I was planning on rolling out another set of Dumpster Vinyl posts this summer or fall, but this one’s just too good to sit on that long. Plus it involves me trying to sell you something, but we’ll get to that.
I wasn’t around for the original Cold War, and chances are you weren’t either. Long story short, USA and Russia weren’t friends, there was a lot of posturing and pissing-contest kind of stuff going on with building up stockpiles of nuclear arms. The good: all of this got man to the moon much sooner than it would have happened otherwise. The bad: living in fear of nuclear weapons. You probably are familiar with the 1951 cartoon “Duck and Cover” (or the South Park spoof of it). I can’t really say if there was still lingering fear of nuclear war by 1963, but I’m sure the previous year’s Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t help things.
At any rate, President Kennedy was worried enough about it to want a better way to get the word to everyone quickly if bombs were about to drop. So the CONELRAD system (which we’ve heard about before) was replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System, which I basically remember as being the least offensive thing that ever interrupted what I was watching on TV.
I can only imagine the tough task that these “Big Sound” writers had before them. Not only did they have to convey to listeners that there was a new Emergency Broadcast System, but also that it replaced the old CONELRAD system and they would have to retrain their radio-dialing-fingers to stop tuning in to 640 or 1240. Not only that, but they’d need to somehow obscure the “emergency” part of the whole deal. You don’t really want to make listeners face their own mortality between ads for used cars and “My Boyfriend’s Back”. So what did they come up with? Sex!
That’s right! Let’s personify the new system as a silken-voiced vixen! This is why I’m doing this series, folks: for hokey stuff like this that was once someone’s good idea. This edition of Dumpster Vinyl is probably my favorite so far–it even tops Tony Bennett telling you the temperature. Without further ado, I present to you… Miss EBS!
Oh, also, there’s also some celebrities saying their names. They probably didn’t even know it was being used for this.
And, regarding that YouTube video there: I did whip up some artwork of Miss EBS.
It looks awful here, because I’m using a free WordPress template that thinks nobody every wants to enlarge images. But it looks great, scout’s honor! If you want to buy a poster, you can buy a poster! You can buy a poster at Society 6 by clicking on this link here. Buy a poster.
(Do it now before Secret Service guys come tell me about copyright law in morse code, with their fists, on my torso. But honestly,
(Also, I’ve never sold a poster before, but I would recommend the smaller sizes to get nice, crisp art. Also, let me know if the prices are too high, or if you can recommend a different site to sell through. Also, buy a poster.)
Last week was pleas for volunteers for the Red Cross; this week the National Safety Council is here to tell you how to be safe on July 4th.
Nah, just kidding, they’re mostly here to scare you into driving safely (and not drinking while doing it) so that you don’t end up “a statistic”. I never understood that turn of phrase. For every recorded statistic, there is its silent statistical counterpart. Oh, X% of fatal accidents on July 4th involved at least one drinking driver? Then that means that 100-X% of fatal accidents didn’t. And then some Y percent of drivers didn’t have accidents at all. And then some Z percent of Americans celebrate at home on the 4th. There is absolutely no way to not be a statistic. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just say “don’t end up a dead guy”?
P.S. Don’t miss Jack Lemmon’s delightful little limerick about a kid losing an eye.
P.P.S. Very disappointed that Stan Freberg’s track about not drinking and driving did not include sound effects. Missed opportunity there, Stan.
Not much to say here, just a bunch of celebrities asking people to volunteer with the Red Cross. I guess I could make a joke about how Boris Karloff’s trying to scare people into learning first aid, because horror movies, or something. Or a joke about how badly Johnny Cash fails at making volunteering sound fun. But it’s sort of hard to work myself up to making jokes about the Red Cross. So here you go, this is another disc.
Oh man. This is the kind of treasure that I was hoping would be buried in all these boxes of LPs my uncle saved from the junkheap. This is a disc full of 10-second spots of celebrities telling you what the temperature is, backed by the most early-60s swingin’ kinda big band music you’ve ever heard. Plus a lot of them relay the temperature in rhyme! And Spike Jones gets to use cartoon sound effects!
Unlike the public service messages, this is a good backdrop against which the celebrities can make some light-hearted jokes about how hot it’s gotten. I love this kooky stuff! If you ever wanted to hear Tony Curtis tell you it’s 88 degrees, your dream is now fulfilled and you can die happy. Please leave me in your will.
I hope you all enjoy this as much as I did!
P.S. Disc MF-7 R in “The Big Sound” series; all the celebrities participating are in the tags for this post.
P.P.S. They had a lot of Connies back then, didn’t they?
P.P.P.S. Fabian’s track sounded like he was in a bathroom stall until halfway through, when I assume someone adjusted his mic or some levels or whatever. And one of Steve Allen’s deliveries is really weak. Makes me wonder how many takes some of these celebrities got.
I sure hope you all like being told what to do, because here’s another public service disc from “The Big Sound” series. This time, the celebrities try to scare you with the idea of hell in the mildest way possible. And despite the fact that some of them urge you to attend “the church of your choice”, there’s church bells at the end of the tracks. I kind of don’t think they use church bells at mosques.
Various things I noted:
Fabian mentions that he’s a teenager; assuming he’s telling the truth, this recording was made no later than February 5, 1963
Fabian is the one celebrity not to have church bells on his track. I picture his agent screaming over the phone at the Big Sound people: “Church bells would ruin his image! He’s a teenager, f’chrissake!”
Henry Mancini doesn’t call himself “Hank” this time, I assume because going to church is important
None of the celebrities mentions God specifically. I’m always interested to see media from this long ago that include proto-PC content
I’m not super-familiar with his work, but I’ve always assumed that Milton Berle worked blue sometimes. I wonder what “church” thought of that?
P.S. For those of you playing along at home, this disc is numbered PS-7-R.
Looks like it might be public service announcements for awhile. This week, we’re dispensing with the spectre of Mother Russia and her many bombs, but we are keeping the “keep the populace in line” angle. That’s right, everybody, Boris Karloff is here to tell those teens to stay in school!
Last week reminded me of Hawkwind “Sonic Attack”; this week’s entry reminds me of the Firesign Theatre. Namely, their third album, “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers”, one of the major story arcs of which was the 1940s/50s teenage movie featuring Porgie and Mudhead. I’ve loved the Firesign Theatre for years even with only a glancing, rudimentary knowledge of the media they were spoofing. But every now and then I turn up the types of source material they grew up on and I appreciate them just a little bit more. Principal Poop’s messages to the students of Morse Science High have definite echoes of the verbiage utilized on this disc.
And this disc gets us one step closer to dating the “Big Sound” series, because Bob Denver’s on here, doing penance for corrupting the youth of America with his stint as Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which ran from 1959 to 1963. Gilligan’s Island started in September of 1964. So I’m going to put this series of programming elements at early 1964 at the absolute latest. Sure, there’s an LP auction aggregator website listing discs from this series as being from 1963, but I am a librarian and I know that media objects are the primary source of information about themselves. So I’m going to just say that we’ve narrowed our range for The Big Sound to 1960-1964. That’s pretty good for only 6 discs in and being too lazy to triangulate the careers of all these celebrities!
And if any of you goddam teens are reading this, STAY THE FUCK IN SCHOOL, YOU LITTLE SHITS.
I’m basically just doing these in the order I’m taking them out of the boxes they’re in, so here’s another from the “Big Sound” series. I suppose we’ll eventually hear from Captain Happy again This disc has some of the same artists as previous entries in this series, which makes sense. I guess if you’ve already got Johnny Cash in the studio introducing his songs, you might as well get him to talk about civil defense. Here, we have got a bunch of celebrities telling people that “civil defense is common sense” and to look to a couple of radio frequencies for updates from CONELRAD. Yes, that’s right, what more comforting word could there be than CONELRAD?
This is one of those times in my life where I finally encounter the source material that spawned endless variations, parodies, and subversions. That’s not to say that this disc is what everyone heard, and that it was precisely what, say, Hawkwind were referencing in “Sonic Attack”. Rather, let this disc stand for every bit of polished 1960s media kindly telling people to be scared of what the Russians were going to do to us, but the government is here to protect you. CONELRAD will tell you which foods are safe to eat.
P.S. Was Huckleberry Hound meant to sound like Pat Boone?
P.P.S. Doesn’t the music make you think of Dragnet?
Yikes, has it been 6 months since I did one of these?
Here we have another in the “Spinning the Magic Circle” series of introductions to songs by the artists who recorded them. I’m happy to report that the ones on this disc are far less boring. Steve Allen even makes a joke this time!
The only names I recognize this time around are Connie Francis, Nelson Riddle, Della Reese, Spike Jones, and Steve Allen. Nelson Riddle was the guy who scored the old Batman TV show! And I’ve never listened to Spike Jones’s stuff, but I feel like I should now; he introduces his records by saying to get the kids out of the room.
This one might have been first in the series? I didn’t realize until comparing this with the other one, but they have some codes on them. This one is RAM-1-R; the one I did six months ago was RAM-2-R.
The CSU Review-Journal-Tribune-Constitution 