Talent Incorporated, 17 Longwood Rd., Quincy MA 02169
then: East Coast Record Productions, 299 Newport Ave., Wollaston MA 02170; 617-328-5057
currently: New World Publishing, 129 Pleasant St., Weymouth MA 02190; 781-331-8848

In running his Halmark label as a perverse parody of a legitimate record company, Ted Rosen went beyond the constrained thinking of other song-poem entrepreneurs. Lesser minds in similar positions sought to foster the illusion of legitimacy via the inclusion of, at minimum, the recording artist’s name amid the printed information on their labels. But Rosen ignored such trifling conventions, reserving the space instead for the listing of the song-poet’s home address, an appeal to vanity one step beyond that of his competitors. You might equally think that a company that operated entirely through the mails[1] might prefer to publish its own postal address on the labels. Bah! There again, Ted Rosen scoffed.

And only the most bourgeois of businesses would ruffle its feathers over such a piffling detail as the consistent, not to mention correct, orthography of its own name. No, it takes a true maverick like Ted Rosen to spell his company’s name one way (”Halmark”) on most of its releases, and another (”Hallmark”) on the rest.

Then again, perhaps it wasn’t quite originality of thought that drove the man; perhaps, instead, it was something more basic and less noble, something such as audacity, or inattention, or miserliness. Whatever the operative trait was, Rosen bore it with abundance, and deployed it with obvious gusto.

He founded Halmark in 1967, by which time he’d already been in the song-poem game for some time. Before Halmark he’d had the Grand label and the production companies Talent Incorporated and Chapel Recording, the latter two of which remain active to this day. Even in this early phase of his career Rosen was already using “tracks.” Back before even his time, in the days when printed music ruled the song-poem roost, composers were notorious for their use of readymade templates, pouring out melodies that were either tauntingly similar to those of well-known songs or obvious recyclings of the composer’s own stock. Rosen helped usher this practice into the recording era. By endlessly reusing tapes of prerecorded instrumental beds, adding only a fresh (to apply the word loosely) lead vocal for each new submission, he found a novel way to outplumb the depths of his industry’s infamous meagerness. Halmark wasn’t the only company to regularly recycle tracks, but the others that did it at least recycled their own. Halmark instead bought discarded instrumentals on the cheap from other studios.