New Year's Eve in July, Some Music Shows from 1958, and a Brief Mish-Mash

Greetings!  Today's offerings come from a far smaller number of tapes than usual, but within those tapes, primarily from the first one, there is a total of over five hours of material here. 

But first, a couple of comments. 

Reader/listener Kyle has again identified a site which contains a lot of information on the history of multitrack recordings, and the writer's history with sound on sound and later methods. It has a few home recording examples in the second part. You can find that site and those recordings here.

And then I also want to thank "Snoopy" and another anonymous poster, who both chimed in with appreciation for, and information about, respectively, the avant-garde music and the DJ tape by Lance Shepard, and their comments can be found at the end of that post, here. And Eric Paddon, who can always be counted on to offer up some interesting and relevant history on media recordings, added some thoughts to the Today Show tape I shared last time around. 

Thanks, everyone, as always!

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I was going to save the following tape for a New Year's Eve post, but I realized that I have too many countdown tapes to save all of them for one post. So instead of Christmas in July, this will be New Year's Even in July, complete with part of a nationally syndicated countdown of the top hits of 1980, as heard on WRBR in South Bend, Indiana.

Unfortunately, this is not the entire countdown, but it is the more than four hours of it that could fit on a 2400 foot tape at 3 3/4 IPS. Doubly unfortunately, most of the commercials are cut out. And triply unfortunately, this production, from some organization called Opus, and titled Opus 80, is an adult contemporary (or "soft rock") version of the top hits of 1980. So there is a LOT of dross among the occasional excellent record, more than even would have been the case in a general Top 40 look at the hits of 1980, and a lot of songs heard here would not have been anywhere near a top 100 from Billboard's main pop chart. 

To choose one example, Al Stewart's "Midnight Rocks" scores on this countdown - nationally, on the Billboard all format Hot 100, it got only to number 24 in its actual chart run, not nearly big enough to be one of the biggest 100 hits of the year.  There are a bunch of vacuous quotes and brief interviews throughout. 

Here's the side of that box: 

A small portion (about an hour) of this very countdown is available elsewhere online, but I couldn't find that anything further of it is out there, so I thought I'd share what I have. 

Download: Opus 80 - A Countdown of the Soft Rock Hits of 1980, 12-31-80 WRBR-FM, South Bend, IN - One Section.mp3

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Download: Opus 80 - A Countdown of the Soft Rock Hits of 1980, 12-31-80 WRBR-FM, South Bend, IN – Another Section.mp3

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And now, a step backwards of 22 years (or more) to a show centered around a singer named Patrice Munsel. This comes from the fellow named Charles that I wrote about at a bit more length in this post (sorry about linking to it twice). This is not from the same batch related to the composer that I wrote about there, it's from a previous set of tapes he sent me, which I am also glad to be able to share at this time. 

I'd never heard of Patrice Munsel, but you can read about her show here, and from there you can link and read about her. In short, she was an operatic soprano whose husband worked in TV and got her a show. As you'll hear, the show was a mix of Ms. Munsel singing on her own, guest performers and comedy sketches. As you can see on the tape box, below, this tape contains two such episodes from April of 1958, one of them loosely Easter themed. These are not the entire shows - commercials are cut, for one thing, but even accounting for a few minutes of commercials, the two episodes heard here add up to about 30 minutes, which was the actual length of a single show, at the time. So these are excerpts. 

Download: The Patrice Munsel Show - 4-4-58

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Download: The Patrice Munsel Show - 4-18-58

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On the other side of the tape, there are more excerpts, this time from "The Patti Page Show". Patti Page I have heard of and am familiar with. However, while the tape box says these recordings are from 1958 - and they could well have been made that year - the show actually aired in 1956 and 1957, with reruns airing a year later. These are recordings of those reruns. "Including the final show", with Patti's comments making clear that she did not expect it to be her final show. 

Download: The Patti Page Show, Excerpts from 1958 Including Final Show

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And now, a very short reel. The name of this file makes clear what is on it - a series of short recordings all heard back to back on the same reel of tape. What I tend to refer to as a "Hodgepodge". The most interesting and entertaining thing here is the brief segment of the brilliant Bob and Ray at the beginning - unfortunately the start of the routine is missing, but its easy enough to figure out what's going on. That recording is from NBC's "Monitor", on which Bob and Ray were regulars, for a time. The rest of the tape is sort of hit and miss - a bit of piano, a bit of a speech and an NBC promo. 

Download: Short Hodgepodge - Bob and Ray on "Monitor", Piano, Speech Segment, NBC Promo

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