"Buried Under the Fecundity of His Own Creations":
Reconsidering the Recording Bans of the American Federation of Musicians, 1942-1944 and 1948

By Tim Anderson

The power to record sound was one of the three essential powers of the gods in ancient societies, along with that of making war and causing famine.

--Jacques Attali

For most Americans the idea that a recording could be treated as anything but a musician's ally stands at odds with our conventional understanding. This is despite the fact that the United States witnessed two national recording bans and a number of local resistances where musicians have argued that the inability to control recording technologies was the key issue of their professional lives. Most recent was the 1989 struggle between local Las Vegas musicians and the casinos and showrooms for which many were employed. In an effort to cut costs from their shows, management turned to recorded musical backdrops in an effort to displace musical laborers and shore up the bottom line. Of course, since those musicians who were necessary to the creation were the very ones whose jobs are no longer needed, these stockpiled reserves of their labors were correctly identied as the very source of their own displacement. As Mark Massagli, then-president of the local Las Vegas American Federation of Musicians (AFM) chapter, noted with bitter irony, "If tape is used [as a musical backdrop], the musicians get stabbed with their own knife."