Happy New Year, everyone,
First, I want to thank everyone who wrote with nice thoughts and positive feedback about my postings. I really appreciate it.
I want to address one comment to a poster named Bill, whose post did not contain a return e-mail address, and who asked a question about his potentially sharing with me selections from his own collection of reel tapes. Yes, Bill, I would love that. I don't like to share my e-mail address here, as it seems to end up causing me to receive an influx of spam, but you can find it at the end of this post, which I wrote about 15 years ago.
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Today, I have two recordings having to do with rumors - one about a man who was quite clearly dead being alive, and one about a man who was quite clearly alive being dead. (I also have a bonus clip, since the first two are so short.)
First up is a remarkable - and remarkably tasteless - recording from either radio or TV, I can't tell which. In it, a man who sounds a lot like Mike Wallace to these ears reads a short piece which had apparently started circulating at the time, regarding the various clues indicating that John F. Kennedy was not dead. You have to hear this thing to believe it - it is seriously obnoxious, or, as Capote described it in denying its authorship, "Grotesque".
Download: Possibly Mike Wallace - "Dead or Alive", Possibly by Truman Capote
Play:
Next up, an inane little 95 seconds out of the middle of a badly (choppy) recorded set of Top 40 radio recordings. In this short clip, we hear a unique take on Paul' McCartney's mid-'60's accident, leading to another possible reason why The Beatles might have added clues to Paul's supposed "death". Sheesh.
Download: DJ Speculates on the Paul McCartney Story
Play:
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And here, on an unrelated note, for those who might enjoy it, and without any real comment, is a recording someone, somewhere, on some date, made, of an 11-minute conversation between two people via walkie-talkies.
Download: Unknown - Walkie Talkie Conversation
Play:
The DJ commenting on the Paul McCartney rumor sounds a lot like Dick Clark to me. I tried looking for some sort of app that could identify celebrity voices, without any luck. :-(
ReplyDeleteIn March 1969, the alleged Capote "JFK Is Alive" letter was circulated to a number of New York and Chicago radio hosts and apparently more than one of them read the letter on the air. The only one I've found a specific reference for is a Chicago radio host at WIND and later WGN named Howard Miller (who I am totally unfamiliar with, though looking at his profile, he was a noted conservative talk radio host in the Chicago market for many decades). I do not know Miller's voice so it could be him but if multiple hosts were known to have read it, this could easily have been any one of them.
ReplyDeleteThe "walkie talkies" are actually CB radios based on the 3 letters + 4 numerals call signs read that sound like "KBC7843" and "KOF7411." Ham radio callsigns use an entirely different syntax. This recording is probably from the late 1960s to early 1970s before the whole "good buddy" craze took hold. The licensing requirement and call signs were dropped around 1983 after they had been largely ignored for years.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting to me is that for as popular as CB radio became during the 1970s - becoming the original "social media" - there are very few original recordings from that era circulating today.
I do not believe that this is Mike Wallace on that awful "JFK is Alive" stuff. I do not believe that Wallace would associate himself with this crap.
ReplyDeleteBTW, did you know that the Oakland Athletics in the middle 1970s broadcast their games one season, at the behest of owner Charlie Finley, on the citizens' band?
And that whole DJ thing about Paul is ridiculous. Exactly what kind of "research" would this mysterious DJ have done in the late 1960s? Flown to England himself and investigated a crash for which there was no public record at the time? What a load.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the McCartney tape goes, NO WAY is that Dick Clark. First of all, the speed is slightly slow. But more importantly, there are times that this man speaks with some Dick Clark nuances, so I can understand why some could believe it is Clark, but I say: NAY.
ReplyDeleteThanks Bob, for getting the year started off with more interesting recordings to provoke the memory flood!
ReplyDelete