Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin RichmondToday we're sharing an episode from another Pushkin podcast we love called The Last Archive. The fourth season of The Last Archive just dropped and it's full of truly unexpected stories and big ideas.
The episode you will hear today, "Player Piano," is an audio biography of one of the most famous composers of the 20th century who most people have never heard of: Raymond Scott. He wrote tons of hits in the '30s and since then his music has been sampled by Lizzo, J. Dilla and the Gorillaz.
Aside from being an avid composer, Scott was also an inventor. And later in his life, he was hired by Motown Records to create a machine that could help people write songs. He called it The Electronium.
Today's episode is a crazy piece of musical history, and just a wild story. Be sure to subscribe to The Last Archive to hear other episodes about time travel, invasive species panics, freelance wiretappers-turned-evangelists, and secret science fiction family histories, and more.
Pushkin. Hey everyone, we're taking the week off here at Broken Record. But while we're away, I wanted to introduce you to a show from a friend of mine called The Last Archive. The episode from that show that I'm playing for you today is an audio biography of one of the most famous composers of the twentieth century who most people have never heard of, Raymond Scott. Whether you know him or not, you know his music. He wrote tons of hits in the thirties. A lot of them were used in the Looney Tunes cartoons in some really iconic moments. But if you're not a cartoon of fiicionado, you probably know him from being sampled by the likes of Lizzo, j Dilla, Gorillas and more. But what even most fans of Scott don't realize is he wasn't just a songwriter. He was also an inventor, and later in his life he was hired by Motown Records. The Motown Records run by Barry Gordy to create a machine that could help people write songs. He called it the Electronium. It's just one of the crazy histories uncovered in this season of The Last Archive. You can check out all the other episodes from season four. Now there's something for everyone's stuff on time travel, invasive species, panics, freelance wire tappers turned evangelists, and secret science fiction family histories. I'll let you figure that one out for yourself. But this episode is the one that really got me, so I want to play it for you here today. Here's player piano from season four of The Last Archive.
The Last Archive, A History of Truth.
About thirty years ago, a man named Irwin choose It encountered one of the strangest machines almost nobody had ever heard of.
I was forty, I was broke. It was kind of a professional failure.
Choose It was a DJ for a small community radio station in New Jersey. A friend of his had put him on to a musician named Raymond Scott, one of the most famous musicians of the early twentieth century who had somehow been completely lost to history.
These were records that were twenty five cents of pop and used record stores back then.
And you didn't even They didn't even have him in a bin. They had him under the bins.
Joos It loved Scott's music, and he began to get drawn into the mystery of it all? Who was this guy? He was obsessed, but his research kept dead ending.
I went to a library and went looking through music history books, and there's almost no mention of Raymond Scott. He wasn't in the jazz books, he wasn't in the classical books, he wasn't in the pop books. I was kind of mystify. He was kind of a mystery man.
He was stuck until his friend found Scott in a phone book. He was still alive, living in California, Jews. It made a phone call and then he got on a plane and flew across the country. By then, Scott was in his eighties. He'd had a few strokes and he couldn't speak. He would rest in the back of a dingy old ranch house with the heat turned all the way up and a humidifier on full blast, so there was a kind of heavy fog all around. His wife was taking care of him, but she also kept a lot of stray animals. There was a dog with paralyzed hind legs dragging itself around, and a lifetime's worth of stuff piled everywhere.
There were old rusted tape decks, There were wires, There were reels of tape. There were seventy eight oar PM discs, many of them broken, some of them on shelves old magazines of electronic industry publications, parts catalogs, some of them dating back to the nineteen forties and fifties.
I should say this story spooky as it is, it's kind of my I'm been Thatt of Haffrey, and I've produced this podcast for the last few years, and I'm hosting a season of six episodes now, which more on that later. All my life, I've written about history and made music. To find a secret, hidden archive full of strange musical electronics. I can imagine almost nothing better to know through artifacts what someone else once knew, something lost because the records and papers and magazines that choose had found told a story. Scott had been one of the most famous musicians of the twentieth century. He'd been on TV every week for a long time, in all the big magazines and films with the movie stars, but almost nobody remembered him now and.
I saw Raymond's entire life's work spread out between a leaky guest shed, a garage, some outbuildings on the property in Van NY's.
And somebody so famous be so forgotten. But something else didn't make sense either. There are all these old machines and tools strewn about with the rusty edges, and in the corner of the guest shed covered in dust, choose It saw a huge hunk of metal encased in wood, a.
Large, dusty piece of furniture, a bit like a wooden console.
But it wasn't furniture. It was a heavy machine with wires spilling out, hundreds of switches on a black metal front, and wood paneling all around. It looked like the cockpit of an airplane, except that some of the switches and buttons said things like record and power, and others said things like DOA.
I didn't know what it was.
Later on, someone helping to sort through Scott's files found a contract. It was between Raymond Scott and Motown Records, and it detailed a binding, confidential agreement to build that machine. That Choose. It was staring at a machine that was meant to write songs, the Electronium Choose. It had come out to California because of these twenty five cent records he'd gotten obsessed with. It was honestly pretty random, but somehow he'd stumbled on one of the strangest stories in the history of technology.
How did it work?
That's the voice of Brian Keihu, one time keyboardist for The Who, Fiona Apple, producer, Beatles historian, and one of the people for whom this machine has become now a kind of holy grail because it makes no sense. Raymond Scott began building this thing in the nineteen fifties, and it was a kind of mechanical early artificial intelligence that actually worked. Were freaked out about chat GPT. Now this thing was built in secret at a major studio in the nineteen seventies. Michael Jackson used to watch it work, and nobody now can figure out how to get it to work again. In the years between choose it stumbling upon the electronium in that Rundown ranch house and today a lot of people have gotten involved in preserving the machine or bringing it back to life in some fashion. Brian Keyhu, but also Mark Mothersbaugh, the lead singer of Devo gat Ye the pop star, and teams of engineers and programmers and musicians from all around the world. Because it turns out that the man behind it knew how to make music like no one else and they want to hear it again. Welcome to season four of The Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately is if we don't know anything at all. This episode is about that machine and its inventor, Raymond Scott, not just because Scott is the most famous composer of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of, but because I think his life traces one of the biggest stories about truth in our world today, the attempt to define the difference between man and machine.
Remarks before Harry sits down. He is now setting down.
There's another reason I want to spend some time with Scott.
He is making himself comfortable.
He recorded his whole life and again there he goes, which made for some fun research. Raymond Scott was born in Brooklyn in nineteen oh eight. His parents named him Harry Warno. His father had sailed from Russia to New York two years earlier on a ship called America. Sometime after Scott was born, his parents bought a music store in Brooklyn. In Brownsville, a small Jewish neighborhood. They lived in the two floor apartment above their shop, surrounded by music and sound machines. Scott especially loved the phone. Sometimes he'd make prank calls. Scott was growing up in an in between time, a mismatch of the world we know now, in the world of the nineteenth century. The electrified subway was brand new then. The year Scott was born, it had made its way out to Brooklyn, but the gas street lamps in Brownsville were still lit every night by a lamplighter. There were chickens in the street, the smell of the sea out over Canarsi, candy shops and tenements, hot spiced corn beef in the delis, and briny half sour pickles in the Jewish market, farms in Salt Water. It felt like the old country. It felt like the ends of the earth.
It was a lack a little village. It was a neighborhood.
Pearls Imny Winters one of the girls from the neighborhood. Later on she and Scott got married, and she's all over Scott's recordings. Jusit, who never got over his obsession with Raymond Scott interviewed her with a colleague just a little before she died.
They used go into the music store, you know, to buy music.
When I was a kid, that music shop is where I think the dream of the songwriting machine began. It was a snapshot of everything that was changing in music in the early nineteen hundreds. For centuries, if you wanted to hear music in your house, someone in your family needed to know how to play. For a while, buying a song meant buying sheet music bound together in little pamphlets. But later in the nineteenth century, technologies that could capture and reproduce sound were invented, and by the start of the twentieth century, mechanical music was taking off. Suddenly, you didn't need to know somebody who could play to listen to music. You could listen on records, wax cylinders, the radio. Scott was obsessed with these machines and the music that came out of them. He even started an amateur home radio station so he could make broadcasts from his bedroom to the living room.
You mean to tell me that's recording now, Oh my god, lot to fuck that.
Even as a kid he was always working on something. He dangle microphones out the window to record conversations on the street or the neighbor practicing piano. He would hang around the music shop with his dad, tinkering and watching not just how music was made, but how it was sold, what sold, and how it got reproduced. And there was one machine in particular that he became fascinated by.
He told me that he taught himself to play the piano with the player piano, and I guess that's how he first started.
The player piano. You've probably seen one before in a saloon in an old Western, you know, when someone gets shot, falls on the piano and it starts playing itself. That's the player piano, a piano that plays as if there were a ghost of the keyboard. Songs were sold as scrolls of paper with little holes punched out for each note, a set of mechanical instructions for the piano. The result you could hear nearly any song in your home, even if you you had no idea how to play it yourself. Scott loved the piano in the shop. He'd take a role and probably play it as slowly as possible, fitting his little fingers to the keys as they press themselves down, learning by machine. Most people these days think of the player piano as a novelty or a gimmick, but I want to spend a minute with it here because it's a big part not just of music history, but of automation history. We tend to think of automation as man versus robot, factory lines and coal mines, but the player piano was a kind of robot too, one we often forget about, but in early, massively influential, one that foreshadowed so much of what was to come. When Scott was a kid, people thought the player piano would be the future of music. There were hundreds of thousands of them sold each year in millions of song roles. By nineteen nineteen, when Scott was eleven, there were more player pianos being sold than regular pianos. It wasn't just sales, though. Copyright laws in the United States were built around the player piano and the record player an equal part. You can draw a straight line from player piano roles to punch cards and the first computer programs, and people made all kinds of player pianos. What you're listening to now is a special kind of player piano role that could capture all the subtleties of a human performance. This one was recorded by the composer w C and reproduced decades after his death. By machine. That's what Scott was learning in his family's music shop, role by role, not just to play like a machine, but to wonder at all the magical things machines suddenly could do. When I was trying to understand how Scott grew up, I read up on his neighborhood, and in one memoir I found a particular detail that snapped it all into view. The drug store just down the street from Scott had a poster in the window. It was titled the Human Factory, and it imagined a person as if they were a kind of complex machine, with all these little engineers inside. Scott must have passed that poster plenty of times. He had dreams of becoming like a machine himself, attaching motors to his hands so he could play the piano faster, the kind of way only a player piano could. Everywhere that line between man and machine was beginning to blur, but there was one place where the difference was unmistakable. A machine never made mistakes. The song sounded the same every single time, and to Scott, that was the ideal.
The struggle between being a musician and an engineer was very real for him. He just loved equipment. Mock was the one insisted that he go to Julia. I don't think he wanted to.
That choice music or engineer. It set the chorus for Scott's entire life because Scott never could give up on engineering. But his brother, who was a rising star in music, saw that he had a gift for composing that almost no one else did. He got Scott a job as the pianist for the CBS Radio Orchestra, and immediately Scott began to get noticed. He was anxious that people would think he only had the job because of his brother, so Harry Warno flipped through the phone book until he found a name he liked, Raymond Scott, a name he also chose because it sounded less Jewish and he was always anxious about that. He played his piano, he wrote his songs, and he kept his engineering passion more as a hobby. CBS was a good situation except for one thing. He was always playing standards songs that people knew they liked and had heard a million times already.
He said that he wanted to write music that people would like the first time they heard it. He asked his brother Mark if he could put together a bit. He wanted to put together a six piece band with himself in it.
Mark said yes. Scott started hunting for five musicians who could do exactly what he wanted. What he wanted was music with a spark that could form a connection with a listener immediately out of nowhere. He had a couple songs ready, so he found his guys, rehearsed, and then he got an audience together in CBS's Studio B. They dimmed the lights all the way and they began to play. A journalist wrote about it a year later.
Nobody who attended that premiere eighteen months ago was likely to forget it. Out of the darkness, there came a thin wailing note, barely masking a slow, suggestive thumping on the drums. When it was over, the audience rose to its feet and cheered.
Fan Mail poured in, Who was this man's Scott?
Where was he from? Where had he been all these years?
They created.
Generated such an amazing listener reaction that they immediately got a recording contract with the Master Label, which was owned by Irving Mills, who was Duke Ellington's manager.
The response was unprecedented and.
Admitted I'm going to take you right on in, but we're going to have a very entertaining visit with one of the years.
Them fational music, good, don't they get in there.
Scott was trying to sell a perfect musical package. He said he went out to clubs to track which tempos made people get up and dance. He had a whole thing about names. He called his band of six people a quintet, not a sextet. He even renamed his saxophone player.
And he is the youngest of all group.
His name was originally Dave Harris, but now it's Eric Hoek Eric Koek.
Then it's an interesting name.
Yeah, that's Raymond's idea of a name.
He wouldn't write his music down. He'd just play it at the piano for his quintet and then have them play their parts back till they could do it right note for note.
And they called the pillow that marvel field of memories. They never to get a composition Wednesday've.
Done it once they had it down, It rarely changed and that was just how Scott wanted it. If he could have replaced each of his musicians' minds with a scroll of music, he probably would have.
He didn't know how to handle human relationships too well.
They called him a bully, they called him something, he's bastard.
They called him all kinds of names because he was trying to make them play better. One of his musicians once said, nobody worked with Raymond. Everybody worked under Raymond.
Johnny Williams, the drummer, said we were we We hated every minute of it because we were being told what to play. He said, at the same time that we hated it, we were making more money than anybody in town.
The music was like jazz, but without the improvisation or the looseness. Tightly managed the price of mechanical perfection.
Well, he rehearsed, I want to cut that price, and he rehearsed keep on again.
Thee from getting accocated by saying, temple to do it that way without thinking about it.
And he was driving his musicians crazy because they would say, nobody needs to rehearse this much.
Scott held his musicians to an impossible standard. He wanted them to play like machines, but it's hard to argue with the results. His rise was stratospheric. Stravinsky, Cab Calloway Duke Ellington. They were all Raymond Scott fans. In the nineteen forties he had his own radio show, The Raymond Scott Show. He became the music director of CBS Radio, where he led a racially integrated radio orchestra. This, I think not because he was especially progressive, but because all he cared about was the music.
This is in so many ways explains why he was working with machines late in life.
Oh yeah, he was his best friend.
The machines were his best friends. To me, when I heard this story, I kept thinking about Scott as a kid at the player piano. When that machine was invented, it scared people. Two years before Raymond Scott was born, John Phillips Sussa, the famous composer, wrote an essay called the Menace of Mechanical Music. The whole course of music has been the expression of soul, states he wrote. And now in this twentieth century come these talking and playing machines to reduce the expression to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, discs, cylinders in all manner of revolving things. The player piano became a dark symbol of modern life. When Kurt Vonnegut wrote his first novel about a dystopian America run by engineers in their automatic machinery. He called it Player Piano. By the time Raymond Scott was getting famous, those fears about mechanical music were everywhere, same story.
Everywhere, new machines, high speed production. Few are jobs, and ten men for every job it can be had.
Scott was fighting a classic back mechanical perfection against human error. What was at stake were free will agency the human soul. That conflict was one of the main rhythms of twentieth century history, and Scott was like a leading melody and then he hit a wrong note that story. After the break in the nineteen forties, Raymond Scott was properly famous. He and his wife Pearl, packed up their kids at his equipment and moved to a big house out in Tuckaho, New York.
He had a mindful apartment and said he fully moved from there. Of course, he was a ham radio operator. He wanted to be where he'd have good reception.
I kind of love that he finally had enough money to buy a big house. But actually the only reason he was moving out of the city was so that he could have better ham radio reception. He was tinkering with his machines again, not just microphones in high fi equipment, but new sorts of instruments. The problem was electronics was not a casual hobby. In the late nineteen thirties and early forties.
He saw an electronic parts catalog and he wanted to order every part in the catalog.
Stan Warno is Raymond Scott and Pearl's Imni Winter's son. He made a great documentary about his father called Deconstructing Dad. I visited him last winter.
And he thought, the only way he's going to make enough money to do that is to form a big band. And so he did form a big band and went out on the road.
It's more thirty in New York and time for CBS to present the Raymond Scott Show across the continent and later to the whole world by shortwave come song Hits of the Day, starring America's number one composer with a band. Here he is Raymond Scott.
In the nineteen thirties, Scott's hits seem to have been about the music first, but in the forties his focus seems to have shifted from writing great songs to making as much money from his music as possible so he could fuel his mechanical hobby. He was like his own version of his dad's music shop. Music sold any way you like. But a big band needed a singer. He was always churning through them, always on the lookout for someone perfect. And that's how he met Marjorie Chandler.
We went in Chicago and we took an apartment there.
Scott heard through one of the band's managers that there was a young girl from Canada he should meet. She'd sung in a big radio contest in one first place. She was about thirteen years old and her voice was amazing. Scott decided to take her on as a student full time.
He thought she had real potential, and so she came to live with us.
Marjorie's family sent her to live at the house in Tuckahoe. According to Pearl, she and Scott were like surrogate parents, except Scott and Marjorie spent endless hours practicing. It was like with his quintet, except Chandler was a kid away from her parents. This tape is likely from later on, but even then you can hear how exacting he isles guys, you.
Think the.
Scott gave her a new name, Dorothy Collins. She'd go to school, she'd wander around the big House and write her name Marjorie over and over again. Then she'd go back to practicing love. It was a backbreaking regimen, but she was an incredible talent.
And as she got older and better she be he began featuring her in his band.
She grew up with the family. When she was a bit older, she sang with the band for the first time on the air. After Scott started hosting The Lucky Strike Hit Parade, a popular TV show, she became the featured singer. She was twenty four, and at some point along the way they got romantically involved.
And then I have seen some letters where my mother was writing to him saying it's really I'm not really comfortable with her, and who knows what was going on, because again that they eventually got involved with each other and he divorced my mom and married her.
Scott and Marjorie now Dorothy Collins, were married when she was twenty five. I don't want to dramatize this or speculate on how and when they got together, because no matter what, it's a dark turn. She had been like an adopted daughter to them, away from her own parents. It was the culmination, I think of the most dangerous strain in Scott's thinking about musicians and people must have seen in Marjorie Chandler. In the beginning. Was Dorothy Collins the chance to make his own musician, his own person, as if he were building a machine. Every week they appeared on TV together, Collins became a kind of American darling, achieving a level of celebrity even Scott had never had a star. The money came pouring in. They moved into a mansion on Long Island.
It had thirty two rooms and four stories.
That's deb Studebaker, Raymond Scott and Dorothy Collins's daughter. She's a teacher and a poet, which you can hear by the way she describes her childhood home.
The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway. It had had a forest behind. It was very grand. There was a library with a secret door you pull it out. There was a through behind it. We would go on these explorations in the forest. There was wisteria hanging over an archway that was always filled with bees.
Inside the house, Scott had begun to amass all the electronic parts he wanted. He was at once secretive and proud to show it off.
Let me take you downstairs and show you these technical facilities, and I take it we're supposed to have, oh maybe a half a million separate items or so. An electronic music studio wants to grow and grow and grow and grow.
The room was full of gear, switches, meters, welders, a furnace.
But now I'd like.
To take upstairs to show you what we've been building with all this equipment.
Upstairs was a thirty foot wall of obscure electronic musical machinery. Alongside his other musical work, Scott had begun writing and recording music for commercials. I have for several months now been unable to get this jingle for Sprite out of my head. Over the course of the nineteen fifties, Scott wrote jingles for a lot of big companies schlitzpier RCA, Victor, vix Ford, Chrysler, and a lot of the time it was Dorothy Collins singing them. He had a plaque over his piano that read, ideally the words should make sense, what makes and Nolan bout dance a melon ballads and then bout.
Dance what makes and Nolan bout dance the ice.
Dart past the Fight.
These companies were selling the future, and they needed a sound to match it. In the nineteen fifties, Americans were drunk on the post war promise of consumer technology. It was the age of automatic, of being able to buy all sorts of machines that would make your life easier, to.
Make reality of imagination.
This is Bendix the Tomorrow People.
Scott and Collins seemed at the time to have a happy life together as the Tomorrow People, throwing parties at their mansion, making music in the machine rooms, and listening to it in the listening room. They were, in many ways the sound of that post war dream world. They made music meant to push the button that sent consumers marching off to make a purchase. During those years, Scott was creating the kinds of machines. His music helped to sell whirling spinning devices that seemed as if they came from the future. Just keep in mind how different what you're hearing is from popular music in the fifties. I mean, this was the top song of nineteen fifty nine.
I come send the British cap a company. There wasn't as many as there was.
Obamaga refired once more and they began to run it down to Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico.
Music like Scott's just didn't exist in the mainstream, but he was sneaking it in there through commercials. He saw his machines as a way to push the envelope and thought that because the sounds they made were new, they'd catch the ear and away jingles made with old instruments couldn't. Scott seems to have created one of the first, if not the first, musical sequencer, a device that is the foundation for much of modern pop. In a weird historical twist, one of the ways he had financed all this experimentation was by selling his early hits to Warner Brothers, where they became a lot of the music soundtracking the Looney Tunes. Literally, this man put the tunes in Looney Tunes. But then he started to get sick. His brother and his father had died of heart disease, and Scott had his first heart attack in nineteen fifty eight. I don't think it's a coincidence that within a year, he began to work on the first version of the Electronium, his songwriting machine.
I remember him telling me, you know about this machine. I'm working on a machine that's going to compose and perform at the same time.
This was the stuff of science fiction, a dream of few people had had, but nobody went for it quite like Scott. A machine not just for playing music, but for composing it. Scott began to work harder and harder on the machine, and at the same time his marriage to Dorothy Collins unraveled.
She discovered that she loved acting in the theater, and my dad didn't travel with her or us. He was always working on his own stuff. But I think there was a certain lightness. I think that she probably found being respected now, you know, for something new that was hers. Acting was hers. He had nothing to do with that.
Collins left and then they were divorced. She testified in court that he was such a perfectionist, so intensely critical, that he gave her asthma and she couldn't sing when he was around.
So my mother used to say it was like Frankenstein's Monster, and the monster kind of woke up and decided, you know that she could be her own person.
But Scott was bereft, and he took a bunch of sleeping pills, thinking he was going to kill himself, but he just went to sleep for a long time.
He moved out of the house into an industrial space in a big office park on Long Island. His TV show was off the air, he didn't have a hip band anymore, and he was alone. But he had one thing left, the electronium.
I have very clear memories of being out there and the electronium was in the very next room, iterating away, which is what it did. You had to kind of set it up and then it would go through these iterations and we would be listening to it, and he would hear something he really liked and he'd jump up and go in there and record it on the cassette.
In the nineteen sixties, Raymond Scott was living in a long, low, white cement warehouse surrounded by machines.
He had to seriously downgrade his life.
Jeff Winner, he works with Choose It, that radio DJ who went out to visit Scott and together with Scott's family, they're preserving, managing and sharing his archives.
He went from a massive mansion of his own design to living on Long Island in a warehouse that wasn't even zoned for residential, that didn't have a kitchen.
He was not supposed to be living there.
He'd gotten married for the third time, to a woman named Mitzi Curtis, and this time it stuck. But money was tight, popular music was moving on. He was still composing the occasional jingle, but now really it was all machines and not just in his warehouse. The concern over automation was reaching a fever pitch in the United States. In nineteen sixty John F. Kennedy even ran for president against the machine threat.
Because the problem that West Virginia is facing is the problem that all America is going to face.
That is the problem of what happens to man when machines take their place.
Meanwhile, Raymond Scott seems to have been trying to replace as much of himself as possible with the machine.
Everything he had ever done up until that point, in one way or another, would become part of Electronium, even if he hadn't even declared to himself that that was his goal.
Yet it's like everything's under that one roof.
His baseline generator his drum pattern generator, the melody sequencer, all of it tied together with thick wires hidden behind the concrete walls of the factory.
And when Raymond came to the door, the first thing I encountered was, well, I want you to write sign this disclosure agreement.
Tom ray He used to work at Mogue, probably the most famos misynthesizer company of all time. He's taught in electronic music history at the Berkeley College of Music, where he was a professor. But at the time he met Scott in the summer of nineteen seventy, he was a graduate student working on his dissertation for a PhD in music.
I mean, I'm not an industrial spy. I'm a graduate student.
Ray had heard that Scott was touched with genius, and he wanted to see what he'd been inventing.
What did I see? I saw everything. Oh my gosh, you know, what is this thing over here? And I said, doesn't seem to have a keyboard or any kind of an interface. He said, well, it does. It had one little micro switch, and so he goes over and he flips some of these many many knobs and switches and things on the panel. Of the thing, said I'm going to have it suggest a theme, and it gives out with a little melody, and then he says, uh, I think I will ask it to make the intervals, the musical intervals wider, and he flips a couple of switches and they're wider, you know, And he put together, as I sat there, a rather lush uh composition with not only accompaniment but counterpoint, and you know, the whole thing.
Scott was inventing madly during those years. The electronium combined a lot of different gizmos he'd created, and it was a constantly changing set of modules. You controlled the music the machine made by means of switches he called the composer guidance control. One of the major X factors of the electronium is that it seems to have had some way of generating randomness within the preset patterns. They would change on their own over time. But it's not clear to anyone how this was a crazy idea. But you can get a clue to why Scott was after it from an ad he made around then with Jim Henson, the Muppets guy for IBM. They were pitching new word processor, but the ad is all about modern life. It's a kind of crazy montage of vacant looking people, machines and explosions.
There always seemed to be enough time to do the paperwork. What today there is today?
There isn't enough time.
Today, there aren't enough people.
Machines should do the work, that's what their best bet.
People should do the thinking.
That's what their best bet.
But what about a machine that did the work and the thinking. When Scott was born, machines were being created mostly to help people do roat physical labor. In the first half of the twentieth century, they began to do those things automatically at the push of a button, and by the age of the electronium, machines began automatically to do things that looked a lot like intellectual labor.
This rulebot manipulator can be easily taught because of its electronic brains.
Can this type of control be applied to other types of machines? Certainly in that light, Scott was reaching for the brass ring, a machine capable of making art, of helping people make art that expressed a human soul and stirred human emotions. But he needed money to do it, so he started doing a little press, small articles here and there. It's like inventing the typewriter, he told a journalist. Only the typewriter furnishes the plot and reads the result.
I've always told people that I consider Raymond Scott one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and music.
But if you wanted to buy an electronium from Raymond Scott, it was going to cost you an arm and a leg, and it was a crazy idea. So it was by a stroke of luck that the head of Motown Records, Barry Gordy, heard about it.
It was not a one man organization or a two man organization, but it is an organization of teamwork, you know.
I mean, it's the unseeing hero, so to speak.
Barry Gordy founded Motown in nineteen fifty nine in Detroit. Before founding the company, he had worked at a car factory during the years when there was lots of hubbub over plants that had achieved near full automation. It was on the assembly line that Gordy started to think about doing music differently. In his autobiography, he wrote, at the plant, the cars started out as just a frame pulled along on conveyor belts until they emerged at the end of the line. I wanted the same concept for my company, only with artists and songs and records.
It would it had gone any year without Hit Records, we would out of a business.
Motown was a black owned business selling music by black artists to everyone in America. Like everything in the music business, it was precarious economically because Hit Records deal in matters of taste, and taste is subject to bia sees and whims. Gordy, with his assembly line pasted, wasn't having that. He wanted to systematize as much as possible. They'd ab test songs with different artists until something stuck. Like R and D. They had a house band, the Funk Brothers, providing ironclad rhythm section arrangements across Motown songs. Is if they were the engine department. The only thing missing was the automation. And that's why it makes sense to me that one day in the early nineteen seventies, Barry Gordy pulled up to Raymond Scott's warehouse with a string of limos to see the automatic songwriting machine for himself.
And by the way, Barry Gordy knew who Raymond Scott was like anybody of his generation. Raymond Scott was a famous person, so Gordy also knew he was getting that in the deal, someone who is a musical mind, who has already written hits.
Scott showed Gordy and his crew the warehouse and then he fired up the electronium, just like he did with ray He must have shown Gordy how you flipped the switches to set a pattern, then watched as the machine iterated, changing notes, repeating phrases, rifling through ideas semi randomly.
And during the last couple of moment to Patta, generator was only one four or five.
Scott was selling an idea at that point, the potential of a songwriting machine that could hit on, an idea that a person alone never would. If it came up with a hook that sparked in the way a hit does, you'd know it when you heard it, and you could bottle it up and sell it to millions of people. This idea, I think came straight from Scott's quintetes finding that sound that you liked the first time you hear it. It's a tricky balancing act because it has to be new enough that it catches your attention. But a hit also has to sound familiar enough that you kind of know what you're going to get as soon as you hear it. It's like an elevator pitch to the listener. And Gordie was uncompromising about it. Here's Smokey Robinson in a twenty nineteen documentary remembering that process.
You used to say that all tied.
We got to get him in first ten seconds.
We had to grab company's fabulous intros.
You know, something that would get your digit. And so in that light, the electronium makes perfect sense to me. What if you could take a machine that had baked into it all of the patterns, an intuitive musical sense of a proven hit maker like Scott, but then this crazy X factor of proto artificially intelligent randomness. That dream was Scott's life's work. He needed it to work. Everything was writing on it.
So Gordy was so impressed that you wrote a check on the spot for ten thousand dollars to get started, and that was a lot of money back then.
It was a huge windfall. Scott was overjoyed. Gordy wanted the instrument remade to suit Motown's needs, so Scott began work immediately. The machine would be a culmination of everything he'd worked on up to that point, including the player piano from his childhood. Here's a call from a couple of years earlier between Scott and Bob Mogue, the the sizer legend who'd worked with him, And this knocked me out when I first heard it in the archives. But he was still thinking about the player piano. You can hear the ideas just bursting out of him.
I have some things that I think would lest we slip you, and this is how the secret stuff. But well, I'll have to explain with you when I see when I see. Okay, but the the programming isn't evitable. I mean, you know, the computing machine into programming things and was programming things and all them a major tools of programming things. Yeah, and so the programming it's going to be the way it's done.
A player piano for the space age. Scott, of course, quickly blew through the Motown down payment and ran out of time, but Gordy didn't seem to mind. Scott moved out to Motown's offices in Los Angeles to work on the electronium in a room above Barry Gordy's garage. He became the director of electronic music research and development. Eventually he started to work on the machine in the Motown studios.
People were in awe of him. I'm thinking of a couple different engineers who were up there who would just come out and be like shaking their heads, kind of like like you know, what is going on kind of thing.
Scott's daughter deb Studa Baker Again, according to a former engineer at Motown, Michael Jackson, would come by Scott's studio, a small room on the second floor and watch the electronium work. It made music unlike anything they'd heard. The idea wasn't that the machine would write a complete song structure versus chorus bridge, but that it would iterate on combinations of rhythm, chord and melody in search of that spark. It was a way of automating the part of songwriting. Scott excelled at the thing that caught your ear and made you like something the first time you heard it. It was meant as a collaboration between man and machine, one that took the hard work out of the most crucial part of the songwriting process. The inspiration but over time, the the extreme cost weighed the project down. Also the fact that Scott was never satisfied, refused to be finished. The electronium worked, it just was always opened up, being redesigned, refined, changed. At one point, that same engineer tried to get Motown's famous session musicians to play along with the machine as part of a drive to use the instrument on a recording, but they revolted.
They didn't like it.
They didn't like the idea of it, they didn't like the concept, they didn't like what it theoretically represented.
And these guys were great musicians. They didn't want to be replaced by a machine.
It's not known whether the electronium ever suggested an idea that made it into a Motown song, but I think it's unlikely. Gordy let Scott take the electronium home with him eventually to tinker with it around the house. He'd stay up all night and work on it all day in his pajamas, building new bits and pieces, taking it apart, and building it again. Then his health got worse, the music industry moved on started to forget about him. He had several strokes, and the electronium sat and the guests shed out back gathering dust, waiting to be found.
Well, it's doctor Frankenstein's monster, isn't it.
Brian Keihue again synthesizer wizard, former keyboardist for The Who, Fiona Apple, producer and the second person this episode to bring up Frankenstein's monster more happily, in this case about a machine rather than a person. He's working now to bring the electronium back to life. We spoke last winter.
And so electronium might be literally just a piece of inspiration. If I play piano or if I play guitar and write songs, my fingers are even limiting because I tend to play a certain chord shape where I'm jazzier and he's more country. But if the electronium was not confined by those things, it might come up with ideas that are beautiful hybrids. Maybe little jazzy, but little polka, and who knows what it would come up with. That It's an idea to say that the human creativity is limited. It's a beautiful thing when it works, but as we know, you can't just write great music all day, otherwise everybody would.
I guess part of the problem is like in a creative line of work. Your business, especially when you're a motown, which is an empire at that point, is totally dependent on this fundamentally unknowable, unreliable thing, which is human creativity. Like you never really know when the music is going to strike, and so especially with the kind of assembly line motown idea, if you could just make that predictable and automate it the aha moment, then that would take a lot of the uncertainty out of the business.
I think you pointed out something that most people don't want to ever mention, which is that creativity is unreliable. You might be Paul McCartney and able to write some of the world's greatest songs. But if I brought him in the room right now and gave him an hour, said write me a great song, it doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way. But you can understand why someone who devoted his whole life to making perfect music wish that it did it. Raymond Scott died in nineteen ninety four in obscurity and relative poverty in a nursing home near that faded house and Van nuys Jo's a Winner. A slew of fellow enthusiasts, and the Scott family started to comb through his archives to piece the whole crazy story together. They shipped boxes and boxes of tapes and records and papers to the Mars Sound Archives at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Then they released his music and compilations. Scott had always kept his machines mostly secret in case anyone wanted to steal them, but when they finally released Scott's electronic music in the early two thousands, he suddenly had a new set of posthumous hits. You probably don't even realize you've heard a Raymond Scott's song before, but he's been sampled all over the place. Gorillas, Jay Dilla, Lizzo, They've all sampled Scott. His music is in the Simpsons, ren and Stimpy HBO shows. The song you're hearing now is called port Afino, and it was unreleased in his lifetime, but there are all these recordings of it, each trying it a different way, all electronics, with vocals, with saxophone. When the archivists found it, choose it thought the melody was so classic it must have been a cover.
And I went into various databases looking for a port Afino. There's like eighty or one hundred things called port Afino, and I would go through iTunes listen to every goddamn one of them, and not one of them was Raymond's melody. But to this date, I mean, that thing's been out for twenty one years, no one has come to us and said, h that's cover version, or someone else wrote that, or it's a traditional melody.
A true original. Meanwhile, Mark Mothersbaugh, the lead singer of Devo, bought the Electronium and dragged it from the shed to his studios. Brian key Hugh is trying now to assemble a team of engineers to bring it back online in digital or physical form. Even with all the schematics, they're still mystified.
You know. Somebody said it's still a black box, and that's true. We still don't know what it did. And I feel like we're looking through a keyhole at a room and we can barely see it until we get through the door a bit more.
There are Scott cover bands and Scott festivals. Somehow his music still resonates. Whatever spark he caught is still catching. What I think is strange, as most of the musicians who knew Scott earlier in his life seemed to have hated him, but the engineers who knew him at the end of his life loved him. A lot of his early jazz hits were aggressive, frantic firecrackers of song, but the electronic stuff is often sweet, guileless innocent. Some of that stuff was written in partnership with the electronium. His melody, its patterns, and it sounds like a songwriter at peace with himself.
At one point he'd resisted human control of it, but then he took one of the voice cards and adapted it to a keyboard input. As he found before when he would put a Hammond organ or mostly an ondulan on top of the electronium, it really needed somebody doing a nice melody in order to sell the package.
There is, I think a lesson in Scott's life, one that's kind of a morality tale for our own AI adult chat GPT world. He walked from automatic pianos to the first computers. He sought perfection, he sought industrial scale creativity, but the trade offs he made were the relationships around him, the failure to see the humanity of the people he was trying to control. People would sometimes talk about Scott as if he were a machine. But I think there's something in his music that testifies to a soul, that ghost at the keys of the player piano, those recorded phone calls to his family, that early string of hits, All the musical machines, what they have in common is the goal of each song to connect people through sound. Scott prized perfection in that end above everything else, and it ruined him. Someday soon someone might be able to bring the electronium back to life. And here again the inside of Scott's mind. But still I think he must have known the electronium could never write a Raymond Scott song. For that you needed Raymond Scott on the Last Archive is written and hosted by Me, Ben Nattaphaffrey. It's produced by Me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on this episode by Arthur Gompertz and Lucy Sullivan. Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton Pushkin's executive editor. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphonet. Additional music by Quarantooth. Our foolproof player is Becca A. Lewis. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jannette Junior in the Star Ganette Foundation. Special thanks on this episode to Alan w and Tenman, Jack Hurtz, Carl Miller and the Pierian Recording Society, and Byron Werner for a bibliography. Further reading and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head to the Last Archive dot org. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm slash Newsletter. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Nattafhaffrey.
