Robbie wrote me:

> Hi Ed !  I'm also a fan of the quaint sounds of Rollo Mexico
> -- were the arrangements by Senor Lodoza himself?

Robbie, I met Lodoza in 1959 and visited him every time I went to
Mexico after that.  It was not so much for the new rolls he made, and
yes, he did most of the arranging on a special perforator in the front
room behind the counter.  For years he refused to let me see the
perforator: "Es un secreto," he used to tell me, and I do not have to
translate that for you.

What all of us went there for in those days were the unbelievable number
of reproducing rolls he had: hundreds of all kinds -- Ampico, Duo-Art
and Welte, and different kinds of Welte for the European instruments.
He sold them for a song and we all loaded up.  It was a pretty well-
kept secret.

He perforated the rolls on varying degrees of paper, some almost
resembling mulberry paper; it still had what looked like pieces of
wood bark in it.  The rolls were never spooled until you bought them.
They were kept in little bins along the walls; you picked out what you
wanted, he spooled it and you played it sitting at a wheezing pumper
kept in the front room for that purpose.  I asked him why and he said
because the spools and cores were very expensive.

I just went downstairs and pulled out one of the last catalogs that
Fernando Diaz Lodoza (that is his full name) published, if you can call
it that: it was a legal-size sheet mimeographed on both sides.  In
those days the Mexican peso was worth eight American cents.  His roll
prices were as follows:

Large rolls:  80 pesos ($6.40 US).  Those included selections like
Claire de Lune; Selections from La Gioconda; and Poet y Campesino
(and if you need me to translate that ... well...!!)

[ It's in every good roll collection!  :-)   -- Robbie ]

Medium rolls:  60 pesos ($4.80 US), which included Danubio Azul; Vino,
Mujeres y Canto; and Fantasia Impromptu de F. Chopin.  (You can figure
all of those out.)

Small rolls, the bulk of the 'catalog', were 40 pesos ($3.20 US).

As you can see, all the titles were translated into Spanish, and my all
time favorite translation is "Cocktails para dos!"

Stamped in the bottom of all the rolls from Lodoza was this legend,
and I am going to type the whole thing in Spanish and then translate:

   No tire sus rolls usados rotos.  Nosotros se los compramos.
  "Rollos Mexico"  Articulo 123 No 5 Mexico, D.F.

Literal translation: "Do not throw away your worn out used rolls,
we will buy them. Rollos Mexico ... etc."

He had hundreds of used rolls, many of them going back to before he
took over the firm.  He was a fine musician, and his arrangements have
a distinct quality to them.  My all-time favorite is "Tico Tico", and
he signed the roll leader for me.

I count seven large rolls, eleven medium rolls and 240 small rolls.
Now, he never had all of them in stock; usually the ones I wanted were
NOT in stock, but then he would have had a tremendous inventory and he
was really a poor man.  He played in dance bands at night to supplement
his living and feed his family -- that is how close he had to watch the
pesos.  He was totally devoted to the roll business, and he is another
of those wonderful old men that I recall with fondness.

In later years, he wanted to sell everything.  He had lost his lease
and he finally took me in the back and showed me his Acme perforator
and did a roll for me while I watched.  The master was never a complete
roll; the intro was cut, then the verse, then the refrain, then a
'bridge'.  Then he stopped the perforator and went back for the second
verse which of course was the same as the first.   After two verses or
more, he moved the master to the ending that he had arranged.  All of
this was marked on the master in red crayon, in Spanish, as to what
order it was all to go in.

He offered me the business for a song, but I was too busy making money
repairing player pianos, and getting things out of Mexico was not as
easy as it is now.  Hell, in 1964 I bought a working open-bench
streetcar off the streets of Vera Cruz, had it loaded on a flatcar,
hired a man to ride with it (it would have never gotten to the border
otherwise), and it went to a museum here that eventually let it rot
into the ground.  How I got that streetcar out of Mexico without a
permit makes interesting reading, but not in the MMD.

Then I heard that Ramsi Tick had bought the perforator, but now I
understand that he trashed all the old masters.  In that back room was
even the machine for stenciling the words on the rolls and the machine
that cut the stencil.  He finally, after all those years, showed me
everything including the unusual master roll cutting machine, which had
levers that your clicked down for the notes you wanted, not unlike what
QRS uses. You turned a wheel on the side and it was punch, skip, punch,
skip, etc.  If you look at the rolls there are no chain perforations.
And I am almost sure that the Acme was a one-to-one perforator.

You know, I was going to put this all in a post to the Digest, so if
you can make anything out of it, go to it.  That is about all I
remember anyway, except that I was sad to hear that the masters never
left Mexico.  What a shame.  I understand that QRS does not have the
perforator anymore.  By the way, it was driven with flat belting
running off a line shaft in the ceiling, just as it had been installed
many years before.

Ed Gaida

 [ Phil Wenker (Golden Age recuts) gave me an original Lodoza
 [ arrangement of a 1929 "hot orchestra" piece named "Deep Hollow".
 [ The Spanish title bestowed by Lodoza is "Profundidad" (Profound)!
 [
 [ The roll had a strange, regular skipping pattern, which we first
 [ thought was a problem in the pianos air-motor.  Then I marked every
 [ beat of the roll and discovered that one step was missing about
 [ every 1-1/2 measures!  In some instances the timing was adjusted,
 [ but there were still plenty of chords that sounded too early.  The
 [ song is quite long, and I think that he found that it wouldn't fit
 [ on the small spool, so he rigged up a bicycle chain or something and
 [ re-sampled the roll for a slower paper speed.  Recently I corrected
 [ the music and Tonnesen's made copies, so now the skipping is gone and
 [ it sounds as originally intended:  Muy Profundidad !   -- Robbie