The backstories of those favorite albums that still frame our memories
My oldest daughter Bella remembers that one day back in the early 1980s, when I was driving her and her friends to school, I mentioned that there was a need for a tape about middos. I don’t actually remember this at all, but apparently, we were listening to Uncle Moishy, and since the songs were mostly about mitzvos, it got me musing that there was room in the market for a tape about middos too, which are another important facet of our lives. Together with the kids in the carpool, we started to discuss which middos could be included.
I then sat down with Moshe Yess a”h, my partner for Volume I, and we wrote the story and the script. There are so many middos listed in Orchos Tzaddikim, so we knew that to do the subject justice, we needed many songs. Our idea was to create a story line that would be riveting, and then slowly, over a series of albums, cover the most important middos. We wanted each song to play in context of real situations children find themselves in, and we especially wanted them to reconsider their actions and do the right thing.
After the first album, The Marvelous Middos Machine 1 (Up, Up and Away) in 1984, Moshe Yess moved away from Toronto to Montreal, and I did the rest on my own. Back in the 1980s, Jewish music projects didn’t have the budgets they have today — there simply was very little money in the industry to hire people. If you came up with an idea and were producing it, you’d have to act and sing yourself. Marvelous Middos tapes were born on a shoestring budget: I was Shnooky, Moshe was Dr. Doomshtein, and Dr. Middos is the voice of Rabbi Shmuel Klein, a noted educator who also contributed ideas and songs to the series. Other talented friends from school and shul joined, and I gathered a small choir of boys from Yeshivas Eitz Chaim, the school I taught in at the time.
Dizzy’s “What’s my ketchup doing on the radio, Doc?”
Create a free account to keep reading.
