Dumpster Vinyl Volume 15: Red Cross Public Service from “The Big Sound” series PS-3-R

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.

 

Dumpster Vinyl Volume 9: Celebrity Degrees from “The Big Sound” series

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.

Dumpster Vinyl Volume 8: “Go to Church” Public Service from “The Big Sound” series

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.

Dumpster Vinyl Volume 5: “Vote” Public Service from “The Big Sound” series

This is another disc in the “Big Sound” series, which so far has included the “Spinning the Magic Circle” song introductions.  I have no idea what else was included in the the Big Sound package.  It’ll be just one surprise after another as I dig through these boxes, one record at a time.

This one is called “Vote” Public Service, with a code number of PS-6R-1.  Both sides include music artists (many whom we’ve heard already on the Magic Circle tracks) as well as other celebrities (Ed Sullivan & Jerry Lewis, f’rexample) telling you to get out and vote. There’s also some jingles with a man and woman singing increasingly lame rhymes about voting on Side A.  The idea being, I suppose, that voting is preferable to listening to them rhyme “issue” with “miss you” one more time.  Side B also includes some intros to reporting on voting results at local, state, and national levels, and voting analyses; there’s also an all-purpose “political bulletin” intro, the kind of thing that would come in handy in case one of the candidates started beating up civilians before the polls closed.

This disc is a time capsule, but in a different way from that of the song introductions.  You get a sense of the time period through a number of elements here.  For one, when’s the last time you heard a jingle on the radio that wasn’t trying to sell you something?  There’s a line on one of the tracks about voting “for men” who were running.  Lastly, and this is my favorite, one of the jingles urges voting as a bulwark against “the Red elation to crush our nation”.  What the hell does that mean, anyway?  Was it ever the case that, if the percentage of the populace that voted got too low, there would be no elected leaders?  Did not voting leave the door open for a Russian guy to just waltz up to the Capitol Building, say “I see that there was only a 30% voter turnout, hand me the keys, please”?  Or would whichever American politician did win look at the low turnout, think “well, nobody really cares” and just call up the Kremlin and tell them they won?  I may never understand the 60s.

Dumpster Vinyl Volume 2: Who’s in the Magic Circle now? from “The Big Sound” series

Earlier this week I introduced you to Happy Day Radio and Captain Happy. Today I’m going to give you something a little different from the collection of LPs salvaged from a radio station dumpster. Here we have the first in a series (that is, the first I’ve digitized) of introductions to songs by various artists. The “line” of discs seems to be called “The BIG Sound”, though the introductions were made under the title “Spinning the Magic Circle”. Each of these tracks has the “Spinning the Magic Circle” intro, plus an introduction to a song by a singer.  There is no mention of any song title in any of these introductory tracks.  Morever, there is a production track with the “Magic Circle” business, and then space for, I assume, the radio station to record their own intros, or to use if they had a musician there are the station for an interview.  The tracks on side 1 of this disc have the “Magic Circle” intros before the artists talk; side 2 has just the artist introductions plus a production track of just the backing music.

Here’s the information from the paper disc sleeve (these have no cardboard sleeves):

Exclusive United States Distributor:
Richard H. Ullman, Inc.
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y.

Stars International Presents
The BIG Sound

Stars International and Richard H. Ullman, Inc. are divisions of the Peter Frank Organization, Inc., Hollywood/New York

There is no date on either the sleeve or the disc, but I can make a rough (rough!) guess based on a few clues:

1. These were found along with the Happy Day Radio discs, which themselves were produced in 1970.
2. This particular disc features artists who recorded music in the 1950s
3. One artist in particular hopes that their song will bring back good memories, and two others imply that the song has been around awhile–indicating that this might have been meant for an oldies station (although, I should add, one of the artists introduces a song as being a new recording)
4. Four of the artists (Kirby Stone, Frankie Vaughan, Pete King, and Steve Allen) refer to their songs as being from their “latest album”. I can confirm that Frankie Vaughan and Steve Allen were recording into the 60s (Stone and King are a little more difficult to research)

So I would have to guess early 1960s at the absolute earliest, and early 1970s at the latest.  Anyways, I hope you enjoy “Spinning the Magic Circle”!

P.S. Doesn’t Steve Allen sound incredibly bored by the whole thing?