Eat or Be Eaten
A mere 20 years ago, Stan Cornyn produced an album of the inside adult humor troupe Firesign Theatre by the name of Eat or Be Eaten. Far from the typical big shot, Cornyn has always had my admiration, just for being himself. Google him, as I just did, and what sets his career apart comes right to the top of the list. “King of Liner Notes” is his moniker.
Liner notes on LPs were huge in the record business in the 60’s and 70’s, and Cornyn wrote great ones, born of both a feel for the music and a flair for the slice of stardom that he brought to the project pie personally. The concept of a record album was more coherent then, like a concert orchestrated as an experience, thoughtful, artful, conceptual, not merely the list of a coupla hits plus filler that later led to its disintegration when making the transition to the era of distribution via online downloads.
One fan site offers this excerpt, which pretty much captures the essence of Stan’s approach to liner notes. “This is the dean martin. It is a largish bird which, like the purple martin, is given to frequent perching and swallowing. Its dark crest is going just a shade gray at the temples. The rest of its plumage it frequently sheds in favor of all new feathers from Sy Devore’s. Specifications on the dean martin rump have not been established, this bird not having yet appeared in any European art films. Its tail is believed not to be forked, except on formal dinner occasions.”
– Stan Cornyn, The Hit Sound of Dean Martin
Many levels on which to appreciate that snip of copy. Another web writer reviews his definitive book on the record industry, Exploding, which displaced Hit Men as my favorite book about the business. “In technology, the recording industry ties last with the Amish,” Cornyn laments. “Music is terrific, it’s fun. There’s a chance that the record business will be really enlarged by the artists’ ability to meet the public without the ‘big five’ record companies. I’m not going to say that this will happen, but there is an opening there.”
1985
Eat Or Be Eaten - The Firesign Theatre (Lp) (Cd) (Ct)
[Cd W/ Sub-Code Graphics]
Produced By The Firesign Theatre And Fred Jones
Written And Performed By The Firesign Theatre
Side One:
Getting In (16:00)
Side Two:
Getting Out (16:00)
Mercury 826 452-1 M-1(Lp), 826 452-2(Cd), 826 452-4 M-1(Ct)
Eat or Be Eaten was, as you can see from the reference to Lp and two halves of the program on two side, produced as an LP and an audio cassette. In 1985, remember, it was still early days for CD-Audio, and CD-ROM had just been announced by Philips and Sony, but at about the same time, Philips brought out CD-I, and this other thing, CD+G, where graphic images (G) came up on a TV screen while the audio was playing. Stan was by now an Warner “executive” and due in no small part to his deep knowledge of the record business and take-no-prisoners style, was charged with maximizing Warner’s interest in multimedia as head of the Warner New Media subsidiary. So he experimented with CD+G, CD-I, and CD-ROM with a sense of the art and the business nobody else possessed.
Eat or Be Eaten thereafter became my code for Uh-Oh in the business, as in something has just shifted in the balance of the ecosystem, and I’d better pay attention. Here’s an example in the news this week.
Uh-Oh
Just when you thought the world was safe from falling meteors, and we simply had to monitor the process of elimination between the four competing factions for the next generation physical storage and delivery disc technology, BD, ED, FD and HD. The next thing you know, this fun looking rock comes flying through the windscreen, shattering your orderly and comprehensive models of how things would pan out for the next coupla decades.
Holographic discs are expected to soon deliver 1 TB, that’s terabyte, not tablespoon, of high quality sound, images, data, or animation. General details are available in the following table, in yesterday’s blog, and more tomorrow.
All the firms with significant R&D and ties to the two large federally funded research projects on holographic disc technology have formed a consortium for the purpose of setting pre-commercial standards. Products are expected to be released in the next 36 months. Suddenly, the leap-frog effect of Blu-Ray’s capacity advantage over HD seems more of a hop than a leap, and the circumstances of none of the blue laser factions being able to come together to the table to discuss a unified standard, yet the next generation doing so in a very close timeframe, suggests that something has changed in the way we are regarding the future chain of events in the storage roadmap.
posted by julia b schwerin