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 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?