What was Tin Pan Alley?

I thought this was super cool. Tin pan Alley. Yeah, this is one of those things where I've sort of knew what tin pan alley was, and you always have heard that term thrown around, but I never really really got it until this episode. Yeah. Same here. Uh, and it's pretty cool, like the term tin pan alley, t I n full stop p A n alle You forgot a second full stop full stop. Um. I just want to make sure people know it's not one word like tin pan It's two words. But that is linguistically speaking,

that's a senecto key what it is? You know what that is? Right? I've seen the movie Man, that movie geez Um about the Charlie Kaufman thing, right, Yeah, yeah, um, senecta senect to key New York. Yeah, So a senect the key is, uh, it's when a specific place stands in for a broader term like Wall Street, like wall streets are real street, but Wall Street also means like the finance industry or Hollywood. Hollywoods a real place. Okay,

this makes a lot more sense than the Charlie Kaufman movie. Yeah, so so tin pan Alley is uh is a bunch of things. It was a place and in New York City, which what we'll get to in a second, like exactly where um. And it was also referred to sort of the beginnings of the music publishing industry and a genre

as well. There's kind of a lot of things, but it stems from the root of a tin pan, like a tin pan or a it was a cheap piano, Like if he had a really cheap piano, you would say it sounds tin panty, right, because like that's what the hammer on the piano's hitting is tin pans rather than strings. Yeah, it sounds just like a real tinny tone, like you're beating on a tin pan. So that's where the term originally came from. And depending on who you ask, this area of New York um was called tin pan

Alley because perhaps a journalist first wrote about it. All the sounds coming from the songwriters from these buildings on this one block sounded like tin pan Alley. Right, it's no exaggeration to say tin pan Alley. Specifically this little stretch in New York like block or so maybe less than a block. It's a it's a block, okay. Um was the place where the American popular music industry was born. Yeah,

so it's specifically street between six and Broadway. Um, kind of between Chelsea and Kipps Bay, a little northwest of like the flat Iron building and Um. It's interesting to think that, like the music, the beginnings of music distribution wasn't like pre phonograph from pre records. There was still music distribution, but it was it was sheet music right right, So I think, Chuck, we should get back in the way back and go to an indeterminate part of the

mid nineteenth century in the United States. Let's do it. So, like you said, everywhere, there's a lot of it. Um. It's like you said, if you wanted to hear music, you had basically two choices. You could go here it played live somewhere everywhere, from a barbershop quartet to maybe an orchestra um or right, or you could have a family member who knew how to play music and buy a piano and of it in your home. Those were your too, two ways to to hear music because, um,

everywhere there was no such thing as radio. Let's just let's just say it everybody, Yeah, there was no radio. There wasn't And if you think about it, radio was was. You know, we we take it so much for granted today, but it was a huge watershed change in the way that Americans in the world heard their music. You could just hear it at home being played by professionals like

the most the greatest musicians you've ever heard. You could just sit around and listen to it at your home, whereas just years before, a few years before, you had to listen to your twelve year old try to bang out some song on the piano that you just bought. Um, and that was your option aside from going to hear it live. And so this this whole idea of uh the music industry being born, it was basically predicated on

two things, Chuck. One was the fact that pianos were starting to become ubiquity in American houses and people were learning how to play those pianos, so music instruction became kind of widespread. And then Secondly, copy copyright law started to really solidify in the United States in the nineteenth century, and so that sheet music became much more valuable than

it was before. Yeah, like, if you can't, like I can't read sheet music, I learned, Yeah, I learned to play guitar by ear um and kind of I guess every friend I know that it's a musician except for a couple learned by ear um. If you came up formally through high school band or something like that, um, or maybe just private music instruction, then you may be able to read music. But back in the day, if you could not end still today, if you could not play by ear the only way to do so was

through sheet music. And that was that was the first commodity in the music business, was literally just selling sheet music to people. Right, So it's hard to wrap your head around now, but that was the commodity. It's hard to wrap your head around. But if you think about sheet music is basically the predecessor to the cassette or the record or the CD or the MP three, it's

the exact same thing. It's just too to hear it, Like that is what you went and bought at the store and then you came home and played it rather than listening to somebody else playing it. Yeah, and like they sold a lot of them, like the very first hit that Tin Panaley put out, And this was a period.

I mean, this was an eighty one when Wait Till the Clouds Roll By was put out, So Tin Panaley generally was early eighteen eighties till early nineteen twenties or so I saw, like late nineteen twenties, was it really Yeah, yeah, I guess you know, you can never say when it was dead dead um. But in one month in eighteen eighty one, they sold seventy five thousand copies of sheet

music to Wait Till the Clouds Roll By. Right, that's amazing, yeah, because this was it was a good song, and people wanted to hear the song, so they went and bought the sheet music. So that was one thing, right, So there was sheet music. That was how you got this stuff out. And but even before Wait Till the Clouds Roll By, which it seems like it was probably America's first number one smash hit, prior to that, there was plenty of sheet music to be sold. Um, but it

was a largely like church hymns. Um. It was it was. There was a lot that were sold for schools um and like I said, copyright law changed. It allowed tim penalty to develop, and it did so in two ways. One, it's like the courts started taking copyrights for music seriously in the second half of the nineteenth century, so you could actually enforce your copyright against people who were infringing

on it. And then secondly, the courts, the Supreme Court and specifically said, hey, if you wrote a song outside of America, when it comes to him Erica it enjoys you can copyright it in America too, which means that the music publishers source of free sheet music, which was just basically stealing foreign music, printing it out in sheet music form and then selling it and not paying any royalties because it enjoyed no copyright protection, that source dried up,

and so all of a sudden, this American music that they they had to pay for now seemed a lot more attractive because now they had to pay for them. The music generated overseas too, So this copyright law and the fact that more and more people were learning to play piano and so you had an actual market four sheet music, those two things came together all right, let's

take a break. I feel like that's a pretty good set up, okay, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about who these music publishers were and how they went about their work early on in the Tin penn Alley era right after this. All right, So we've been throwing around the term music publishers a lot, and that sort of means a different thing now than it did back then. Um. But back then music publishers. Some of them wrote songs, to be sure, but generally they

did not. UM. A lot of the early publishers out of Tin pan Alley had backgrounds as salespeople. So there was a guy named very successful publisher name is Ador wit Mark. He started out selling water filters. Another one named Leo Feist sold corsets, another one named Joe Stern and Edward B. Mark sold neckties and buttons. Uh. And a lot of these people, I guess we should point out to uh came over from Europe. A lot were Jewish, UM.

Some African American songwriters like they were minorities. Um kind of for the most part, early on, it feels like, right, and they they saw a huge opportunity in this music business that was starting to coalesce because prior to this, I mean, there were there were music publishers, but it was basically some guy who worked at a printer who had a friend who could transpose music by ear and they would just take some song that they heard and

turn it into sheet music and start selling it. Or they worked at the music store, and the music store basically did the exact same thing. And so everyone was ripping off everyone else's songs, and anybody could be a music publisher. But when those copyrights started to become enforced, um, it became much more valuable to invest in original music

because you could make a lot more money off of it. So, um, those those a lot of those Jewish immigrants and a lot of the African American songwriters and composers kind of coalesced into New York. They came from Boston and Detroit and Atlanta and St. Louis and all over the country, and all those towns lost their publishing houses, um, and they all moved to New York, and they very specifically moved to this one little stretch on street UM, and

it became tim Pan Alley. And it's really interesting, um to look at, like how it worked back then, and how it sort of mirrored how music like music grew out of that model really and change in some ways, but kind of stayed the same in a lot of ways too. Um. Like you always hear about music contracts and how terrible they are for rock musicians or pop musicians, and it was kind of the same way back then.

These these publishers got together, they created this songwriting factory on this block of buildings through different companies, and they would get they would recruit songwriters to come in. They had different arrangements. Sometimes they would just buy it outright from you, including the rights to change the name of who wrote it. Uh. Sometimes they would have the right to throw one of the other more I guess once they had you know, established themselves another co author's name

on there. But they would just you know, say, write these songs. Write these songs, and we're gonna buy them from you, and we're gonna try and make them pop. Like you couldn't put them on the radio, so we're gonna try and get them popular by getting them onto vaudeville and on stage and sending not moles, I guess. But it was almost like early Paola, uh, sending these performers into vaudeville to sing these songs and perform these songs,

and people are like, wow, that's pretty catchy. I want that, right. That's how they that's how they marketed it, and that was like the whole thing, like if if you, It was the first time that the music became an industry because there was almost an assembly line field to it where they would have feelers out to find out like

what people were into a music at the time. One of the one of the early transitions that Tim Panali underwent was when it started, Um it was a it was a factory churning out like comedic, often deeply racist songs, UM lots of ballads, uh, just what you think of a super old timey songs, right, And then the public started to get kind of bored with that and they decided that they kind of like this ragtime thing that the Scott Joplin fella has um has started to create.

And so Tim Panaley this is classic. Tim Panalty went out figured out how to play ragtime, started co opting the ragtime genre and created pop music. So they took what was a really difficult um kind of music. It's called syncopated rhythm where you've got a melody within a rhythm, right, So, um, you know ragtime, right, Okay, So they figured out how to take this very difficult thing and kind of popify it to make it easy for uh, the audience to play.

Because again, here's the thing. They're not saying, Hey, you're the best of the best studio musician. We've got this really tough song over here that sounds great, but it's really tough to play. We want to pay you to come play it. We're going to record it and distribute

it onto the radio that didn't exist yet. They had to figure out how to take difficult songs kind of dumb them down into something catchy and memorable and importantly easy to play, so that they could sell that sheet music to local musicians or those barbershop cortets, or so that the twelve year old at home could play it for the rest of their family. And so that is how they kind of started to take popular music and

make it even more popular. They decided what music was popular based on what what the what America was starting to get into at the time. Yeah, and they would, um, there were these musicians called song pluggers. So how it would work is a music publisher and Tin Panaley would um buy a song or the rights to a song off of them of a musician who wrote it, maybe put their own name on it, and then they would give that song to a song plugger who was a musician who would go and perform this at a music

shop that maybe sold pianos or something like that. And this was pre radio. How they got the music out in the public. Uh, and it was it was crazy. These song pluggers got money. Irving Berlin started out as a song plugger, right and so um, it's kind of like if you you know how you go to a grocery store on a Saturday and they'll be sitting there giving out samples of something and you'll say, oh, this this cheese with this cracker tastes really good. I'm gonna

go buy this cheese and these crackers. This is the exact same thing, except you would say, oh, this song sounds really good, I'm going to buy the sheet music. That's what music pluggers were for. That's how they got the word out. They that's how they advertised the music

was to play them. And then another way to do it check is like you were saying, they would set vaudeville shows up or musical reviews or Broadway shows whatever with these popular songs and these songwriters to to help get them out that way too, so that audiences would go hear these things. So you could hear him in the music shop, you could hear him at the theater.

Um you uh, you might hear them. Um well, it's basically it is the theater in the music shop where the two main venues less I'm forgetting what yeah, and they would That was the plugging, But there was also booming. So, like I said, you had Irving Berlin, and like George Gershwin started out as a song plugger, Al Sherman started out as a song plugger. But if you wanted to be more aggressive than that, even you would do something called booming, which is uh, you would buy like tickets

to a show. You would have the plugger up there playing the song, and then those twenty five people were plants basically that already knew the song, that would sing along to it, and then everyone, you know, the only thing better than hearing a great song for the first time in you know, nineteen ten in New York City is hearing people around you singing it and you're thinking,

how have I been missing out on this thing? And that may be the first time it was ever performed in public, and it was all just a big, kind of a big scam. It was. It's hilarious though that that's how you just look around and suddenly be overcome

with fomo. So you'd be into this new song and run out and buy the sheet music, I guess, um So, so there's there was this process to all this, and like you said, like you could be a like a no name composer who would show up at Tim Panaley with the song that you're trying to sell and if it was good, the publisher might buy it, but like you said, you would get some sort of terrible contractor they would buy it out right, take your name off of the composition and put their own name on there.

But they also um hired composers I think, like you were saying to where they were they were they had they had a few hits under their belts, so they had a steady gig at the music publisher and their contract was a little better, but they were not in creative control for the most part, to where the music publisher would say, hey, everybody's into this ragtime. Make me some ragtime songs. Everybody's into jazz and this blues stuff. Make me some bluesy kind of stuff that I can

turn around and sell. And the competition was really fierce among the in house composers, because just because you composed a song doesn't mean it was going to be turned around and transcribed into sheet music and then people would buy it. Like you, you you had to basically audition your song to see whether it made it to the next level.

And so in tim Panaley, and this is where it got its name, there would be you know, no name composers, house composers, vaudeville acts um all running around playing music from these open windows because there wasn't air conditioning back then. And so at any given time you'd walk down tim Panaley and there'd be a dozen or scores of different songs all being played on these pianos, streaming out of

the windows onto the street at the same time. And that's where that that reporter Monroe Rosenfeld came up with the idea of tim Panale said when he was walking down the street, he was kind of describing what that was like. He said, it sounded like, you know, a bunch of tim pants being struck at once. Yeah, and this this whole area of New York, this one block

just really became like a creative well. There were uh, vaudeville theaters, there were play theaters, like it was sort of the earliest incarnation of the theater district before it moved towards Times Square. Uh. And then other parts of the entertainment industry obviously are drawn to that area. UM Variety Magazine that's where it first popped up on that

block when it was called the Clipper. Uh. The William Morris Talent Agency had an office on that block, and it was just sort of the you know, after I think Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and I think one other city kind of where the early seats of the early music industry. It all roundly landed in New York and just such a creative area and era. It's so neat to think about, too, because that's happened in places before. Where if you take a bunch of creative people and jam them into a

small area, just amazing stuff of happens. Like you can do something as big as birth a genre of music, or like pop music, which is like an umbrella. It's not even a genre. There's genres underneath pop music, you know, where something that big can happen when you get that many creative people together in one place. Should we take another break? Sure? Alright, let's take another break, and we'll talk about some of these songs of these composers. Uh

in the Great American Songbook right after this. Alright, So there's money being made, yeah, dad, a lot of money, even for early on. I mean, I can't imagine what sheep music costs, but they were selling so much of it, um it added up um. Irving Berlin, I mean he went on to start his own music publishing business, but early on, when he was just pumping out tunes and nineteen seventeen, he made about a hundred thousand dollars a year in royalties. Yeah, that's that's dollars too, right, Yeah,

And these songs like these are some standards. You know. It's what's known as the Standard American Songbook. Um, just like it's an unofficial designation, but they're considered to be like the classics of the earlier early twentieth century. Like, I mean, we all still know these songs, stuff like uh, Ain't She Sweet? I don't know. Ain't she sweet? You're mucking down the street? What you don't know? That song? No, that one I've not heard. Oh boy, do you know

baby face? Yes, got the cutest little baby face. Yes. I love that song. It makes me smiling by the light of the silvery moon. Give my regards to Broadway. Happy days are here again over there. A lot of this had to do with like wartime, early wartime stuff. Sweet Georgia Brown, Take Me out to the ball game? Yeah, and that that in particular, we gotta say that was written by two guys, um Jack Norworth and Albert von tilser Um and they've never they've never seen a ball

game before. Well maybe that's what they were saying, but though, yeah, take me out to the ball game because I've never been exactly, And they changed that line. But that was so tim panale, like where it's like everybody's into baseball right now, so let's make a song about baseball. YouTube. We've never seen a baseball game, it doesn't matter. Make make me a song. And that's that's how to take

Me Out to the ball Game was formed. Yeah, and I think under one of the like you said earlier, some of the earliest work with like kind of humorous comedy songs. One that still stands out today, I believe from that genre is Yes, we Have No Bananas, which always thought was kind of funny when I was a kid. It's a little funny, and I guess I still do if I'm being honest. Um. There was also uh yeah,

you can go down this line. And there's some pretty substantial songs that were written during this time, and not all of them were stand alone. A lot of them, like I said earlier, were created for musical reviews. Um, America the Beautiful was written by Irving Berlin for a musical review called Yip Yip Yap Hank, which no one has heard of. No one does that anymore, but um, it was. It was meant to be performed and produced

by soldiers that had an eight show run. But um, the song, obviously, America the Beautiful has survived long beyond that because it became an American standard. So like these these vehicles that were built around to kind of get the song out there to the public faded away, but the songs themselves have stood the test of time. Yeah. Absolutely, I think he pulled it from that production or was it in the original production or did he pull it.

I think it was in the original one. Well, he eventually pulled it out of the production then because he thought it was too sentimental. And then that song went on to be the one that everyone remembers. Yeah, you're right, you're right. I'm sorry it didn't show up in there. But you also said so. You mentioned Irving Berlin forming his own publishing house. Um, he was a quintessential rags to riches story for Tim Panaley, where he was like

a waiter in a cafe. Um became a song plugger, one of those guys who plays songs to basically his marketing. UM couldn't reach eat music, knew everything by ear Um had a friend transposed the songs he came up with into into actual written music. A little factoid there that Irving Berlin couldn't read or write music, right, Um. And

then he became a well known composer. And then he became such a well known composer he opened his own publishing house and then started making a hundred thousand dollars a year in royalties. There was another guy named Charles K. Harris who was one of the earlier success stories. I think in eight nine three or two, he had a song called After the Ball, and he just knew it was a gem because he offered to a publisher and they offered him a price for it that he was like,

that's way too low. I'm going to set up my own publishing house. And he did, and he started selling it um and was making something like twenty five thousand dollars a week eighteen nineties money, which is like seven hundred grand a week. This guy just went from nobody to seven grand a week, ended up selling five million copies of his song After the Ball. And if you listen to it now, it's not that good. Frankly, it's not but but bully for him, you know, it's no

ancient suite. No, uh yeah, it's amazing, man. People like popular music hit the world like, you know, like a lightning bolt from the beginning. Yes, because it was so ultra tailored for the American public. Like again, they would take Ragtime, which was a Scott Joplin creation. And Scott Joplin was the son of a slave. He was an African American. A lot of people thought he was white. Still to this day, a lot of people think he was white. I think because of his his name frankly um.

And it was the predecessor ragtime was the predecessor to jazz. And it had like a real like feel to a real soul that everybody's heard, like some of the original ragtime music, like the entertainer Maple Leaf rag And if you can't immediately bring those to mind, just go to

YouTube and you'll be like, Okay, of course I get that. Um. But the idea that that Tim Panaley could just kind of come along and take this cool, deep soulful music and popify it basically to make it palatable to audiences, in particular white audiences who had the most money at the time. Um, that was why it would why why it became so successful. It was almost dumbed down. It was music that was dumbed down in a way to

make it appealed to as many people as possible. Yeah, or even worse, uh, by white publish shows and producers to be used in minstrel shows. Yeah, this version of music, this new genre of music that was so unique in the Harlem Renaissance by Scott Joplin was co opted for

minstrel shows. So shameful. Yes, So there's a real debate going on now about the legacy of tim Panale in some ways, um, and some people point to it and say, look, these guys were churning out the most eye popping lee racist songs that the America has ever come up with.

They were they were coming, they were selling them to the masses, and in doing this, because this was the origin of popular music, they were really effectively perpetuating racial stereotypes and embedding them more than they ever had been before because people were not being mass audiences were being reached like they were with this early sheet music. And so in this in this respect, the tim Panale doesn't deserve to be revered or respected or to be made

it as a historical landmark as the real fight. Yeah. That that's like as recently as like late last month, I believe, Chuck, there was a Landmark Commission City Landmark Commission meeting where this was being debated, right. Well, yeah, and so like you said, some people were saying that on one hand, other people are saying, yeah, but so many of these were Jewish immigrants, uh, an ethnic minority.

So many of them were African American songwriters, and tim Panaley was also the home to the first black owned and operated music publishing business in the country. Yeah, some people are saying, look like, yes, it was taken and co opted to be popular, but so were operettas and ballots, like that's just what they did. It wasn't it wasn't meant to be offensive to UM African Americans. And as a matter of fact, it was basically these Jewish immigrants

saying I kind of identify with your plate. I want to preserve and celebrate this and expose this music to as many people as possible. And that some people pointed this process in tim panale as the way that um, the African American arts became um exposed to the larger the larger population of America at the time. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah, so that that debates going on, that's where the idea of whether or not this area should

be designated as an historic landmark is falling, right. Yeah, And like you said, it's kind of hard to pinpoint an actual death date of tin Pan Alley because these things like that happened gradually over time, but technology, like uh it has so many other times kind of killed the notion of Tin Pan Alley, didn't it. Well, that's a really good point right, the radio. It was the radio radio killed the old timey sheet music star, and

the video killed the radio star right exactly. So again, you didn't need to make sheet music any longer, or you certainly didn't have to learn to play sheet music at home if you wanted to enjoy music, if you could just buy a radio, people quit buying piano those And yeah, it's kind of sad, it is said. It would be nice if everybody was walking around and knew how to play a piano, like hotel lounges would be

a lot more interesting, right, But that's I mean. Once the radio came along, everybody said, so long cheap music. I hated you all along, but you are my only option. Now I can listen to like Benny Goodman and all of these other cats who are super hip and really good at what they're doing, and I want to I want to listen to their their music. And not only did technology killed Tim Panale in this sheet music publishing industry,

but it also changed the genre a little bit. It kind of skewed it more into swing and um some of this yeah big band, some of the stuff that came out of the thirties onward, Um, or that was really kind of where that transition went. Yeah, have you ever been somewhere where they have a public piano and seeing someone just walk by and sit down and blow mines?

Didn't you see Greg Allman do that? God? No, if you know someone who saw that, please try and remember who it was, because I need to hear that story. I'll try to remember. I can't remember who it was. That's pretty amazing. Okay, I don't think I'm making this up. Let me, let me, let me go specific mental role of decks. But have you ever seen that? Sure, just like you're I mean not Greg Almond, but I've just seen your regular average person sit down at a piano.

And like, while someone uh New York does this from time to time, they'll have them on a sidewalker in a park or something. And in Atlanta they have one over in Atlantic Station. I've seen people do it there, uh, and it's always just really cool. And that makes me miss the fact that piano, Like a lot more people used to learn piano than they do now. I think I would love to know how to play the piano to for that very reason, because I'd love to be able to sit down and just want to be that

guy so bad, right, someday, it's not too late. I remember the first time I saw it was that a student council retreat in high school. That was this one. Uh. You know, all the student councils from the county get together over the course of a weekend or a weekend do stupid stuff um, and learned about leadership um. But there was this there's always like this one guy on student council at another school. You're like, man, he didn't seem like a student council type. He seems like he's thirty.

And this guy did uh, and he was on student council at some other school. But he was like, you know, I had like the rat T shirt and it was just sort of a like a dirty metal head bad boy of student counts. He totally was. And there was a piano and one of the lobbies of the dormitories where we stayed at Barry College in Rome, Georgia, And on the very last day there were a bunch of people hanging out in there and this dude goes over

and sits down and just crushes it. And I remember seeing the girls in the room and thinking that guy has got it. All going on, like that's the key man and that boy and the rat t shirt grew up to be Greg allman. Have you have you ever been to a sig Goold's Request Room? Um? You His friend Joe McGinty owns it, he's co owner of it, and he plays piano there. It's just like sing along piano karaoke and it is amazing. I cannot believe you haven't been there yet. You have? So does one person

play the piano and everyone sings along? Joe McGinty plays, and then no, they like like, people can sing along if you want, but it's really one person going out there and doing karaoke with Joe accompanying you on the piano. Okay, well I've done I've done the rock and Roll Live Man karaoke before. Oh yeah here in Atlanta, which is a lot of fun. Um, what do you what do you do that? Uh? Somewhere in the Highlands I think the Dark Horse maybe. Okay, yeah, that sounds right. Yeah.

I went for my birthday a couple of years ago and did Cheap Tricks Surrender and uh did a pretty good job, if I may say so. Is that surrender parentheses? Dream Police those are two different songs. Okay, is it surrender parentheses? I want you to Want Me? Yeah, that's the one. I've heard that song, but it's funny. At the one in Atlanta, there's uh, you know the DJ English Nick. No? Wait, was he on like the radio

like radio DJ? Yeah, he still has English Nick. In Atlanta, he hosted and he is the the emergency back up if you're no good, because being bad at karaoke is no fun, but being bad at live bank karaoke it's really no fun for anyone. So he stands back there and if you're not very good, he's singing along with you and he will just give the signal to sort of do a little upping of his vocals and lowering of the other vocals. Is it like the the slice across your neck like that? No? I mean I think

it's just like an eye signal. And uh, I remember being nervous. I was like, oh, man, if they if they bring up English Nick during surrendering and be mortified. But they didn't. And afterward he gave me a nod like a good job. But oh you got the nod from English Nick. Yeah, that means a lot. I have the opposite story. What happened. I went to Claremont Lounge to do karaoke years back, chose to do Darling Nikki.

Oh interesting. In the middle, the karaoke DJ breaks in and goes, It's like William Shatton are singing, isn't it? Oh my god? You was their supporting dancing just but but really just hanging on by her fingernails. You know, you gotta stopped an insulted mid song, mid song, but I finished Buddy Good. Yeah. I would literally pay a hundred dollars to have seen that. I wager that it would have been worth two fifty. Okay, it was pretty pretty bad. Do we have anything else on Tin Pan Alley?

I forgot what's what we were talking about, Chuck, Well, we should. We're not gonna get into it here. We should do a full show on ASCAP though. Yeah, because yet another thing that early Irving Berlin did was create as CAP, the American Society of Composers and Performers, Right, I think producers, producers Okay, man, I didn't even have it in front of me, but um, they basically protect and register copyrights for artists. Yeah, it's so convoluted to

these days. Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely deserves its own thing. But that was another thing that was born out of Tim pan Alley. Yeah, and you know what, I am living in the future now because I have a turntable now finally again after many many years of not having one that I can play wirelessly throughout all the speakers in my home. Oh, isn't that amazing? That is the future for sure, that you can actually do

that and it sounds great. And now I just went to the record store for the first time in a long time yesterday and bought thirteen records. I traded in probably five dred CDs to get records. He was like, I'll give you a hundred and thirty bucks for the lot and I was like, fine, fine, just get these stupid nineties CDs away from me. Now. They were great, but it was just I felt like I should pay him to take all these off my hands. Did you still have the jewel cases? Oh? Yeah, they were all

something that jeweled up. And so, yeah, I bought records for the first time. And I'm going to make that a when we go on tour now and when I traveling and make it a point to go into local record stores again. I think that's great. I really really had a good time thumbing through records. It was a lot of fun. I'll go with you, text me, yeah, let's do it. Okay. I think that's it for tim Panale. R I p Tim Panale. Depending on your viewpoint, I guess yeah, there needs to be a great Another was

a movie in the forties called tin Panale. But someone should do a really good uh look at the early burgeoning film I'm sorry movie into almost oh boy music industry about tin Panalely it'd be oh yeah, that would be great. There's so many characters involved. Just put Hugh Jackman in a Sharknado in it. And and by the way, you got called out for bringing back bread. I did. I said in it was some episode that I think the diving bell up is so that we should bring

bread back. And I guess that's what the kids all say. Now. I didn't realize that, but like at least ten people emailed and said, yeah, millennials are talking about getting that bread. It's like they are. I guess so. I like to think that I had absolutely nothing to do with that. But but you were the seed do you think so? You never know? Man, that'd be cool. Before we go

to the chuck, I do have one more thing. I have to give a shout out to what I considered the greatest song to come out of Tim Panaley Um. And I believe it was an Irving Berlin song. Yeah it was Let's have another cup of coffee? Have you heard that we use that for something? Didn't we? I don't remember. We probably did because it's prominent in one of my favorite movies of all time, Paper Moon. That

was a great song. I love that song so much. Um. If you haven't ever heard that song, go listen to it because it's one of the most just blindly optimistic songs of all time and it's about coffee, yea and pie. Okay, now that's it. Now I've got nothing else. If you want to know more about tim pan aale uh, you can go read up on it and maybe follow whether it's going to get designated as in New Story Clan mark or not. We'll find out. In the meantime, it's time for a listener mail. So this is just a

very sweet email from someone. Hey, guys, I'm sure you're ceving emails like this all the time, but I would be remiss if I didn't thank you for all the wonderful work you do. I've had a really tough time with mental illness, and there have been a lot of nights your wonderful podcast staved off panic attacks or worse. Thank you for keeping me calm and educated, and thank you for making me feel safe even in perilous circumstances. Thank you for giving me something to talk about when

my depression has kept me in a fog. Without your massive backlog and seemingly endless supply of fresh, fascinating subjects, I surely would be lost. I spend some time researching, and I can truly appreciate just how much time and energy go into becoming familiar enough with something to explain it as accinctly as you guys do your superheroes and rock Star. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for the wonderful work you do. You've truly saved me.

Kindest and warmest regards, Georgia. And that's really lovely, Georgia. If we're ever in a town near you, you are guests listed. Yes, Wow, Chuck, I think that was a really good, good idea. Thanks a lot, Georgia. That was very sweet email. We appreciate it. We're glad we could help in some some small measure. Thank you very much for the kudos. Uh, if you want to send us kudos, we love that kind of thing, including kudos. The candy bar. Yeah,

I remember that the kudos. They were great. Yeah. Um. Actually I don't know if if somebody sent us one, if it would still be so great. Are they not around? No? I think like they would have been manufactured in six or something like then. I don't keep up with the candy bar scene. That's what I'm saying. They're not around anymore, you know, I know. Okay, so uh wow, that was

a little sidetrack on kudos whatnot. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go onto stuff you Should Know dot com and find all of our social links there, and you can also send us an email to stuff podcast at I heart radio dot com. M Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H