Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Lee & Barry Gold
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Lee & Barry Gold |
| Interviewer: | Megan Genovese |
| Interviewee: | Lee & Barry Gold |
| Date(s): | August 1, 2017 |
| Medium: | aural, transcript |
| Fandom(s): | Science Fiction, Filks, Tabletop RPG, Star Trek: TOS |
| External Links: | The University of Iowa Libraries link |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
In 2017, Lee & Barry Gold were interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.
Interview length: 02:56:53.
The Media Fandom Oral History Project is supported by the Organization for Transformative Works, the organizers of Escapade conventions, and the University of Iowa Libraries. For more information about the origins of this interview, where it is housed, contact information, suggestions regarding future interviewee candidates, and how to become volunteer interviewer or transcriber, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.
Some Topics Discussed
- founding the UCLA club The Third Foundation
- Bruce Pilz
- going to Westercon in 1967 and hearing filking by Johnstone
- Star Trek changed the gender balance of science fiction fandom when they first came in there was perhaps one woman for every four or five men.
- speculation on the origin of the term filk
Excerpts
NOTE: these are roughly translated; it would be wise to listen to the interview itself, and feel free to make corrections to the words below.
We started remembering each other partly because we were both fans and interested in science fiction and partly cause he liked my songs and we ran around in the same social circles and got to know each other and became friends and filk was a small but certainly definite part of that.
When I first came into fandom, most of the people were independent, whether they were independent men or independent women. I'm most of the people, whether they were married or going together or not, they were still, if they, if one of them ran a fan zine, that doesn't mean that their social boyfriend or girlfriend was an adjunct to them. And then as the years went by, you started seeing people coming in where the girl would automatically become a helper of the boy. You started seeing this totally different dynamic. Where the woman or girl was going to be the supporting person rather than going to be someone who was going to be important in her own right.
[...]
And it was obviously something growing up in the 50s that was the common social pattern. You know, the man ran things, the wife helped right in the 50s right. And people who sought out SF fandom were gender, socially, gender role, socially social role tended to be different. They were, they might be women who liked math, they might be women who liked engineering, they might be women who like programming. They might be women who otherwise not fit the 1950s and early sixties social roles. I'm not talking here about anything to do with sexual rules, I'm just talking about whether they fit the social roles. And one of the things that Trek did with Yeoman Land and all were here, we all are on a spaceship that the women are all subservient to the men.
Almost anything in the world. I have written, I wrote a filk song about a non existent role-playing story, uh, called You Bash the Balrog, which has become tremendously popular over the years. Uh, I wrote a filk song about Dutch history, uh, tearing down the dykes in the combat against, uh, the Spanish in order to, um, drive out the army of the Duke of which started out as a terrible pun of, because there was a previous song who had, which had a chorus, what's, what's the chorus, very of that Leslie Fish Song troll. Uh, the one above Elf quest your hearts. Damn, you're sold and you're always right. And I thought it would be amusing to change dam there too. D a m instead of d a m n. So I rewrote it about Dutch history and wrote it as damn the waves. Damn the tide stem c, uh, and wrote it about the, uh, Dutch, a declaration of independence, which came several hundred years before the American one, uh, which I have learned about through reading Van loon slides by Henrik van Loon, which is a strange and wonderful history book, which has the author inviting dead people for dinner. And the first one, the first, well, second one, he invited George Washington and William of Orange, William the silent rather. Um, yeah, that's an unusual way of writing history.
Sometimes I've written a song about a book that people haven't read and they've gone out and bought it and read it, which is means I guess that it's a kind of a book review. Uh, sometimes I have found myself, uh, giving, writing a song about a very old story that people don't want to read anymore because nowadays a lot of people have been turned off, say Robert Heinlein because they've read his later full of gross sex stuff and therefore they're not reading his earlier stuff written in the 1950s, which I think is kind of sad.
I would say it very select when we started, most filk songs were written to known melodies for technological reasons. Because if you could say, oh, this is too, this melody that everybody knows, then you only had to learn the words. And that was because when it started in the forties and 50s and 60s tape recorders weighed 50 pounds.
Because they were reel to reel tape recorders. Actually probably on the 50th floor people had was wire recorders, which are 1958 I got when I was 16 I got a real surreal tape recorder and a weight above 50 pounds. Yup. And then somewhere, when do you figure the case set recorder came out very the way. Yup. And all of a sudden you could bring along this thing that weighed one pound. Yeah. And that was technology. All of a sudden you could go to filk sing and when somebody seemed to be likely to sing something you wanted to record, you could turn on your case set recorder or one guy in the 80s right in a VCR and set it up in the filk room with a six hour videotape. And we courted everything that was played for six hours and then came in and changed videotapes. And so you all of a sudden got these new technologies to allow you to record things. And so all of a sudden, because of these new technologies, instead of having one song out of 50 being tune original tune, you started having a totally different balance where you might get one song out of three.
Nowadays with the web, you can say, I have my new melody up on the web and you can learn it there. And instead of having to go in person to hear somebody, you can download their performance off of youtube or off of some private performance that they've uploaded onto the web.
I mean I got into fandom for, for friendship and that's what I've continued as for, for friendship. And that's the nice part is the on Facebook. I occasionally read psychological studies of the people who find that Facebook makes them more lonely. And as there's like, until these are people who have friended people they don't know. And what Barry and I have done is only friend people. We actually know who we are friends with and therefore it doesn't make us lonely. We are interested in what these people are doing and they're interested in what we're doing. And when somebody joins a and D, everyone says, welcome and how are you doing? And they don't just talk about role playing. They say, here's who I am and 30here's what I'm doing in general and here's how my work is going and, and so on.
Um, as you say, that name comes from a Typo. Um, but it was then applied to the activity that had been going on for some years before that. Um, they didn't come up with the activity to fit the name. Did it have a name or an accepted name before? Philco? I there so I can tell no of, but of course I will have around in the forties and 50s and so on. Uh, I mean, it wasn't named nobody writing it down. No, I gave the quotes that I was able to find it in books and so on. And that's, that's the best I can do. I got in and 67 I talked to Dickey any, I talked to Karen who's dead now elk up, which is a shame because he was a nice guy. Uh, Bruce and, and Ted Johnstone got in in 61 I talked to Karen Anderson is still with us. And as far as I can tell from her, there were these, there's was this lovely typo. And she thought, well, here's this thing that people have been doing all these years. Let's apply this typo to what people are doing.
And it's the sort of thing that a brash young newcomer would do.
[snipped]
Write me a song. So he did. And she said, this is a filk song. I've just, you know, uh, Leejay may not have known what he wrote, what he was talking about when he titled Filk Song, but that's okay. I am using this word from now on to mean these things. And that was that. Uh, and right, exactly. Sure. I mean, it filled a hole in the, uh, in the world.
[snipped]
fandom has always had an, well, I shouldn't say always fandom in the fifties and sixties liked creative misspellings as way of defining itself as weird. That may have changed. I'm not sure that fans feel the same need to be weird that they do nowadays that they did back them. Uh, you had people talking then about beer, B, h, e, e r traveling giant, Jia and t as someone who would go cross coast to attend a convention. Uh, God, g, h, o, d, all sorts of, of creative spellings. Yes. Not to mention a creative pronouns like him or he shot him or in his hurt and there was a a great deal of that sort of the creative rewording of things. When I came in in the mid sixties, I haven't seen as much of that lately. I'm not sure that there's as much felt need for defining fandom as its own weird culture as there was back then.
So basically we're aging out and some days they might not be any family because everybody will have died. That is depressing. Okay. Which is why this kind of project is useful to do before we'll drop dead.