SOVIET X-RAY RECORD Bill Haley Comets Rockin' Matilda BONES MUSIC roentgenizdat
$
95
$ 95
Sold For
Jun 2, 2025
Sold Date
May 31, 2025
Start Date
1
Number Of Bids
USA
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Description
A series of great Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Yugo-Slav Records from early G&Ts to World War II recordings on 78 rpm Victrola Records
Click this link for more Russian and Slavic Records in my other listings!
USSR X-RAY roentgen film "roentgenizdat" record.
Undeveloped/ unexposed film stock
10" 78 rpm, seems to be a standard groove recording, plays very well with a 3.0 mil stylus
Writing on center area:
Children's Rock - Haley
Different hand: Rockin Matilda
Sticker: Bill Haley
Authentic record from the late 1950s/ early 1960s from the Soviet Union .
Rockin' Matilda by Bill Haley and His Comets
Written by
Marie Cowan, Milt Gabler, Bill Haley, Banjo Paterson, Ruth Keefer, Catherine Cafra
Released on
Rockin' Around the World
Album
March 17, 1958
USSR X-RAY roentgen film "roentgenizdat" record.
Undeveloped/ unexposed film stock
10" 78 rpm, seems to be a standard groove recording, plays very well with a 3.0 mil stylus
CONDITION: EXCELLENT, material is slightly wavy, but plays extremely well with great sound
A GREAT EXAMPLE of a BONES RECORD
bootleg recordings of music pressed on to discarded x-rays that had been banned in the USSR, lest they promote insurrectionary tendencies in listeners.
Perhaps the authorities had a point. If the relatively tame jump-jive of Bill Haley & the Comets’ Rock Around the Clock had British teenagers ripping seats out of cinemas in frenzied excitement, one has to wonder what it would have done to young Russians. For teenagers who didn’t much fancy joining the Leninist youth brigades of the Komsomol, the lure of the stilyagi – a hipper subculture that embraced all things jazz, rock’n’roll and Hollywood – must have seemed irresistibly exotic. Certainly appealing enough to send them along to self-styled “culture traders” such as Rudy Fuchs, an engineering student who was so keen to get involved with western music that he regularly gave blood in exchange for cash so that he could save up for a recording lathe. Blood money in exchange for bone music.
Record like this were popular underground source for songs of prohibited but extremely popular russian performers like Lescheko or Vertinsky, underground criminal folklore songs, foreign jazz & pop music and later rock'n'roll in Soviet Union. Though 99% of roentgen film record belong to late 1940s- very early1960s, the whole timespan includes period from late 1930s until early 1970s.
Western music may have been changing the world in the 1950s, but if you happened to be in Russia you were out of luck. State censorship was in full effect in the Soviet Union, and sneaking in, say, an American rock record was close to impossible. But a few industrious music fans managed to find another way.
Stephen Coates, the leader of a British band called The Real Tuesday Weld, happened on this secret history by accident. Several years ago on a tour stop in St. Petersburg, he was strolling through a flea market when a strange item caught his eye.
"I thought, 'Is that a record? Or is it an X-ray?' I picked it up, and it seemed to be both," he recounts. "They guy whose stall it was was a bit dismissive — I think he wanted me to buy something else. But I brought it back to London, and I was fascinated by it. So I started to dig, and that has led me on a very strange journey."
Coates is now an obsessive of what is nicknamed "bone music" — makeshift LPs etched into used X-rays, which were playable on a turntable and provided a fitting disguise for their contraband contents. He's collected his findings in a new book called X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone, and he joined NPR's Michel Martin to talk about it. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.
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