September 24, 2024 • 34 mins
Nowadays most people are at least generally familiar with the concept of karaoke -- technology allows you to sing along with your favorite songs, often to the delight of your friends and fellow amateur vocalists. It's a global phenomenon, and has created countless karaoke-based communities wherein, if only for a moment, anyone can be a star. In the first part of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max delve into the origin story of karaoke, which may have began all because one Japanese guy was mad at his coworkers.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for joining us today. Let's give a big shout out
to our super producer, the Man, the myth Legend, mister
Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Huzzah, I am technically still alive. Yeah, it's good to hear.
I know Max has been. You've been plagued by the
ick this season. The weather's on top of the man,
it is.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
It's sitting right on your face and apparently flatulating upon it.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
We learned the term pink ear, pink ear and cloaping.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Yeah, that's when you close and open dirty double.
Speaker 5 (01:02):
When you open at a restaurant, you work to the
closing shift and not like you know that, mid bs.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
You and I have a very different idea of what
dirty double means.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
I know, and I don't google dirty double, y'all, just
don't restaurant industry.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Everything in the restaurant industry has some innuendo to it.
But yeah, this is the fourth time in a year
of sick. That's the note in five years I did
and get sick. I've been sick now four times for
lost time, buddy.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, we also we also want to again with we
always begin our our episodes with and end our episodes
with thanking the people who make the episodes possible. With
this in mind, ridiculous historians. My name's Ben Bollen. I
would like to introduce you yet again. Don't call it
(01:48):
a comeback to the one the only research associate in
this episode, mister Noel Brown. Can we get like an applause?
I don't have to, Okay, sure, I'll take it.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Thank you. Yeah, always always take the applause.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
I'll take the bow. I'll take it. It's a mid bow,
not a low bow.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Now we're talking about something that's been on our minds
for quite a long time.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Oh years, decades. I mean, I don't know you.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
I've never known you to be a participant, but I
know you are a delighted spectator.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I don't participate in the western version of karaoke with
a large public audience of strangers, but I will.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
I will kill that room. Bro. We got to make
this happen.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I don't think I've ever shared a private karaoke space
with you, and I look forward to it.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
Do you have a go to jam?
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Well, it's illegal for you to ask me. I don't
think that's true in the Philippines.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Oh, as far as I know, we're in the good
old us of a ben. But you keep your secret spinbulling.
I got a couple. If anyone's interested.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
What do you got? What do you got? Well, I
like to do. You know, I've got a cup. I've
got a bit of a range.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
So I like to do things where I sing kind
of low good stuff for that would be new Romantic
eighties kind of synth wave kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
I really like, Uh, don't you want me? Baby?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
You know, don't you want don't because you get to
do that kind of low Bowie Krune kind of thing. Sure,
speaking of Bowie and his low Crune, I like to
do a bit of it. It was a single, but
a lot of people don't know it doesn't really like
the room up usually but ashes to Ashes by David
Bowie off of the Scary Monstrous Record. And if I
want to showcase my higher range, I'll do and I
would do anything for love, but I won't do that
(03:43):
by meeth Low.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
I've seen that.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I've seen these because folks, if you don't know, Noel
comes from an operatic background. So the man does have
the range. We are not blowing smoke quite. I would say, honestly,
you're phenomenally talented musician.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
I appreciate that, and it means a lot to me
to hear you say that, and it's something that means
a lot to me in my life. I don't sing
as much as I used to, used to be in bands,
and I work on a lot of music, but I'm
just now kind of getting back into singing and recording
my own songs as supposed to producing others. But karaoke
is a fun, kind of democratic way of getting out
(04:25):
there and flexing your your pipes.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
If that's the phrase, oh wait, wait, wait, wait, we
have to say it. This is very familiar to a
lot of us listening. But Noel, for anyone who does
not know what Carrie Okay is, how would you describe it?
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Well, it's interesting because I mean the modern concept of
karaoke in terms of like a machine or a device
used to sing along with music with the main vocal removed,
is really a relatively modern and like dating back to
around the late sixties early seventies. But you know, sing
alongs have been around for a lot longer than that.
(05:09):
Folks will likely remember or have seen, you know, in
retrospect with false nostalgia, the good old bouncing ball like
m I C K E Y m O USC or
some of the old Max Fleischer cartoons. So a sing
along kind of situation was certainly popular with these kinds
of shorts that would play before a feature as far
back as like the thirties and forties. You would have
(05:32):
lyrics on the bottom of the screen and the audience
was invited to participate. So I mean, at its core,
karaoke is a participatory musical kind of communal events, you know,
where people sign up on a list, whether it be
at a bar or a private room like you were
talking about Ben, although in the private room it's a
lot easier to get a spot because it's just you
(05:54):
and your friends and you've rented the space for a
certain amount of time. But then you get up there
and belt out your sometimes to a little bit corny
midi fied recreations of the song. That has changed and
varies widely now in terms of the quality of karaoke accompaniments.
But yeah, the idea is just to kind of get
(06:15):
up there and give it your all. And I honestly
think that some people think karaoke is really first and
foremost for people that aren't people that sing all the time.
And a lot of people don't ever sing except maybe
in the shower or when they're doing karaoke.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Yeah. The number one fear, at least in the US
is public speaking, which is bizarre to you and Max
and myself. Obviously we got that face tattoo a long
time ago. I hear drop we got when we earned
our stripes.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, I just remembered, and I don't think you've ever
heard me do it, but this may surprise you know.
I absolutely kill music of the Night.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
Yeah. I love the Broadway karaoke eers. It's the subcategory
of karaokeers.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
You'll have folks that around Halloween time will do uh,
you know, stuff from Nightmare before Christmas, for example. But boy, Ben,
music of the Night, that's that's a jammer. It's really
it really demonstrates some range. I'm gonna have to insist
on you doing that when we get our private room.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Oh boy, here we go. It's the hot tub all
over again. You're bringing up this point about you. You're
bringing up this point that I think is mission critical here,
which is the idea that carry okay as a It's
a Japanese term, and it is, like you said, sometimes
(07:46):
describing a machine right, a specific device. Uh. But it
also and I love this point, it also describes something
that people have been doing forever. Like you said, singing
in the shower. Name one person who doesn't sing in
the shower, and I will one hundred percent profile them
(08:07):
as a not fun person.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
That's funny you should say that, Ben, because I don't
ever feel compelled to sing in the shower. Yeah, but
you sing in real life, that's fair. And I do
do karaoke relatively frequently. I went for the first time
in quite a while the other weekend, and I didn't sing.
I maybe have mentioned the show, but I quit drinking
about a month and a half ago, and this was
(08:29):
the first time I don't care or been to a
karaoke situation without the assistance of alcohol, and I kind
of wanted to take it easy and just sort of
watch my friends sing and just sort of be there
in a different context outside of you know, the pounding
shots or whatever. So it was a lot of fun
and that we have a We mentioned the local our
favorite chicken wing joint here in Atlanta, they do a
(08:50):
fabulous weekly karaoke night and some friends of the show,
Rowan Newby, as well as my buddy Orlando Montoya, who
was a local public radio guy, his big karaoke nut.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
It's a real kind of community, you know, Orlando. Orlando's
a buddy.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Yeah, we used to work together back in the day
when I was with public radio in Augusta, Georgia Public Radio,
and he not terribly long ago joined the Atlanta team,
the Atlanta branch of public radio, and he does like
the afternoons and has.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
The most delightful public radio voice.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
You could imagine. I'm Orlando Montoya, and that voice also
translates to a delightful singing voice.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Now, let's I love the point about karaoke as community.
This is something that I think exists in step with
the idea of a carry okay machine. What what is
a karaoke machine?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Nell, Well, it's as simple as a device that combines
a microphone, some sort of playback mechanism, and a speaker.
Sometimes it will have a vocal effect like a reverb
or a delay, a type of effect where you go bop baa,
or like a quicker version of that which would be
more of like a slapback sound. Both of those things
(10:09):
are designed for comfort for the singer because if you
sort of smeared a little bit with reverb, as anybody
that's cut vocals in a studio will know, it makes
you a little more comfortable because you just sound larger
than life. Just to quickly backtrack before we get to
the kind of advent of that device that you're describing,
I just wanted to go back a little bit to
(10:29):
the whole bouncing ball idea. It was actually invented by
the cartoonist Max Fleischer, you might know from like from
the Ink Well with Coco the Clown. Some of the
earliest use of rotoscoping. There's a really cool Betty Boob
cartoon that features Mini the mouture that features the dance
stylings of Cab Callaway. It starts off with him like
(10:51):
actually you know, film of him dancing, and then it
transitions to a rotoscoped version where his movements are basically
translated to this ghosts. And if anyone's familiar with rotoscoping,
it's a technique that you know, it's a little bit
dated now, but it can be used for interesting creative effect.
But it's where you essentially translate real life movement onto
(11:12):
cartoon cells. For lack of a maybe more expert way
of describing it, but the original Cocoa Song cartoons ran
from nineteen twenty four to nineteen twenty seven, featuring this
sing along technique, which is just lyrics on the bottom
of the screen with the ball bouncing in rhythm to
(11:33):
let you know where you're supposed to be, you know,
in the song lyrics. It was revised again in nineteen
twenty nine as a segment called Screen Songs. This was
for Paramount Pictures and then the film, the short film
Come Take a Trip in My Airship came out in
nineteen twenty four. So this would often feature popular songs
(11:55):
from you know kind of I guess you could call
them pop right or figures at the time, we're talking
about folks like Irving Berlin and his tune when the
Midnight Chu Chu Leaves for Alabama, So not the pop
music we think of today.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Oh and that, uh, that is the midnight Chuo Chuo
leaves for Alabama, Alabama, not Alabama. Yeah, we're working with rhymes.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
I know it's true, it's true.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
I love that you're pointing this out because what you're
pointing out here is a fundamental human urge, the idea
to participate in some way with things you enjoy. Right,
So the the black batah balancing over in my mind, dude,
it's the little dot or whatever logo might be.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Yeah, it can be styled in many different ways.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Ben, did you find anything about, like, what, what's the
technique for translating this to the screen, because at the time,
I mean, sound sync was relatively new, and it's tough
to synchronize the visuals with audio with a level of
precision that makes it like actually time out correctly for
(13:18):
someone using it to follow along.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, it's kind of a it's kind of like a
conductor for an orchestra because in the early days before
the talkies, which are I think going to stick around
for a while in the in the eras of silent film,
we had on seeing orchestras or musicians playing along right.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Or the audience or an organist or whatever, right right,
or an organist or whatever. And when these folks, uh,
this audience would.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
See these these indications, the orchestra or the musicians or
the organist were also following those cues. It's kind of
like the conductor going bupa pup, pup.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Pup, pup, pup, Papa papa pah. You love that one.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
It's true, and that, you know, one of the most
impressive to me, especially given the time. Examples of sound
sync to literally, you know, synchronizing musical events with on
screen events would be Fantasia. And if anyone's ever visited
(14:32):
the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, which I'm always
screaming about, there's a whole section devoted to how Disney
achieved that level of sound sync.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
And it's crazy that it had to do with like holes.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
Punched in the side of the film that synchronized to
various movements and events that needed to then be synchronized
to the soundtrack.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Really really difficult.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
But if you watch Fantasia, which came out in nineteen forty,
the level of precision in what they achieved with that
sound sync, it'll be like, you know, a fairy tapping
their wand on a flower and lighting up and glowing
and all of that, and it has a perfect connection
with an orchestra queue you know, for this the classical
(15:14):
score of that film. So I mean, it's just mind
boggling to me how early this kind of technology was
kind of mastered by masters like Walt Disney. But for
the Fleischer cartoons, we were talking about the movement of
that black baton quote unquote that bounced was a white
disc over the tops of the lyrics, and the movement
(15:34):
got captured on super high contrast film so that the
kind of guide stick, I guess was invisible and the
ball would appear as white on black, even though sometimes
the ball and lyrics would actually be super imposed over
still drawings or photos even live action footage.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Sometimes, so really really interesting stuff. So that's kind of
the advent of this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Not to mention a show in the nineteen sixties TV
show I believe that was produced for NBC called sing
Along with Mitch, which was hosted by a super kind
of outgoing and charming host named Mitch Miller.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
We've actually got a clip from it right here. If
you want to take a listen, please, he'll just sit there,
come on and thank.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
A whole lot. And for folks listening at home, Mitch
Miller he kind of looks like Stalin.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
It's very interesting.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
He's got this kind of Stalin esque beard and mustache
thing going on, but a lot more cheerful. So at
the beginning of every episode, lyrics to the songs are
shown at the bottom of the television screen. But they
didn't have the bouncing ball. It would just be kind
of static lyrics, unlike what you'd see in those cartoon
shorts that would play before features in the cinema. But
(17:05):
you asked about the device itself, karaoke as a machine,
it's a little bit disputed, or maybe a little bit
of a bone of contention, as to who the true
inventor of karaoke was, because, like you said, ben karok
can refer to an actual physical device, and it can
also refer to kind of a culture, and one individual,
(17:28):
despite how important or transformative their invention might be, doesn't
really single handedly create a culture. So the idea for
a karaoke machine came to an inventor in Tokyo by
the name of Shigaichi Nagishi.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
In the late sixties, around sixty nine.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
He overheard a colleague making fun of him for his singing,
because unlike me, this guy probably saying in the shower
and saying just walking around doing his work on the
factory floor.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
He owned an electrocx factory.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
So he thought that if he could sing on top
of a backing track, then this would make it a
little less awkward than him just kind of singing badly
a cappella by himself.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, and this guy owned, as we said, a electronics factory,
so he had the infrastructure to create this thing to
have his look. It comes from this pettiness, right.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
He is the person.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
He's not the first person to think, oh, if I
could sing with a band behind me, it sounds great.
He was the first person to have that thought and
also have the infrastructure to support it. So in nineteen
sixty seven he creates this we could call it a
(18:52):
predecessor of the modern karaoke machine. And he did it
entirely by just pushing his pushing his kids, pushing his employees,
the people who work for Presido. His head engineer shows
up one day and Nigishi says, all right, I know
(19:12):
you've got a lot on your plate. I need you
to do some guyver stuff for me right now. And
he's like, what about my real job, And the guy says, no,
don't worry about that. I need a microphone app, I
need a mixing circuit. We make these eight decks already,
so just get it done and then you know, end
(19:34):
of day, check it.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
It would seem so yeah, and I think the factory
produced I believe it was what we would consider eight
track tapes, which are kind of these like cartridges. If
anyone's ever messed with one, you can get an eight
track player for home.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
But they were really popular, I believe, also in cars.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
And it was the same technology that was used for
the kind of carts that radio stations would use to
play sound effects and music, because you could just pop
it in and it would auto play, and then it
would auto flip whenever the first side was over. I've
actually never messed with an eight track myself, but they're
already making these. The basics for what was needed to
produce this machine were all simple pieces of audio technology,
(20:18):
Like you said, Ben, an amplifier, which is what takes
a sound and makes it loud, pumps it through a speaker,
a microphone which converts sound waves into either recordable or
projectable sound, and that playback, which would be another input
on that mixing device.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
What ended up being created was something called the Sparko Box.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yeah, and shout out to help me with this shout
out to La La Saintpete dot com. It's a big
source for us on the history of carry Okay, good.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Blog post, just about just kind of the trajectory of
some of the stuff, and I highly recommend checking it out.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
So back to our guy de Guiche, the madman, the
utter mad lad here has taken his head engineer off
of what I'm sure were very important projects and said,
make me a little box. Make me a little box
so I can go around and let people know that
(21:16):
I really do have the pipes. And as you said,
they called it the Sparko Box and the Gishe partners
with a local distributor liaison a fixer, and they tried
to lease the machine to different bars in the area,
kind of the way people lease out vending machines, you know,
(21:38):
or ATMs. They just wanted it to be a presence,
but they ran into the actual musicians who were playing
guitar already in these spots.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Yeah, I didn't realize this. I guess a cultural thing.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
They these bar performers had a name in Japan, Nagashi,
which I was not familiar with at all. I guess
it was sort of like an era where this was
the popular form of entertainment, you know, in these kind
of pubs. It's interesting too, because it's sort of the
same thing you run into anytime, like a new technology
sort of hits where there's always concern about who it's
(22:21):
going to replace, and there's always backlash from that class.
Sometimes these fears are overblown, I would argue, like with
the synthesizer. You know, when drum machines and synthesizers first
came out in the late seventies early eighties, while synthesizers
earlier than that, there was a lot of concern for
musicians unions that the synthesizer would replace the orchestra. But
(22:44):
what ended up happening was it became a tool that
was completely its own thing. I'm sitting in a room
here surrounded by synthesizers. I would never use them to
try to imitate an orchestra per se. I would use
them as elements that might be found in an orchestras
in term of combining different sound sources to create something
greater than the sum of its parts. But there's no
(23:06):
replacement for a bassoon or like a kettle drum. Certainly,
you can now get sample packs and things that will
you know, recreate those sounds, But a synthesizer sort of
makes its own sort of new sound, and maybe there
was concern that the karaoke machine might displace these Nagashi,
so it didn't really immediately take off, and Nagishi actually
(23:27):
decided to kind of abandon the whole enterprise entirely and
not pursue a patent.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, that's correct. By around the mid nineteen seventies, he
you know, this guy's a technocrat. He kind of got
done with the idea. I think if you look at
his history, what really happened is he was able to
prove to his colleague that he sounded better when he
(23:55):
sang with music, and that's really why he was done
with it. And we want to again credit where due.
We wanted to shout out Matt Alt, who interviewed Thegishi
in twenty eighteen for a book that Matt wrote called
Pure Invention, How Japan Made the Modern World. So we're
getting a lot of this from him. And our guy
(24:19):
produced about eight thousand Sparko boxes as you were saying,
as they're called, and delivered them across the land. Like
he tried to make a good idea. It didn't work
for him, but it did set a precedent.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, it really did, And I just wanted to mention
too that Alt in his interviews with Nigishi, pointed out
that maybe some of the concerns that led to this
not immediately being adopted are super similar to some of
the concerns and the debates surrounding machine learning and artificial
intelligence today in terms of how it could affect or
(25:00):
impact the jobs of everyone from writers to musicians to producers,
because everyone's just so hot to get AI to like
do all this stuff that used to be done by people,
and it does it with varying degrees of success. I
actually saw a really cool interview with the filmmaker Guilllmo
del Toro where he said something to the effect of,
(25:22):
in terms of AI used for video, that they've proven
themselves to be good at creating pretty interesting screensavers and
that's just about it.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
And I don't think he's wrong.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
But this tech has also been used in music production,
like the new version of the Apple recording software Logic Pro.
It went without a meaningful update for years and years
and years, and in the update that came I believe
last year, it had all of these AI tools things
for creating music out of nothing. You know, it just
(25:55):
link entering in a prompt or selecting a pulldown menu
and it creating kind of a song for you. It's
a little weird, though, if you're making demos at home,
probably not bad as a stand in for a drummer.
But the Sparko Box didn't make Nigishi a bunch of
money for the reasons that we addressed, because they really
didn't take off right away.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
He also never pursued the pat like we said, but
copycats were.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Hot on his heels to kind of take advantage of
what would be maybe better timing for this technology.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Enter Daisuke inOui Inui, I believe.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Right, So enter Daisuke Annue. This guy comes in about
four years after the initial ideation of the Sparko Box
from that technocrat, and he calls his machine the juke
eight like juke box plus eight.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Track eight track Yeah, and it often gets credited as
being the world's very first karaoke machine. But we know that,
as often as the case with inventions, he was standing
on the shoulders of someone else. We don't know, I
don't believe, we know definitively if he was super aware
(27:13):
of Nagishi's developments, but it's certainly likely, but it also
could be some form of parallel thinking. But whatever the
case is, the Juke eight was jumping on a trend
of jukebox as being popular in bars and nightclubs and
things like that, which is basically, anyone knows you feed in.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
A couple of coins and you get to be the DJ.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
But what this did was added the bonus feature of
not only being able to be the DJ, but also
being able to be the star of the show. So
that kind of democratization of singing really played a huge
part in this, and it did seem to take off
more than with the Sparko Box. And just wanted to
(27:55):
shout out an article on Time Asia by Pico Iver
and I ever points out something that I think we've
talked about on other episodes of Ridiculous History. Just the
nineteen hundreds marked Japan kind of establishing itself as a
real force to be reckoned with in terms of innovation.
(28:16):
And this is the case with lots of things that
they were producing in the nineteen hundreds, like companies like
Sony producing the Walkman, which became a cultural phenomenon, because
again it put the power of listening to music, you know,
in the palm of your hand. Not to mention video
game companies like Nintendo and Sega and all of those
culturally important innovations that were coming out of Japan, including
(28:39):
of course, as people also mentions companies like Bandai and
their you know, claw machines and things like the Tamagachi.
So let's hear a little bit about Innoe's upbringing.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, so, Innoe is born in Osaka in nineteen forty.
He started he started as a music in high school.
He played percussion because he said, all you have to
do is hit the drums. Before he was out of
(29:10):
high school, he was actually making more money than any
of his fellow students because he played in a Hawaiian band.
And this Hawaiian band, by the way, is performing in
old dance holes like VA halls, kind of structures that
were left behind by the American occupation of Japan.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah, exactly. He did not have a technology background like Nagishi.
He was coming at this strictly from a kind of
musical perspective and figuring out ways to make money from
being a musician.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
And he was pretty good at it like.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
By nineteen seventy, he and six other bandmates were playing
in kind of more fancy joints near Kobe, and they
were actually serving as kind of a live karaoke band
for folks who wanted to sing popular Japanese songs at
the time, or even like military songs. His friends that
(30:13):
he played with were able to read music, but like
you said, ben AOI was more concerned with just bashing
on the drums and never really bothered to embrace the
theory side of being a musician.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
So you can hear some choice interview quotes with our
guy here. He said that he could read music, but
most of his friends or colleagues could, so he would
watch he would remember songs he heard earlier, and he
would literally watch the lips of whomever was functioning as
(30:50):
the front person as this song burked. And he said,
out of the one hundred and eight club musicians in Kobe,
i was the and the clients in my club were
the worst singers, which was funny because the name of
the club, Baron was so high and that's it's funnier
in Japanese.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
But it does make.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Meaning like hyphalutin, like the idea of a baron being
like a very fancy man.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's the gist of it.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
He he did get a lot of fans, and some
of his fans had access to infrastructure. This is where
you know, we're getting in the weeds with this, but
this is this is pretty cool stuff. The there was
a guy who just kept showing up to Annoy's gigs.
(31:41):
And it turns out that he was the president of
a steel manufacturer, a steel interest and h and he
loved the way that he loved the way that this
percussionist would kind of play the drums and look at
this guy as he is singing, probably out of time,
(32:04):
if we're being honest, out of time, out of tune,
and so and so he's like, Hey, I like your vibe.
You're the best drummer I've ever met. You make me
sound amazing. Hey, will you go with me on a
road trip? So I think I'm getting this right. But he.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
Was asked to go on this trip.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Unfortunately, he sadly did not feel like he could leave
his bandmates in a lurch. So you know, this guy
wanted him to accompany him to this getaway with for
fancy business folks at some hot spring, so instead of
going with him and playing live, he recorded all of
the accompaniments to the songs on tape and gave them
to the guy to take with him to I guess play,
(32:47):
so he and his buddies could sting along.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
That's right, and this boss, we have this confirmed as
a true story. This boss did a did use the
tape and had a great time. Apparently he delivered what
is often called an emotional rendition, which is not the
(33:12):
same thing as singing well but you know, it's like
that football film Rudy. He had a lot of heart
and he sang a song called leaving Haneda Airport on
a seven fifty flight, which is a banger if you
know it. And this is this is where we start
to get the term that the world uses today. And
(33:37):
hold the phone, pause the music, skip the song. We've
got more on the playlist for you. This is a
two part episode on the history of Kerrie.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
OK.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
We will be right back in just a few with
the with the.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Stunning conclusion, please seek along at home, big, big thanks
to our super producer mister Max Williams. Noel, thank you
so much for being our research associate on this one.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
It's near and dear to my heart, Ben. Thanks for
the opportunity. Huge thanks to Alex Williams who composed our theme.
Jonathan Strickland, the Quizitor, A J. Bahamas, Jacobs the Puzzler.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Rachel Big Spinach, Lance Eves, Jeff Coat.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
You know the names.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
We hope you like him as well. We got a
weird shout out to Jimmy Carter and snuck in just
spoilers ahead, snuck in one of our favorite quotations about
the guy, Jimmy, If.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
You're hearing this, Jimmy, can you hear me right right right?
Speaker 1 (34:37):
So? Ground Control to Major Tom. We can't wait to
hear from you soon. Stay tuned to.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
See you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for joining us today. Let's give a big shout out
to our super producer, the Man, the myth Legend, mister
Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Huzzah, I am technically still alive. Yeah, it's good to hear.
I know Max has been. You've been plagued by the
ick this season. The weather's on top of the man,
it is.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
It's sitting right on your face and apparently flatulating upon it.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
We learned the term pink ear, pink ear and cloaping.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Yeah, that's when you close and open dirty double.
Speaker 5 (01:02):
When you open at a restaurant, you work to the
closing shift and not like you know that, mid bs.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
You and I have a very different idea of what
dirty double means.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
I know, and I don't google dirty double, y'all, just
don't restaurant industry.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Everything in the restaurant industry has some innuendo to it.
But yeah, this is the fourth time in a year
of sick. That's the note in five years I did
and get sick. I've been sick now four times for
lost time, buddy.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, we also we also want to again with we
always begin our our episodes with and end our episodes
with thanking the people who make the episodes possible. With
this in mind, ridiculous historians. My name's Ben Bollen. I
would like to introduce you yet again. Don't call it
(01:48):
a comeback to the one the only research associate in
this episode, mister Noel Brown. Can we get like an applause?
I don't have to, Okay, sure, I'll take it.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Thank you. Yeah, always always take the applause.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
I'll take the bow. I'll take it. It's a mid bow,
not a low bow.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Now we're talking about something that's been on our minds
for quite a long time.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Oh years, decades. I mean, I don't know you.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
I've never known you to be a participant, but I
know you are a delighted spectator.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I don't participate in the western version of karaoke with
a large public audience of strangers, but I will.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
I will kill that room. Bro. We got to make
this happen.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I don't think I've ever shared a private karaoke space
with you, and I look forward to it.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
Do you have a go to jam?
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Well, it's illegal for you to ask me. I don't
think that's true in the Philippines.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Oh, as far as I know, we're in the good
old us of a ben. But you keep your secret spinbulling.
I got a couple. If anyone's interested.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
What do you got? What do you got? Well, I
like to do. You know, I've got a cup. I've
got a bit of a range.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
So I like to do things where I sing kind
of low good stuff for that would be new Romantic
eighties kind of synth wave kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
I really like, Uh, don't you want me? Baby?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
You know, don't you want don't because you get to
do that kind of low Bowie Krune kind of thing. Sure,
speaking of Bowie and his low Crune, I like to
do a bit of it. It was a single, but
a lot of people don't know it doesn't really like
the room up usually but ashes to Ashes by David
Bowie off of the Scary Monstrous Record. And if I
want to showcase my higher range, I'll do and I
would do anything for love, but I won't do that
(03:43):
by meeth Low.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
I've seen that.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I've seen these because folks, if you don't know, Noel
comes from an operatic background. So the man does have
the range. We are not blowing smoke quite. I would say, honestly,
you're phenomenally talented musician.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
I appreciate that, and it means a lot to me
to hear you say that, and it's something that means
a lot to me in my life. I don't sing
as much as I used to, used to be in bands,
and I work on a lot of music, but I'm
just now kind of getting back into singing and recording
my own songs as supposed to producing others. But karaoke
is a fun, kind of democratic way of getting out
(04:25):
there and flexing your your pipes.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
If that's the phrase, oh wait, wait, wait, wait, we
have to say it. This is very familiar to a
lot of us listening. But Noel, for anyone who does
not know what Carrie Okay is, how would you describe it?
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Well, it's interesting because I mean the modern concept of
karaoke in terms of like a machine or a device
used to sing along with music with the main vocal removed,
is really a relatively modern and like dating back to
around the late sixties early seventies. But you know, sing
alongs have been around for a lot longer than that.
(05:09):
Folks will likely remember or have seen, you know, in
retrospect with false nostalgia, the good old bouncing ball like
m I C K E Y m O USC or
some of the old Max Fleischer cartoons. So a sing
along kind of situation was certainly popular with these kinds
of shorts that would play before a feature as far
back as like the thirties and forties. You would have
(05:32):
lyrics on the bottom of the screen and the audience
was invited to participate. So I mean, at its core,
karaoke is a participatory musical kind of communal events, you know,
where people sign up on a list, whether it be
at a bar or a private room like you were
talking about Ben, although in the private room it's a
lot easier to get a spot because it's just you
(05:54):
and your friends and you've rented the space for a
certain amount of time. But then you get up there
and belt out your sometimes to a little bit corny
midi fied recreations of the song. That has changed and
varies widely now in terms of the quality of karaoke accompaniments.
But yeah, the idea is just to kind of get
(06:15):
up there and give it your all. And I honestly
think that some people think karaoke is really first and
foremost for people that aren't people that sing all the time.
And a lot of people don't ever sing except maybe
in the shower or when they're doing karaoke.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Yeah. The number one fear, at least in the US
is public speaking, which is bizarre to you and Max
and myself. Obviously we got that face tattoo a long
time ago. I hear drop we got when we earned
our stripes.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, I just remembered, and I don't think you've ever
heard me do it, but this may surprise you know.
I absolutely kill music of the Night.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
Yeah. I love the Broadway karaoke eers. It's the subcategory
of karaokeers.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
You'll have folks that around Halloween time will do uh,
you know, stuff from Nightmare before Christmas, for example. But boy, Ben,
music of the Night, that's that's a jammer. It's really
it really demonstrates some range. I'm gonna have to insist
on you doing that when we get our private room.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Oh boy, here we go. It's the hot tub all
over again. You're bringing up this point about you. You're
bringing up this point that I think is mission critical here,
which is the idea that carry okay as a It's
a Japanese term, and it is, like you said, sometimes
(07:46):
describing a machine right, a specific device. Uh. But it
also and I love this point, it also describes something
that people have been doing forever. Like you said, singing
in the shower. Name one person who doesn't sing in
the shower, and I will one hundred percent profile them
(08:07):
as a not fun person.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
That's funny you should say that, Ben, because I don't
ever feel compelled to sing in the shower. Yeah, but
you sing in real life, that's fair. And I do
do karaoke relatively frequently. I went for the first time
in quite a while the other weekend, and I didn't sing.
I maybe have mentioned the show, but I quit drinking
about a month and a half ago, and this was
(08:29):
the first time I don't care or been to a
karaoke situation without the assistance of alcohol, and I kind
of wanted to take it easy and just sort of
watch my friends sing and just sort of be there
in a different context outside of you know, the pounding
shots or whatever. So it was a lot of fun
and that we have a We mentioned the local our
favorite chicken wing joint here in Atlanta, they do a
(08:50):
fabulous weekly karaoke night and some friends of the show,
Rowan Newby, as well as my buddy Orlando Montoya, who
was a local public radio guy, his big karaoke nut.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
It's a real kind of community, you know, Orlando. Orlando's
a buddy.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Yeah, we used to work together back in the day
when I was with public radio in Augusta, Georgia Public Radio,
and he not terribly long ago joined the Atlanta team,
the Atlanta branch of public radio, and he does like
the afternoons and has.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
The most delightful public radio voice.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
You could imagine. I'm Orlando Montoya, and that voice also
translates to a delightful singing voice.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Now, let's I love the point about karaoke as community.
This is something that I think exists in step with
the idea of a carry okay machine. What what is
a karaoke machine?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Nell, Well, it's as simple as a device that combines
a microphone, some sort of playback mechanism, and a speaker.
Sometimes it will have a vocal effect like a reverb
or a delay, a type of effect where you go bop baa,
or like a quicker version of that which would be
more of like a slapback sound. Both of those things
(10:09):
are designed for comfort for the singer because if you
sort of smeared a little bit with reverb, as anybody
that's cut vocals in a studio will know, it makes
you a little more comfortable because you just sound larger
than life. Just to quickly backtrack before we get to
the kind of advent of that device that you're describing,
I just wanted to go back a little bit to
(10:29):
the whole bouncing ball idea. It was actually invented by
the cartoonist Max Fleischer, you might know from like from
the Ink Well with Coco the Clown. Some of the
earliest use of rotoscoping. There's a really cool Betty Boob
cartoon that features Mini the mouture that features the dance
stylings of Cab Callaway. It starts off with him like
(10:51):
actually you know, film of him dancing, and then it
transitions to a rotoscoped version where his movements are basically
translated to this ghosts. And if anyone's familiar with rotoscoping,
it's a technique that you know, it's a little bit
dated now, but it can be used for interesting creative effect.
But it's where you essentially translate real life movement onto
(11:12):
cartoon cells. For lack of a maybe more expert way
of describing it, but the original Cocoa Song cartoons ran
from nineteen twenty four to nineteen twenty seven, featuring this
sing along technique, which is just lyrics on the bottom
of the screen with the ball bouncing in rhythm to
(11:33):
let you know where you're supposed to be, you know,
in the song lyrics. It was revised again in nineteen
twenty nine as a segment called Screen Songs. This was
for Paramount Pictures and then the film, the short film
Come Take a Trip in My Airship came out in
nineteen twenty four. So this would often feature popular songs
(11:55):
from you know kind of I guess you could call
them pop right or figures at the time, we're talking
about folks like Irving Berlin and his tune when the
Midnight Chu Chu Leaves for Alabama, So not the pop
music we think of today.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Oh and that, uh, that is the midnight Chuo Chuo
leaves for Alabama, Alabama, not Alabama. Yeah, we're working with rhymes.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
I know it's true, it's true.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
I love that you're pointing this out because what you're
pointing out here is a fundamental human urge, the idea
to participate in some way with things you enjoy. Right,
So the the black batah balancing over in my mind, dude,
it's the little dot or whatever logo might be.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Yeah, it can be styled in many different ways.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Ben, did you find anything about, like, what, what's the
technique for translating this to the screen, because at the time,
I mean, sound sync was relatively new, and it's tough
to synchronize the visuals with audio with a level of
precision that makes it like actually time out correctly for
(13:18):
someone using it to follow along.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, it's kind of a it's kind of like a
conductor for an orchestra because in the early days before
the talkies, which are I think going to stick around
for a while in the in the eras of silent film,
we had on seeing orchestras or musicians playing along right.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Or the audience or an organist or whatever, right right,
or an organist or whatever. And when these folks, uh,
this audience would.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
See these these indications, the orchestra or the musicians or
the organist were also following those cues. It's kind of
like the conductor going bupa pup, pup.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Pup, pup, pup, Papa papa pah. You love that one.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
It's true, and that, you know, one of the most
impressive to me, especially given the time. Examples of sound
sync to literally, you know, synchronizing musical events with on
screen events would be Fantasia. And if anyone's ever visited
(14:32):
the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, which I'm always
screaming about, there's a whole section devoted to how Disney
achieved that level of sound sync.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
And it's crazy that it had to do with like holes.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
Punched in the side of the film that synchronized to
various movements and events that needed to then be synchronized
to the soundtrack.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Really really difficult.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
But if you watch Fantasia, which came out in nineteen forty,
the level of precision in what they achieved with that
sound sync, it'll be like, you know, a fairy tapping
their wand on a flower and lighting up and glowing
and all of that, and it has a perfect connection
with an orchestra queue you know, for this the classical
(15:14):
score of that film. So I mean, it's just mind
boggling to me how early this kind of technology was
kind of mastered by masters like Walt Disney. But for
the Fleischer cartoons, we were talking about the movement of
that black baton quote unquote that bounced was a white
disc over the tops of the lyrics, and the movement
(15:34):
got captured on super high contrast film so that the
kind of guide stick, I guess was invisible and the
ball would appear as white on black, even though sometimes
the ball and lyrics would actually be super imposed over
still drawings or photos even live action footage.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Sometimes, so really really interesting stuff. So that's kind of
the advent of this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Not to mention a show in the nineteen sixties TV
show I believe that was produced for NBC called sing
Along with Mitch, which was hosted by a super kind
of outgoing and charming host named Mitch Miller.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
We've actually got a clip from it right here. If
you want to take a listen, please, he'll just sit there,
come on and thank.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
A whole lot. And for folks listening at home, Mitch
Miller he kind of looks like Stalin.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
It's very interesting.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
He's got this kind of Stalin esque beard and mustache
thing going on, but a lot more cheerful. So at
the beginning of every episode, lyrics to the songs are
shown at the bottom of the television screen. But they
didn't have the bouncing ball. It would just be kind
of static lyrics, unlike what you'd see in those cartoon
shorts that would play before features in the cinema. But
(17:05):
you asked about the device itself, karaoke as a machine,
it's a little bit disputed, or maybe a little bit
of a bone of contention, as to who the true
inventor of karaoke was, because, like you said, ben karok
can refer to an actual physical device, and it can
also refer to kind of a culture, and one individual,
(17:28):
despite how important or transformative their invention might be, doesn't
really single handedly create a culture. So the idea for
a karaoke machine came to an inventor in Tokyo by
the name of Shigaichi Nagishi.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
In the late sixties, around sixty nine.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
He overheard a colleague making fun of him for his singing,
because unlike me, this guy probably saying in the shower
and saying just walking around doing his work on the
factory floor.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
He owned an electrocx factory.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
So he thought that if he could sing on top
of a backing track, then this would make it a
little less awkward than him just kind of singing badly
a cappella by himself.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, and this guy owned, as we said, a electronics factory,
so he had the infrastructure to create this thing to
have his look. It comes from this pettiness, right.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
He is the person.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
He's not the first person to think, oh, if I
could sing with a band behind me, it sounds great.
He was the first person to have that thought and
also have the infrastructure to support it. So in nineteen
sixty seven he creates this we could call it a
(18:52):
predecessor of the modern karaoke machine. And he did it
entirely by just pushing his pushing his kids, pushing his employees,
the people who work for Presido. His head engineer shows
up one day and Nigishi says, all right, I know
(19:12):
you've got a lot on your plate. I need you
to do some guyver stuff for me right now. And
he's like, what about my real job, And the guy says, no,
don't worry about that. I need a microphone app, I
need a mixing circuit. We make these eight decks already,
so just get it done and then you know, end
(19:34):
of day, check it.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
It would seem so yeah, and I think the factory
produced I believe it was what we would consider eight
track tapes, which are kind of these like cartridges. If
anyone's ever messed with one, you can get an eight
track player for home.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
But they were really popular, I believe, also in cars.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
And it was the same technology that was used for
the kind of carts that radio stations would use to
play sound effects and music, because you could just pop
it in and it would auto play, and then it
would auto flip whenever the first side was over. I've
actually never messed with an eight track myself, but they're
already making these. The basics for what was needed to
produce this machine were all simple pieces of audio technology,
(20:18):
Like you said, Ben, an amplifier, which is what takes
a sound and makes it loud, pumps it through a speaker,
a microphone which converts sound waves into either recordable or
projectable sound, and that playback, which would be another input
on that mixing device.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
What ended up being created was something called the Sparko Box.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yeah, and shout out to help me with this shout
out to La La Saintpete dot com. It's a big
source for us on the history of carry Okay, good.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Blog post, just about just kind of the trajectory of
some of the stuff, and I highly recommend checking it out.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
So back to our guy de Guiche, the madman, the
utter mad lad here has taken his head engineer off
of what I'm sure were very important projects and said,
make me a little box. Make me a little box
so I can go around and let people know that
(21:16):
I really do have the pipes. And as you said,
they called it the Sparko Box and the Gishe partners
with a local distributor liaison a fixer, and they tried
to lease the machine to different bars in the area,
kind of the way people lease out vending machines, you know,
(21:38):
or ATMs. They just wanted it to be a presence,
but they ran into the actual musicians who were playing
guitar already in these spots.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Yeah, I didn't realize this. I guess a cultural thing.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
They these bar performers had a name in Japan, Nagashi,
which I was not familiar with at all. I guess
it was sort of like an era where this was
the popular form of entertainment, you know, in these kind
of pubs. It's interesting too, because it's sort of the
same thing you run into anytime, like a new technology
sort of hits where there's always concern about who it's
(22:21):
going to replace, and there's always backlash from that class.
Sometimes these fears are overblown, I would argue, like with
the synthesizer. You know, when drum machines and synthesizers first
came out in the late seventies early eighties, while synthesizers
earlier than that, there was a lot of concern for
musicians unions that the synthesizer would replace the orchestra. But
(22:44):
what ended up happening was it became a tool that
was completely its own thing. I'm sitting in a room
here surrounded by synthesizers. I would never use them to
try to imitate an orchestra per se. I would use
them as elements that might be found in an orchestras
in term of combining different sound sources to create something
greater than the sum of its parts. But there's no
(23:06):
replacement for a bassoon or like a kettle drum. Certainly,
you can now get sample packs and things that will
you know, recreate those sounds, But a synthesizer sort of
makes its own sort of new sound, and maybe there
was concern that the karaoke machine might displace these Nagashi,
so it didn't really immediately take off, and Nagishi actually
(23:27):
decided to kind of abandon the whole enterprise entirely and
not pursue a patent.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, that's correct. By around the mid nineteen seventies, he
you know, this guy's a technocrat. He kind of got
done with the idea. I think if you look at
his history, what really happened is he was able to
prove to his colleague that he sounded better when he
(23:55):
sang with music, and that's really why he was done
with it. And we want to again credit where due.
We wanted to shout out Matt Alt, who interviewed Thegishi
in twenty eighteen for a book that Matt wrote called
Pure Invention, How Japan Made the Modern World. So we're
getting a lot of this from him. And our guy
(24:19):
produced about eight thousand Sparko boxes as you were saying,
as they're called, and delivered them across the land. Like
he tried to make a good idea. It didn't work
for him, but it did set a precedent.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, it really did, And I just wanted to mention
too that Alt in his interviews with Nigishi, pointed out
that maybe some of the concerns that led to this
not immediately being adopted are super similar to some of
the concerns and the debates surrounding machine learning and artificial
intelligence today in terms of how it could affect or
(25:00):
impact the jobs of everyone from writers to musicians to producers,
because everyone's just so hot to get AI to like
do all this stuff that used to be done by people,
and it does it with varying degrees of success. I
actually saw a really cool interview with the filmmaker Guilllmo
del Toro where he said something to the effect of,
(25:22):
in terms of AI used for video, that they've proven
themselves to be good at creating pretty interesting screensavers and
that's just about it.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
And I don't think he's wrong.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
But this tech has also been used in music production,
like the new version of the Apple recording software Logic Pro.
It went without a meaningful update for years and years
and years, and in the update that came I believe
last year, it had all of these AI tools things
for creating music out of nothing. You know, it just
(25:55):
link entering in a prompt or selecting a pulldown menu
and it creating kind of a song for you. It's
a little weird, though, if you're making demos at home,
probably not bad as a stand in for a drummer.
But the Sparko Box didn't make Nigishi a bunch of
money for the reasons that we addressed, because they really
didn't take off right away.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
He also never pursued the pat like we said, but
copycats were.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Hot on his heels to kind of take advantage of
what would be maybe better timing for this technology.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Enter Daisuke inOui Inui, I believe.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Right, So enter Daisuke Annue. This guy comes in about
four years after the initial ideation of the Sparko Box
from that technocrat, and he calls his machine the juke
eight like juke box plus eight.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Track eight track Yeah, and it often gets credited as
being the world's very first karaoke machine. But we know that,
as often as the case with inventions, he was standing
on the shoulders of someone else. We don't know, I
don't believe, we know definitively if he was super aware
(27:13):
of Nagishi's developments, but it's certainly likely, but it also
could be some form of parallel thinking. But whatever the
case is, the Juke eight was jumping on a trend
of jukebox as being popular in bars and nightclubs and
things like that, which is basically, anyone knows you feed in.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
A couple of coins and you get to be the DJ.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
But what this did was added the bonus feature of
not only being able to be the DJ, but also
being able to be the star of the show. So
that kind of democratization of singing really played a huge
part in this, and it did seem to take off
more than with the Sparko Box. And just wanted to
(27:55):
shout out an article on Time Asia by Pico Iver
and I ever points out something that I think we've
talked about on other episodes of Ridiculous History. Just the
nineteen hundreds marked Japan kind of establishing itself as a
real force to be reckoned with in terms of innovation.
(28:16):
And this is the case with lots of things that
they were producing in the nineteen hundreds, like companies like
Sony producing the Walkman, which became a cultural phenomenon, because
again it put the power of listening to music, you know,
in the palm of your hand. Not to mention video
game companies like Nintendo and Sega and all of those
culturally important innovations that were coming out of Japan, including
(28:39):
of course, as people also mentions companies like Bandai and
their you know, claw machines and things like the Tamagachi.
So let's hear a little bit about Innoe's upbringing.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, so, Innoe is born in Osaka in nineteen forty.
He started he started as a music in high school.
He played percussion because he said, all you have to
do is hit the drums. Before he was out of
(29:10):
high school, he was actually making more money than any
of his fellow students because he played in a Hawaiian band.
And this Hawaiian band, by the way, is performing in
old dance holes like VA halls, kind of structures that
were left behind by the American occupation of Japan.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah, exactly. He did not have a technology background like Nagishi.
He was coming at this strictly from a kind of
musical perspective and figuring out ways to make money from
being a musician.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
And he was pretty good at it like.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
By nineteen seventy, he and six other bandmates were playing
in kind of more fancy joints near Kobe, and they
were actually serving as kind of a live karaoke band
for folks who wanted to sing popular Japanese songs at
the time, or even like military songs. His friends that
(30:13):
he played with were able to read music, but like
you said, ben AOI was more concerned with just bashing
on the drums and never really bothered to embrace the
theory side of being a musician.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
So you can hear some choice interview quotes with our
guy here. He said that he could read music, but
most of his friends or colleagues could, so he would
watch he would remember songs he heard earlier, and he
would literally watch the lips of whomever was functioning as
(30:50):
the front person as this song burked. And he said,
out of the one hundred and eight club musicians in Kobe,
i was the and the clients in my club were
the worst singers, which was funny because the name of
the club, Baron was so high and that's it's funnier
in Japanese.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
But it does make.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Meaning like hyphalutin, like the idea of a baron being
like a very fancy man.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's the gist of it.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
He he did get a lot of fans, and some
of his fans had access to infrastructure. This is where
you know, we're getting in the weeds with this, but
this is this is pretty cool stuff. The there was
a guy who just kept showing up to Annoy's gigs.
(31:41):
And it turns out that he was the president of
a steel manufacturer, a steel interest and h and he
loved the way that he loved the way that this
percussionist would kind of play the drums and look at
this guy as he is singing, probably out of time,
(32:04):
if we're being honest, out of time, out of tune,
and so and so he's like, Hey, I like your vibe.
You're the best drummer I've ever met. You make me
sound amazing. Hey, will you go with me on a
road trip? So I think I'm getting this right. But he.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
Was asked to go on this trip.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Unfortunately, he sadly did not feel like he could leave
his bandmates in a lurch. So you know, this guy
wanted him to accompany him to this getaway with for
fancy business folks at some hot spring, so instead of
going with him and playing live, he recorded all of
the accompaniments to the songs on tape and gave them
to the guy to take with him to I guess play,
(32:47):
so he and his buddies could sting along.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
That's right, and this boss, we have this confirmed as
a true story. This boss did a did use the
tape and had a great time. Apparently he delivered what
is often called an emotional rendition, which is not the
(33:12):
same thing as singing well but you know, it's like
that football film Rudy. He had a lot of heart
and he sang a song called leaving Haneda Airport on
a seven fifty flight, which is a banger if you
know it. And this is this is where we start
to get the term that the world uses today. And
(33:37):
hold the phone, pause the music, skip the song. We've
got more on the playlist for you. This is a
two part episode on the history of Kerrie.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
OK.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
We will be right back in just a few with
the with the.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Stunning conclusion, please seek along at home, big, big thanks
to our super producer mister Max Williams. Noel, thank you
so much for being our research associate on this one.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
It's near and dear to my heart, Ben. Thanks for
the opportunity. Huge thanks to Alex Williams who composed our theme.
Jonathan Strickland, the Quizitor, A J. Bahamas, Jacobs the Puzzler.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Rachel Big Spinach, Lance Eves, Jeff Coat.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
You know the names.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
We hope you like him as well. We got a
weird shout out to Jimmy Carter and snuck in just
spoilers ahead, snuck in one of our favorite quotations about
the guy, Jimmy, If.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
You're hearing this, Jimmy, can you hear me right right right?
Speaker 1 (34:37):
So? Ground Control to Major Tom. We can't wait to
hear from you soon. Stay tuned to.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
See you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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