Dumpster Vinyl Volume 17: Miss EBS (Emergency Broadcast System) from “The Big Sound” Series PS-5R-1

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.)

 

Dumpster Vinyl Volume 10: Thought for the Day (serious) from “The Big Sound” series

This is a disc full of platitudes from celebrities. Making jokes about empty platitudes is just too easy, and as pointless as the platitudes themselves.  I will say I was happy to hear Cesar Romero on here!

This disc is more interesting, though, in terms of what someone at radio station wrote on it.  For one, it indicates that this actually was used on the air.  Side 1 has a few notes written on the label.  For track 3, which was Jayne Mansfield, someone has circled her name and written “NO” out beside it.  We established before that the latest that some of these discs could have been recorded was Feb. 1963, based on Fabian saying he was still a teenager.  Given that Jayne Mansfield appeared topless in the film “Promises! Promises!” in August 1963  (stills from which appeared in Playboy a few months earlier), my guess is that the ensuing scandal (Hugh Hefner was arrested on obscenity charges; the film was banned in some cities) led this Georgian radio station employee to nix playing Mansfield’s “thought for the day” about unrealized potentialities.

Another couple of marks on the label – there are question marks beside the tracks for both Lionel Hampton and Lorne Greene.  Again, this was a radio station in Georgia, in 1963, and I have to imagine that Lionel Hampton must have sounded “too black” for somebody.  And here’s Lorne Greene’s thought:

“This is Lorne Greene with a thought for today: there never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be any race of people on the Earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.”

Again: Georgia.  Again: 1963. You figure it out.

It’s one thing to have found anti-communist rhetoric in the recordings themselves, another entirely to see the moralizing and racism pervasive in a specific time and place.