Even More Usless Information

[This is from the latest column I write for the Metro newspapers across Canada.  Sound Check appears every Friday. - AC]

I spent an ungodly amount of time researching music for The Secret Music of Rock (my weekly radio show) and a museum exhibit due to open in Kansas City this fall.  I continually uncover some pretty wacky things that I feel duty-bound to report to you. I swear that none of this is made up.

• It’s estimated that around the world, 5,000 people make a full-time living from The Beatles. This not only includes people at their record label, their publishing company and their various offices, but writers, researchers, collectors and various other full-time Beatles experts.

• Your dog thinks your music is noise. Because they perceive sound differently than we do (it has to do with their hearing ability, frequencies of their vocalizations and their resting heartbeat), dogs can’t perceive music the way we do. Cats, on the other hand, have a certain appreciation for songs that have a fast beat and plenty of high notes. However, studies have proven that both dogs and cats become agitated by heavy metal.

• One of the most expensive gramophones ever produced was called an auxetophone, which amplified music by means of a convoluted compressed air system. (Electronic amplification was still 20 years in the future.) When it went on sale in 1906, it sold for $500, the equivalent of more than $12,000 today.

• Ramones drummer Marky Ramone has his own brand of marinara sauce.  It’s also used by a food truck in Brooklyn called Cruisin’ Kitchen.

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