Tag: TM

If You Ain’t Heard Your Name By This Time, It’s Probably Cause It Just Don’t Rhyme!

My messy office at home

Helaine has declared it spring cleaning time. There’s no excuse for me to be a slacker. After 23 years in this house we’ve accumulated a lot of crap. Everything must go!

OK–not everything, but if I haven’t looked at it over the last decade (or possibly two) it needs to be tossed. Fair enough.

The anti-intuitive part of cleaning and straightening is the first step is to make things messier! I have two wall units. I pulled most everything to the floor.

That’s tough love cleaning. It becomes easier to toss than return!

From time-to-time a discovery is made. Like most archaeological digs, most of what was unearthed in my room was worthless. Not everything!

I have audio tapes. Reel-to-reel. No player. I couldn’t toss them. OK–I tossed a few unlabeled boxes.

There were audio cassettes too. That’s where this afternoon’s KGB aircheck came from.

Tonight there are audio CDs and three gems I have to share. Indulge me.

Part of what made radio so special was the production of it all. The premier production element was (and is) the jingle.

I’ve written about and linked to the work of Jon Wolfert. He is the King of Jingles. Irrefutable. He is the keeper of the flame.

Alas, none of what I’m posting is his. I hope he doesn’t think I’m cheating.

First up the PAMS copyright notice. A jingle company could have printed its copyright notice on the label. Not PAMS. They chose to sing theirs!

Second, the iconic news opening from the Johnny Mann produced package that ran on stations consulted by Bill Drake (and a few others). After the third note, just say (in your ballsiest voice), “It’s twenty minutes before three. I’m Byron MacGregor, CKLW 20-20 News.”

Finally, a jingle company’s tribute to itself and its clients. This is the TM Song. This blog entry’s title, “If You Ain’t Heard Your Name By This Time, It’s Probably Cause It Just Don’t Rhyme!” is included in the lyrics!

I love this stuff. Radio and I were very close.

Audio Tape – How Quaint

When we cleaned out the house last month, a lot had to be thrown away. There were certain items, however, where I drew the line. Specifically, I kept audio tapes. These little five and seven inch reels chronicle my time in radio.

I know I work in television, but in many ways I still maintain my undying love for radio. It’s where my broadcasting career started. In high school, it was the career I lusted after.

Radio has changed. What I found romantic has been beaten out of the medium by national chains and their bean counters. I still love radio.

Unfortunately, my audio tapes represent a dead storage format. I’m not sure audio tape recorders are made anymore. I don’t have one.

We used to have a very nice audio deck at the TV station. Where it is now is a mystery to me. Audio, like everything else, is recorded digitally, not on tape.

Luckily, my friend Rick still has two audio decks in his basement. One is in the studio, the other sadly sits in storage. Even the deck in the studio needed to be re-cabled before we could roll on the tapes.

They’re too nice to chuck, too dated to use.

First, we listened to an aircheck from the early 1970s. I was working at WBT in Charlotte, NC. 1110-WBT was a blowtorch – a 50,000 watt AM station that could be heard from Canada to Florida (and we had a jingle which claimed just that).

I thought I was a pretty good disk jockey then. Wrong. This aircheck will never see the light of day again.

There were a few things of note on the tape. Our hourly IDs were voiced by Johnny Olsen, who was the announcer on virtually every Goodson-Toddman game show of the era. Rick, who can recognize most contemporary VO guys, drew a blank.

Trust me, back then he was immediately recognizable.

This tape was meant to get me a job. In order to attract some attention, I opened with a medley of jingle singers trying to sing my name – and failing. That was actually pretty cool.

The other tapes included more recent airchecks, a few custom jingles and the “TM Song.” TM, a jingle company in Dallas, produced a sales presentation jingle, singing all their clients call letters.

There’s just no way I could have let these tapes become unplayable. And now, they’re stored digitally and protected from another era of electronic obsolescence.

Blogger’s note: I have worked on this audio for over an hour. How frustrating!

For some reason you sometimes have to click on the play button twice. I wish I knew why. Adding this reminder is much simpler than fixing it.