WARNING: ANATOMICALLY-CORRECT LANGUAGE

…I forget exactly how I got these; I want to say I found them on a web site somewhere but can’t recall exactly which one. Anyway, these are a set of airchecks of several nights on CB radio channels in the Milwaukee area in the last week of December 1970 into the third week of January 1971. There’s a whole lotta arguing here, involving such hot topics of the time as the length of hair on men and the “race” of others (there are some racist epithets to be found herein, and I think Milwaukee civil rights activist Fr. James Groppi is mentioned in here somewhere). It is not by any means easy listening; not only is there pro wrestling-style heat in some of the exchanges, there’s also the common static and squealing of overlapping signals that made CB radio monitoring annoying at times. But as a documentation of Average Joes and Janes in Cream City 37 years ago, it’s hard to beat…

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…’twas on October 1, 1962, that Johnny Carson started his employment by his third television network. First had come CBS in 1955, with a half-hour sketch comedy show that lasted all of 39 weeks, then a midday Godfreyesque hodgepodge to burn off the remaining weeks on that network’s contract with him. After that, ABC came calling with a daytime game show, Who Do You Trust?, which Johnny successfully hosted for four and a half years. Then NBC noticed Jack Paar’s notice to quit The Tonight Show and the third network made Carson an offer to take over the late shift come Autumn. Carson took the offer and stayed roughly five months short of 30 years. These are two examples of what Johnny did best — host the big, BIG names (ex-Veep Dick Nixon) and those whose name you never remembered the next day but you sure recall what they did (John Twomey, a “manualist” — playing flatulence-like music by only using his own dampened hands). It can be argued that John Philip Sousa spun like a lathe in his grave at both guests…

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…since quite a few of you liked the 1961 Mort Sahl offering a few days back, here’s another, and even rarer, piece of Sahl to consume, crackly vinyl and all. It’s his earliest album, recorded in 1955 (but not released until around ‘58, and then quickly withdrawn from distribution), recorded at the halfway point at a Dave Brubeck concert (Mort was a pal of Paul Desmond’s at the time). I’m still wondering how all those lab animals deserved all those free Luckies, too…

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…this one is among the oddest items in my collection, if only because a hit-making record company actually thought it would be a hit. This piece actually started out as a regular bit in Redd Foxx’s standup act throughout the ’60s, and as such it was specifically targeted by Foxx at the segregationist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Circa 1969, Andre Williams, the legendary Mister Rhythm (as Foxx himself dubbed him), produced this version in a Gospel setting. This time he had the performer, Ray Scott (in no way to be confused with the Green Bay Packers play-by-play announcer of the same name), refer merely to “The Governor.” Of course, there have been other Governors who resemble this target — Arkansas’ Orval Faubus, Mississippi’s Ross Barnett, Georgia’s Lester Maddox, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond — so I suspect Williams thought leaving the dedication open like that might give the thing timelessness. Anyway, it was put out as a 45 and quickly sank like a stone on the charts, as the post-MLK market didn’t have the stomach for the red meat Williams and Scott were feeding it. I found a copy of the 45 about 15 years ago, and on my oldies show at WSUW Whitewater, Wisconsin, I began playing it — where it became a listener request favourite, somewhat to my surprise. (That’s the reason for the cue burn you hear at the beginning.) Who knows, perhaps Quentin Tarantino will include it in an upcoming movie sometime, or The White Stripes might make their own version of it (although, without a rhythm part, I don’t know exactly what Jack would have Meg contribute to any such recording)…

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…I’m posting this one because it was about the “bank holiday” ordered by President Roosevelt in his first days in office, and even though it doesn’t address the deregulation farce that led the United States to the situation we’re in now, it is still light years ahead of anything I’ve heard in the last few days from, as Will Rogers called them, our hired help in Washington in terms of clarity and capacity to reassure the listener that things aren’t going to fall apart in America…

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…and here is some standup comedy pointed at the administration of the winner of the debates above. Mort Sahl had a huge recording career in the 1950s, frequently commenting on the Eisenhower Administrations; here, recorded in the Spring of 1961, is his first crack at Jack Kennedy’s shop. Curiously, I don’t think he had nearly the same amount of record releases after Ike that he did during Ike…

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…it was 35 years ago tonight that Jim Croce and Maury Muehleisen, two of the most uniquely gifted folk musicians America ever produced, were killed in a Louisiana plane crash. Croce was a great storyteller, and not merely in musical terms; the audio file here has Jim introducing a couple of his songs (with a quick bit of Muehleisen’s voice just under halfway through)…

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…not nearly as long as We Hold These Truths or On a Note of Triumph, or even Between Americans, but this is among the finest pieces that Norman Corwin ever created or Orson Welles ever uttered near a microphone. Don’t believe me? Then, the next time you see it, I defy you to think of the phrase “the moth is in love with a 60-watt bulb”…

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…after all, I did name her after the tune …

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