For those who don´t know me, I dedicate myself to the design and manufacturing of high end audiophile loudspeakers, and as I realize, that any equipment is only as good as the music it reproduces, I write articles about all things sound and music.
For most of us today listening to the music we like implies a 5 dollar monthly membership at some streaming service and whatever gear we feel fits our need.
There was a time, and perhaps for some there still is, where listening to specific types of music meant not only jail time but forced labor camps in unkind climates with little chance of ever making it out alive. This story is to honor the extraordinary effort and risk men and women undertook to listen to the music they wanted to listen to. It is particularly, about how the Soviet Beatlemania was made possible through technological trickery.
This story starts in the 1930´s in Germany where Robert Lachman was frustrated by the fact that the increasingly anti-Semitic climate was leading to all sorts of export bans to Jews living in what then was Palestine. Little is known about Mr. Lachman today, but his frustration was with regards to a specific ban: That of shellac records. I can only suppose that he was as passionate about music as I ever hope to be as he was not willing to put up with the embargo and came up with a rather ingenious way to circumvent it:
He devised a method to use old X-rays films and cut the groove into the material. At the time, the highly flammable nitrocellulose was being replaced by a safer cellulose acetate material and as serendipitous as it may seem, Lachman found that one could cut a reasonable record groove into such material using standard shellac cutting equipment. He did so enthusiastically and sent of lots of contraband music to his Jewish Friends and Family in the Middle East. Call them “slipped discs” if puns are your thing, otherwise this is today known as “bones music”. Other slang terms coined were "ribs music", or "bones jazz".
The exact date of the invention is unknown but the switchover to safety film and Hitler´s rise to power both happened in 1933 and we can assume that Lachman´s invention happened after that date. Lachman´s Records still play on a standard Gramophone today and are reported to have only mildly deteriorated quality compared to what was available commercially at the time.
During the National Socialist regime and particularly the second world war, all cultural contribution from enemy nations, but particularly Jazz was considered “fremdländisch” or culturally alien and was under strict censorship. The term "entartete Musik" or "degenerate music" was coined and used in propaganda like the picture shown, including defamatory and hateful caricatures of African Americans playing music. Nevertheless there was an avid underground Jazz community playing swing and rag time in what was yet another triumph of our human pursuit of the arts in times of hostility. Whether “bones music” played a role at the time is not well documented and I would love to read comments of anyone who has information in this regard.
The method of using X-ray films to transport censored music was definitely used again by around 1956 when the Soviet empire under Stalin was starting to exercise increased thought control and was very adamant on censorship particularly of western arts and music.
It is unclear whether an emerging community of bootleggers were aware of Robert Lachman´s original thought when building their homemade recording devices to record music on X-Rays, or if they came up with this on their own, but by the time Beatlemania hit Europe, the method was well established and a black market emerged. Russian musicologist Artemy Troitsky recalls:
"Grooves were cut with the help of special machines, made, they say, from old phonographs by skilled conspiratorial hands. The quality was awful, but the price was low, a ruble or a ruble and a half."
By the time Beatlemania was in full gear Western recording technology had switched from Shellac to Vinyl and the quality of sound reproduction increased dramatically. The Bones Music, however, maintained its rather low quality shellac sound. This did not scare off Soviet resident enthusiasts to produce, distribute and buy X-Ray records in rather large quantities regardless.
Real discs were incredibly scarce and sought after and accordingly expensive. At around 70 Rubles they were worth roughly 50% of an average workers monthly salary. The prices went up dramatically the further away one was from Moscow within the Soviet empire with original vinyl fetching as much as 200 Rubles on the foothills of the Ural Mountains.
The story of the bones bootlegs came to an end with the advent of tape recorders in the late 1970ies. For obvious reasons, people preferred to trade and buy tapes bootlegged from original vinyl rather than dealing with the dismal quality of music on X-rays.
Interestingly enough, the Soviet system seemed to have been inconsistent with its ban of the Beatles with the state run record company Melodyia producing legitimate recordings of a wide range of Beatles, Lennon and McCartney Music. A compilation containing “Girl” was the first in 1967 and “Junk” made a musical compilation of “music from around the world” in 1973. A year later, a rather large catalogue of instrumental interpretations of Beatles related tunes including “Imagine”, “Jealous Guy”, “When I am Sixty Four”, “Birthday” was published. Strangely enough for a society to uphold Marx´s belief that “religion is opium for the masses” Melodyia also released “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison that same year.
Melodyia continued producing recordings by the Beatles by 1980. Some of the releases were a single with “Octopus Garden” and “Something” from Abbey Road. And at the time the Soviet empire came to an end in 1991, “The White Album” and “Abbey Road” had both been released as officially purchasable record sets.
Differently to the Rolling Stones and other Bands, the Beatles never did a performance in the Soviet Union.
For all those interested in the topic, there is a book about to be released November, titled "X-Ray Audio Project" by Stephen Coates that can be preordered here.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.
