More Than FOUR HOURS of Gary Owens on Armed Forces Radio, 1967!

Today's post will excite some of you for hours on end. First, I will say this: 

In the early 1980's, I became of devotee of Gary Owens' magnificent radio show "Soundtrack of the '60's". The music was wonderful, and I became familiar with a lot of oldies I hadn't heard before, particularly those from 1960-63. But the real appeal of the show was Gary Owens' insane commentary and asides between the songs. I was, of course, familiar with him from "Laugh-In", but had known nothing else of him. These shows made me a huge fan, and I filled multiple cassettes with nothing but the looniness he filled his deejay patter with. 

So now, what I've discovered in my collection, is a series of recordings made in Saigon, presumably by a soldier, in 1967, of a show called "GO: The Music Guy Show", which aired on Armed Forces Radio. Here's the slip from inside the box: 

There are actually six shows on the tape, five of them complete (or nearly complete) and the last one interrupted when the tape runs out. There are brief gaps in a couple of the others, where the recording stopped for some reason. 

Looking at the inset card again, I think I have these dates wrong - the first three are probably the "Pre-Cassette (sic) tapes, which are undated, above, and the last three are probably the ones with dates. But I'm not going to start over again and rename and link them all.... Oh, and the last two were recorded in terrible quality - very bass-heavy and hard to listen to. I have done some equalizing to them. If that is not to your liking, let me know, and I'll post them in their original form and you can have a crack at 'em. 

Anyway....

The music heard on these shows is not appealing to me AT ALL. Those of you who enjoy the Beautiful Music offerings I've put up may find this right up your alley, although I suspect this material would have been more accurately termed "Easy Listening" in 1967. I did grin at the song "I Looked Back" by Perry Como, but Como was almost ALWAYS far better than anyone else in this god-forsaken genre of music. I didn't know Gary Owens, but I've always pictured him enjoying the top 40 hits of the day over this sort of mush, so I imagine him gritting his teeth through these sessions, but I could be wrong. 

But as I expected, the star of these tapes is Gary Owens, who is, just as on "Soundtrack of the '60s", hysterically funny in his asides and bits. He throws in some historical facts here and there, and each episode has a bit of puffery about citizenship, soldiering or similar. But then it's right back to the ridiculous names, silly voices and general ridiculousness. 

This tape is a real treasure.   

Download: Gary Owens - GO, The Music Guy Show - Armed Forces Radio, 8-5-67

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Download: Gary Owens - GO, The Music Guy Show - Armed Forces Radio, 8-12-67

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Download: Gary Owens - GO, The Music Guy Show - Armed Forces Radio, 8-19-67

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Download: Gary Owens - GO, The Music Guy Show - Armed Forces Radio, Unknown Date # 1

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Download: Gary Owens - GO, The Music Guy Show - Armed Forces Radio, Unknown Date # 2

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Download: Gary Owens - GO, The Music Guy Show - Armed Forces Radio, Unknown Date # 3 (Incomplete)

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You might also enjoy the writing on the inside of the tape box: 

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Well, it wouldn't be a full post without a "Very Short Reel", and so here are some parts of a Spelling Test which popped up on a small reel of tape. This tape only qualifies (and barely) as "Very Short", because a few minutes have been edited out of the middle of it. As you'll hear, a loud hum recurs a few times. At one point on the original tape (around 2:15) the hum finally overcame the recorded speech entirely, and so I cut that part out. As a result, the test jumps from the seventh word of the ten word test directly into the answers being given, starting with the spelling of the first word. 

This teacher is sort of cruel, I think. He had the children score each other's tests and then told them they were to read out loud the score of the person whose test each of them had reviewed. Ecch. 

Download: Unknown - Spelling Test 
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