Randy McNutt

Ever hear of a butt splice? A cover? An iron mother? A biscuit? These were terms used in the heyday of vinyl records, from 1949 to the mid-1980s. This colorful and almost forgotten language was once used by record producers, label owners, disc jockeys, jukebox operators, record distributors, and others in the music industry. Their language is collected in this dictionary. Each entry offers both an explanation of a term's meaning as well as its context and use in the history of the record business.

"Vintage Tape Recorders" tells the story--through original advertisements, company promotional material, and photographs --of America's early professional tape recorders on which hundreds of thousands of recordings were made over the years, as well as commercials, jingles, and on-location projects. Intended as an underground history of old tape machines, the book also features forgotten recording studios and their old gear and unusual recorders. In this over-sized book of 8.5 x 11 inches and 213 pages, you will find tube amps, old microphones, tubes, vibrators, old pro-model tape recorders, mixing boards, and other studio equipment that was once a big part of the audio business from the 1940s to the 1980s. Even old disc cutters and wire recorders are included. Looking for information on vintage equipment? You can find it here--some of it with the original spec sheets and company promotional items that give all the background needed to assess what the recorders were all about. The companies' original dealer materials are large enough for readers to see what made these machines so grand. The recorders include Ampex, Belerant, Scully, Presto, and many others that were used from 1948, when tape machines first started appearing in recording studios, through the 1980s. The book primarily focuses on the 1950s and '60s, when hits came out of dusty little studios in far-out places from Muscle Shoals to Memphis to New Orleans. Here you can find the kind of equipment that was used. The book also features a detailed and personal introduction and a timeline by author and independent record producer Randy McNutt. The book ends with a section called the Magnetic War, a pictorial story of the battle that once raged between the wire recorder and the tape recorder. If you enjoy recording, you will want to browse through the many wonderful advertisements and promotional photos that have been lovingly assembled for this book. Whether your fascination lies with one, two, three, four, eight, sixteen, twenty-four tracks, you can find most of them in "Vintage Tape Recorders." Published by HHP Books, where vinyl is king, mono is hip, and analog will forever reign. The book is one in HHP's Vinyl Collector Series that keeps alive America's stories history of music and recording. Others in the series are "Too Hot to Handle," the vintage recording studio book, and "Spinning the Groove," a book filled with the lore and legends of America's old record business.

Captivating portraits of extraordinary individuals Famous Buckeyes are recognized by practically everyone. They range from presidents and inventors to aviators and astronauts. But other important Ohioans have been unfairly forgotten over the years. To find them, the authors of Unforgettable Ohioans dug beneath the layer of well-known names to discover a cache of remarkable individuals whose lives had significant national or international impact. They won't show up on the top-ten list of most famous Ohioans, but their stories are nonetheless intriguing and important.Randy and Cheryl Bauer McNutt introduce us to David Harpster, who became "the Wool King of America," as the newspapers of his day called him, and drove a significant segment of the nation's economy; Lucy Webb Hayes, the future First Lady who sacrificed her comfort and safety—even the safety of one of her children—to become a "mother" to hundreds of injured Union soldiers during the Civil War; Zachary Lansdowne, the Greenville naval officer who became an expert on lighter-than-air craft and commanded the airship USS Shenandoah when it crashed in Ohio in 1924; Benjamin Hanby, the Westerville songwriter whose hit songs comforted both Rebel and Yankee soldiers—and still entertain us each Christmas season; Lloyd "Cowboy" Copas, the smooth singer from Blue Creek who helped establish modern country music and later died in the same airplane crash that claimed the life of Patsy Cline; and Moses Fleetwood Walker, the Steubenville baseball player who came out of Oberlin College to become the first black player in the major leagues—in 1884. The lives and achievements of these and other extraordinary Ohioans are featured in this fascinating and entertaining book.

In Finding Utopia, Randy McNutt sets off again to explore Ohio's forgotten nooks and byways. He begins where his last journey ended—on roads less traveled—finding more ghost towns, battlefields-turned-cornfields, and old memories that beckon him like spectral hitchhikers. On the way, he meets another cast of quirky and determined people who struggle to keep their towns on the map.Aided by his aging Jeep and a longing to escape, McNutt discovers a pioneer inn that harbors the ghost of a headless coach- man (and a surprising personal connection); a Victorian town that looks like an empty movie set; the gruesome battlefield on which the U.S. Army suffered its worst defeat ever by Native Americans; and a gunpowder manufacturing town that was blown to atoms on a sizzling summer day in 1890. Often encountering a past that is livelier than the present, he walks through another town where magnetic water once "cured" many ailments, stays the night in a stagecoach inn known for a ghostly cat and its owner who still roam the halls, finds a town built on cranberry bogs, and uncovers what's left of a World War I training camp sitting atop ancient Indian mounds. In tiny Utopia, for which this book is named, he descends into an underground stone chamber to hear tales of the spirits that haunt it.McNutt's first two books—seamlessly combining the genres of travel narrative, history, and memoir—won praise for effectively merging past and present, and giving readers a strong sense of place. As with those, Finding Utopia will appeal to anyone interested in heritage tourism, folklore, Americana, Ohio history and lore, back roads, ghosts of many kinds, and small-town life.

The author travels around Ohio in an attempt to uncover missing pieces of the past where rural America converges with small cities, fading history, and disappearing culture, in an offbeat journey around the Buckeye State. Original.