Quick Loop #15
The checkered development of tape recording, and Russian sympathies in Porkopolis
Third and final post about virtually anything . . . for now. So let’s go straight to the burning questions of the day.
Naah.
More tracks on pre-wax
During the COVID shutdown in early 2020, a small group of Internet posters decided to resolve the question of what was the first song recorded on 16-track.
So, a first point: the original reel-to-reel tape recorders were developed in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Really. A German company named AEG developed the process of recording on tape and demonstrated it in 1935. (AEG survived the war and was purchased by Daimler-Benz, Mercedes’ parent, in 1985.) Now, they weren’t the only ones working on this, but the others had been stymied by the problems inherent in taping, namely tape hiss. It couldn’t be overcome. But instead of giving up, as its U.S. competitors had done, AEG found that you could add bias, an inaudible signal that boosted the signal you wanted to record out of the range of the hiss, which then could be corrected on replay. Using this technique, AEG developed the original commercial reel-to-reel recorder, Magnetophon, which the Nazi government designated as a state secret.
During WWII, the Nazis would sometimes broadcast tapes of Hitler speaking in certain places — disguising that the speech was on tape. They would also play concerts that Hitler was supposed to be attending that night. That way, if the Allies wanted to bomb a Hitler speech or concert in an effort to kill Der Führer, they wouldn’t find him, because he’d actually be speaking or listening (and being taped) somewhere else! (Shades of Inglorious Basterds.) And then another German company, I.G. Farben’s BASF division, found that tapes coated with certain metal oxides produced greater fidelity, and the great reproduction produced by that version of the Magnetophon mystified the Allies, who wanted to identify it.
The U.S. Army assigned that task to the U.S. Army Signal Corps, but all it found were low-level dictating machines — better than American wire recorders, but not much. But a young electrical engineer serving in the Signal Corps and stationed in Paris named Jack Mullin took this task on as a personal challenge. And at the very end of the war, he was sent for other reasons to inspect a site in Frankfurt am Main (or just Frankfurt to the Americans) and first ran into a working Magnetophon at Radio Frankfurt. And he was amazed. The engineers there told him that there were portable models at some of the stations nearby. And so, after being assigned to return to the U.S., he visited a station at the resort town of Bad Nauheim, about 20 miles from Frankfurt, where the station engineers gave him TWO working and portable Magnetophons, as well as a couple of boxes of the BASF tapes, which he took back to the U.S. with him.
Mullin saw an opportunity to develop this system further and then sell it to the movie studios, because it was so far advanced beyond the audio systems in use. And after some further development on his own, he did a couple of presentations to the studios in 1947. The audio people thought Mullin’s system was great, but the studio higher-ups weren’t really interested; they didn’t believe that people went to the movies to see technical wizardry (a far cry from today’s special effects-laden releases).
But by chance, at the second presentation was a man named (no joke) Murdo Mackenzie, who was Bing Crosby’s audio director, and he saw a potential for the system that Mullin hadn’t. Crosby did live performances on NBC radio and had previously asked NBC for permission to prerecord his performances on transcription disks at his home studio, but NBC had refused due to the loss of fidelity using such disks at the time. As a result, Crosby had taken a year break from radio (1945-46) and had just been back on the air for about a year. But here was a new medium that promised loss-less reproduction! Mackenzie arranged for Mullin and Crosby to meet, and, after a couple of demonstrations proving that Mullin’s recorder was as good as he claimed, Crosby was all-in immediately (and later that year became the first artist to produce radio shows on pre-recorded tape).
Crosby then invested $50,000 in a local six-person tape company called Ampex (a name many of you have heard), and they turned Mullin’s modified Magnetophon into a new commercial product, the Ampex Model 200, which soon came in a two-track model for stereo. Oh, and Crosby gave one of the first models to his friend Les Paul, who had already been experimenting with delays in his pop records with Mary Ford. Paul loved it so much that he worked with Ampex for several years to develop an eight-track recorder, the Ampex 351, and, thanks to Atlantic’s star audio engineer Tom Dowd, the second Ampex eight-track model was installed in 1957 at Atlantic Records in NYC.
Yep, you’ve got that right: the eight-track recorder was developed by Ampex in the mid-1950s. But they were expensive, and they were seen as more suited for jazz recording than for popular music. Popular music continued to rely on either three-track or four-track, which was considered to be all that was needed for popular music (except by Tom Dowd). The basic backing track would be recorded in stereo on two tracks; the vocals would take a third, and the fourth was extra. And, after all, pop records were usually mono. Interestingly, the first 8-track machines didn’t make it to the U.K. until 1968 (and we’ll discuss that later).
And perhaps things would have stayed that way, except that a new generation of musicians didn’t write music but were nonetheless virtuosos. They wanted to be able to play several parts on the same song, not just one two-track background. Because they couldn’t write music, they generally couldn’t write the parts out for others to play. And, of course, that became an issue in New York City and Los Angeles first of all. NYC studios saw their city losing the lead in popular recordings, and they thought that a recording deck with more tracks would give them an edge. And so Mirasound Studios in Manhattan partnered with Ampex to build a recorder called the AG-1000, the prototype of a new series of recorders called the MM-1000, using 2-inch tape and 16 tracks, with a modified tape transfer system that had originally been designed for video recording.
And that brings us to an Ampex article about Mirasound, which has the following clip (emphasis added):
Mirasound Studios: First Studio to Use 16-Channel Recording
In 1967, Mirasound recently moved to its new enlarged quarters on 57th Street. Five studios, four for audio, one for video, made up the complex. Always considered a leader at innovation, it was the first studio to put in 16-channel recording with the new Ampex two-inch multichannel recorders. Since receiving the recorder, it operated 10 to 12 hours each day. According to Robert Goldman, President of Mirasound, "When recording today's modern sounds, the Ampex 16-track recorder produces higher quality recordings. We find the new Ampex machine provides the maximum recording versatility and economy." In 1968 Mirasound will increase its multichannel capability even further with the delivery of two new MM-1000 multichannel recorders, one a 16 channel version, the other a 24 channel. "The new Ampex Master-Maker will offer us even more opportunity for creativity," Goldman said.
* * * * *
Some of the groups that recorded regularly at Mirasound are The Lovin' Spoonful, The Happenings, Vanilla Fudge, The Doors, The Charrells (the first group to use 16-channel recording), Frankie Valli, The Bob Crewe Generation, and folk singer Janice lan. The Bob Crewe Generation did the "Girl Watchers Theme" at Mirasound, originally as a Pepsi Cola commercial. It was later released as a successful popular record.
Question solved without looking very hard: The Charrells were “the first group to use 16-channel recording.” Only one question left: who the heck were The Charrells? A very intensive search revealed that there was never a group by that name. And one of the posters pursuing this question concluded that the name was a fake filled into the studio logs to disguise who had really recorded first on the AG-1000. But why?
Before going on, we need to introduce another name: Bob D’Orleans. D’Orleans was a recording engineer who worked at Bell Sound, with some part-time work at Mirasound, through 1964, when he was hired as the builder and general manager of "Golden World" studios in Detroit. Golden World became hot due to being the most advanced studio in Detroit during the Detroit music boom around Motown, and D’Orleans tried to buy Golden World in 1966 — but was outbid by Berry Gordy, who then moved his own Motown people in. So D’Orleans then moved back to NYC and took over as GM of Mirasound until 1969 (per Billboard).
Many years later, D’Orleans posted an online account of those days in a thread on a website called “Soulful Detroit”, where most of the discussion was about Golden World. People on that site accepted those posts as coming from the real Bob D’Orleans, and so I will as well. Before those posts are lost in the ether, here is what D’Orleans wrote (all typos verbatim from the original).
Just a note to let you know the whole story about 16 track.
Bob Goldman and I went to Ampex in Redwood City to talk to them about various things. While walking through one of their warehouses, I spotted an old RCS VTR transport. Since everybody was always asking, "More tracks", I asked Leon, "Hey, you got the transport for 2" tape, why not make a 16 track recording machine." He was doubtful, but we went to R&D and hashed it over, and then the big boys ok'd it for R&D to work on it. The biggest problem was the 16 heads, mainly crosstalk. Anyhow, the first prototype was shipped to Mirasound, by then in the Henry Hudson Hotel. Now, what do you do for a console. We took a piece of beaver board, cut 16 slots in it, put 16 cheap faders in them, wired the output directly to the machine. I called a band I worked with before, Vanilla Fudge, and asked them if they would like to come in and records whatever they wanted, using the new 16 track, at no cost. They did and, as they say, the rest is history.
Couple of aside notes.
As you know the VU meters on the previous machines were lined up vertically
1
2
3
4 ETC
When I played back the first time, reading the VU meters on the machine, the reading looked funny. I usually put the bass on 1, bass drum on 2, and so forth. When I read the VU's on the machine I realized that the R&D had done them horizontally.
1 2
3 4 etc
The other was when the Vanilla Fudge asked me to splice. There was no cutting block available for 2" tape, but thank God I had come from the old, old school when there weren't splicing blocks. Make your marks for the splice, align the marks together, demagnetized scissors, make diagonal cut, using 1" splicing tape, splice it together, it wasn't pretty but it worked.
So, if we treat this as authentic, let’s think about Vanilla Fudge (who, amazingly enough, have reformed (without the late Tim Bogert) and are still together!). We know that Vanilla Fudge recorded a lot of its first album at Mirasound, including "You Keep Me Hangin' On", which was even mixed down to mono there. And Vanilla Fudge would have been recording its second album (which would ultimately be released as its third, "Renaissance") when this opportunity came up. We also know that "Renaissance" (as well as the second released album, the disastrous "The Beat Goes On") was credited as being recorded at Ultra-Sonic Studios on Long Island, under the direction of producer (or, in the band's opinion, overproducer) Shadow Morton. And last, we know that when the band broke from Morton for its fourth album, "Near the Beginning", the band went back to Mirasound, probably because Mirasound had not only recorded their hit but had given them this opportunity. So what did Vanilla Fudge record?
Knowing more probably would require Vanilla Fudge (or the original tape boxes) to tell us. But we can speculate. Personally, I’ve tended to think that it was a song named “All in Your Mind”, which was credited to all four band members when it was finally released on Vanilla Fudge’s greatest hits CD, Psychedelic Sundae. The problem with that theory is that band members Mark Stein and Vinnie Martell say in the 1993 liner notes to Psychedelic Sundae that “All in Your Mind”, which is very reminiscent of The Pigeons, the name of the band before becoming Vanilla Fudge, was recorded during the sessions for their fifth album (not recorded at Mirasound), even though the song wasn’t listed in any of the tape logs and was just found in the Atlantic tape vaults. In 2010, when Rhino put together a compilation of all of the band’s early recordings called Box of Fudge, the song had been identified as coming from Mirasound and was placed first in the compilation, because everything else was logged.
But what if it had been logged when recorded as being by “The Charrells” and then the artist was only corrected when it got into the Atlantic tape vaults, because it was something the band did that wasn’t being overseen by Shadow Morton? That would answer all of the mysteries about this recording. So that’s what I think the song is. But I could be wildly off-base. The only thing I know is that, whatever it is that they did, they couldn’t have taken the master tape to Shadow Morton and put it on either of the albums he produced, because no studio other than Mirasound could work with the 2” tape.
You Don’t Know What It’s Like to Listen to Your Fears
As we discussed before, around the same time in 1967 that Mirasound was introducing the 16-track recorder, The Beatles had managed to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Zombies Odyssey and Oracle on a jerry-rigged seven-track setup at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. And EMI promised to buy an eight-track recorder for Abbey Road, which prompted Trident, the other large studio in the U.K., to buy one as well. But after receiving it, EMI’s engineers refused to set it up with the delays needed for rock recording, instead reserving it for classical and jazz. Trident actually did install it as promised, making it the first eight-track rock studio in the U.K. — over 10 years later than the U.S., at a time when the U.S. was about to convert to 16-track.
It was February 1968. Brian Epstein had been gone for six months. The Beatles’ recording of “Lady Madonna” was about to be released as a single. George Martin, the producer of The Beatles and the only person in The Beatles’ inner circle who hadn’t become rich by the start of 1968, because he just received his regular salary as head of Parlophone Records until the end of 1967 with occasional (and fairly trivial) bonuses for his success, had quit EMI (which owned Parlophone) as of January 1, 1968 so that he could charge market rates as an independent producer for the band — which meant he no longer had the clout inside EMI to get the eight-track set up at Abbey Road. The band was distracted by trying to work with EMI about the launch of its Apple products, potentially including Apple Records. And it was also trying to produce some songs for other projects, including the upcoming animated Yellow Submarine movie that it was contractually committed to make for United Artists in the U.S.
And then EMI asked if they could film The Beatles in the studio that weekend in London, in order to make a promotional film for "Lady Madonna”, as The Beatles were heading for Rishikesh, India the next week for a transcendental meditation course with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Now, The Beatles had been adamant about not allowing themselves to be filmed while recording — even though Abbey Road Studios had added filming capacity. But these were not normal times. Because this wasn’t intended as a recording of a song but just backup footage to add to a video of an existing song, for once they said OK. However, once The Beatles got in the studio, with both independent contractor Martin and EMI engineer Geoff Emerick present, John suggested that they work on a half-finished song of his, which he and Paul McCartney finished in the studio during filming, even though they would only be recording in 4-track.
The song filmed was “Hey Bulldog” — which ended up being included with three other songs as “throwaways” in the Yellow Submarine movie and album. (Note: You may notice Lennon singing while playing piano. That wasn’t done for the camera. Lennon always sang live vocals while playing piano, even though they were rarely used — except on the demo recordings of his released after his death.) As promised, the footage (all in color) from the first ten takes (the band stayed and did more overdubbing after the film crew left) was used to make a promotional video for “Lady Madonna”.
And then all the original taped footage sat . . . until 1999, when all of the lawsuits among The Beatles that had been filed in the wake of the Allan Klein management disaster had been settled . . . in which Paul was 100% right and the other three, especially John, were 100% wrong, because — as Paul told them, although the others wouldn’t listen because Paul’s in-laws had told it to him — Klein was a crook who had intended to steal their published records, the same way he did with everything The Rolling Stones recorded before 1970.
That’s quite a claim, and so I should explain it. British managers failed to realize that, because Britain had been so poor following WWII, the standard royalty rates in the U.S. were much higher, and, with the exception of The Beatles, who were hugely successful in both, most of the British Invasion artists were far more successful in the U.S. than in the U.K. So what Klein did was a form of arbitrage based on his superior knowledge, taking advantage of the British ignorance about American royalty rates. He first had the British artists assign the copyrights for their new albums to a middleman company that he owned. Then, on behalf of the middleman company, Klein manufactured the records and licensed the rights to sell them to the record companies — negotiating an American royalty rate, and he semi-honestly paid most of the royalties to the artists. Most of the British managers dramatically cheated on royalty payments; for example, Shel Talmy, who produced The Easybeats’ great “Friday on My Mind”, says that he was never paid a penny of royalties by The Easybeats’ managers, and that story was typical in 1960s Britain. Klein did not need to steal at that level, because he’d already stolen something much more valuable.
Accordingly, the British artists thought that Klein’s licensing structure had enabled them to get greater royalties. But it hadn’t; the only real effect of that structure was to transfer ownership of the records to Klein’s company ABKCO (an acronym for “Allen and Betty Klein Company”). And that was exactly the structure that Klein put in place when he released Let It Be in the U.S. (although not in the U.K. or Canada, because the contract there was fixed between The Beatles and EMI, though Klein hoped to change that in the future). Those of us old enough to remember the album release of Let It Be know that it came out in the U.S. on a RED Apple label, not the regular Granny Smith green that The Beatles used, and the album itself said that it was produced by an ABKCO-managed company. The reason for that was because Klein had pulled his usual shenanigans, getting The Beatles a huge royalty increase in return for Klein gaining ownership of the copyright for the album.
So why wasn’t the recent reissue of Let It Be on ABKCO? Because The Beatles still own all their own copyrights, despite Klein’s maneuvering. How? Because Brian Epstein had structured The Beatles as a true partnership, with unanimous consent required for decisions, and Paul never signed Klein’s management contract with The Beatles (although he pretended he had at the time; the truth didn’t come out until Paul filed to break up the partnership at the end of 1970 because he hadn’t authorized Klein to run it). So the contracts that Klein executed on behalf of The Beatles partnership to transfer the Let It Be album copyrights to ABKCO were void ab initio (from the inception), and Klein didn’t get any of the copyright that those contracts would have transferred to him. (But, because the other Beatles had signed Klein’s contract, Klein aggressively sued them for his losses due to Paul’s failure to sign, which became a major factor in the animosity between Paul and the other three after Klein’s termination. It took the others a long time before they realized how much money Paul had saved them all.)
How did Paul know not to sign? Paul’s girlfriend (later wife) Linda Eastman was the daughter of John Eastman, an American lawyer/manager like Klein who also had a shady reputation. But in part, that was because the record industry in the U.S. was largely mob-dominated in the 1950s. Linda’s brother John Eastman (who just passed away this week) had a reputation as an honest entertainment-industry lawyer, and even Lee wouldn’t cheat his daughter and future son-in-law.
In fact, Lee gave Paul great advice the first time they met; Paul asked Lee about good investments for his excess funds, and Lee told Paul that he should stick to what he knew: music publishing rights to his own songs and to the songs of other artists that he liked. Not being a real music fan himself (unlike his daughter and son), he asked Paul if there were any artists from the ‘50s that Paul really liked, and Paul unhesitatingly said Buddy Holly (no surprise to anyone who knew that The Beatles took their name from Holly’s The Crickets). Within a couple of days, Lee had put a deal together for Paul to buy most of Holly’s publishing — and the investment was a grand slam for Paul McCartney. George caught on to the importance of publishing from watching Paul, but John never did before he died. Anyway. . . .
Without any more litigation, Apple Records was able to resume operations . . . and amazingly, it still had the raw footage that had been shot that day at Abbey Road, including some great shots that hadn’t been used in the promo film. After some meticulous re-editing, we actually have a film of The Beatles recording “Hey Bulldog”. The cameras captured everything in the first ten takes (with #10 being the master), including the live vocals, even though they weren’t really trying to film “Hey Bulldog”.
Imagine being so talented that you could come up with this song and then treat it as a throwaway. . . .
The Beatles Finally Record in 8-Track
While in Rishikesh, The Beatles wrote about 40 songs, as John and George worked on some different styles with folksinger/pop star Donovan Leitch — who said Paul was the one who always carried a guitar around. After they all came back, John, Paul, and George got together at George’s house to play their new songs for each other. They got along great while doing that. So. at Paul McCartney’s urging (undoubtedly supported by George Martin, who was now getting paid only when working), The Beatles decided to go back in the studio at the end of May to record a new album. And they were upset that EMI had purchased the eight-track recorder but hadn’t set it up for rock music, just classical and jazz; EMI said that they couldn’t do the required modifications to the head block while the band was recording, and they’d need at least two weeks.
Plus, now that they were out from under Brian Epstein’s direction, the band members had changed their lives significantly. John and Cynthia Lennon had gone to India together, but soon after returning, John had dumped Cynthia in favor of Yoko Ono, and Yoko was accompanying him to the studio. Paul and Jane Asher had gone to India together, but soon after they returned, Paul had dumped Jane in favor of Francie Schwartz, apparently solely to break up with Jane, because Francie was also quickly gone afterward. George had written a lot of songs during the break, generally much better than his previous songs, but John and Paul were still only planning on giving him one song per side of the new album, and George started to spend a lot more time with fellow guitarist Eric Clapton (who then became completely infatuated with George’s wife Patti Boyd, while George was starting an affair with Ringo’s wife Maureen). Perhaps The Beatles felt more kinship with oversexed Peyton Place than with India.
And, although George Martin was now being paid very well to supervise the new album, he actually had very little control over the recording process, as the band broke up into subgroups for some recording and refused to take his advice. But all of the personal drama didn’t cause the band to forget about the eight-track recorder, and the debate about the first Beatles single on Apple Records brought the matter to a head.
Although Paul and John still wrote a few songs together, most of their songs were now solo projects, and each of them wanted to write the first single for Apple. John’s pick was the song “Revolution” (featured in the last article), which John had written as a slow, doo-wop style song but had sped up into a rave when Paul expressed a desire to make the hardest rocking song ever. Paul’s pick was “Hey Jude”, but he concluded that he needed an orchestra part that was too complicated to be recorded in four-track, so he had EMI book two days for The Beatles at Trident: 31 July and 1 August 1968. And on 29-30 July, The Beatles recorded the backing track in four-track at Abbey Road — a recording that was so laborious that George didn’t even play on it (because Paul had to leave a track open to overdub bass, and John was playing acoustic guitar).
Quoting from the the 2018 The Beatles album reissue liner notes by Kevin Howlett:
[The] final Abbey Road mix was transferred to an eight-track tape at Trident Studios on 31 July. However, it was decided to record the song again. It was during this day that Paul's original line "She has found you, now go and get her" was altered to "You have found her, now go and get her". During the verses, George played a few linking passages on electric guitar. . . . The eight tracks on the tape of take one recorded at Trident consist of: track one: drums; two: piano; three: vocal and electric guitar in the first section then strings, clarinet and brass; four: John's acoustic guitar; five: piano, electric guitar, community singing, and handclaps; six: two electric guitars then brass instruments and strings; seven: bass guitar; eight: lead vocal, backing vocals, tambourine, and community singing.
The Beatles believed they could have the “Hey Jude” tape from Trident mixed by George Martin at Abbey Road, since Abbey Road did have an eight-track machine. But for whatever reason, it wouldn’t work, increasing the band’s frustration and forcing Martin and The Beatles to book another day at Trident (August 8) to mix the song. The tensions in the band were reaching the breaking point, and surprisingly the person who broke was Ringo, who had felt more isolated from his bandmates ever since the Rishikesh trip, which he bailed out on after less than two weeks. He quit, effective immediately.
There were three consequences of Ringo’s departure. First, the band tried to continue recording without him, with Paul playing drums on the basic tracks. Second, the band booked three more days at Trident, but they couldn’t get time until 28-30 August. And third and most significantly, the band decided to finish up their current songs and then take a two-week break at Abbey Road, as EMI had requested. The break ended with a hard deadline for EMI to modify the eight-track head block for rock music: 5 September; after which, they’d stop the current sessions. In the meantime, they worked on bringing Ringo back, and they also recorded “Back in the U.S.S.R.” at Abbey Road and "Dear Prudence" at Trident, both without Ringo.
By 5 September, Ringo was back, and the head block modification was barely complete (the first thing done that day was testing it). As part of the Ringo negotiations, George had gotten the others to agree to make a third try at recording "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" when they came back, and to make sure they stuck to it, George brought Eric Clapton along with him to the sessions. By the 6th, the song was complete, and The Beatles never had to record in four-track again.
Interestingly, the post-Beatles switch to 16-track was much less dramatic. The Beatles got EMI to lend them recording engineer Geoff Emerick, and (after the disastrous recording sessions for Get Back in January 1969), they had Emerick install a 16-track deck at Apple Studios, which took 18 months and $1.5 million and was finally complete in September 1971 — except that The Beatles had broken up (for good, after all of the Allen Klein-themed lawsuits started hopping) in January 1970, and Apple ultimately sold the building and closed the studio in May 1975, less than four years after its opening.
Non-spoiler
So this column has been all about recording history, but I can’t wrap up a column about popular music without noticing that, in the wake of Olivia Newton-John’s death, National Review’s Jack Butler has published what must be a contender for the all-time best Captain Obvious headline: “Xanadu Is a Bad Movie with a Good Soundtrack”. Except . . . at one point in his review, Butler says that Olivia “could make even a bad movie worth watching”. Well, no, and Xanadu proves that.
By the way, with all of the eulogies to Olivia over the past week, I don’t believe that I saw one mention of the fact that she was the granddaughter of a legendary Nobel Prize-winning physicist: her mother Irene was the daughter of Max Born.
Unbridled lawlessness
I thought I was going to get through without addressing any serious issue in this column. Then I read the sports columns from Cincinnati, also known as “Porkopolis”.
So Cincinnati is hosting a men’s and women’s pro tennis tournament this week known as the Western & Southern Open, which makes little sense because Cincinnati is eastern and northern. The women’s pro tennis tour is full of Russians, which is why the tour threw such a fit when Wimbledon, in the wake of Russia’s aggressive invasion of Ukraine, banned all male and female players from Russia and Belarus — only to have a Russian tennis player who technically claims to play for the Russian puppet state of Kazakhstan, Elena Rybakina, win the women’s singles title. (It seems that, under Vladimir Putin, Russian tennis players have more than a little in common with cockroaches; you can’t seem to get rid of them.)
Well, yesterday two Russian women, Anna Kalinskaya and Anastasia Potapova, were playing a qualifying match in Porkopolis. Seated peacefully behind the match was a woman spectator wearing a Ukrainian flag as a drape. One of the Russians complained to the chair umpire, who was a feckless young French woman named Morgane Lara. Instead of telling the Russian to mind her own business as long as the woman spectator was watching the match peacefully, Lara got down from the umpire’s chair, marched over to the woman, and told her it was “not nice” for her to wear the Ukrainian flag while watching two citizens of the aggressor country trying to destroy Ukraine. The woman responded that it was not nice for Russia to invade another country. That set Lara off, and she eventually had the woman thrown out of the tournament.
Tournament organizers, living up to the piggish reputation that has haunted Cincinnati for the last two centuries, defended Lara, claiming that the Ukrainian flag was too big to be on the premises. They refused comment when asked further questions — as well they should, because siding with the aggressor is the mark of cowards. Is cowardice, like pigs, also a Cincinnati trademark?
But then again, to paraphrase Major General Philip Sheridan from another context, the only good Russians I ever saw are dead. Perhaps Cincinnati will wise up to that. But more likely not. Too bad.
In Anticipation of Tonight’s Primaries
Liz Cheney: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Be seeing you.