<VV> Thought I'd seen everything

[Tony Underwood]

At 03:15 hours 12/30/2004 -0600, Dennis & Debbie Pleau wrote:
>Some trivia, C. W. McCall is now Mannheim steamroller the Christmas music
band.
>

I don't think McCall per se (actually an alter-ego of Bill Fries) is still
involved with MS.   Mannheim Steamroller is a kinda nome de plum for Chip
Davis who cooked up the name to promote his new age music compositions
which were performed by various musicians of his acquaintance from earlier
days, thus called Mannheim Steamroller regardless of who the particular
performers are although it's Davis who both  wrrites and conducts the
performances.   

Mannheim Steamroller has much more out there than just a Christmas album.
They have also been producing other new age recordings for almost 30 years.
  Good stuff, got several.   Been a fan for a long time.    Somewhere I
still have a recording of "Fresh Aire", the first record Mannheim
Steamroller actually produced as such.    

It was also one of the first recordings of what's regarded as "new age"
music, dating back to the mid-1970s and was also:   

[Trivia point]

...among some of the first true audiophile "direct to disk" LPs ever
recorded... in that it didn't go onto tape first, but each musical cut was
directly fed onto a nickel master via some careful work and dedication...
and a number of "takes" to get it right.    As such, "Fresh Air" sounded
particularly clean and sharp and had NO background hiss normally associated
with mass produced LPs.   This, back in the day before digital recording
really cleaned up the sound quality for everybody.   


It became a bit of a novelty item in that serious stereo stores ended up
receiving copies of "Fresh Aire" from Davis's freshly organized "American
Grammaphone" recording label to demo their high end stereo  gear...  which
is how I got my recording of MS's first offering, "Fresh Aire" back in the
'70s.     Interestingly enough, this first LP by Mannheim Steamroller never
showed up in music stores for some odd reason.  Somebody said that "real"
recording companies didn't think it was any good... this "new age" music...
  Heh.     The only place it was seen was in hi-fi stores being used as a
demo record.   Since then, additional follow-ups of "Fresh Aire" II, III,
IV, V  etc have followed.   THEY are in music stores.   

Chip Davis was into other stuff before kicking off MS...  such as clumping
together "The Old Home Band" (I had to look this up) which is where the CW
McCall character came in, who was cooked up as "the story-teller" for a
band by the same name by partner-in-crime Bill Fries, who Chip Davis had
worked with before... Fries's voice "sounded good" on the Davis-penned song
"Convoy" which "McCall's" band performed together with the Chip Davis
musicians from the Old Home Band.   Or something.  

Anyway, it seems that MS ended up filling a slot as the "other band" when
the McCall band's regular backup group which usually performed first as the
lead-in act at concerts canceled out at the last minute, and Davis's
"freshly assembled" Mannheim Steamroller "filled in".   Most of the guys in
MS at that time were members of Davis's Old Home Band and were also the
same guys who were actually performing in the McCall band.   By the way,
Mannheim Steamroller is an old slang musical term for a rising crescendo.   

Interestingly enough, in that instance (first time MS actually performed in
public as such) it was musicians in the main band (C W McCall) who simply
changed clothes between the two performances and first performed as
Mannheim Steamroller, the "opener" band... then changed back into "country
duds" and performed as "C W McCall"...   and *nobody* noticed.   Seems the
performance by MS *was* noticed however, even more than the McCall
performance...  which is sometimes described as how MS and it's New Age
music took off and found fame.   

Now I gotta go look around some more and see if I can maybe turn up one of
those original "Fresh Aire" recordings... just for the heck of it.  


 tony..