It’s the time of year for saving money!
I recently reviewed a Blu-ray Disc celebrating the movies of the legendary, influential and timeless comedy duo, Laurel & Hardy. While working on that review I came upon a bonus feature on one of the four discs in the set which intrigued me, prompting a bit of research beyond it’s scope. (to read about that set, click here). I thought some of you might appreciate knowing about this…
To my surprise, there on Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations I found a fascinating series of music sequences recorded for soundtracks to several of their movies and shorts, including rare demos and such.These recordings were first transferred to special transcription discs in the 1940s.
Fragile and one-of-a-kind, the music on these rare discs didn’t see the light of day until 1980 when they were carefully cleaned and transferred to tape. The recordings were issued on a very limited edition vinyl record in 1982 which is very much out of print and seemingly difficult to locate (at least based on my initial research on the web).
Not to worry….
Thanks to Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations, you can now hear some of that great music which was written by LeRoy Shields and Marvin Hatley during the 1930s before the duo’s voice overs and sound effects were added.
The segments are quite fun and sound excellent considering their vintage. Some are demos, while others are longer versions than you might hear in the films. For example, the fun pop song “Honolulu Baby” is presented in its full take without the cutaway to Laurel and Hardy’s dialogue as in the movie.
However, if you are curious but aren’t quite ready to plunk down the $60-80 for Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations just to hear some of this type of music, there is a more affordable solution out there which may appeal to many of you.
If you have access to streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz and just want to hear the fun period music from the Laurel & Hardy films without soundtrack dialog, there is a wonderful album there by the acclaimed Dutch revival music ensemble The Beau Hunks.
Named after a Laurel & Hardy short film, The Beau Hunks achieved notoriety with their note-for-note transcriptions and modern-made yet authentic-sounding recordings of music from The Little Rascals comedy series.
Made using vintage period instruments and performed with remarkable authority, the music on these Beau Hunks recordings is richly detailed. Yet, they still feel right, honoring the period in which they were supposed to have been recorded.
I didn’t realize that this fine group had also done a tribute to composer LeRoy Shields — who, again, along with Marvin Hatley crafted the Laurel & Hardy music — until I started doing some research for this article.
Like the Little Rascals albums, the results on this LeRoy Shields tribute are wonderful. It is a whole lot of fun to hear — in great fidelity — themes such as “On To The Show” and “Dash & Dot.”
You will probably know these titles and other songs like “Dance of the Cuckoos” (aka “The Cuckoo Song” and “Ku-Ku”) immediately if you’ve spent any time watching Laurel & Hardy re-runs on television over the years.
If you are interested in streaming this fun music, following are links to it on: Tidal (click here), Qobuz (click here), Spotify (click here).
The music on Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations is grand escapist fun and now you can hear it on Blu-ray Disc as well as streaming (and CDs and LPs). It is all there waiting for your rediscovery.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cd06191142010ee014b316d6a8c5984cf994aef00930b3fe2946395bb99f812e.jpg Hi, Mark. I produced the Marvin Hatley LP in 1982, when I was 23. I
had first met Marvin at meetings of the Los Angeles area Way Out West
Tent of Sons of the Desert, the Laurel & Hardy appreciation
society. Marvin regularly attended the meetings and provided hot jazz
piano before the meetings got started. He was a remarkable man, and I
was blessed to become friends with him. In 1980, he finally brought out
the “old, scratchy records nobody would care about,” and not only were
they not scratchy, but indeed many people would want to hear this music
without “the pots and pans,” as Marvin called it — the sound effects
that obscured the music in the film soundtracks. The records were,
however, fragile, because they were glass transcription discs; Marvin’s
friend Paul Mertz, former piano player with the legendary Jean Goldkette
Orchestra in the 1920s, was now working at one of the studios and
transferred Marvin’s 35mm nitrate optical track film to disc for him in
the early 1940s. The discs were glass because metal was being given to
World War II scrap-metal drives In 1982, I was a college student and
had gotten $2,400 in scholarship money which I didn’t really need (a
university education in California was actually very inexpensive in
those days), so I figured out how to produce an LP. In 1982 that
involved making a 15ips tape master (with two seconds’ worth of white
leader tape in between tracks). I had my friend, radio show archivist
Ken Greenwald, clean the discs and transfer the discs to tape. Marvin
was still a creative and versatile musician at 77, and my college chum
Scott Comerford had a reel-to-reel tape deck which could do
multi-tracking, so we went up to Marvin’s Hollywood hilltop home and
recorded six new tracks of songs that he’d written in the ’30s for Hal
Roach films; Marvin sang and played hot “stride-style” piano, tuba,
accordion, celeste and bass trumpet. I had 1,000 copies of the LP
pressed — it cost $1,762.00. I paid Scott $200, paid myself back the
$1762 and gave Marvin the profits, which after advertising and postage
costs came to something like $8,000. He bought himself a splendid new
stereo outfit with part of the money. Many of the LPs were sold at the
1982 Sons of the Desert convention in Detroit (the LPs arrived only two
days before we were going to leave!). We spent our first night in the
hotel numbering (me) and signing (Marvin) about 300 copies and sold
almost all of them. The rest I sold by mail order and at a couple of
meetings of the Way Out West Tent before they were gone. I have five or
six copies and occasionally will find one in a used record shop or
online. Marvin was so brilliant — in the 1980s as well as in the ’30s
— and I am proud to be the only person who got some of his magnificent
music preserved. The original music tracks for the L&H films which were on the LP are now
on the Blu-ray and DVD, and the sound quality is very good indeed. The 1982 tracks, plus
a few which were for other Hal Roach films, are still exclusive to the LP.
Attached is a photo of Marvin
and me with the new LP in 1982 at the Sons of the Desert International
Convention in Detroit. Photo by Marcia Opal.