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Buried Treasure and the Echo all over the World

A bit about me: While most children were out playing sports, making friends, scraping knees and engaging in the socialization now prescribed as essential for healthy personal development (whoops), I was collecting. Not surprisingly, this was a learned behavior, and one I picked up in no small part because, well, I was going to get dragged to antique stores either way, so there you go. I still collect CDs, books, and so on, but when I was a kid, it was action figures, video games, shot glasses, old lighters, pretty much anything I could hold in my oversized 10-year-old ogre paws.

My mother was a big influence on me in this way, and as a result of going from shop to shop to auction house and so on, I’ve got a pretty decent knowledge base of a whole host of random artifacts, from Stickley Furniture to Northwood glass. Hardly the most masculine of trivial pursuits for an already awkward boy child, but maybe the intent was to take traditional gender roles down a peg. Or maybe it was just, “Well, the world doesn’t have enough weirdos.” I don’t really know. When I was out this past weekend and stumbled on a couple Edison Records cylinders, I was plenty happy just to recognize what they were.

By now it’s more or less commonly accepted that Thomas Edison — inventor of the lightbulb, phonograph, etc. and hero of Fourth Grade Social Studies textbooks across his and my native New Jersey — was a prick and a thief. Bullying competitors into either leaving the East Coast, as he did with the founders of Hollywood, or putting others like Thomas Lambert out of business with a barrage of patent suits, Edison was ruthless in the tradition of any number of capitalist supervillains, the only difference was a question of scale. Where others in his era might’ve sent Pinkertons in to bust up a union, Edison seems not to have been above getting a goon squad to pound on some nerds. Probably the kind who went antiquing as kids. So it goes… allegedly.

To this day, in the dining room of mom’s place in Jersey, there resides in a china cabinet an Edison Standard Phonograph and a couple of “Gold Moulded Records” — cylinder records from around the turn of the 20th century, predating the flatter discs that would emerge as the dominant format (78s were so hip) in the 1910s. I bought the ones I saw the other day (of course) and brought them home for a bit of investigation. There are two different labels on top of the thick cardboard case around each black wax cylinder. One has had its catalog number fade away — good luck finding out what it is — and the other is written over. What was at one point “You Can’t Stop Me from Loving You” by Manuel Romain from 1909 is now labeled as “The Messenger Boy March,” which was recorded for Edison by the awesomely-monikered Imperial Marimba Band and released on Blue Amberol, which was a different production method and actually blue wax (limited numbers, dude), in 1917.

Because the record in that container is black, not blue, I think it’s probably the original and that the case was just used to store “The Messenger Boy March,” but without a working player, I don’t really have confirmation it’s that and not some other release. The outsides look good, but both of the records also have some cardboard residue on them from being in the cases for so long and at some point probably encountering some moisture, so I don’t even know if they’re playable. But screw it, they look good on top of the bookshelf in the living room.

Also in my pitiful round of Googling — being married to somebody who actually does research for a living is humbling in so many ways — I found a company called Vulcan in the UK who make new cylinders you can buy if you have an old phonograph to play them (their website is here). I’ve always thought that would be a cool idea for black metal bands with short songs who don’t find tapes “kvlt” or shitty-sounding enough. Probably won’t take off as a trend, but as someone who regularly hears about this or that “dead format,” be it cassettes, CDs or vinyl, I’d die laughing to get a single on an Edison cylinder to review. Just make sure to include a download card.

Imperial Marimba Band, “The Messenger Boy March” (1917)

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