King Daevid MacKenzie

…14 years ago this morning The Wolfman passed on. This is what he sounded like in his best days, at XERB Tijuana (from a studio on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood)…

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…last Thursday, I mentioned there were two Michael Jackson records I really liked, “Got to be there” and “Corner of the sky.” I got a few emails asking what “Corner of the sky” sounded like, as “Got to be there” was apparently a big enough hit that it made the cut of the non-stop MJ mix on most music radio stations last Friday, but “Corner” got omitted. (”Corner” was actually credited to the Jackson 5ive, and only reached #12 in Cash Box and #18 in Billboard.) This is it…

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…and, finally, we come to the last of Orson’s commentaries for ABC, no doubt the end coming as a result of Southern ABC affiliates grinding down the resistance of network suits by threatening to drop their affiliations, usually in favour of the Mutual network…

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…as a result of the previous weeks’ broadcasts, the local movie theater in Aiken, South Carolina, which had originally scheduled two nights of screening the Welles-directed The Stranger (which was then in its first wave of theatrical release throughout the United States), banned the film from its screen. And Welles was further burned in effigy in Aiken at a demonstration of some sheet–erm, sort. Here, Orson not only reports the extent to which Aiken’s feathers were ruffled, but also the fact that his investigators have also found the actual location of the Woodard blinding, the nearby community of Batesburg…

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…further on the civil rights topic in general and the Isaac Woodard Jr. matter in specific…

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…into this little piece of Corwinesque prose on a matter relating to an early issue the United Nations was trying to deal with, Welles dropped a little reference to Sunday in Washington being as dead as Sunday in Zion, Illinois. Orson knew Zion well, as he was born in the next municipality due north, Kenosha, Wisconsin. I was born in Kenosha, too (so now you know where my Welles fascination is rooted), and once worked for a radio station located in Zion, and I can confirm that Sunday in Zion is still dead these six decades plus later. After that, Orson reads a letter of protest from the mayor of Aiken, South Carolina, relating to the Isaac Woodard Jr. affair that made up the previous week’s broadcast…

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…here’s the first of the commentaries that got Welles in trouble with the ABC brass, a series concerning the blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr., who had been discharged from the U.S. Army at Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, got on a Greyhound bus bound for his Goldsboro, North Carolina, home — but in Batesburg, South Carolina (the nearby Aiken is misidentified as the site in this broadcast), he became the victim of one Linwood Shull, Police Chief. ABC affiliates throughout the South promptly raised hell with the network’s New York offices, and, for a little while anyway, ABC stood behind the justly infuriated Welles…

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…on this one, Our Man Orson didn’t make the studio in time, so ABC tapped Don Hollenbeck to sit in. This is the same reporter who went on to work at CBS, at Ed Murrow’s request, and was played by Ray Wise in Good Night and Good Luck a few years back. Hollenbeck’s job here is relatively representative of the kind of commentary blocks that populated radio schedules throughout the ’30s and ’40s, the exception being that Hollenbeck was always a damned good writer and, his opening caveat notwithstanding, every bit as good as Welles was on this series…

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…in which Your Obedient Servant justifiably gripes about a picture of his then-wife, Rita Hayworth, being applied to the bomb being exploded that weekend on Bikini…

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…as a bonus of sorts this week, I’m sending y’all the airchecks I have of when Orson Welles tried doing the news commentary thing for ABC Radio back in ‘46. The first of these dates back to exactly 63 years ago tonight, and Orson’s concerns about the impending death of the Office of Price Administration, which FDR had set up to make sure companies didn’t start raping the wallets of John Q. and Jane Q. Public. I think this is also the one in which he makes a side acknowledgment of his having once been a columnist for the New York Post, which shows how radical (and regrettable) a change in editorial policy that paper has undertaken in the last six decades…

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…now here is one of my all-time favourite airchecks. When The Beatles showed up in Vancouver in August 1964, local radio station CKNW had their On The Town program (a local variation on the same idea as NBC Radio’s Monitor during the same period) cover both the press conference and the concert. The press conference is from an edited aircheck, while the concert coverage is from a linecheck of the direct signal from their remote FM transmitter back to the station…

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…this is probably my favourite piece of Paul Harvey’s work, a short commentary on the night of 22 November 1963, after President Kennedy’s assassination. You may want to note how Harvey’s closing comments seem to mirror Chet Huntley’s commentary on that night’s Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC-TV. And, for those of you in Texas and Oklahoma confused by the station identification of WBAP as being in Dallas on 570 kHz, WBAP and WFAA Radio (the latter of which is now KLIF, itself a station unrelated to the original KLIF on 1190) had been locked into a confusing FCC licensing arrangement that, by 1963, dictated that the two stations would shift frequencies, networks, cities of license and transmitting power – ABC in Dallas on 570 with 5000 watts, and NBC in Fort Worth on 820 with 50,000 watts – several times a day. Eventually, everyone involved grew so tired of the shifting, which led to a lot of announcers’ gaffes over the years, that in 1970 WBAP finally paid WFAA $3,500,000 to stay on the weaker 570 with ABC while they kept the stronger 820 with NBC. Of course, in te years since then, WFAA Radio was sold by the Dallas Morning News, while NBC’s radio network evaporated into oblivion and WBAP was eventually bought by ABC…

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…today, I’m letting y’all have some pieces of the work of Paul Harvey that I haven’t seen floating around the Web as frequently as I’d thought they’d be this week. First being a mischievous little edit someone did of a Harveycast’s Bose Wave Radio commercial and a story (or two) about drug issues. Yes, it was naughty, but I still find it funny…

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…the Christmas greeting records by four certain Liverpudlians seems to have brought a huge group of new subscribers from Europe to this neck of the cyberwoods; for them, and anyone else who’s been wondering where these things went, here’s the repost of the lo-fidelity monaural aircheck of my Technicolour Breakfast radio show over WSUW in Whitewater, Wisconsin, the week before Spring Break 2001. (If, by any chance, one of the new fans of this podcast happens to be Program Director of Big L - http://www.bigl.co.uk/ - I am available should you have any thoughts of importing me to my ancestral land.) If any of my new European buddies would care to drop me a line at thevoiceoflabor@hotmail.com I would most certainly appreciate it. Same goes for whoever it is in Beijing who loves the Phil Ochs tune from a few months back, too…

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…and, no, I never got around to sending this aircheck to Harry Shearer. I don’t think so, anyway. I’m still trying to find out if I have the VHS tape of the C-SPAN simulcast of Ralph Nader guesting on Chuck Harder’s radio show in the ’90s. I promised Harry that one and still can’t find the thing, and you know how I am about promises …

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…I’m gonna devote the 12 Days of Christmas to writing a film script. So have a happy holiday, whichever it may be (I have the candles on my menorah ready to light) and make it out of 2009 alive …

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…throughout their collective recording career with EMI, The Beatles recorded and released special Christmas greeting records for the members of their official fan club. As one of my holiday offerings of this year, here’s the entire set of ‘em, all the way from 1963 (pre-Invasion of America, recorded in October, while JFK was still alive) to 1969 (wherein Ringo Starr contributes a plug for his movie with Peter Sellers, The Magic Christian — it turns out the plug was more imaginative than the movie)…

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