Blood Money For Bone Music

It’s easy to take the modern miracle of music acquisition for granted. In the 1950’s, before MP3s, streaming choices and cassette tapes getting music into the hands of real fans was a daunting task. Especially when it was banned in your country.

Cold War U.S.S.R was no exception. Music from the decadent west was illegal. If you wanted to hear early rock & jazz, you had to somehow acquire a true bootleg record. Enterprising people in those days would home press records onto just about anything they could get their hands on. The best medium was X-Ray stock. The flimsy celluloid holds a groove well enough to withstand repeated plays on a simple turntable.

Of course, there were other medium used to cut records in those days in that oppressed society. Street signs and cake pans were also used. Desperate times called for desperate means and listening to banned music was no exception.

Now these, so called “bone records” are showing up on the internet for collectors to snap up. One such collector is trying to grab them up for a project which would serve as a way to protect these records and to show the extraordinary lengths people would go through to discover and hear their favorite music.

X-Ray Audio was founded by Stephen Coates for that very task.

In one particular tale, a local Russian by the name of Rudy Fuchs would give blood to earn enough money to press a few copies of a record he thought was important enough to spread to the community from an illegally acquired album. He literally gave his blood for “bone music”.

You think you may be a lover of music. But, do you love it this much? What lengths would you go through to discover new music?