Dumpster Vinyl Volume 7: “Stay in School” Public Service

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.

Dumpster Vinyl Volume 6: “Civil Defense” Public Service from “The Big Sound” series

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?