Ad records
Thursday, 29 January 2009
First the good news: Pim Reinders, Dolf Hell and I signed the contract for the Dutch advertisement record book-with-two-CD’s that will be published in December of this year by Nijgh & Van Ditmar. All the texts are finished, the copyrights are cleared, and now we are working on the illustrations and the actual recordings for the CD’s. I have most of the 40 songs that will be on the CD’s in near mint condition, but a few could be better. If I know that you have a collection of Dutch advertisement records, you can expect a mail one of these days with a list of records that we would like to borrow, if you have a mint copy.
The bad news is that Dolf Hell gave me some records and illustrations. And now one record is missing. It is the 78rpm paper flexi record that Proost & Brandt released somewhere in the late fifties. Dolf thinks that he gave it to me, but I am pretty sure that he did not. Very painful.
I wish I could be 100% sure that I am right, but I cannot. I remember several earlier situations in my life in which I thought that I was absolutely right about something, but turned out to be completely wrong later. So I will not rest until that record surfaces, or I will find Dolf a new copy. I once had two copies of this record: I know that I gave one away, but I don’t know what happened with the other one. Because it is a 78 rpm record I was never too interested in it: the 78 rpm Dutch advertisement records are already being collected by many other people. It might be possible that I still have that record somewhere. But Dolf’s copy was mint, and in the original envelop, and I don’t think that my copies were that good.
Here is a Dutch advertisement record that will not be in the book:
Dolf lend me this record for this blog: I don’t have it and I waned to hear what is on it. There was a little problem: the record has a deep crack, that makes it impossible to let a needle go through the groove. I tried to force the needle to stay in the groove with my finger, but even that didn’t work. Here is the best result of all my recording attempts:
.
I hoped that I could record all the sound that is on the record and then make a montage of the best parts, but there are too much pieces missing to make that worth the effort.
Luckily this is not a very good advertisement record. Of course, the fact that Wim Sonneveld made it makes it interesting anyway, but it is not in my Top 100.
I cannot stand it when something cannot be found. I am not the most organised person in this world, but I like to think that I am a organised enough to have other people lend me their records and books. This missing record of Dolf is really worrying me. And what even more worries me: how often do things like this happen without me even realising it? How many people have I disappointed in my life without knowing it? Even when I have done nothing wrong and it is just the idea of that other person, I don’t like situations like that at all. But it is the not-knowing that bothers me most.