My best friend and I both bought that song. Two 15 year-old boys: not exactly the target demo!
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58 years of Beautiful Music comes to an end
- Thread starter KilowattKat
- Start date
Jeff Beck did a nice version of that song as well. KLUX from Corpus Christi and KNCT from the Temple area also program East Listening. I think they have both added some vocals to the playlist.
Back then, the Beautiful Music stations likely played a cover of the original.
Until people like Shulke and Marlin Taylor modernized the format, most Beautiful Music stations (called "Good Music" or something similar in the 60's) did not play many covers of Top 40 and pop hits. They played standards in instrumental versions. So you had lots of instrumental versions of Sinatra and Nat "King" Cole hits, but none of Buddy Holly and Bobby Rydell hits.
That modernization must have happened quick by the early 1970s. From my memory in St. Louis, I clearly recall a television ad for KEZK in the fall of 1974. At the time the station was brand new, and in the background of the ad was an instrumental cover of The Bee Gees "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart."
KEZK started up just as Beautiful Music-formatted WIL-FM (and briefly KFMS) went automated Country in August 1974.
I would think that for those songs that have vocals in a BM/EZ format, the listeners would best be served by lyrics that aren't dark, such as in "Only Women Bleed". Now what about an instrumental version?
Yeah. I was never bothered by "El Paso" on standards radio but "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" is too violent for standards. WERT actually plays Johnny Cash's song with the lyrics "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die".
They could play songs that don’t test well and call it “Stiffs for stiffs”
It happened simultaneously with the success of SRP and Bonneville's "Beautiful Music" syndicated products. We are talking about the 1969-1972 period when many stations signed on to those services and found huge success.
They did play instrumental standards, but were more into Percy Faith and Frank Pourcel than Mantovani and Bert Kaempfert.
In the mid-60's we had "good music" stations that still ran harp riffs between songs and in the sweepers. I did that myself in '66 with HCTM1 in Ecuador, but by '68 had moved to a beautiful voice saying things like "all day... all night... all nice....... WZZZ Yourtown!"
In the earlier 60's we had light classical pieces in the format, usually some pianist doing a "version" of a single movement.
There's a difference?
Kaempfert did more songs that are considered hits and Mantovani did covers. Percy had a few hits. I'm not familiar with Pourcel but I think he was more like Mantovani.
Huge, if you programmed Beautiful Music (I did, for about 70 stations in Latin America)
The difference is that Kaempfert had more of a "big band" sound and some cuts even had a bit of a jazz influence. Mantovanni sounded more orchestral in the sense it as fuller and did not feature solo instruments as much... more 50's and early 60's in style.
Percy Faith was a mainstay of US "good music" and "Beautiful Music" formats as he early on adopted the policy of doing covers of Top 40 hits. He was not a singles artist.
The biggest of all is Frank Pourcel. Mainstay of US instrumental stations, and at the forefront of the format outside the US, along with Paul Mauriat and others like Caravelli, James Last, and, later, the "French Invasion" of Clayderman and Borelli and the rest of the Dauphan label artists.
Austin had an interesting Beautiful Music dynamic at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.
The original KHFI 98.3 had been running a Beautiful Music format since 1964 (after new owners dumped Classical.) The music emphasized lush, strings-based arrangements that were typical of the genre at the time.
In 1969 KHFI got a rival in the form of KASE 100.7. KASE targeted the same audience, but its music was wind instrument based. They used the liner “The station with that big band sound” although the music only vaguely resembled the big bands of the 30s and 40s. To my ears KHFI and KASE were pretty much the same type of music, just with different instrumentation.
A few years later, KHFI had gone in a few different directions and KASE morphed into string based music.
Postscript: KHFI had perhaps the most stark “dual format“ from 1971 to 1972. At the beginning of 1971 it kept the Beautiful Music from 6am to 9pm but ran a freeform Progressive Rock format from 9pm to 6am. A few months later the Rock format was full time. However in June 1971 KHFI got a Progressive Rock competitor in KRMH, which split the audience. By the summer of 1972 KHFI was back to fulltime Beautiful Music. But KASE had grabbed the audience (with a better signal) and the Beautiful Music format was gone for good on KHFI by the fall of 1973.
Post-postscript: KASE kept the Beautiful Music format until 1981 when it flipped to Country, which it maintains to this day. Beautiful Music was picked up by KPEZ 102.3 (ex-KMXX) but was gone by 1986, the end of the format in Austin, other than fringe coverage from KNCT in Killeen.
Post-post-postscript: Austin Classical fans displaced by the KHFI flip in 1964 got Classical back with the launch of KMFA in January 1967. The station is still going with the format 56 years later.
The original KHFI 98.3 had been running a Beautiful Music format since 1964 (after new owners dumped Classical.) The music emphasized lush, strings-based arrangements that were typical of the genre at the time.
In 1969 KHFI got a rival in the form of KASE 100.7. KASE targeted the same audience, but its music was wind instrument based. They used the liner “The station with that big band sound” although the music only vaguely resembled the big bands of the 30s and 40s. To my ears KHFI and KASE were pretty much the same type of music, just with different instrumentation.
A few years later, KHFI had gone in a few different directions and KASE morphed into string based music.
Postscript: KHFI had perhaps the most stark “dual format“ from 1971 to 1972. At the beginning of 1971 it kept the Beautiful Music from 6am to 9pm but ran a freeform Progressive Rock format from 9pm to 6am. A few months later the Rock format was full time. However in June 1971 KHFI got a Progressive Rock competitor in KRMH, which split the audience. By the summer of 1972 KHFI was back to fulltime Beautiful Music. But KASE had grabbed the audience (with a better signal) and the Beautiful Music format was gone for good on KHFI by the fall of 1973.
Post-postscript: KASE kept the Beautiful Music format until 1981 when it flipped to Country, which it maintains to this day. Beautiful Music was picked up by KPEZ 102.3 (ex-KMXX) but was gone by 1986, the end of the format in Austin, other than fringe coverage from KNCT in Killeen.
Post-post-postscript: Austin Classical fans displaced by the KHFI flip in 1964 got Classical back with the launch of KMFA in January 1967. The station is still going with the format 56 years later.
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You made it sound like Kaempfert and Mantovani had more in common than Percy and Pourcel.
Do you mean the only French artist to have a U.S. number one?
Lots of hits have been recorded in Paris like Elton John’s Honky Chateau album and the Stones Exile On Main Street. While those albums singles did not go all the way to 1, Pink Floyd’s The Wall was recorded in Paris and did produce a number one single. There has to be others.
And to think, I only knew KHFI as 'K-98', a Class A Top-40 station that I would listen to as my uncle and dad traveled between Fayetteville, AR and McAllen, TX on some long road trips.
No, but they were both traditional. Kaempfert used brassier arrangements, and Mantovanni was more like "101 Strings" but a bit more creatively arranged,
I happen to like Bert Kaempfert, and my impression is that while he and his orchestra did their share of covers, he tended to have more original compositions with interesting, upbeat and sometimes pop-like arrangements.
I'm less familiar with Mantovani, but from what I know, he seems to emphasize the strings more (as several have said here, Kaempfert is more on the brassy side), and has a more classical, traditional sound.
Both have their place, and their respective sounds tend to complement one another nicely, I've found.
c
I'm less familiar with Mantovani, but from what I know, he seems to emphasize the strings more (as several have said here, Kaempfert is more on the brassy side), and has a more classical, traditional sound.
Both have their place, and their respective sounds tend to complement one another nicely, I've found.
c
Kaempfert's orchestra is one of my favorites. Some stations play more of his songs than others. I haven't heard much of him lately on WERT, but WERT was playing him a lot a few months ago.
America's Best Music, if it was playing more songs, is apparently down to just "Bye Bye Blues" but that's one of the best.
Billy Vaughn's "Look for a Star" has been played the last three times I've listened to WERT, and Herb Alpert's "Zorba the Greek" and Al Hirt's "Java" have been the only other instrumentals today. I read somewhere that the reason I like "Java" so much is that Captain Kangaroo used it.
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