| As this
is kind of like asking your local basehead to stop by the crackhouse and
see if he likes the accommodations, we stopped by as soon as we had a spare
minute, and the very thing I wanted to hear happened to be in the stack
today. It’s an LP called Deep Voices: The Second Whale Record,
and it’s just what you think it is -- recordings of the songs and sounds
of Blue, Right, and Humpback whales. It was released in 1977, and there
was a flexidisc of whale songs from National Geographic tucked into the
sleeve, and its liner notes evoke times which, if they resemble those in
which we now live, do so only as the gods resemble men: as greater, less
disappointing versions of them. Which is to say that the liner notes begin: This is the second whale record. The first, “Songs of the Humpback Whale” (Capitol ST-620) was released in 1970 and is still in print. It has had a surprising success; over 100,000 copies were sold, more than any other recording of natural sounds in history. Since humpback whales are the recording artists they receive the artist’s royalties, the money being sent directly to the Whale Fund of the New York Zoological Society. |