(Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy - a word or two about live albums in 1978)

Tonight we're going to start what I hope will be another regular weekend feature: Newstalgia Pop Chronicles. The idea came about largely as the result of discovering a huge stash of recorded interviews and interview programs in the vault, pretty much untouched the last twenty years. They comprise primarily of figures from the Pop music world (including Rock, Jazz, Folk and just about everything in between) talking about their lives and their work. The sources run the gamut but the main emphasis is on our popular culture. Some people will be very familiar and others will probably need reminding as to who they are and what their contributions were. Some have long since left the scene while others are caught at the very beginnings of their careers. But all of it represents a slice of cultural history and hopefully some enjoyable weekend listening and a break from Weekend talk shows (even for a few minutes).

So tonight we're starting off with a weekly series produced by the BBC called Rock Capsule. This one is for the week of July 3-9, 1978 and features interviews with David Gilmour, Phil Lynott, Fee Waybill and Steve Hackett.

As always, if you like it we'll keep it going. It should be interesting.

As a rule I hate looking back. The trouble with looking back is you tend to stare at it a long time, and nothing really good ever comes of that.

I'm also not a big fan of "nostalgia". I think of nostalgia and think "fond remembrance of events that never occurred" - time tends to blow small events out of proportion and large events into heart stopping defining moments which, at the time didn't amount to much.

So why look back at all?

The idea of putting together a site like Newstalgia is to help put history and current events into perspective. Some things never change, some people never change - only the names and situations and outcomes. Sometimes history consists of the same set of events and circumstances over and over until the lesson is learned or the methods changed.

Much of history is a series of repeats: (India/Pakistan war over Kashmir - 1951)

Much of history includes investigations, exhaustive, scathing,combative:

(Senate Crime Committee Hearings headed by Estes Kefauver, 1951)

Some history involves people - in a certain place, in a certain time:

(first general election in Ghana after Independence 1957)

All of these are issues I plan to present, by way of audio, some video and what other documentation I can find from my lifelong collection of news and current events to convey the continuing nature of history - what it did to us then, and what it means to us now. Some things never change and some things are destined never to be the same again.

That's what I'm trying to do. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Gordon Skene - The Gordon Skene Sound Collection

(Algeria, 1957)

Newstalgia

I would venture to guess, just based on uncovered evidence, that America in the 1950's was probably more balanced from a cultural standpoint, than it is now.

Why do I say that? The evidence - weekend radio in America was a veritable grab-bag of music, information and culture - all laid out, usually in one place. In 1955, NBC Radio introduced a Weekend service called Monitor. It was an adventuresome idea, geared along the lines of America's then-insatiable curiosity over how things worked.

Monitor's credo was "go anywhere, do anything" and it lived up to that credo over a 48 hour period, beginning at 12:01 on Saturday morning until 11:59 Sunday night.

This episode of The Grand Ole Opry comes from that service. For a half hour (On June 22, 1955) it featured the talents of "Little" Jimmy Dickens, "Cousin" Minnie Pearl, Del Wood, Jimmy Newman, Chester "Chet" Atkins and a host of others. Strictly Americana at its most rural.

But here's the thing - right after Grand Ole Opry, Monitor went to Birdland and featured a set by Woody Herman and Erroll Garner, and a half hour after that, a set by Tyree Glenn and "Philly Joe" Jones.

And the next day, you got the NBC Symphony. Quite a blast of disparate culture, to say the least. But if you were up for it, you got one hell of an education in the space of 48 hours. And your musical taste got very broad and all-encompassing. And if you were a musician, you stumbled into a gold mine.

So as a reminder of how potentially isolated we've become as a culture, here is a half-hour of down-home rural/middle America/roots music, supplied by Mainstream Radio in the form of NBC on June 22, 1955.

The Jazz portion comes tomorrow.

I doubt anyone who was born during the "Reagan Years" would have any vague idea of what this is all about.

Popular culture has moved so far, so fast and the mainstream aspect of that culture has become so compartmentalized, marginalized and abandoned that listening to this entry may seem downright strange to you.

And hearing his tape again I realize just how far removed we are today from that period of time in our popular culture where the Disc Jockey actually served as a sort of Town Crier and imparter of wisdom and musical taste.

In 1967 we had AM radio and AM radio had B. Mitchel Reed, who was one of the most popular disc jockey's in Southern California. A transplanted New Yorker, whose reputation had been cemented at another Top-40 AM radio station, WMCA. Reed was a cornerstone and a bridge between the staid music business of the time and the bubbling under counter-culture in search of the alternative. And it was probably because of his pioneering spirit in the area of free-form radio that made such a dent in audiences growing up in the mid-late 1960's in California.

Here is one hour of B. Mitchel Reed on KFWB from July 15, 1967. We swore by him.

If you think the Hippie Movement of the 1960's was the most parodied, lambasted, pigeonholed and marginalized era by mainstream media, you have only to listen to this documentary, produced by KNX Radio in Los Angeles in 1959 to know The Beat Generation won that dubious achievement hands down.

Titled The Beatniks, this one hour look at the Beat Generation as it was happening in Venice California was narrated by noted 60's and 70's Astrologer Sydney Omar and hosted an interesting cast of characters, headed by the somewhat self-appointed guru Lawrence Lipton who figures prominently as spokesman for all that is Beat and Bohemian in Los Angeles at the time, even to the point of proclaiming The (Greenwich) Village and North Beach (San Francisco) were no longer relevant, but now The Gas House in Venice was. Once you get around the rather quaint and self-conscious proclamations, there are some interesting people who were legitimately influential forces in the Beat Generation, among them Kenneth Patchen and Stewart Perkoff.

So it's an interesting listen, even if it is slathered over with a lot of marginalization.

But then, that's the 50's anyway, and mainstream always.

(Radio in the 1960s looked an awful lot like this most everywhere)

It's been one and possibly two generations gone by that never actually heard what AM radio was all about, or what it aspired to do, in the 1960's. Before radio tightened up playlists, got generic and became bastions of shrill talk radio, there was music and lots of it.

In 1967 it was still pretty much geared to the 45 rpm disc, the singles market. Even though by the end of that year things would already be changing dramatically until by the following year the discovery of FM would further erode a once powerful force of the Music business. AM radio, despite trying, always sounded lousy, it just couldn't help it. But what it lost in quality it more than made up for in sheer personality and a desire to connect with an audience in a meaningful way.

In 1967, upstart radio station KBLA located in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank became something of a middle ground between the 45 culture of the hit record and the burgeoning subculture of free form radio.

Because it was a very competitive market (KRLA, KHJ and KFWB being the dominant forces in Los Angeles at the time) and because the station wasn't all that powerful, the experiment didn't last. And on June 16, 1967 KBLA did it's final day as a free-form/top 40 radio station. Dave Diamond, himself a popular fixture on the L.A. scene in the 1960's, would go off to other stations after this final broadcast.

But the writing was on the wall and it would only be a matter of months before a tsunami of change would sweep over popular culture, and popular media was the first to feel it. Top-40 on AM radio at least, had its days numbered.
So here is a small slice of history (less than one hour from a three hour show) to give you some idea of what the fuss was all about at the time. Fortunately for everyone, there were a lot of people armed with tape recorders who, like their geek brethren of later years with computers, sat faithfully by their radios day after day and preserved this stuff for some future generation to marvel or gaze askance with strained credulity.

It was another element in what it all later became - how it all wound up.

I confess to having read Tom Wolfe's The Pumphouse Gang some 30 times since getting hold of it in high school. Not that I was thick to the message, but with every reading some nuance, some observation came flying out with such razor sharp accuracy that I could not imagine anyone who is a more keen observer of American culture than he is.

So naturally, sharing this essay read by Wolfe, as part of the Comment series from 1971 seems a perfect addition to the Chronicles.

If you haven't read any Tom Wolfe, or aren't familiar with him, I would really urge you to put him on your list of "must reads', particularly when it comes to class and culture clashes of the 1960's.

But in the meantime, have a listen for five minutes.

(A Christmas Sing With Bing - 1958. Guilty pleasure)

For those of you (and I guess there are a lot) who despise Christmas, this particular post ain't for you.

But since this is a blog dealing with aspects of our popular culture, present and past, you can't really let the season go without a nod to what was, for a very long time, an American Institution - Bing Crosby.

Every Christmas eve, like clockwork, CBS radio would blare out their annual "Christmas Sing With Bing" all throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, when TV took over with their Christmas extravaganzas and radio was promptly abandoned.

This Christmas Sing With Bing from 1958 was typical of the tradition with a heavy emphasis on the religious aspect of Christmas, not so much the consumer part. There is also a nod to the events of the past year, with a piece on the Nautilus and our newest state Alaska. The first "Sing With Bing" in 1955 was issued on lp by Decca (now Universal), and became a staple of their Christmas catalogue well into the CD era.

Crosby died in 1977 and with him went this tradition. He's pretty much relegated now to annual marathons of "White Christmas" and "Holiday Inn", but I thought you might enjoy a one hour dose of what the season used to be like fifty years ago. If you've never heard this before, I'd be curious to know your impressions. To you it may seem odd and quaint, a relic of a distant past. It was part of my culture of growing up and sometimes those impressions can be muddled. I took it for granted and never thought it would be any different.

We live in such interesting times. But nonetheless, it's Christmas Eve and we're almost at the close of another decade. And as with everything in life, it constantly changes and never remains the same.

Enjoy the holidays and thanks for all your support this first year of Newstalgia.

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