Telephone Time Tunnel

I had a bit of good blogging fortune this week. After I posted about “Hello Trouble” on Wednesday, I got a comment from someone who grew up in Shoals, Indiana. Eventually I learned that her father had serviced jukeboxes in Shoals for Sherfick’s, undoubtedly the owner of the jukebox in the Dwyer Café. This gentleman also worked for National Gypsum in Shoals, where my grandfather had the contract to provide security services. So, they knew each other from National and from the café. Since the man serviced jukeboxes from 1960 to 1963, he could very well have been the guy who gave me the 45 featured Wednesday and today. I don’t think the world can get much smaller than that, but this year of blogging is starting to churn up a lot of pleasant surprises, so we’ll see.

That paragraph was a news flash, and here’s another: you may note fewer loud thumps in this recording; that is because a regular reader, Yah Shure, gave me a couple of tips on click/pop reduction that doesn’t involve ruining the presence of the sound. The sound isn’t perfect, but most of the really bad thumps are gone. Believe me, if I could find another (cleaner) copy of this record, and several others, I would share them with you.

Now I’ll give you the original post I wrote a month ago. I have talked myself out on the Big 6 story (until someone comes up with new data for me), but the song brings other thoughts to mind.

Today’s song, “Can’t Hang Up the Phone” by an anonymous Nashville vocalist (perhaps the guy who sang “Hello Trouble’ on Wednesday), talks about how desperate the protagonist is to get his girl on the phone. He’s going to “keep on sayin’ that I love you to the dialin’ tone.” To the mind of current telephone users, the lyrics sound ridiculous. I am here to help you understand this guy’s logic.

Now, in 2008, people who have only a cell phone will not hear a dial tone very often. On a land line, I can punch in the number before I pick up the handset, so I don’t hear any dial tone there, either.

Even those who use a land line often know that, after twenty seconds (I just checked) of listening to the dial tone, you hear the recording “If you’d like to make a call . . . ,” followed shortly by the terrible screech that is supposed to wake you up if you fell asleep because of the sonorous A 440 tone that was massaging your eardrum. So nowadays this guy in the song couldn’t possibly say “I love you” more than a dozen times before the phone started giving it right back to him.

Ah, but it was not always so. When I went off to college in 1978, our phones at school, rotary dial and all, had a magical feature: you could dial part of a number and let the phone sit. It would not ring, and it would not cut you off. When I told a friend I liked Mary Ann Di*****, he dialed her number, all but the last digit, and told me to do that one myself. I sat there for ten minutes, sweating, wondering how stupid I was going to sound. I finally dialed the last digit, and her phone was busy. I didn’t let them put me through that again.
So the guy in the song had the same type of mechanical phone setup we did at Indiana University. It was indeed primitive, though not compared to the nearby Smithville Telephone Company, whose wires sometimes had been strung along pasture fence posts and were prone to being torn loose by cows who rubbed against them.

But our phone book did have a listing for Fone Company—see Indiana Bell Telephone Company. Same thing for “Phone Company.” I am not kidding you.

And so, first Stonewall Jackson, then the anonymous singer of my version of the song, sits waiting for the girl who just dumped him to need to call her mom for a recipe or something. And at that point, she will hear his voice, realize that she was wrong to let such a persistent suitor go, and fall back in love with him.

Um, nowadays we call that stalking, I think. Don’t try it at home.

But it’s a really good song. I had to do funky things with the sound file to get it to work; there was a fatal skip in the intro, so I spliced in part of the intro to the second verse to keep the song together. And where he says “caused my heart to break,” you will be able to tell that I had to deal with another skip. Sorry about that. If one of you has a better transfer than mine, let me know.

And that, folks, is what I can say about Big 6 Records. I was hoping I’d have space to tell the story about my grandfather and the hellgrammite he gave me to hold, but it will have to wait. I’ll be back Wednesday with another tune from the Dwyer Café jukebox—one you know. See you then!

Big 6, Can’t Hang Up the Phone

Label scan

Story of a Jukebox

My dad’s parents lived in Shoals, a town of perhaps a thousand people that ran on gypsum mining and farming. On Main Street in Shoals there was a little restaurant called the Dwyer Café, and my grandparents owned it. When we drove down (five hours by car once I-65 opened), I loved to hang out there. I cleaned tables, washed dishes, peeled potatoes, and generally prepared myself for a career in the food-service industry. You could ask if that was a good idea, but I promise you I have never asked anyone if they wanted fries with that. Whatever “that” is.

The other thing I did at the Dwyer Café was stare at the jukebox. Three-year-old caithiseach couldn’t get enough of this particular device. When someone ordered a song, a semicircular metal hook grabbed the correct 45, laid it on the platter, and the tonearm came over and began to play the record. My record player was manual, so seeing the mechanics of an automatic player up close never bored me. The tonearm also held a small brush to shoo dust away from the groove. I found that very elegant, and I asked for a brush for my first good turntable.

I played two songs on that jukebox a lot. One I will discuss next week, but the other one is legendary in my music collection. Uncle Tom didn’t get me this record; I got it myself. The song is called “Hello Trouble,” and it appeared on the Big 6 label. I will approach the story from the beginning, so you can see what I learned about the song as time went on.

The record was created to maximize jukebox record slots: it had three songs on each side, with very fine grooves. I had some EPs at home, so it didn’t surprise me to find a 45 with six hits on it. Something I never figured out, and still don’t understand, is how the tonearm could find the right spot to start the second and third songs. It was like magic; if you ordered “World of Forgotten People,” the needle dropped in exactly the right spot, just after “Hello Trouble.” And if you played “Hello Trouble,” you didn’t get the other two songs for free. If you know how this machine from the early 1960s worked, do tell.

I knew the jukebox man sometimes opened up the window and swapped out records. I learned to my horror one day that he was taking “Hello Trouble” away. My distress must have been evident, because he gave me the 45. As many times as I had played that song in Shoals, I could now play it a hundred times more often in Merrillville. The tragedy of losing the recording forever was averted, and I added a prized tune to the box of 45s when I got home.

From 1963 until 1979, I played “Hello Trouble” often. The 45 didn’t get Ground to Dust, because I had better needles then, but it got crackly, as you’ll soon see. The 45 went to college with me, and when I got a good turntable and an excellent tape deck, I decided to tape the song so I could retire the 45.

That was a bit of a challenge. The lighter tonearm skipped on the record. As I was determined to get this song recorded, my roommate Ray and I doodled with the anti-skate setting. I figured out that by moving that knob at the right instant, I could get past the skip in the guitar pickup notes, and then by turning it fully to the other side, I’d slip through the second skip in the groove. I got my recording.

Then I thought it might make sense to look for the song on LP. Since the artist was not listed on the 45, we had to guess at who the singer might be. Ray suggested Buck Owens, and at the local record store we learned that Buck had indeed recorded the song. I was hesitant to buy the LP without being sure, so I held off to await further data.

From 1979 to the early 1990s, I listened to my tape of “Hello Trouble” and didn’t buy Buck’s version. But when his box set came out, I couldn’t resist. Instead of being unable to pull the trigger on a $5 vinyl purchase, I dropped $30 on Buck’s box. I ran home and dropped the laser on “Hello Trouble.” And I’ll be darned if it wasn’t the wrong version. Way wrong, not even similar to the one I had loved for thirty years.

You see, Buck had his way of doing songs. I have made a medley of Buck Owens intros from the early days of his Bakersfield Sound, and you’ll see that it’s not much of a stretch to go from these recordings to a cookie-cutter-Buck version of “Hello Trouble.” But it’s not the way the song should have been done. Considering that I have heard the song covered later by the Desert Rose Band and others in the Buck Owens style, rather than in the original manner, I am a bit miffed still at Buck. He changed the chords in the chorus, for crying out loud. And since he let Wynn Stewart give him his break in music without giving back much, Buck and I are going to have a little chat in about sixty years.

So, having eliminated Buck from the running for singer of “Hello Trouble,” I bothered to do some research. I learned that the song’s writer, Orville Couch (1935-2002), had taken the song to #5 on the country charts, with the run beginning on 11/24/1962 and lasting 21 weeks. His version, Vee Jay 470, was not available on CD. So that search stalled.

But I went to Nashville to check out the scene in 1996, and in a store full of 45s I found “Hello Trouble” by Orville Couch. The store had turntables, so I dropped the needle on it, and . . . it wasn’t my version. It was far closer than Buck’s, but I suddenly knew what was going on. I owned six soundalikes of early-1963 country hits. The actual hits are:

Artist-Title-Peak-Debut
Orville Couch, “Hello Trouble” #5 11/24/1962
Unknown, “World of Forgotten People” Not a Top 40 hit
Kitty Wells, “We Missed You” #7 11/3/1962
Stonewall Jackson, “Can’t Hang Up the Phone” #11 1/26/1963
Unknown, “Safely in Love Again” Not a Top 40 hit
Porter Wagoner, “I’ve Enjoyed As Much of This As I Can Stand” #7 12/8/1962

All of my versions are soundalikes. Since 1996, I have been looking for a cleaner copy of this 45, but I can’t even get anyone to confirm that Big 6 Records existed. What I can say about the song is that, of the three concurrent versions of “Hello Trouble,” my Big 6 cut is the smoothest and most listenable. It’s the version I learned to love, it’s true, but the harmonica in the Couch version is far too sappy, and Buck took the song to Bakersfield and never gave it back.

One thought comes to mind. When Billboard calculated jukebox plays for chart purposes, Couch et al. would not be getting credit for the plays of Big 6 45s. That makes me think these songs could have climbed a bit higher on the chart were it not for this soundalike record. The same might hold true for songs that got the Hit Records treatment. At least the songwriters got their royalties. I think.

Speaking of them, Orville Couch posted 100 compositions with BMI, but none seems to rival the success of “Hello Trouble.” His co-writer, Eddie McDuff, shared credit on numerous Couch-McDuff composition. McDuff also wrote two tunes with Dorothy Barnett Couch, who I figure to be Orville’s wife. There’s not much more available on these guys.

And that’s “Hello Trouble” for you. Be sure to listen to all of the sounds, so you can see the complete picture. When I was three, I especially liked the line about letting Trouble “rest your shoes.” It was several years before I figured out that Trouble was a girl. I figured that out all at once, and I suspect this should be my theme song.

Saturday I’ll have another song from the B side, with commentary on the technology of the time. See you on the flip side!

Big 6, Hello Trouble

Orville Couch, Hello Trouble

Buck Owens intro medley

Buck Owens, Hello Trouble

Big 6 Hello Trouble label scan