Implicit favoritism, and the Birotron

Having used the word "favorite" in both of my first two posts, it is apparent that I will have to retire that word from this blog.  At the rate I anticipate going, every song posted will be a favorite, or at least by a favorite band, and should be understood to be so.  Doing a weekly two-hour college radio show in the 80s, I played plenty of songs that weren't favorites, but the more relaxed pace of blogging affords me the luxury of cherry-picking.  Or did I really have that many favorites back then, and now in my 40s I just don't like as much?

The June/July 2007 issue of The Believer has an article by Paul Collins on "rock's rarest instrument," the Birotron, and lucky for us the entire article is online here.  Being a piano player in my youth, I was into keyboard-oriented rock music; I liked the sounds of electric keyboards, but I never really got into the mechanics of them.  So when I learned that the Mellotron produced its sounds by playing tapes, I assumed they were tape loops.  Makes sense, doesn't it?  Not so!  It used strips of tape that had to be pulled back once they reached the end!  The Birotron was Dave Biro's improvement on the Mellotron, using tape loops (unfortunately in the 8-track format) to produce a theoretically infinite sustain.  The quite sensible concept did not pan out so well; see the article for the details.  Collins writes, "[Rick] Wakeman toured with a prototype Birotron and recorded Yes’s 1978 hit single “Don’t Kill the Whale” with it—you can hear the endlessly held choir notes peeking through the mix at the very end of the song."  That's useful if you have a copy to listen to, but if you don't, you can listen to it here:

Yes--Don't_Kill_The_Whale

Yes

I got Yes's Tormato album when I was in tenth grade.  Punk rock was happening right then, but I didn't know it.  At that time I was still listening to Washington's major AOR station, WAVA, where I heard Frank Zappa's disco putdown, "Dancin' Fool."  I found the song amusing, and I had a vague notion that Zappa was cool, so I bought the album with "Dancin' Fool" on it, the double-LP Sheik Yerbouti.  Discovering that most of the other songs on the album were pornographic and/or scatological was both titillating (what high school boy wouldn't get a kick out of that?) and disappointing (there was only one stereo in the house, in the living room, so I could hardly ever listen to it!).  Disappointment won out, and I traded it to a guy in my video production class for Tormato.  It's not the best Yes album (that would be Fragile, duh), but it's not terrible, and it contains some of the funkiest beats they ever recorded.

Tormato