Wanna Buy a Record? (Capitol Records, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Charles and I watched a couple of YouTube videos on the history of Capitol Records, one an audio post of a celebratory album the company put out on its 10th anniversary in 1952 and one a film called Wanna Buy a Record?, a promotional film made in 1951 and framed by Mel Blanc – showing his face and body for once in a film instead of just using his voice – attempting to sell a record to a large man who looks like character actor Edgar Kennedy but isn’t (he had died in 1948, three years before this film was made). The only other performer listed in the opening credits is Billy May, the bandleader who was one of Capitol’s biggest sellers in the early 1950’s, and I had known he was a large man but I hadn’t thought he was this large. There’s some weird by-play between the two as Blanc finds out his would-be customer isn’t married and calls him a “gay blade,” and later the two dance together – obviously gags that “read” far differently now than they did in 1951! There are also intriguing glimpses of important Capitol artists, including Dean Martin (he isn’t identified but he’s clearly recognizable) and a country singer I’m pretty sure was Merle Travis.

The film shows off the Capitol offices and studios as they existed in 1951, before the construction of the famous Capitol tower, and the record store Blanc supposedly runs is the real-life Wallichs’ Music City, whose owner, Glenn Wallichs, co-founded Capitol with singer and songwriter Johnny Mercer and former songwriter turned Hollywood producer Buddy de Sylva in 1942. At the time the record industry was beset both by World War II (which, among other things, made it difficult for record companies to secure shellac, a key ingredient in the material from which 78 rpm records were made; for a while during the war you could purchase a new record only if you brought in an old one in trade) and an American Federation of Musicians strike against the record companies which lasted from 1942 to 1944. (The strike was called to try to stop the use of recordings in restaurants, bars and other venues that had previously employed live musicians; the resolution involved setting up something called the Music Performance Trust Fund, which collected royalties on record sales and used them to pay musicians to give live performances. There were actually two strikes, the big one from 1942 to 1944 – though Capitol and Decca settled by the end of 1943 while RCA Victor and Columbia held out for another year – and a shorter one in 1948 over who would administer the trust fund.)

The U.S. government imposed a ration on shellac and gave the scarce supplies to companies that had already been in business before the war, and Capitol had got in under the wire by making its first hit, “Cow Cow Boogie” sung by Ella Mae Morse with Freddie Slack and His Orchestra, in early 1942. (Some companies tried to evade the strike by recording abroad. Columbia had started a recording of the third act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in New York with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf; when the strike started they took the star singers, Lauritz Melchior and Herbert Janssen, to Argentina and finished the record with conductor Roberto Kinsky and the orchestra of the Teatro Colón, the opera house in Buenos Aires.) Charles and I have been watching enough of these vest-pocket documentaries on record-making lately that the processes involved – particularly the elaborate metallurgy needed to take a master lacquer and turn it into a metal master (a negative image of the record), then into a mold or “mother” (a positive) and into the negative “stampers” that are used to press the finished records – have become quite familiar to us.