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.

 

 

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 3: Who’s in the Magic Circle Now? from “The Big Sound” series

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.

Anyway, here’s another Magic Circle disc. Enjoy!