Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

If you had visited the New York World’s Fair in 1964, the General Motors Futurama exhibits would surely have been high on your itinerary.  The first structures to be seen as you approached the Flushing Meadows Park site of the Fairgrounds would have been the glinting globe they called the Unisphere and its omnipresent companions, the futuristic, mushroom-shaped shafts of the New York State Pavilion that towered next to it like the Martian tripods of H.G. Wells. 

But upon entering the grounds, you could not have missed the Futurama building — at 320,000 square feet, the largest in World Fair history.  Its famously oblique canopy shot up more than a hundred feet above the Futurama gate like the ‘59 Chrysler tailfin of the Gods.  And, as its name suggested, within its vast confines was housed THE FUTURE, that marvelous era of lunar commutes and underwater resorts through which we would all soon be jet-packing.  It was in here that you could view the megalopolis of tomorrow, with its stratosphere-scraping glass high-rises and moving sidewalks… the automated highway-building machine that would use laser beams to cut through jungle brush and leave a gleaming super-highway in its wake… the atomic-powered “aquacopters” that would dig for precious ore at the bottom of the ocean.  In 1964, the utopia of Buck Rogers had not yet been eclipsed by the dystopia of Mad Max, and we could believe that technology would bring us these and other marvels.

And as you drifted through this greatest of all empty promises, you might have wondered at the constant tape loops of strange, electronic music blaring from loudspeakers positioned throughout the Futurama hall.  You could have been forgiven for thinking this music, with its perfectly machined syncopations and cascades of bloops and bleeps, was composed by one of the building-sized super-computers being touted by I.B.M. elsewhere in the Fair.  But it was actually the work of a man who first rose to fame in the 1930s playing light jazz with the likes of Shirley Temple and Perry Como… whose songs would become the looney tunes accompanying Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in the 1950s… and whose music would help hawk everything from Nescafe to Hostess Twinkies in the 1960s. 

This unusual music, which in many ways prefigures the electronica of the 1970s and ’80s, is the product forged by the unique vision of Raymond Scott.  Scott’s 1930s compositions like “Powerhouse” and “The Tin Trumpet” were big hits in their time, recorded by his own Raymond Scott Quintette as well as by bandleaders like Artie Shaw and Paul Whiteman.  And the Brooklyn-born songwriter also enjoyed a popular career as conductor for LUCKY STRIKE’S YOUR HIT PARADE on radio and television during the next two decades. 

But Scott’s true passion was inventing unusual electronic musical instruments in the warehouse-sized basement below his spacious Long Island estate, instruments that he used to write and record the advertising jingles and commercial music that comprised his career during the 1960s and ’70s.   We’ll examine the career of Raymond Scott further… in the future.