Bones And Grooves

You are going to a

Halloween Party

tomorrow
and you want some useless trivia to tell everyone so you look intelligent  while making small talk.

I tell this story almost every time I am getting an x-ray.

The story has been around for a six  decades,

but I first heard about it when I was watching a

Beatles Documentary.

  The story I found on the website
NPR

explains it all really well.

Bones And Grooves: The Weird Secret History Of Soviet X-Ray Music

"Western music may have been changing the world in the 1950s, but if you happened to be in Russia you were out of luck. State censorship was in full effect in the Soviet Union, and sneaking in, say, an American rock record was close to impossible. But a few industrious music fans managed to find another way."

"What happened was, it's 1946 or so. The Second World War is over but a much colder war has begun, and in the Soviet Union a lot of culture was subject to a censor, whether it be art, paintings, architecture, film. In St. Petersburg, this guy turns up, and he had a war trophy with him. That war trophy was what's called a recording lathe: It's like a gramophone in reverse, a device which you can use to write the grooves of music onto plastic. People who came into his shop observed what he was doing, and, as is the Russian way, they bootlegged his machine and made their own machines. It was a bit like dealing or buying drugs, actually. These records were bought and sold on street corners, in dark alleyways, in the park."

There you have it.

You can now sound intelligent telling trivia to your friends at that

Halloween Party,

and how the ingenuity of a few

Russians

brought home

Rock N' Roll

to the

Soviet Union.

This is,

Trying To Carve Some Grooves Into Some Real Bones,

Jim Hauenstein,

And,

“The only truth is music.”
- Jack Kerouac -

That is my story and I am sticking to it!

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