Posted 1:13 AM by Gene

I've said before show-biz coverage stinks. It is bad enough that it plays tricks when you look things up on the Web. Case in point: I've been trying for some time to locate information on this deconsecrated East Side church that served as a Columbia Records studio from 1949 to (I think) 1982, when it was demolished. (I believe a condo stands there now.) Anyone who loves music and records will know of 201 E. 30th St. -- a landmark studio with superb acoustics where thousands of famous recordings were made. But look it up in Google and half the entries seem derived from some dimwitted press release for some preposterous attempt to MONETIZE the many photos made there, written by some twenty-something intern musical illiterate who insists the only records made there were Highway 61 Revisited, Kind of Blue and West Side Story. (Sometimes we condescendingly throw in Lady Day, although she was virtually finished when she recorded there.) And he probably had to ask somebody who didn't know much about music (meaning a LEGENDARY DAVIS functionary, no doubt). If the IDIOTS at ROOTKIT MUSIC -- I mean Sony Music Entertainment made some of the pictures available on the Web we might know that more than WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DYLAN and Miles Davis recorded there. And that's important because this Highway61RevisitedKindfofBlueWestSideStory nonsense says in so many words everything else recorded there was nonexistent and can safely be ignored. Just one example I've seen: Decades ago in a Masterworks anthology of cast-album music (what is THAT?) was a picture (printed teeny-tiny) of cast and crew members of Gypsy huddled around the 30th Street control board (think Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, and Sandra Church, the original Gypsy Rose -- there were others) -- and there at the knobs was the walrus-faced Fred Plaut, the label's most brilliant engineer -- from the little I can glean a German refugee, formerly with Polydor. (Nat Hentoff says he was from France.) And he wasn't even identified, indeed he is very seldom identified in what pictures do appear of him. (There's another picture in that anthology from the Bells Are Ringing session -- also printed teeny-tiny -- showing Plaut adjusting a mike while Judy Holliday beams at her three-year-old son.) Anyone who's listened to as many Columbia CDs as I will know his smooth, perfect sound. Surely this is something more than Highway61RevisitedKindfofBlueWestSideStory. And yes, he did KIND OF BLUE. And no, his face does not show up through Google.

And it does no good to look up Don Hunstein, the extraordinary photographer from Columbia's golden age -- all the entries are of the DAMNED WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DYLAN and Miles recording Kind of Blue. Sometimes I think the whole Internet's run by WEENIES.

P. S. Before 30th Street Columbia recorded at Liederkranz Hall, another building of which it is near impossible to find information despite its significance. Bix Beiderbecke recorded there. So did Blue Eyes. (So did Victor.) If I am right Columbia had to give it up when CBS insisted on turning it into a TV studio. It was demolished in the mid-50s.



P. P. S. I've located more information: the studio was originally the Adams-Parkhurst Memorial Presbyterian Church, built in 1875. It sometimes is referred to as "an Armenian church" as the Armenian Evangelical Church (now on East 34th Street; broken link) shared the facility for 25 years. So did radio station WLIB. It had two spires which were demolished before Columbia took possession. This confusing site devoted to church organs in New York gives the address as 207 E. 30th, but they're identifiably the same building. It also says it was demolished in 1965, which is either for another church or flat-out wrong.

(Revised with this correction on 2/19/2010 at 12:10 p. m.: That confusing church-organ site says the church was demolished "subsequent" to '65, but no mention of Columbia Records.)