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"Big Announcement" Regarding John and Ken on Monday

TheBigA said:
My sense was that before the advent of those short jingles, the intent was to replicate the old time radio sound when stations had in-house bands that would create transition music.
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I did my first jingles in 1964, using American tracks recorded in Mexico. All we did was change the station name from the "demo package" of "7-90 Radio Éxitos" to "57 Radio Musical" while keeping the phrases that the Mexico City station had in the package for "good morning" or "weekend" or "Number One" and the like.

Of course, the package had originally been done the year before for WABC and a syndicated version was done offered. The dial position of course had the melody of "I love Manhattan" which was meaningless elsewhere, but catchy none the less.

We re-did the jingles for the Quito station each time WABC did a new package... even the "a go-go" set!
 
radiofan2023 said:
This video of the Johnny Mann Singers doing a jingle session is great:
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This is, of course, not typical. These are custom jingles for a huge station. Normally the singers have done the same tracks but with different calls/names and hear tracks (often just the rhythm) in the headphones and sing the lyrics.

What is not clear is that very often the same singers will do the same jingles in several tracks which, Phil Spector style, will be mixed together in the final version.

And the final seconds of the video have the PD and the Dirrector / Arranger together! I've never done jingles without being present, and have done quite a lot of custom jingles too... often a 6 to 8 hour session for a large package. In the 80's, such a package for a smaller market (top 20 but not top 10) might have run $12,000.
 
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DavidEduardo said:
I've never heard of a jingle being "redone" in a different style.

(A re-sing on the same tracks might be done if something was not sung right... but the tracks never changed)

A station hears demos (tapes way back when), CDs later and now online. They pick the package a jingle company has open in your market that they like.

Jingles are done in syndicated form except for major market custom work. The jingle company has packages with prerecorded tracks for K and W and different call letter or name syllable counts. You buy the package and they fit your calls or name into the existing track that is the best fit.

The instrumental track is not done custom for the vast majority of packages. You pick the package, and adapt the track lyrics to your station name and slogans and airstaff or program names.
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I remember, in the 70s, TM offered two prices for at least one of their jingle packages (The Winning Score?). The higher price was if they were sung in Dallas. You could get a break if you went with L.A.

As a young PD, that made no sense to me the first time I heard it, but the thing was that Tom Merriman had a core group of singers in Dallas who just had..."it". This really solid vocal blend.

The L.A. voices-for-hire were good. They just didn't have "it". You got the backing tracks, you got your calls sung, but it was just missing...."it".

I actually knew a couple of PDs with far more generous budgets than I had who bought the L.A. package and ended up on a plane to Dallas for the re-sings.

Not sure how long TM offered both.
 
DavidEduardo said:
This is, of course, not typical. These are custom jingles for a huge station. Normally the singers have done the same tracks but with different calls/names and hear tracks (often just the rhythm) in the headphones and sing the lyrics.

What is not clear is that very often the same singers will do the same jingles in several tracks which, Phil Spector style, will be mixed together in the final version.

And the final seconds of the video have the PD and the Dirrector / Arranger together! I've never done jingles without being present, and have done quite a lot of custom jingles too... often a 6 to 8 hour session for a large package. In the 80's, such a package for a smaller market (top 20 but not top 10) might have run $12,000.
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Thanks for explaining all that, David!
 
Weiserguy said:
Besides, Bob Edwards was, in the 70s, 80s and 90s, host of NPR's All Things Considered, and more famously, Morning Edition.
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I got a good laugh out of that goof, imagining Bob Edwards trying to get a bunch of newlyweds on television to talk about "making whoopee".
 
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michael hagerty said:
I remember, in the 70s, TM offered two prices for at least one of their jingle packages (The Winning Score?). The higher price was if they were sung in Dallas. You could get a break if you went with L.A.

As a young PD, that made no sense to me the first time I heard it, but the thing was that Tom Merriman had a core group of singers in Dallas who just had..."it". This really solid vocal blend.

The L.A. voices-for-hire were good. They just didn't have "it". You got the backing tracks, you got your calls sung, but it was just missing...."it".

I actually knew a couple of PDs with far more generous budgets than I had who bought the L.A. package and ended up on a plane to Dallas for the re-sings.

Not sure how long TM offered both.
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I was not aware of that. When I did some custom jingles for Puerto Rico, JAM and I went to LA as there were singers with more experience in Spanish. They turned out very very well. And there is something about doing jingles in a studio that faces Hollywood High on Vine a block or so from Hollywood Boulevard.
 
DavidEduardo said:
I was not aware of that. When I did some custom jingles for Puerto Rico, JAM and I went to LA as there were singers with more experience in Spanish. They turned out very very well. And there is something about doing jingles in a studio that faces Hollywood High on Vine a block or so from Hollywood Boulevard.
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Too bad little KUTY couldn't have afforded to do that, I was driving through the desert way back in the late 60s and their "KUTY Palmdale" ID sounded like 3 or 4 random people recorded it in a closet !
 
TomásEstefan said:
Too bad little KUTY couldn't have afforded to do that, I was driving through the desert way back in the late 60s and their "KUTY Palmdale" ID sounded like 3 or 4 random people recorded it in a closet !
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This one for my station is one guy in a closet.

(Wake Up) Paul Walker.wav

drive.google.com drive.google.com

It costs me nothing, a friend in London does some production as a side job and he does them for free for me.

It adds another voice to the station that isnt me and for what it is, sounds pretty decent.
 
michael hagerty said:
From 1926 until---I'm not really sure.

By 1970, KFI had ditched the network's newscasts and the weekend "Monitor" show and were simply airing the spots from within those programs. They were clearing network features in evenings, late nights and overnights.

IF I recall correctly, NBC finally jumped ship to KIIS-AM around '74 or '75---but I think that went south when KKDJ became KIIS-FM.
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FWIW, the Broadcasting Yearbooks have KFI as an NBC affiliate in the 1976 book and as ABC Entertainment for 1977, with KIIS as ABC Contemporary both years and also "ABC News" (?) in '76. My memory thinks that NBC went to KGBS; the L.A. Times archives don't have an easily found confirmation for that, but there are listings from the fall of '76 showing KGBS as carrying NBC's 50th anniversary specials.
 
deepstblu said:
FWIW, the Broadcasting Yearbooks have KFI as an NBC affiliate in the 1976 book and as ABC Entertainment for 1977, with KIIS as ABC Contemporary both years and also "ABC News" (?) in '76. My memory thinks that NBC went to KGBS; the L.A. Times archives don't have an easily found confirmation for that, but there are listings from the fall of '76 showing KGBS as carrying NBC's 50th anniversary specials.
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A word of caution on using dates from BC Yearbooks: The form for the next year's yearbook was sent out around September of the prior year. If it was not returned, the last one that did get returned was used. So, by the time you got the Yearbook, the data was at least 6 months old. And by the time the next Yearbook came out, it was a year and a half old.

I know of people who were listed on the staff of three different stations in three different markets in a single Broadcasting Yearbook. And the data like network affiliations was similarly dated. For most of the later years of the YB, they took data from stations, not from the network itself.
 
DavidEduardo said:
I was not aware of that. When I did some custom jingles for Puerto Rico, JAM and I went to LA as there were singers with more experience in Spanish. They turned out very very well. And there is something about doing jingles in a studio that faces Hollywood High on Vine a block or so from Hollywood Boulevard.
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I was surprised because there's so much talent in L.A. But it really was just a chemistry thing---Tom Merriman had this core group of voices in Dallas.

I do recall that "The Winning Score" was a very expensive package---and it came right on the eve of a lot of Top 40s going the other way and ditching jingles.
 
TomásEstefan said:
Too bad little KUTY couldn't have afforded to do that, I was driving through the desert way back in the late 60s and their "KUTY Palmdale" ID sounded like 3 or 4 random people recorded it in a closet !
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Stations like KUTY (and for that matter, KIBS in Bishop) often got jingles from Pepper-Tanner---a company in Memphis that traded advertising time for jingles. Small-town stations (and some smaller stations in bigger markets) gave up however many minutes a week that Pepper-Tanner would sell to a client and keep the money for.

There's a guy on YouTube who has a ton of the generics Pepper-Tanner offered. Jingles where you, the station would have to say your own call letters, but they'd sing some innocuous thing, like this:


You could also get your call letters sung. I'll never forget the one Pepper-Tanner cut KIBS had:

Male Singers: "We know a riddle!"

Female Singers: "They know a riddle!"

Male Singers: "What starts with a K, ends with an S, has an I and a B in the middle?"

Female Singers: "K-I-B-S?"

Male Singers (shout): "You're right!"

(stinger)


I should sue for emotional distress.


When KGBS in L.A. dumped Country for pop in 1968, they went to Pepper-Tanner and got these:



It ain't the Johnny Mann Singers.

Or Ron Hicklin.

Or Anita Kerr (bringing us back to KFI).

("There are no shortcuts on the freeway to happiness----K-F-I, Los An-ge-les.")
 
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CTListener said:
So KGBS changed "from country to a modern radio format." Ouch. Typical coastal thinking about country radio back then.
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The phrasing, I’m sure, was Pepper-Tanner’s—and they were in Memphis. And I don’t think it was meant as “in contrast to Country”.

KGBS wasn’t really sure what to call it. They thought “Top 40” was too confining a definition, no one had really hit on “Adult Contemporary” at that point, and it definitely wasn’t MOR.

KGBS was getting its tail handed to it by a Country station in Long Beach (KFOX) and after two or three years straight of that, needed to make a move.

They made that switch shortly after KFWB went all news, bringing Bob Hudson and Roger Christian on board, and bringing Bill Ballance back to L.A. after a couple of years in Honolulu and San Francisco.

It took a couple of years to gel, but it proved to be a good move for the station.
 
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SomeRadioGuy said:
This one for my station is one guy in a closet.

(Wake Up) Paul Walker.wav

drive.google.com drive.google.com

It costs me nothing, a friend in London does some production as a side job and he does them for free for me.

It adds another voice to the station that isnt me and for what it is, sounds pretty decent.
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Cool...
CTListener said:
So KGBS changed "from country to a modern radio format." Ouch. Typical coastal thinking about country radio back then.
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KGBS called it's format "Gentle Country". They sounded like KOST 103 would if it played "soft country" rather than "soft rock".
 
CTListener said:
So KGBS changed "from country to a modern radio format." Ouch. Typical coastal thinking about country radio back then.
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Remember, KGBS was a daytimer until the mid-70's. When Storer bought KPOP, a 5 kw daytimer, it went to Beautiful Music. They tried a variety of formats, such as Country, personality MOR and the like until the fulltime facility was built and they went Top 40... right when contemporary music formats were all moving to FM.

Storer had a lot of difficulty figuring out what to do with big market AMs, including New York, Detroit, LA, Miami and others. They understood FM so poorly that they sold most of the ones they had in the later 60's.

But they made tons of money with their TV stations, and the stock went way up. What I made on Storer stock and a couple of others paid for my own first radio station in 1964.
 
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