the spread of “fake news” about the military.

Many Russian musicians who have denounced the conflict had their shows cancelled or left the country and there is a wider collection of Russian artists and culture workers who are taking a stance. An open letter signed by over 17,000 states:
’We, artists, curators, architects, critics, art critics, art managers - representatives of the culture and art of the Russian Federation - express our absolute solidarity with the people of Ukraine and say resolutely “NO TO WAR!”. We demand an immediate stop to all hostilities, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine and the holding of peace talks.’

Many have been sacked or been unable to work. Kiril Serebrennikov one of Russia's leading theatre and cinema directors who is known for his liberal and LGBT-friendly stance had his ballet ‘Nureyev’ cancelled by The Bolshoi after he criticized the invasion

Even public use of the word ‘war’ comes with risk of detention.

Alas, the cultural effects are not just in Russia. It's possible to unequivocally condemn the invasion whilst acknowledging its origins are complex and the west has played more of a part in its causes than our mainstream media allows. It has also been very disappointing to witness ludicrous black and white thinking applied to ’Russians’ (millions of whom don’t support Putin and / or live abroad), and to Russian culture here in the UK. I was personally challenged about the appropriateness of promoting a show by Russian theremin player Lydia Kavina (a British resident of over 25 years). A friend who is living in semi-exile in Turkey and resolutely anti-war was ‘disinvited’ from a festival he had been booked for in Bournemouth because he was Russian. I even heard recently that a well-known hipster store in London has taken books with Russian content (such as Fuel’s ‘Russian Criminal Tattoos’ and ’Soviet Bus stops’) off its shelves.

My friend Alex Kan, the BBC’s Russian arts correspondent is devastated. Born in Soviet Ukraine, like many others, he relocated to Russia and has moved back and forth between the two countries and the UK since. He has family and friends in both and considers their cultures and languages completely intertwined - for him, this conflict is more like a civil war. He has spent his entire life promoting cultural connections between Russia and the west and now feels it is all in ruins. I have spent a lot of time in Russia, I have many Russian friends. The scale of what they are experimenting does not match what the people of Ukraine have faced but many have felt they have to leave, and those that can’t are living in fear and despair.

So, to go back to the start, what, if anything, has the history of Bone Music to say about what has happened?

The x-ray underground of the 40s, 50s and 60s was one of the few ways to express protest (even though that protest was usually non verbal). Whilst it would be way too dramatic to claim it had a pivotal role in the changes that were to come, it was certainly one of the Samizdat roots that eventually flowered into mass cultural disobedience, and it remains symbolic of the way that music can help bring about transformation.

That transformation took place over decades, but perhaps In our speeded-up world, it can happen much more quickly, especially if those to whom it matters the most - the young - believe that it can.

Culture is one of the most important things that connects us all - beyond, ideology, nationalism, politics and beyond conflict.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

I have just made an interview with the author John Higgs for my BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE radio show. John’s book ‘Stranger Than We Can Imagine - Making Sense of the 20th Century’ is a terrific read - it really provides a narrative to understand a radically changing world and the birth of the youth culture. We mainly talked about the emergence of the teenager in the post war years. John places ‘teenage year zero’ to the 1953 issue of ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard.

Tutti Frutti, along with Rock Around The Clock, ignited teenagers on both side of the iron curtain and one of the things that has been interesting in researching our new book Bone Music is seeing how the ‘youth quake’ of the US and the UK spread through the Eastern bloc powered by swing and rock’n’roll. It is also fascinating to realise that the X-Ray underground, which serviced those styles to young Soviets, was itself a teenage phenomena - particularly at the beginning.

Boris Taigin and Russian Bogaslovsky, started cutting Bone Music as the Leningrad bootleg outfit The Golden Dog Gang when they were only 18. Mikhail Farafanov, another of our interviewees, when he was just 17. Most of their customers were teenagers too. Kolya Vasin was barely 14 when he first came across Little Richard on an x-ray record. It blew him away. His friend came to his house after school and showed him a disc saying:

‘Look Kolya! This is American rock’n’roll!’

He took the record in his hands, looked at it through the light and saw the image of bones. Immediately, he was fascinated and, when he put the record on the gramophone and it started spinning, he heard wild singing. He was delighted by the ecstatic screaming voice, and fell back, stupefied.

‘Who is this!?’

His friend said it was Little Richard and the song was ‘Tutti Frutti’. Kolya immediately became a convert at the church of rock’n’roll.

I have written several times about the Stilyagi, the only real Soviet youth culture group according to Artemy Troitsky. These were kids who listened to rock’n’roll, jived, drank, tried to dress how they imagined American kids did, spoke in pseudo American slang and generally wanted to have fun. I discovered there were similar groups in most of the Eastern bloc countries: Hungary had the Jampecek, in Poland there were the Bikiniarze, in Czechoslovakia the Potapka and in Romania the Malagambisti. All dressed in an ersatz rock’n’roll style and aped US mannerisms.

Like their western counterparts, and the earlier French ‘Zazous’ and German ‘Swingjuden’ (swing kids), they all used music and clothes to distinguish themselves from the older generation and from their more conventional peers who reacted with shock and confusion. The media and the authorities were enraged - just at they were in the West at the British Teddy boys and the US rock’n’rollers.

The similarities across these various groups were remarkable. A pamphlet publicised by the British Anarchist Federation described how a fascist magazine in wartime France wrote of the the male Zazou

”Here is the specimen of Ul-tra Swing 1941: hair hanging down to the neck, teased up into an untidy quiff, little moustache a la Clark Gable,..... shoes with too thick soles, syncopated walk”.

Female Zazous wore their hair in curls down to their shoulders or in plats. Blonde was the preferred colour worn with bright red lipstick, and sun- glasses, jackets with extremely wide shoulders and short skirts. Stockings were striped or fishnet, worn over shoes with thick soles (see images)

It is virtually an exact description of the eastern bloc cold war kids - who were just a little later to the party. The fascist youth movement the Jeunnesse Populaire Française patrolled the streets with scissors, attacked zazous and forcibly cut their hair - just as the Soviet youth patrols Komsomols did to the Stilyagi, Even the satirical cartoons published by a disparaging media were a dead ringer. Yet all these groups were small in number - often just a few in any town.

But teenage styles change - and fast. The stilyagi fell behind the times, partly because fashions had moved on in the west and partly because they were growing up. New generations of teenagers caught the bug of clothes, dancing and cool music and in the more open climate of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ were forming their own youth culture, dismissive of the previous generations’ style - just as they always have been.

A fascist paramilitary forcibly cuts a Zazous’ hair.

"The Invisible Battle of the Cold War Airwaves’

I recently made a contribution about the x-ray audio project and the role that shortwave radio played in the story of the X-ray discs for a program for KMTS radio (Listen HERE) - a channel that is dedicated to short wave broadcasting (thanks to Pete Polanyk).

Up to 25 years ago, shortwave radio was a major source international news and media. The BBC World Service, Radio Moscow —the mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda, Voice of America —the mouthpiece of US propaganda, Radio Netherlands, Radio Berlin International, Radio Havana, Kol Yisrael, All India Radio and many more all broadcast their messages over vast distances via shortwave. The BBC estimated global listenership to be more than 120 million people weekly.

The advent of the internet brought a decline - many broadcasters decreased or stopped their shortwave transmissions altogether - the BBC World Service no longer transmits via shortwave to America and most of Europe - but there is still a lively community of shortwave enthusiasts, listening (SWling) clubs and technical hobbyists.

During the cold war, adapted and hacked shortwave radios were one of the main ways that Soviet youth could access Western jazz and rock’n’ roll’ in the 50s and 60s - and were an important source of tunes for bootleggers to cut bone discs.

"The Invisible Battle of the Cold War Airwaves’ an episode of my Bureau of Lost Culture show, explored three stories of cold war era radio in the USSR.

I met with Russian broadcaster Vladimir Raevsky to talk about radio jamming. As the East and West super powers squared up to each with nuclear weapons, a parallel invisible war was being fought on the airwaves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on broadcasting propaganda and music into the USSR - and by the Soviet authorities.on attempting to block them from being heard by using electronic signals to interfere with the transmission.

We also hear about the strange story of the ‘Russian Woodpecker’, a dystopian broadcasting station near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor which allegedly attempted to 'brainwash the West' using radar. (In fact, it was more likely part of the Soviet early warning anti-nuclear defence system)

And BBC Russian Arts correspondant Alex Kan, sat with me in a London cafe to tell of the brave young ‘Radio hooligans' who broadcast their own individual pirate radio shows during his youth in the USSR.

You can listen below - or subscribe to all the Bureau’s transmissions HERE

Bureau of Lost Culture

The Lost World of The Self-Made Record

For several years i have been researching the wonderfully odd, lost culture of the coin-operated and domestic machines that allowed ordinary people to make a record of their voice long before the advent of tape or digital recording (Jack White has been using one, The Voice O Graph, recently to produce unique lo- fi caught-in-the-moment records, including an album with Neil Young).

These machines are broadly the same devices - recording lathes - the Soviet Bootleggers based their own home-made versions on and there were similar machines for public use in the USSR - although not in coin-operated booths.

One of the most poignant uses of the way of recording were the ‘Voices of the Forces’ records made by soldiers stationed abroad to send messages back home during the second world war - you can watch the short British Pathe film on those here.

In a recent Bureau of Lost Culture show on Soho Radio, we were joined by oral historian and broadcaster Alan Dein to hear a selection of recordings of strange, moving ghostly voices from his collection and learn how the public were able use these records to commemorate visits to tourist destinations or to capture the sounds of loved ones - or their own voices - in a way that had never been possible before.

You can listen below and to all the Bureau of Lost Culture shows HERE or at the major podcasts providers HERE

These records sit right at the junction of oral history and audio recording history. The audio contain is unique, on the verge of being lost and I am currently hoping to combine my research into them with new musical works.

An early test example is here:

Voices of the Forces: British Pathe 1945

Soviet Lathe Operator late 1930s

The Virus of X-Ray Bootlegging

Whatever side of the Covid lockdown and vaccination arguments you are on, it has been difficult not to chafe somewhat, not to feel an irrational slight sense of resentment at the restrictions that have been imposed for the collective good.. Over the last two years, at least here in the UK and in the US, there has been much novel debate about personal freedom versus public good, individual rights versus government control. yet in repressive cultures, these kind of contradictions and feelings were- or are - common and much more brutal.

The Soviet ideologues who sought to control the music that people could listen to, claimed they did so for the sake of those people - for the benefit of society at large. Perhaps they even believed that claim. For them, the Stilyagi who dressed in flashy western styles, or young people who professed a love for rock'n’ roll, wild dancing and individual expression, were hooligans, antisocial layabouts, an embarrassment to their industrious conventional peers, at best misguided, at worst ungrateful and disloyal to their mother country.

Stilyagi satirical cartoon

It's worth remembering that in the 50s and 60s, wild behaviour, individualism and youth culture came under attack in the west too . Elvis and The Beatles were banned briefly in a few places, rock'n' roll records were kept from some broadcast playlists and newspapers ran hysterical, outraged articles about the excesses of young tearaways.

Those who made or sold foreign goods, clothes and music on x-ray in the Soviet Union came in for much stronger criticism. They were spongers, wreckers, parasites, vultures feeding off the innocent - a hidden virus infecting and imperilling society. They should be shamed, forcibly re-educated, prosecuted, stamped out.

They were regularly lambasted in the Soviet press, in publications like Pravda, Smena or Krokodil (where it has to be said the satirical cartoons were often rather stylish). Newsreels shown before the main feature in cinemas, poked fun at those who danced and dressed in western styles and excoriated the bootleggers and black marketeers.

Young men arrested for selling bootlegs n Shadows on the Pavement

In ‘Shadows on the pavement’, a film from 1957, bone bootleggers are portrayed as a hidden danger threatening to infect society. A concerned narrator intones over footage of young guys and a girl arrested and interrogated for selling bone music:

“These young men, who have swapped school for the back door of the GUM department store, are selling goods they made themselves - foxtrots on x-rays, the images on which symbolise the damaged anatomy of their spiritual misery ..

This is what we say to those who live their life in the backstreets and in the dark hallways. Whoever they are, these shadowy foreign clothes sellers or worshippers of rock and roll, these fully-grown slackers who don’t want to work – we put the mark of shame on them… We know how to condemn and pass judgments. We don't want dirty shadows to stain our pavements" 

Arrested Bootleggers Leningrad 1957 - thanks to Andrey Lukanin

It's heavy handed, strong stuff and feeds into our idea of the x-ray bootleg culture as being one of freedom fighters battling against a brutal repressive system. There is of course truth in that but it is only part of story. As the appetite for foreign music increased and as awareness there was money to be made spread. more and more unscrupulous characters, low-level criminal types and chancers got involved in the trade. Often they did not care about the quality of the records they sold, or even about their content, and the authorities condemnation was perhaps a little more understandable.

The entrepreneurial trajectory of western bootleggers followed a similar path. The first big vinyl bootlegs produced in the late 60s, such as Dylan's ‘Great White Wonder' were made by music fans who only came to realise their commercial potential later. The realisation of that potential prompted more organised, larger scale and less musically motivated operators to get involved.

Their activities attracted outrage - mainly from the big record labels - but unlike in the USSR, there was little chance that outrage would be followed by public shaming, sabotaged careers or imprisonment. While the Soviet authorities could at least claim their censorship was for the collective moral and cultural good, the big western labels' prosecution of bootleggers was obviously entirely commercial in intent - even when they pretended to be concerned about audio quality of bootlegs or the infringement of the artistic rights of musicians.

But in the the end, in the east or in the west, outrage, condemnation, legal action and even persecution made little difference, because when it comes to music, (if not to viruses), ideology, political and commercial interests rarely seem to get in the way of what ordinary people really care about.

I will leave you with a cheerful image as we leave 2021 and head into 2022 :)

Two Virgins John Lennon and Yoko Ono 1968

Get Back Sessions Beatles bootleg 1974

Ruslan Bogaslovsky's Criminal Record

Ruslan Bogaslovsky was one of the founders of The Golden Dog Gang, probably the best known of the Leningrad x-ray bootleggers. I detail some of his extraordinary story our upcoming BONE MUSIC book. Rudy Fuchs described him as the ‘hero of Soviet underground record production’, whilst his partner in crime Boris Taigin said:

‘Today, when we can have as much music as we like, we should still remember and bow low to the man who laid the first stone in the foundation of our musical freedom”

Bogoslovsky was technically ingenious, producing high quality bone discs, and even shellac based bootlegs, but was not good at avoiding the authorities, He served three prison sentences for bootlegging related activities in the fifties and early sixties.

I met his son Sergey Bogaslovsky in St Petersburg a couple of years back. It seems that even after the end of the x-ray era and after his various spells in prison, Ruslan led an extraordinary independent, anti-establishment life on the fringes of legality.

He died in 2003 at his family house on the shore of Lake Hepo-järvi. We have various drawings of the recording lathes he made and a homemade master disc for pressing records but sadly, a fire at the house in the 1990s destroyed most of his collection of records and equipment.

In our BONE MUSIC exhibition we have an installation: ‘The Bootlegger’s Room’ - the creation of an imagined scene where the bootlegger (Bogaslovky) has just been arrested.

For our Bone Music Berlin catalogue, the artist Silvia Righetti made a truly wonderful cartoon representation of this moment.

You can check out more of Silvia’s work HERE

Bone Music Berlin

Our exhibition in Berlin (in the old Stasi secret police district) finished this week.

It was amazing - particularly the live events with musicians who werepersecuted and imprisoned during the GDR era. More soon on that but I wanted to post this final image by Paul.

And a selection of others from the show

Forbidden! A Countercultural History of Censorship

Bone Music, amongst many other things, is a a story about censorship. The forbidding of people listening to the music they want to. As such it exists in a history of cultural repression for cultural, economic, class, aesthetic, ideological and religious reasons that is as old as language itself.

Songs, singers, rhythms, genres.music all instruments and dancing were all forbidden to different degrees at different times - along of course with books, films, poetry, paintings, theatre and artists of all types - for often burr reasons. Did any of it really work?

I recently had the pleasure to interview human rights lawyer ERIC BERKOWITZ about his epic new book 'Dangerous Ideas: A History of Censorship from Ancient Times to Fake News.

You can listen here:

The book is a thrilling read, full of sometimes comical, often alarming and always thought-provoking human stories - from that of the ancient Chinese emperor who destroyed any works implying there had ever been a better era than his own, to the current Chinese leader's attempts to have Winnie the Pooh banned (after his and the bear's resemblance was pointed out). The UK and the US don’t fare too well either.

We discuss the situation around the x-ray culture, the fear of dances that might around the passions of young people and the hypocrisy of the Soviet elite when it came to songs.

Why have books, films, images words and ideas always been censored by those in power? Are there times when they should be? Does censorship ever work?

Eric digs deep into the touchiness of tyrants, into our current issues around blame, shame and cancel culture and why he thinks that almost nothing should be censored. We explore why countercultural ideas are so necessary for the culture and why they are only really dangerous when denied expression.

For more on Eric and the book www.ericberkowitz.com

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture www.bureauoflostculture.com

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin

Cold War Spy meets The Fab Four in the USSR

The Beatles were one of the first (and few) British rock’n’Roll bands to appear on Bone records. Though I like their music, I am not a huge fan, so I’m fascinated by the gigantic global impact they had - on both the culture and the counterculture and on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It really is quite mysterious.

I recently interviewed the award winning filmmaker LESLIE WOODHEAD on the subject - specifically on the transformational effect the Fab Four had on young Russians in the 60s and 70s. I know from my own interviews with many of those who grew up on the 50s, 60s and even 70s how important they were. Actually, ‘Important’ doesn’t really cover it - some have claimed their effect to be more significant than all the cold war western cultural propaganda combined in helping to bring about perestroika

When Leslie was asked by Granada TV to film a new young music group in a club in Liverpool in 1962, he had no idea what he was in for - and neither had the rest of the world. He was witnessing the birth of a phenomenon. But by then he had already had some extraordinary experiences - serving a stint as a cold war spy, learning Russian on a remote Scottish pig farm and spending time eavesdropping on Soviet pilots from West Berlin.

These experiences continued to influence his life as a film maker, finally coalescing with his fascination with the Fab Four in the investigations that resulted in his terrific documentary ‘How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin’.

You can listen to our interview below.

To hear more oral testimony and tales from the underground Click HERE or on the image for the BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE podcast

Soviet Soul Music? - The Yard Songs

Vladimir Vysotsky

Of the various types of music that appeared on x-ray, the ones that have most been written about in the west are jazz and rock’n’ roll. That is natural because it fits wth a western view of cold war culture but it is only partly true. I have written HERE about the Russian emigre songs (mostly forbidden) that were the most common recordings found on bone records.

But there was another type of music that was perhaps more important in terms of dissidence, even though it was less common on x-ray. This was the music in the ‘blatnaya’* style - a genre that originated inside the Soviet Union and was always deemed completely unacceptable for recording or distribution: the Odessa ditties, the urban romances, the criminal and gulag chanson - the ‘Yard’ songs.

These songs might have been forbidden from being recorded but they were sung live in the courtyards and communal places where ordinary people gathered out of sight of the authorities. They were not necessarily overtly protest songs as was understood in the west; they were prohibited just because they were about real-life in the USSR with lyrics about love, lust, violence, death, criminal culture, suffering. They revealed the dark underbelly of the utopian communist dream and that was of course off limits. Further, they often contained criminal slang, swearing or coarse jokes at the expense of the Soviet system and officials. Maxim Gorky, the social realist ideologue, had declared in the early 30s that any art form critical of the Soviet system should be banned. Often their tunes were old melodies whose life stretched back to the era before the revolution, tunes everybody knew and loved and were adopted with new lyrics as the years went by. Many are still known and loved in Russia. 

The continued existence of these songs was a kind of collective unspoken act of resistance. Singers could be punished (some were sent to gulags some exiled, others shot), songs could be forbidden (whole books listing forbidden songs were produced each year) but it did not mean they were forgotten. The songs lived on by being performed clandestinely in communal places where underground culture was passed from generation to generation. Sheet music of the most popular tunes was secretly produced, circulated and exported so that émigré singers could make recordings abroad and these be smuggled back in to be copied and distributed on x-ray.

Our friend the scholar Maxim Kravchinsky (see www.kravchinsky.com) is a world expert on this genre of music - and on Russian emigre songs. He introduced me to Eleonara Filina, a journalist and singer of yard songs, who explained how the soul of Russians oppressed under the Soviet system lived on in part by the singing of yard songs:

“Why the yard? Because Soviet people had a tradition of gathering after work or on weekends in their courtyards. That was in our nature, thanks to the fact that there were a lot of communal flats perhaps. We lived like this, crowded, there were so many of us. Apartments were small. The Soviet people were very sociable. They would go out into the yard of their apartment buildings and sit and sing these songs together because TV was not enough, radio was not enough. They were sung wherever people gathered, in the yards, in the kitchens, in the pioneer camps, in the prisons

The thing is, the Soviet establishment was trying to show life as a candy wrapper - everybody's happy, everything's fine, there is no problem, we have a brilliant future. And these songs were about the realities of life, how people really lived. They were about betrayals of love, about suffering, about how people were sent to jail, you know. Everything was expressed in the songs. That’s why they were forbidden.

Moreover, during the years of repression, the intelligentsia were in prisons, along with criminals. They heard these songs and when they came out of prison, they sang them just as the criminals did in the yards. Their kids, the neighbours heard the songs, and they loved to learn them and sing them too.” After all, almost every family had at least one member in the camps

*‘Blatnaya’ does not seem to have any simple English translation but ‘Blatnoy’ initially meant a criminal who holds authority amongst other criminals in labour camps, colonies or prisons. It is a romanticised vision of criminal life and the word ‘Blat’ apparently has connotations of ‘blood’, ‘bone’ and ’bread’ - perhaps implying something essential, something visceral, something of ‘the soul’? I’d be eager to hear from Russian friends on how they understand this word.

—————-

Prisoners at the White Sea Canal Prison C1933 Photo: Oleg Klimov / Russian State National Library, St. Petersburg

Songs like Yury Nikulin’s "Postoi Parovoz” (Hold on, Steam Train), a criminal song of regret, became hugely popular through being sung in the yards.

Don't wait for me Mother
Don't expect me to be the nice boy I used to be...
A dangerous swamp has swallowed me up.
And my life is a constant gamble

One of the most famous criminal songs sung in the yards was ’Murka” which told the tale of a faithless female member of a criminal gang to a tune originally composed by Oscar Strok. It was performed in many versions by underground and emigre singers and even by official singers like Leonid Utyesov.

Underground singers like Arkady Severgny became hugely popular without any official acknowledgement by recording and performing yard songs secretly. Vladimir Vysotsky, probably the most famous actor and singer of the 60s, started out as a yard singer before he began composing his own songs, which themselves were a stylised version of the yard songs. Vysotsky’s music was officially forbidden for many years, but even government apparatchniks listened to it secretly.

How?

On x-ray discs and magnetic tape bootlegs.

I'd love to Turn you On, I mean Off

It’s easy to assume that music censorship was all in the province of the baddies on the other side of the iron curtain, but it turns out we were at it too (banning music for all sorts of spurious reasons). As I wrote HERE, The Beatles were the target of censorship in the West more than once - and even quite late on in the cold war years.

On May 23rd 1967, Frank Gilliard, Director of Broadcasting at the BBC wrote an embarrassed letter to Sir Joseph Lockwood, the Chairman of EMI explaining why ‘Day in the Life’ would not be played - a ban that wasn’t lifted until March 13, 1972.

Click on the image below to read the full details.

(Thanks to Adam Berry for passing this on)

View fullsize

ARTEMYI TROITSKY told me a funny story in this regard when I interviewed him on the subject of Soviet Youth Culture. When he was running his ‘discos’ at the university Moscow in the early 70s, he was forced to provide the authorities with a translation and explanation of the lyrics of each western song he played. He gave up when it came to ‘Day in the Life’ - for probably obvious reasons.. Listen HERE

THE BEATLES. ENCYCLOPEDIC REFERENCE by Nikolay Kozlov1996.

A Soviet Beatles flexi disc (courtesy of Andrey Lukanin)

The 'X-Change'

Alexey with Wills Conover. host of of Voice of America’s Jazz Hour Moscow 1969

I spent a little time with Alexey Kozlov the legendary sax player at his club in Moscow last year. Alexey’s life story is amazing: growing up in the worst years of the Stalin period, learning to play on a borrowed instrument and becoming one of the best known Russian jazz musicians.

One of the fascinating things he tells of was the ‘Exchange’, sometimes nicknamed affectionately, and with a heavy dose of irony, 'The Stock Exchange’. This was a place in Moscow where music lovers and musicians of various types, especially jazzers, would gather. Jazz of course was banned.

After the war, the Exchange was at the corner of Neglinnaya and Pushechnaya Streets and, from the end of the 50s, was located in an alley by the arches between Marx Avenue and October 25th Street. Promoters needing musicians for an event might come there to hire them so The Exchange functioned as a kind of unofficial agency plus a discrete meeting place for jazz players - many of whom had been forced to give up or play in other styles. Sheet music and instruments could be bought, sold, borrowed and swapped along with x-ray bootlegs of the latest American and British hot tunes.

The Exchange as it appears in the film ‘Stilyagi’

Alexey first started to go to the Exchange in 1956 hoping to learn new piano techniques. He was particularly interested in the left hand technique used to play stride and boogie woogie - The Exchange also operated as a kind of underground jazz school where players could learn from each other and swap tips on style, method and harmony.

He was keen to be counted amongst their company. He enjoyed playing rudimentary jazz piano and even tried to learn double bass but his real hero and inspiration was the American saxophone player Gerry Mulligan.  At that time, the sax was banned as an anti-Soviet symbol of American culture beloved only of hooligans - there was the infamous ludicrous claim “'It's just one step from a saxophone to a knife.” Satirical cartoons in magazines like Krokodil would portray ‘Capitalists’ as devils with sticks that resembled saxophones in shape. 

But one day Alexey found a pre-war German alto sax hidden under the stage at the youth music club he attended (he told me it had a swastika on it, so presumably had been looted during the war). In an unusually liberal act, the director of the club allowed him to borrow it. Over the next few months he learned to play - getting tips from guys at the exchange, buying reeds from an old man who made them at home and playing along with tunes on smuggled jazz sides and bone records (Igor Brill the pianist also said that bone records acted as a means of learning for him).

And so, as the 60s passed and jazz gradually became more tolerated in the Soviet Union, Russia gained one of its most influential players.

Alexey Kozlov (baritone saxophone) with Vadim Sakun (piano) Nikolay Gromin (guitar), Andrey Tovmosyan (trumpet) at the International Festival "Jazz-Jamboree" Warsaw 1962

A Short History of the Soviet Underground

The first time the culture of x-ray records and bone music was written about in the west was in the 1989 book ’Back in the USSR: The True Story of Russian Rock’. The author of that book was veteran Russian broadcaster, cultural commentator and journalist Artemyi Troitsky. Art appeared in our first book: The Strange Story of Soviet music on the Bone; and gave us a lot of help. So it was a great pleasure to have him join me for an episode of our Bureau of Lost Culture radio show.

We hear some entertaining, comical, tragic, moving and frankly strange stories including tales of the ‘Stilyagi' Soviet Hipsters, the first disco in Moscow, Che Guevara and Lenin as a mushroom. We ask if counterculture possible in the oppressive, repressive circumstances of the Soviet Union? And we hear how rock music evolved in secret before breaking into the light as perestroika transformed Soviet society.

For more on Art
For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture

The Strange Art of Lathe Recording

The machines used to make x-ray records are called ‘lathes’. In the latest edition of our Bureau of Lost Culture Show on Soho radio, we dig deep into the strange art of lathe recording with US vinyl artist Mike Dixon and Jim MGuinn professional lathe cutter, both experts in the field of short run and handmade records.

A lathe operates as a kind of record player in reverse. With a lathe, instead of a needle there is a cutting head that vibrates and ‘writes’ a groove into a spinning blank disc when an audio signal is fed into it.  The resulting disc can be played back just like a conventional record. 

The process is quite different than the pressing method by which conventional records are made. Pressing involves the creation of a master matrix that is stamped into soft hot vinyl. Pressing is a mass production method – many discs can be made quickly and all are exactly the same. Recording with a lathe is generally done in real time, one disc at a time, and each record is slightly different than all the others.

The lathe we use to cut x-ray records live is a 1957 MSS - MSS made lathes for the BBC to make recordings in the field and for transcription purposes. The Soviet bootleggers built their own lathes based on ones that had been smuggled into the USSR or brought back as war trophies after the second world war.

We have a homemade Soviet lathe built by a bootlegger in the early 1960s as part of then music exhibition.

In the program, we also hear about chocolate records, ice records, records made from road signs and escalator hand rails, cutting records live for an American sports team, Nazi transcription machines, wire recorders and much more esoterica from the arcane byways of audio history...

Find out more about Mike HERE

This is What Its About

Check out the video report on Euro News for a great little summary of our live event. this was recorded at The House of European History in Brussels this January (just before Brexit…).

Recording an Office Fan to X-Ray

Earlier this year, we curated an exhibition with Sony Music in Tokyo. As part of the show we held various live events. At the studios of Dommune TV, the crazy and quite wonderful Open Reel Ensemble joined us for a live broadcast.

Here they are performing with an office fan. Yes, you read that right, with an office fan - which we recorded onto x-ray film and played back.

Courtesy of Sony Music and Dommune