Danny Thomas at Tahoe, A Young Family at Home, One More Set from Antony Bilbow, Even More Hollister, Badly Recorded Top 40 and the New Lux Lotion Bar

I hoped to have this up in a more timely fashion, but I was gone for a weekend and then extremely sick for part of the following week. I hope to have yet another post up before the end of the month. But this one was sort of thrown together. I hope you find it worthwhile. 

First up, and perhaps of interest to at least some of the media-sound-collectors out there, is a recording of an episode of "The Danny Thomas Hour", which ran during the 1967-68 season on NBC and was apparently not much of a success. Each week was a different format - drama, variety, comedy - and on 2/28/68, the host presented a hour of his live act, recorded in Lake Tahoe. There does not seem to be any recording of this out there, audio or video - if there is, I didn't come across it. 

Personally, this sort of thing drives me up the wall, and I fail to understand how it was ever popular. But popular it was, and I know there are people who still love this stuff. And objectively, I recognize that this is by far the most "collectable" thing I'm sharing today, and probably recently, so it deserves the lead-off spot. And so, for those who will like it, here is that tape: 

Download: Danny Thomas at Tahoe - NBC-TV, 2-28-68

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I have, on two previous occasions, shared portions of a tape I found which contains four tracks of a man named Antony Bilbow reading stories on the BBC. Click on his name to see the previous two offerings, as well as this one. At least a few people asked to have more of these, and today I am offering up the third of the four channels on that tape. 

Download: Antony Bilbow - Stories on English Radio, Volume 3

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As I often say here, recordings Top 40 Radio from its golden era are considered precious to many folks out there, and I count myself in that number. In my last post, I featured part of a countdown show from WILS, Lansing. Now I have something considerably less wonderful, from the same collection. Both shares were from three inch wonders, tapes which contain far more recording than one might think such a small item could hold. The problem with today's offering is the resolutely awful sound quality, and again, there is only some of the deejay patter, making these recordings less valuable than many others. Oh, and like many of the machines which were designed to record ONLY those three inch reels, the recording speed was extremely variable, depending on how much tape was left on each side of the reels. 

Unlike the previous offering, this is not all from one broadcast, although there are some countdown items here. And not everything here is from WILS, but most of it is, and I can't make out for certain what the other station(s) heard is/are. Oh, and the last few minutes heard here are from yet another three inch reel that came from the same collection, one which only had a few minutes of recording on it. 

Download: WILS, Lansing, Michigan, Circa Late 1964 and Early 1965

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And now it's David Hollister Time again. I don't want to repeat myself each time I bring up his name, but the explanation for these tapes is at the start of this post, and this link will take you to all of the Hollister tapes I've shared so far. 

Today's Hollister tape has two separate sections. The first part seems to be a rehearsal for something called AORN show, from 3/2/76. I don't know what that was. It starts with multiple takes of a brief parody of "Love Will Keep Us Together". The rest is some sort of short play, performed largely straight through, with a few breakdowns. I will let you discover whatever you find to be its highlights/lowlights/charms, depending on your opinion of the material. 

Download: David Hollister and Others - AORN Show, 3-2-76

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The remainder of the tape has a pianist - presumably the composer - and a singer, running through multiple takes of a song called "Footsteps in the Snow". This is a very Broadway-esque number, as some of the other material on these tapes has been, and as such, is just as much not my thing as that Danny Thomas material up there. But your mileage may vary. 

Download: David Hollister and Singer - Rehearsing 'Footsteps in the Snow' - 6-2-76

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Now here's something I absolutely love - worth 1000 Danny Thomas stage shows. I've called this "A Young Family At Home", and it is simply about 34 minutes with a loving family, enjoying being together. The child heard the most during this tape is remarkably well spoken for someone who seems to be extremely young, and the whole thing is just one charming moment after another. The tape ends oddly, with a short, unrelated recording of something that many of us used to interact with from time to time, but which I'm sure no longer exists. 

Download: A Young Family At Home

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Time for a "Very Short Reel". This is simple enough - some folks spending a few minutes making a commercial for Lux Lotion Bar

Download: Making a Lux Lotion Bar Commercial

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A 1963 College Jazz Festival, Interviewing the Family, Top 40 Radio in 1966, Some Odd Rehearsals, A One Man Hodgepodge, The Rotations of Mars and Earth, and Some Pasta!

 Howdy, 

First, I'd like to feature a couple of comments from recent posts. A frequent poster who goes by "Snoopy" made some fun comments on this post, and specifically the echoey Chicago radio segment, and also asked "What the HELL is going on?!" at the 24:24 mark. I actually meant to mention this - there was some a cappella singing at a different speed on the flip side of this tape, which somehow bled through, backwards, for the last 25 seconds or so of that radio segment. 

And as I was sure he would, Eric Paddon helpfully cleared up any confusion about the baseball recording I posted last time around. Silly me, I didn't even check to see if the dominant game heard therein was the same game as any of the previous offerings. It turns out that it was. How this game ended up on two different reels, with the end AND start of this game on one reel and the rest on another, is a real mystery. Here's what he wrote: 

Back on March 18, you had posted the Bottom 6th to beginning of the Top 8th of this same 7/3/62 game and the beginning of this post picks up exactly where the previous one left off with Jim Landis batting in the Top 8th for the first two and a half minutes. Then it gets inaudible for the next few minutes but then around the five minute mark what we're hearing when the announcer mentions Joe Azcue is batting is the Kansas City A's-Detroit Tigers first game of a doubleheader from August 1 ,1962 with George Kell announcing on the Tiger network but the July 3, 1962 game is still bleeding through at intervals during that but it is predominantly the August 1, 1962 A's-Tigers game that dominates what's audible for the next ten minutes (faintly) and then suddenly we're back in July 3, 1962 starting at the end of the Top 2nd and that continues in good quality up to the Bottom 6th when the previous recording began (except for a couple bizarre sequences where someone is doing a test at slow speed over the recording.)

I have stitched together a single file of all material from this game in the right sequence: 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6krt6umaas2hy1vmcq8qq/1962-07-03-White-Sox-vs.-Tigers-WCFL-Partial.mp3?rlkey=21niwfuyrayhhtnq6u0oo7qg0&st=hcv31y46&dl=0

Thanks!

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I'm going to start with a real (reel) winner this time, a lengthy recording of a broadcast of "The 1963 Villanova Intercollegiate Jazz Festival". This was the third such festival, and aside from the announcer talking over a few bits of performances, it's great stuff. The legendary John Hammond even stops by for an interview. I don't think any more needs to be said. 

Download: The Third Annual Villanova Intercollegiate Jazz Festival, 1963

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Next, something else very special! A long-time reader/listener name Bram B. offered up a three inch reel of tape which had come with a vintage Westinghouse machine (the type that could only record three inch reels, and which looked, to me, more like a sewing machine!) that he had bought some time earlier. The machine did not work correctly, just enough for him to recognize the recording as a home recording of a man and some children. So he sent the tape to me! 

One side of the tape was country music recorded off of records - most of it sounded (to me) like Jim Reeves, which is always a treat. But the real worthwhile stuff was on the other side. 

As Bram first described to me - and I agree - it sounds like a family patriarch, perhaps a visiting grandfather, interviewing some young children. And it is mostly delightful - a segment in which he works way too hard to get one shy child to talk is the only blemish here. The rest is very enjoyable and I wish there was more of it. The supposition he expresses at one point that one of the children would like Batman and Robin seems to date this to the brief but intense heyday of the ABC TV show of 1966-68, so this likely a dates from around that time. 

THANKS, BRAM!

Download: A Man Interviews Some Young Family Members, circa mid-1960's

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I do not know the source of this next tape, although maybe someone out there can make some sense out of this tape box: 

The tape contains a brief lecture - source unknown - about Earth and Mars, the relative speed of each and, essentially, how a contest between the two of them around the sun might be described. That's about all I think I have to say: 

Download: Unknown - A Short Talk On the Rotations of Earth and Mars

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Tapes from the golden age of Top 40 Radio are always welcomed by many people here and on other sites, so I'm sharing this one despite it's multiple flaws. It is poorly recorded, and the recordist chose to edit out commercials and some of the deejay patter. Given that those two things are often the most valuable parts of such tapes, this is, as I said, a lesser example of such a recording. However, it is a portion of a station's top hits countdown show, and some of what the deejay had to say is still there. 

The station is WILS, Lansing, MI, and, fairly remarkably, I found an online posting of the very survey being counted down here (although it starts with a "flashback" to 1964). The date on the survey is April 6, 1966, and it can be seen here. I was quite taken with the fact that there was a local hit, presented as up-and-coming on this show, by a local group called The Plagues. Perhaps others are familiar with this group - they are well known enough to have their own Wikipedia page - but if you'd asked me if a group named after a deadly disease would have had a hit song in 1966, I'd have said that would be very unlikely. 

Download: WILS, Lansing Michigan - Portions of the Top 20 Countdown for 4-6-66

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I've titled this next segment "A One Man Hodgepodge", and I can think of no better name for it (even though a woman joins the man at the end of the segment). Over the course of these 19 minutes, you'll hear a bit of some sort of reedy instrument, some religious songs and readings (including a bit of Revelation), a bit of a fake newscast, and some guitar accompanying wordless vocalizing. At certain points, one of those categories of recording repeatedly interrupts one or more of the other categories listed. 

Download: A One Man Hodgepodge

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And now, the "Acetate of the Month". This is a pretty early Acetate, dated July of 1939, and while it initially sounds like it contains a quiz show, but after a single question, it turns out to contain ads for Fleet-Wing Gasoline, a company I've never heard of. There are three commercials in all, each containing a tricky question, which then segues into an ad for this product. 

Here's the label: 

Note that already, by 1933, radio stations and others who needed playable material were using the 33 1/3 RPM speed, a decade and a half before it was introduced for commercially available products. 

There are many and varied photos of and comments about Fleet-Wing gas stations and products, and one poster to a Fleet-Wing thread out there says the company existed from 1928 to 1970. I've never heard of them before, myself. 

Download: General Broadcasting System 12 inch Acetate - Three Fleet-Wing Announcements, 7-20-39

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And now for a "Very Short Reel". I am very happy to announce that I recently bought a small box full of three and five inch tapes, most of which contain radio ads created by the Needham Harper Steers agency, and I will be digging into this pile of tapes from time to time in upcoming posts. Here's the tape which was on top of the rest when I opened the box. There's no date on this tape (or on any of them, I don't think). It contains three ads for Mueller's Pasta, another company I've never heard of. This company, however, still exists, and according to their website, the nearest store to me carrying their products is over 60 miles away from my home. 

Download: Needham Harper Steers - Three Mueller's Pasta Ads

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Five Segments of Music on the Radio, 1965-1973

This is going to be a fairly simple post. I decided to gather together some of the tapes I've listened to lately which contained radio programming which primarily featured music and share them here, one after the other, with my typical sort of comments in between. There is AM and FM reflected here, Country, Top 40, Christian and what later became known as "Music of Your Life". As indicated above, the recordings on the tapes are each from somewhere between 1965 and 1973. And between them, there is just under six hours of radio recordings here. 

I'll start with a tape of just over 20 minutes, as heard on an unidentified station in 1967. I actually think it's a bit odd that the DJ never, in the course of this recording, mentions the station call letters - unless I somehow missed it. That's almost unheard of. I'd say that perhaps this was a syndicated show, but then, at the start of the segment, the DJ mentions that he's on tape today, indicating that he was usually broadcasting live. I do enjoy the small segment where he indicates that his upcoming scheduled live appearance has been cancelled, seemingly because not enough people showed up to the last one!

Download: Country Music Radio - Unidentified Station, 1967

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Staying in roughly the same time period - in this case, it's 1966 - we flip down the dial to WILS, a powerhouse Top 40 station in Lansing, Michigan. This 45 minute blast from that epochal year is not the ideal aircheck - the sound quality is poor, very poor at times, and whoever was recording the songs did not always record the DJ patter. 

This is not the case of a tape which has methodically had the DJ chatter eliminated - I have plenty of those and they are not terribly interesting, aside from hearing what regional hits there were in a given time and place - but it's not a straight-through recording of the station, either. There are lots of edits, more in some sections than others. But I found it highly enjoyable anyway, if not as enjoyable as some other tapes of this sort. And I hope you'll enjoy it, too. 

Download: WILS-AM, Lansing, MI, Spring, 1966

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Now for the longest segment here, nearly two and a half hours, which I believe is actually segments of multiple broadcasts. The station was WYON, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just about 70 miles down the road from WILS in Lansing (above), and this is the station that had the early version of "Music Of Your Life", although I don't think that format ever featured the likes of John McCormack, or some of the other artists heard here. 

As you'll hear, this programming, in this case an evening show called "Afterglow - Music Just For You", featured a pretty wide variety of popular music, even though things such as Rock and Roll and R&B/Soul were completely avoided, and very little Country Music was heard, either. 

That sounds limiting, and yeah, sure it is, in a way. But on the other hand, here we have The Clancy Brothers, Lawrence Welk, Lobo, The Mills Brothers, Jan Garber Andy Stewart (a double play of Andy Stewart!), Perry Como, Harry James, Lenny Dee and Big Tiny Little, among dozens of others. 

This one is also somewhat choppy - ads and newscasts are cut, and plenty of times DJ patter is cut as well, but in other spots, the broadcast is heard for several minutes uninterrupted. Well, we can't have everything. 

Download: WYON, Grand Rapids, MI, Circa 1973 - "Afterglow - Music Just For You"

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Moving Way Out West, two years earlier, and into another type of broadcast altogether, here we have a show which aired on KHOF, Los Angeles, on November 11, 1971. At that time, the station was apparently owned by FBN - "The Faith Based Network", and here we have 35 minutes of their morning programming. Commercials and other things which aired that morning appear to have been edited out - there are short gaps between the segments (which I cut down to the merest of seconds here). It was Veteran's Day, of course, but why would that be mentioned within a religious show, huh? I'm also puzzled by what makes trumpet solos religious (I know, I know, the original song being played is a religious song, but still...). Otherwise, I have nothing else to say. 

Oh, yes I do. This came to me on one o' them big ten inch reels, complete with a sheet indicating what was on the tape. That's reproduced, below. I also have at least two more episodes of this show, from that same time period, if anyone is interested. Actually, I have them even if no one is interested. 

Download: Religious Music Programming from KHOF, Los Angeles (FBN - The Faith Based Network), 11-11-71

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Finally - and perhaps this is the most fun of the five tapes - here are some recordings made in Pittsburgh in 1965. There are two stations reflected here, both featuring the Country Music of the day, and I caught the names of Roy Scott on WPIT (730 AM), and Bobby Hudson on WEEP (1080 AM). Wikipedia tells us that WPIT was, and still is, a Christian radio outlet, but clearly, in 1965, anyway, they offered Country Music for four hours every afternoon, and horse racing coverage (and perhaps other sports) in the evening. WEEP, which is now WNNL, began playing Country Music that very year, 1965, and became a powerhouse in the format. 

These segments are a bit more cohesive than the tapes shared above, but commercials, news and some chatter has still be excised out by whoever recorded this material. There is enough sports reporting that the tape can be narrowed down to September of 1965 (Joe Torre was suspended for bumping an umpire). And there are a couple of magical jingles here. The simple one at 37:30 for the weather report is one of my favorite jingles ever. 

This is right about the point that the trends in Country Music starts losing me - I'm much more a fan of the 1950's sounds than the dominant styles heard here - with the exception of the phenomenal Roger Miller, who is not heard here. Even still, I found this hugely entertaining. Enjoy!

Download: Country Radio, September, 1965 Roy Scott on WPIT and Bobby Hudson on WEEP

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Very short reels will return next time!