An Interesting Mid-'70's L.A. Radio Station, More Right Wing Buffoonery, The Infinite Voyage, A High School Band, Ella and Steve, and Helping to Relax a Dick.

I'm going to start off this post with a tape I found featuring recordings from KNX in Los Angeles, made sometime near the end of July, 1974. Someone out there is going to be able to tell us the exact date, based on the status of the prison story and the Watergate story, as explained in the news (both stories went on for several days around that time). 

I found this station's format pretty remarkable - there's certainly been nothing quite like it here in Chicago during my 55+ years of radio listenership. Everyone has heard of Album Oriented Rock stations. This is an Album Oriented POP station. Some rock and roll slips through, but the majority of these tunes are from the softer end of the spectrum, and a not insignificant percentage of the tracks are album tracks rather than hit songs. 

According to Wikipedia, at some point in 1973, the station switched to "Gentle Country". This tape would appear to contradict that timing. 

Download: KNX, Los Angeles, Circa Late July, 1974

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Just over two years ago, I shared one tape from a collection of John Birch Society reels, containing an episode of a truly clueless (which should go without saying) mid '60's radio show called "Are You Listening, Uncle Sam", along with a bit of text for those not familiar with these loons. I have here compiled three more episodes of the same show for your perusal, heard back-to-back, belly-to-belly in one file. 

Download: The John Birch Society - Are You Listening, Uncle Sam? - Three Episodes Circa 1967

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I am not familiar with a late 1980's Public Broadcasting show called "The Infinite Voyage", which ran for five very short seasons. IMDB opines that it is "an exceptional series about of humanity, the stars, the dinosaurs, and other mysteries of the world and the universe" in their page about the show. I found a tape containing some of the music from the show.... somewhere, labeled "#3". Whether that's simply tape three or music from the third season or something else, I do not know. The show is available on YoutTube so maybe someone who wants to can find out exactly where this music came from. 

Download: WQED - Music From 'The Infinite Voyage' - # 3
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Now here's a man who is overly confident in his ability to provide the service he's been asked to provide. This is a relaxation tape - by all appearances a homemade relaxation tape done by an amateur. At least I hope he was an amateur, as his work here is... whatever the opposite of stellar might be. 

The man speaking, as you will hear, made this tape for, and provided this tape to, another man, named George Dick. And as you will hear, none of you are supposed to listen to this tape. None of you are supposed to use this tape, either. Do you hear me? NONE OF YOU. 

Download: Relaxation Tape to Be Use BY GEORGE DICK ONLY!

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And now, here is one of two tapes which came to me more or less stuck together. I'll share the other one in another post soon. 

What we have here is a high school band, playing a concert, most likely in 1972. Now, I was IN high school bands starting in 1974, and I must say, I was taken, and taken aback, by the percentage of tunes played by this band which were current and fairly recent pop hits. My bands never did that. And I have collected band albums over the years and have not found this sort of pop-hits-dominated material on any of them. I don't recognize all of the songs, but I suspect that even the one I don't recognize was a popular songs, rather than the standard band repertoire of the day. You'll hear "Morning Has Broken", "Jamaica Farewell", "El Condor Pasa" "Bridge Over Troubled Water", and a medley of Chicago hits. 

The brief news promo heard at the end of the tape, clearly from a completely different source, dates that part of the tape, at least, to April of 1972. 

Download: A High School Band Concert Featuring Lots of Popular Songs ("Wilson Band'), Possibly Circa 1972

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To close, a Very Short Reel. This is pretty neat, and I wish it was longer. It's a few fragments of an appearance by Ella Fitzgerald on what I assume is The Tonight Show during Steve Allen's period as the host. Ella's birthday was April 25th, so this is no doubt from that date, given the content, and the references (including the mentioning of Davy Crockett) seem to indicate that it is from 1955, although I wouldn't swear by that. But she had returned from a European tour that spring. 

The recording is sort of choppy, with conversations cut off and resuming at some later point, but there is a complete performance of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" 

Download: Fragment of Ella Fitzgerald with Steve Allen, circa April, 1955

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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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