More L.A. Radio, Jazz on Shortwave, Two Very Different Sales Presentations and The Edge of Night

First up, a quick shout out to commenter "Snoopy" for identifying that the "Reviewing Stand" episode I posted a few weeks ago is from March 23, 1964, based on the report on the death of Peter Lorre. He also made some funny observations about the WIND Top 1000 programming from a month ago. Oh, and Snoopy, that noise at 82:37 is just me being exactly who I was, much of the time, at that age. 

And thanks to both a commenter George and another, anonymous person for expressing their enjoying of my own pièce de résistance, the "Stop Playing the Tape" segment at the end of that same post. 

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I have made a decided effort, after receiving a few requests, to push to the head of the "listening" line the remaining few tapes I acquired featuring Los Angeles (well, technically in this case, Hollywood)  DJ's. This is not my typically practice, as I try my best to grab things at random to scan and see what's on them, but these are special tapes. The box for this tape claims that both of these (unfortunately brief) segments are from 1967, but one of them is clearly from 1968, given that the date is mentioned at one point - actually, I sort of took a stunned breath when I heard that date, given that it came shortly after a round-up of Robert Kennedy's political progress. May 8, 1968 - not quite a month before his death. 

Anyway, I find it interesting to note how much of these two segments are NOT made up of Top 40 music. I haven't used a stop watch or anything, but the duration of the ads and news reports seems at least to be equal to the amount of music hear here. I also got a kick out of the jingle at the very end of the Frank Terry segment, a clear ripoff of the Doublemint Gum jingle. How did they get away with THAT? 

Anyway, here are Frank Terry (on one side of the tape) and the legendary Robert W. Morgan (on the other), perhaps five months apart from each other, heard on KHJ. 

Download: Frank Terry on 93-KHJ, December, 1967

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Download: Robert W Morgan on 93-KHJ, May 8, 1968

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Due to my postings of Shortwave broadcasts, most of which have been from Australian stations, I've been in occasional contact with Thomas Witherspoon of The Shortwave Radio Audio Archive, and he has reposted several, if not all of my Shortwave postings. 

Here are two more, which I recently came across. These are both segments of episodes of "The Voice of America Jazz Hour", circa 1980, each of which features live recordings of Jazz performers in concert in Europe. I suspect that the recordings shared within this programming might be quite rare, if in fact these tapes were made for VOA and not generally broadcast or released elsewhere. However, it could also be that these performances are actually from released albums, or at least that these performances were later released. By some weird coincidence, these two segments are both 35-36 minutes, even though the show original ran an hour. 

The styles of jazz performance heard here are not at all similar the styles within jazz that 1I prefer, and I therefore know nothing about these performers nor have I tried to research them or these performances. But perhaps some of you out there have a taste for this, and I don't ever want to limit this site to things that I want to hear. If anyone has information to share about these recordings, by all means, do, and I'll pass it along. 

Download: The Voice of America Jazz Hour (over Shortwave), One Episode

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Download: The Voice of America Jazz Hour (over Shortwave), Another Episode

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The next two items both fit the definition of "Sales Pitches", but beyond that, they have absolutely nothing in common. The first is a slick piece of advertising, no doubt the soundtrack to a film, selling (the history of and) the purchase of a weapon of war as nothing less than the cost of maintaining freedom in that modern world (whenever that was - I'm guessing the late 1950's).

The weapon is the Lockheed F-104, and to hear the narrator tell it, it doesn't belong to Lockheed, it belongs to the free world, and to any free country who wants it. Price seems to be no object - somehow I doubt that. The sales pitch actually ends with several minutes extolling freedom - I don't think the product is mentioned in at least the last two minutes of this thing. A rather remarkable document. 

The opening minutes of this tape are in very poor sound quality, but this improves after about 90 seconds. 

Download: Unknown - "Wings of Freedom" - A Short Presentation on the Lockheed F-104

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From the other end of the "Sales" spectrum, here is a low-fi and low-energy presentation about all things file cabinet. 

Download: A Presentation on File Cabinet Sales, 1959

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And now, the "Very Short Reel" for this post. Here we have a couple who have apparently been enjoying (or at least watching) an episode of the seminal soap opera "The Edge of Night", catching, in this recording, the last few moments of the episode, then chatting (with the commercials turned low) about what to have for dinner (eggs, it would seem), then recording the closing credits of the show. Since the announcer mentions a change in scheduling for the following Monday, July 1st, it would seem that (based on the Wikipedia page for this show), that this recording was made on June 28th, 1963. 

Download: Meal Talk and 'The Edge of Night', June 28, 1963

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