RetiredToker76
Well-Known Member
<Puts on stoned professor hat>
Popcorn by Gershon Kingsley, was one of the first*, all electronic popular songs. I put one of the first because some call it the first electronic popular hit, however in 1968 Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog released Switched on Bach, a series of J.S. Bach pieces all played on the first monophonic Moog synthesizer. For reference, that meant that for each voice, Carlos had to play it individually, record it on tape, then play it back, recording the next voice, then repeat for each voice. The final album ended up landing on the Billboard Pop charts even though other than instrumentation, it was faithful playing of J.S. Bach piano music. So technically the very first electronic hit was written during the Baroque era.
The first originally written electronic hit however was Popcorn, also written and recorded with the first Moog synthesizer. The recording I posted was the 1999 redux by Kingsley for the 30 year Anniversary. I love both tracks equally, the '99 edition came out right as I was in college, studying music composition, and learning the history; so it has a bit of personal romance to it for me. He did several version of it over the years and it's been sampled and remixed by more artists than I can name. One of the more famous ones was by Crazy Frog in 2005.
Sadly Switched on Bach, the original album has never been released in Digital form and has been successfully kept off the internet by the license holders (Columbia I think?) but there are several Midi versions people have don as well as the sequel albums which aren't has heavily regulated. Hard copies of the original are in the hundreds of dollars through collectors, I've only heard the original twice. It's breathtaking when you realize it was done on an unreliable, out of tune, experimental synth, a single voice at a time on a single track reel to reel recorder, that had nothing resembling a digital synchronization clock that is now a microchip installed on just about ever DJ table and piece of electronic music hardware sold; and it came out perfect.
The original though, even in the 90's when we watched snips of this show we laughed at how lost the kids look while trying to dance to it on British TV. You can almost see the thought bubbles of 'Where's my Fab4?' 'Where my 4-chord do-wop loop?', 'Where's my 4 on the floor beat?'
If I could time travel, I'd grab a couple of theses kids from 1969 and drop them smack dab in the middle of Burning Man and smugly show them what we've done with that weird ass bleep blop from 1969.
<Prof's hat off>
Yeah, it's interesting.
Here's the original 60's kids looking very lost and confused to the original recording.
