MOR Playlist from 50 years ago as heard on KBIG AM Radio Catalina

[lj]

Wow--50 years have gone by--a half century-- and I still have 4 cassette audio tapes from the summer and fall of 1971 as recorded from KBIG AM. For me this station was tops in SoCal and here is a sampler of wonderful MOR songs from those cassettes--basically the kind of music we celebrate at this forum. See how many these songs you remember.

Vocals: Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66--best of their old stuff from the early albums and new stuff like "Aza Branca" and "Righteous Life". In fact what attracted me to this station in 1970 was that they played more Brasil 66 songs than from any other artist....The Carnival "Where There's a Heartache" with Janis Hansen splendid vocal....Bossa Rio "Day By Day"....Paul McCartney "It's Just Another Day....Carole King "it's Too Late Baby"....James Taylor "You've Got a Friend"....Chicago "Does Anybody Know What TIme It Is"....Barbara Streisand "Time and Love" and "Flim Flam Man"....Eydie Gorme--my favorite singer-- with incredible interpretations of songs by Taylor, King and Bacharach & David from her "It Was a Good TIme" album....Vikki Carr "I'll Be Home"....Claudine Longet "Electric Moon"....Steve Lawrence "The Last Run"....The Lettermen sang "Just Say Goodbye" and "Feelings" a great song arranged with a terrific bass line as written by Mann & Weil--an entirely different composition than the same title by Morris Albert years later....Sinatra--"I Don't Believe I'd Ever Change" and "Triste" and "Agua de Beber"....Perry Como "My Days of Loving You" and "I Think of You"....Tony Bennett "More and More"....Shirley Bassey "Till Love Touches Your Life"....Glenn Campbell "The Last Time I Saw Her Face" and "Here and Now" and "Dream Bay"....the 5th Dimension "Love's Lines Angles and Rhymes" and "Light Sings"....Michelle Lee "There's an Island" and "Going out of My Head".... Elvis Presley "I'm Leaving" and "In the Heart of Rome"....Anne Murray "Talk it Over in the Morning"....Paul Anka "Do I Love You"....The New Christy Minstrels "I Still Do"....The Mike Curb Congregation beautiful "I Was Born in Love With You" with music and lyric by Michel Legrand and the Bergmann's....The Association "P F Sloan"....Alan Copeland Singers "Funny Girl"....Nancy Sinatra "How Are Things in California"....Ray Stevens "Mama and Papa"....Vogues "We're on our Way"....Percy Faith "Don't Say Goodbye"....Shirley Jones " I Still Got My Heart"....Tom Jones "Help Yourself"....Dionne Warwick "Amanda" and "He's Moving On" from the film "The Love Machine"....Liz Damon and the Orient Express "Time and Love"....John Davidson "Say It Again"....Fortunes "Freedom Comes Freedom Goes"

Instrumentals: KBIG had a knack at playing great jazz/pop instrumentals in 1971 such as Paul Desmond "El Condor Pasa"....Charlie Byrd "I'll Walk With the Rain"....Lalo Schifrin "The Theme from Mannix" and "The Getaway"....in the next couple of years they would play songs from Deodato's "Prelude" LP such "Carly and Carole" and "2001" and Herbie Mann "Do It Again"....and KBIG in 1971 played regular pop instrumentals such as from the TJB's latest "Summertime" album such as "Strike Up the Band" and "Montezuma's Revenge"and "Hurt So Bad" and "Darlin".... Baja Marimba Band "As Time Goes By"....Bacharach "Whoever You Are I Love You" and my personal favorite "Nikki"....Burt Kaemphert "My Love"....Roger Williams "The Summer of 42"....Les Reed "Man of Action"....El Chicano "Viva Tirado" and "Cubano Chant"....Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass "Highland Brass"....The Impact of Brass "Never Can Say Goodbye"

Included on the tapes are the fantastic and catchy KBIG radio jingles with choral singers led by Sally Stevens. For me that was like icing on the cake. Their midday DJ Ray Willis was the best. And the station did not feature talk and DJ personalities like its powerhouse rival KFI with Lohman and Barkley. The emphasis was on the music and lots of it, which was unusual for an AM radio station back then.

With a lot of luck magnetic tapes this old are playable if you store them vertically in a cool place far from the sunlight and also play and rewind them frequently.

 

[lj]

In addition, KBIG Radio played two beautiful instrumental songs in 1970 and right into 1971--Tony Mottola and "Kites Are Fun" which has a Bossa Nova feel to it. Mottola was Sinatra's go-to guitarist. Have a listen. And the other was by Francis Lai "Love Is a Funny Thing".

 

[lj]

And here is Francis Lai and "Love is a Funny Thing" which reminds me of French romantic sophistication. Lai, a French national, was renown for writing the music for the films "Love Story" and "A Man and Woman".

 

[Michael Hagerty]

Wow--50 years have gone by--a half century-- and I still have 4 cassette audio tapes from the summer and fall of 1971 as recorded from KBIG AM. For me this station was tops in SoCal and here is a sampler of wonderful MOR songs from those cassettes--basically the kind of music we celebrate at this forum. See how many these songs you remember.

Vocals: Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66--best of their old stuff from the early albums and new stuff like "Aza Branca" and "Righteous Life". In fact what attracted me to this station in 1970 was that they played more Brasil 66 songs than from any other artist....The Carnival "Where There's a Heartache" with Janis Hansen splendid vocal....Bossa Rio "Day By Day"....Paul McCartney "It's Just Another Day....Carole King "it's Too Late Baby"....James Taylor "You've Got a Friend"....Chicago "Does Anybody Know What TIme It Is"....Barbara Streisand "Time and Love" and "Flim Flam Man"....Eydie Gorme--my favorite singer-- with incredible interpretations of songs by Taylor, King and Bacharach & David from her "It Was a Good TIme" album....Vikki Carr "I'll Be Home"....Claudine Longet "Electric Moon"....Steve Lawrence "The Last Run"....The Lettermen sang "Just Say Goodbye" and "Feelings" a great song arranged with a terrific bass line as written by Mann & Weil--an entirely different composition than the same title by Morris Albert years later....Sinatra--"I Don't Believe I'd Ever Change" and "Triste" and "Agua de Beber"....Perry Como "My Days of Loving You" and "I Think of You"....Tony Bennett "More and More"....Shirley Bassey "Till Love Touches Your Life"....Glenn Campbell "The Last Time I Saw Her Face" and "Here and Now" and "Dream Bay"....the 5th Dimension "Love's Lines Angles and Rhymes" and "Light Sings"....Michelle Lee "There's an Island" and "Going out of My Head".... Elvis Presley "I'm Leaving" and "In the Heart of Rome"....Anne Murray "Talk it Over in the Morning"....Paul Anka "Do I Love You"....The New Christy Minstrels "I Still Do"....The Mike Curb Congregation beautiful "I Was Born in Love With You" with music and lyric by Michel Legrand and the Bergmann's....The Association "P F Sloan"....Alan Copeland Singers "Funny Girl"....Nancy Sinatra "How Are Things in California"....Ray Stevens "Mama and Papa"....Vogues "We're on our Way"....Percy Faith "Don't Say Goodbye"....Shirley Jones " I Still Got My Heart"....Tom Jones "Help Yourself"....Dionne Warwick "Amanda" and "He's Moving On" from the film "The Love Machine"....Liz Damon and the Orient Express "Time and Love"....John Davidson "Say It Again"....Fortunes "Freedom Comes Freedom Goes"

Instrumentals: KBIG had a knack at playing great jazz/pop instrumentals in 1971 such as Paul Desmond "El Condor Pasa"....Charlie Byrd "I'll Walk With the Rain"....Lalo Schifrin "The Theme from Mannix" and "The Getaway"....in the next couple of years they would play songs from Deodato's "Prelude" LP such "Carly and Carole" and "2001" and Herbie Mann "Do It Again"....and KBIG in 1971 played regular pop instrumentals such as from the TJB's latest "Summertime" album such as "Strike Up the Band" and "Montezuma's Revenge"and "Hurt So Bad" and "Darlin".... Baja Marimba Band "As Time Goes By"....Bacharach "Whoever You Are I Love You" and my personal favorite "Nikki"....Burt Kaemphert "My Love"....Roger Williams "The Summer of 42"....Les Reed "Man of Action"....El Chicano "Viva Tirado" and "Cubano Chant"....Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass "Highland Brass"....The Impact of Brass "Never Can Say Goodbye"

Included on the tapes are the fantastic and catchy KBIG radio jingles with choral singers led by Sally Stevens. For me that was like icing on the cake. Their midday DJ Ray Willis was the best. And the station did not feature talk and DJ personalities like its powerhouse rival KFI with Lohman and Barkley. The emphasis was on the music and lots of it, which was unusual for an AM radio station back then.

With a lot of luck magnetic tapes this old are playable if you store them vertically in a cool place far from the sunlight and also play and rewind them frequently.

LG: Wow! That's phenomenal! I heard KBIG many times in those days, but never rolled tape and never imagined anyone else did, either. In fact, in 25 years of reasonably active aircheck collecting, I never ran across KBIG tape.

If you haven't already, you should digitize them Despite your great care, that tape will at some point deteriorate.

 

[Harry]

Interesting list. I was noticing that some of the tracks played were just a little "off" from my memories of the period. Example: The Carnival track that I heard was "Laia Ladaia".

While I didn't record straight radio airchecks, I did record those songs that interested me in one way or another. From around the 1969-1971 period on the station I listened to, WFIL-FM in Philly, here are the songs I recorded:

It's Getting Better - Cass Elliot
Laia Ladaia - The Carnival
Honey - Bobby Goldsboro
Walkin' In The Sand - Al Martino
Theme from "Room 222" - The Non-Profit Organization
Knowing When To Leave - Dionne Warwick
My Marie - Engelbert Humperdinck
Someday Man - Paul Williams
You'll Never Get To Heaven - Dionne Warwick
I'm A Better Man - Engelbert Humperdinck
Blue On Blue - Bobby Vinton
The Gold Old Songs - The Vogues
Odds And Ends - Dionne Warwick
Wishin' And Hopin' - Dusty Springfield
I Just Can't Help Believin' - B.J. Thomas
Hitchin' A Ride - Vanity Fare
Alfie - Dionne Warwick
It's Gonna Change - Bobby Goldsboro
And The Grass Won't Pay No Mind - Mark Lindsay
Look At Mine - Petula Clark
Good Morning Starshine - Oliver
Earth Angel - The Vogues
Hey! That's No Way To Say Goodbye - The Vogues
Holly Golightly - Jerry Hayes
Let Me Go To Him - Dionne Warwick
Hurt So Bad - The Lettermen
Don't Sleep In The Subway - Petula Clark
Let It Be - Beatles
That Same Old Feeling - The Fortunes
My Baby Loves Lovin' The White Plains
Viva Tirado - El Chicano
The Best Thing You've Ever Done - Barbra Streisand
Delilah - Tom Jones
Daughter Of Darkness - Tom Jones
Love In Every Room - Paul Mauriat
Anything Goes - Harper's Bizarre
One Day Of Your Life - Andy Williams
Baby I Could Be So Good At Lovin' You - Buzz Clifford
Summer Wine - Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood
In And Out Of Love - Bobby Vee
Here Comes The Sun - Beatles
Reachin' Far Too High - Shanni Wallis
Rainy Night In Georgia - Brook Benton
The Sound Of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel
The Funniest Thing - Classics IV
With Your Love Now - Bossa Rio
Can't Help Falling In Love - Al Martino
New World In The Morning - Roger Whitaker
Forever - Mercy
Gravy Waltz - Steve Allen
Whoever Finds This, I Love You - Mac Davis
Home Lovin' Man - Andy Williams
My Sweet Lord - George Harrison
It Don't Matter To Me - Bread
The Last Waltz - Engelbert Humperdinck
Merry Christmas Darling - Carpenters

My recording habits were that I'd sit by the radio with the finger on the pause button and then starting it as soon as the next record came on. If it was one I liked or needed, I'd let it record. If it was something I already had on either tape or LP, I'd rewind to the start point and do it again on the next song.

This accounts for why there are so many Dionne Warwick and Engelbert Humperdinck songs - I didn't own any of their records. I think this bunch of songs included a Bacharach Weekend, accounting for so many of his songs in a row.

During this period, I would have skipped all of the Herb Alpert or Sergio Mendes records as I already owned them. So you could add to the list things like:

Pretty World - Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66
Hurt So Bad - Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
and some of their older hits that were played often.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

There is a station KGHL in Billings that used to always be on at our parts store. My dad was one of those guys who had to have some kind of "noise" on at all times, so the very first thing he did when he got to work was turn on the radio. I started working there in the summer of '69 and am still there today, although now I'm the owner and we're in a different building!

KGHL was an AM MOR station, so I remember hearing a lot of A&M stuff on there. Tunes I remember include all of Sergio's big hits (I also heard "After Sunrise" for the first time on that station, and also singles from the Bell era), a lot of Bacharach's recordings like "Are You There (With Another Girl)" and others, Sandpipers, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Carpenters of course,, and Herb's "This Guy's In Love With You" and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." There are probably many others I'm not remembering.

The station is still there today but they're a classic country station.

 

[lj]

LG: Wow! That's phenomenal! I heard KBIG many times in those days, but never rolled tape and never imagined anyone else did, either. In fact, in 25 years of reasonably active aircheck collecting, I never ran across KBIG tape.

If you haven't already, you should digitize them Despite your great care, that tape will at some point deteriorate.

Michael--Do you remember the "sea watch" segment on KBIG which reported on sea conditions from Point Conception to the Mexican border? Very appropriate since Catalina Island is only 26 miles from the Calif. coastline. I remember how KBIG had remote broadcasts here in San DIego at Sea World. Do you remember how the KBIG radio jingles were arranged with the sounds of seagulls and foghorns in the background? And how many of their wonderful and catchy jingles would soar with Sally Stevens high vocal flourishes and acrobatics a la Eydie Gorme? And how a lot of the jingles had a relaxing Bossa Nova sound to them? I have them all on tape. I recorded the tape's audio onto my camcorder and then dubbed that to DVD via my Toshiba DVD/VCR combo recorder. That's hardly state of the art, but good enough for me. Maybe I should go to a professional audio/video studio in town and make professional copies. Who knows maybe the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music might be interested to archive these in their library as sort of a MOR music time capsule.

 

[JOv2]

KJOI and KRUZ (Santa Barbara) were the two "beautiful music" stations I remember in the very early 1970s... (I seem to recall KJOI once taking out a full-page ad in the Herald Examiner displaying what I thought at the time was their entire day's playlist...)

 

[Michael Hagerty]

Michael--Do you remember the "sea watch" segment on KBIG which reported on sea conditions from Point Conception to the Mexican border? Very appropriate since Catalina Island is only 26 miles from the Calif. coastline. I remember how KBIG had remote broadcasts here in San DIego at Sea World. Do you remember how the KBIG radio jingles were arranged with the sounds of seagulls and foghorns in the background? And how many of their wonderful and catchy jingles would soar with Sally Stevens high vocal flourishes and acrobatics a la Eydie Gorme? And how a lot of the jingles had a relaxing Bossa Nova sound to them? I have them all on tape.

lj:

I remember all of that. KBIG was one of my mom's favorite stations when I was a kid in L.A. She couldn't hear it after we moved to Bishop in 1965, but we'd go back to L.A. every six weeks or so, and before letting me have my choice of stations, she'd want to spend an hour or so listening to KBIG. And, as you note, the music, while far from Top 40, could be very interesting and jazz-flavored, so I really didn't mind.



For people who aren't familiar with it, it's a bit of a miracle that KBIG existed at all. It was built in 1952 on Catalina Island by a broadcaster named John H. Poole. At 740 on the AM dial, with 10,000 watts, its signal had a straight shot across water to more than 200 miles of California coastline, from San Diego to Santa Barbara. With the right atmospheric conditions, it could travel considerably farther, as this correspondence from 1953 shows.

But, it was daytime only, sunrise to sunset, to protect KCBS, San Francisco, which had been on the same frequency for years. And that put it at a disadvantage in terms of developing a large and steady audience like KLAC, KFI, KMPC, KABC or KHJ, all of which were adult popular music stations at the time.

The reason why the playlist looks a bit more interesting than the typical "elevator music" station is that KBIG signed on as a popular music station like KMPC (and later KFI), and really never left that space until the mid-1970s, when, under new ownership (Bonneville International, the media arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) it pioneered one of the earliest Contemporary Christian formats.

Weekly surveys printed by KBIG from 1956, 1957 and 1958 have survived and are archived here:

KBIG 740 Avalon

An historical archive of surveys and nostalgia from radio station KBIG 740 AM, Avalon.

www.las-solanas.com

The call letters were originally chosen to promote the "chief announcer" of the station, Carl "Mr. Big" Bailey, who was on from sign-on until noon in the early days. If you follow the link in the last sentence, you'll see the monument to "Mr. Big" along the Avalon waterfront on Catalina Island.



That tall fellow greeting the tour bus driver is "Mr. Big" himself.

The studios and transmitter were, as I mentioned before, on Catalina Island. But the business office was in Hollywood at 6540 Sunset Boulevard, where Poole also built auxiliary and production studios. In 1959, Mr. Poole put KBIG-FM on the air in Los Angeles. And by the 1960s, efficiencies became an issue, so the island studios simply became a transmitter building (the chief engineer lived on site) and KBIG-AM's programming originated from Hollywood and was sent via microwave to the transmitter on Catalina.



The building is still there. KBIG moved to a bigger facility ten blocks west on Sunset when Bonneville International (the media arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) bought the stations in the early 1970s.

Around 1973 Bonneville split the call letters. The AM became KBRT and they promoted the stations as "Big" (KBIG-FM) and "Bright" (KBRT-AM)---two different approaches to beautiful music. By the mid-late 70s it was increasingly clear that the audience for that type of radio had gone to FM, so Bonneville went to a very novel approach to Contemporary Christian music (nothing like what you would hear today) for several years before selling the AM to Crawford Broadcasting, which took it Christian Talk.

In 2013, Crawford moved the transmitter to a mountain ridge in Orange County between Irvine and Corona.

" I recorded the tape's audio onto my camcorder and then dubbed that to DVD via my Toshiba DVD/VCR combo recorder. That's hardly state of the art, but good enough for me. Maybe I should go to a professional audio/video studio in town and make professional copies. Who knows maybe the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music might be interested to archive these in their library as sort of a MOR music time capsule."

Digitizing the tape (with backups) is something I'd really recommend. When you say you recorded the tape's audio onto your camcorder, was that just using the camera microphone to pick up sound from a speaker, or did you connect the two?

 

[lj]

lj:

I remember all of that. KBIG was one of my mom's favorite stations when I was a kid in L.A. She couldn't hear it after we moved to Bishop in 1965, but we'd go back to L.A. every six weeks or so, and before letting me have my choice of stations, she'd want to spend an hour or so listening to KBIG. And, as you note, the music, while far from Top 40, could be very interesting and jazz-flavored, so I really didn't mind.



For people who aren't familiar with it, it's a bit of a miracle that KBIG existed at all. It was built in 1952 on Catalina Island by a broadcaster named John H. Poole. At 740 on the AM dial, with 10,000 watts, its signal had a straight shot across water to more than 200 miles of California coastline, from San Diego to Santa Barbara. With the right atmospheric conditions, it could travel considerably farther, as this correspondence from 1953 shows.

But, it was daytime only, sunrise to sunset, to protect KCBS, San Francisco, which had been on the same frequency for years. And that put it at a disadvantage in terms of developing a large and steady audience like KLAC, KFI, KMPC, KABC or KHJ, all of which were adult popular music stations at the time.

The reason why the playlist looks a bit more interesting than the typical "elevator music" station is that KBIG signed on as a popular music station like KMPC (and later KFI), and really never left that space until the mid-1970s, when, under new ownership (Bonneville International, the media arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) it pioneered one of the earliest Contemporary Christian formats.

Weekly surveys printed by KBIG from 1956, 1957 and 1958 have survived and are archived here:

KBIG 740 Avalon

An historical archive of surveys and nostalgia from radio station KBIG 740 AM, Avalon.

www.las-solanas.com

The call letters were originally chosen to promote the "chief announcer" of the station, Carl "Mr. Big" Bailey, who was on from sign-on until noon in the early days. If you follow the link in the last sentence, you'll see the monument to "Mr. Big" along the Avalon waterfront on Catalina Island.



That tall fellow greeting the tour bus driver is "Mr. Big" himself.

The studios and transmitter were, as I mentioned before, on Catalina Island. But the business office was in Hollywood at 6540 Sunset Boulevard, where Poole also built auxiliary and production studios. In 1959, Mr. Poole put KBIG-FM on the air in Los Angeles. And by the 1960s, efficiencies became an issue, so the island studios simply became a transmitter building (the chief engineer lived on site) and KBIG-AM's programming originated from Hollywood and was sent via microwave to the transmitter on Catalina.



The building is still there. KBIG moved to a bigger facility ten blocks west on Sunset when Bonneville International (the media arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) bought the stations in the early 1970s.

Around 1973 Bonneville split the call letters. The AM became KBRT and they promoted the stations as "Big" (KBIG-FM) and "Bright" (KBRT-AM)---two different approaches to beautiful music. By the mid-late 70s it was increasingly clear that the audience for that type of radio had gone to FM, so Bonneville went to a very novel approach to Contemporary Christian music (nothing like what you would hear today) for several years before selling the AM to Crawford Broadcasting, which took it Christian Talk.

In 2013, Crawford moved the transmitter to a mountain ridge in Orange County between Irvine and Corona.

" I recorded the tape's audio onto my camcorder and then dubbed that to DVD via my Toshiba DVD/VCR combo recorder. That's hardly state of the art, but good enough for me. Maybe I should go to a professional audio/video studio in town and make professional copies. Who knows maybe the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music might be interested to archive these in their library as sort of a MOR music time capsule."

Digitizing the tape (with backups) is something I'd really recommend. When you say you recorded the tape's audio onto your camcorder, was that just using the camera microphone to pick up sound from a speaker, or did you connect the two?

Michael--Thanks for sending the terrific history and color pictures pertaining to KBIG Radio Catalina. Talk about Catalina island--JazzTrax is promoting a big smooth jazz festival next month at the island's historic Avalon Ballroom which looks out to the sea. The only two musician names I recognize as participants are Tom Scott and Larry Carlton. However, smooth jazz isn't my cup of tea.

I had to use my camcorder's microphone to pick up sound from the tape recorder/player's speaker, as my old Fisher tape player didn't have out jacks and my old Sony camcorder didn't have in jacks (it only has out jacks to wire to my DVD recorder). I like to shoot video and use and maximize the zoom, and that's why I keep the old Sony 8mm analog camcorder as it has an amazing 20x zoom. The new digital camcorder's they sell for over $1,000 with viewfinders only have at maximum a mere 14x zoom.

 

[Michael Hagerty]

I had to use my camcorder's microphone to pick up sound from the tape recorder/player's speaker, as my old Fisher tape player didn't have out jacks and my old Sony camcorder didn't have in jacks (it only has out jacks to wire to my DVD recorder). I like to shoot video and use and maximize the zoom, and that's why I keep the old Sony 8mm analog camcorder as it has an amazing 20x zoom. The new digital camcorder's they sell for over $1,000 with viewfinders only have at maximum a mere 14x zoom.

Gotcha. So if you do have the audio digitized, you really should work from the original cassettes and not the microphone copy.

If you have a cassette deck that does have an out jack now, a connection between that and a computer is actually pretty easy. I don't have one anymore, but I digitized my old tapes ten or more years ago using my old Sony Walkman and a cord that ran from the headphone jack into the mic input of my laptop.

 

[lj]

Gotcha. So if you do have the audio digitized, you really should work from the original cassettes and not the microphone copy.

If you have a cassette deck that does have an out jack now, a connection between that and a computer is actually pretty easy. I don't have one anymore, but I digitized my old tapes ten or more years ago using my old Sony Walkman and a cord that ran from the headphone jack into the mic input of my laptop.

Michael--Thanks for the info.

 

[lj]

Here's a great song I really like from my KBIG 1971 playlist by Dionne Warwick "He's Moving On". Interestingly, while Bacharach and David produced the song they did not write nor arrange the song. However, the arrangement has the sound of Bacharach written all over it. By 1971-72 Dionne had begun to segue away from Bacharach and David and started to record tunes from other composers.

 

[lj]

Here's a great song I really like from my KBIG 1971 playlist by Dionne Warwick "He's Moving On". Interestingly, while Bacharach and David produced the song they did not write nor arrange the song. However, the arrangement has the sound of Bacharach written all over it. By 1971-72 Dionne had begun to segue away from Bacharach and David and started to record tunes from other composers.

I forgot to post this song--here goes.

 

[lj]

Hopefully this YouTube site is available for listening.

 

[Rudy]

Our TV, like others, had an earphone output, but I had a rare GE portable cassette recorder with an auxiliary input jack, and we'd bought a patch cord to go between the two. That is how I was able to record the audio of some television shows, including one of Herb's mid 70s TJB specials with the Muppets. I have dozens of cassettes still stored, and I have to see if the important ones will play back once, just enough to digitize them...

 

[rockdoctor]

Here in Norfolk VA, the radio stations that I listened to 50 years ago were WTAR and WCVU, both from this area and WRVA out of Richmond on AM and WNOR on FM. At night, I'd often listen to out of state stations that I could pick up. I heard many of these songs and the three AM stations were where I heard Brasil'66 for the first time. WNOR FM also played a lot of Brasil'66 as well until they went more towards the Rock and Roll.

 

[DeeInKY]

Memories... I used to record stuff in the mid to late 60s from WSAI, the Cincinnati AM rock station at the time. 1360 on your AM dial. Dad gave me a tape recorder for my 11th birthday. I already had a transistor radio, so we were good to go.

 

[lj]

Memories... I used to record stuff in the mid to late 60s from WSAI, the Cincinnati AM rock station at the time. 1360 on your AM dial. Dad gave me a tape recorder for my 11th birthday. I already had a transistor radio, so we were good to go.

I got my first tape recorder--a reel to reel device--in 1966 at Radio Shack. However, the recorder was a lemon and I returned it. I also felt that reel to reel for an amateur like myself was a hassle to set up and operate. So when I got a radio with a built- in cassette tape recorder in 1971, I was delighted due to the ease of operation, and I immediately recorded the aforementioned 1971 cassette tapes--the first in my collection. After that, tape recording became sort of a hobby of mine. as I taped dozens of radio shows such as Dick Clark's syndicated "Rock Roll and Remember" and the syndicated "The Great Sounds" from the 1980s featuring the great MOR songs of the past century. Lani Hall had a 1/2 dozen short interview segments, and that's how I first learned that she sang solo on the first Brasil 66 album.

 

[lj]

I'd like to feature four songs for your listening pleasure from the aforementioned Eydie Gorme 1971 "It Was a Good Time" album. The songs were written by Burt Bacharach and Carole King and are among their less played songs. You could say that 1971 was a pinnacle year for both composers. Burt had entered 1971 at the top of the musical world having just won in 1970 two academy awards for best original score and best song (Raindrops) from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and having written gold records for the Carpenters (Close to You) and for the 5th Dimension (One Less Bell to Answer). And Carole King's 1971 Tapestry album and single "It's too Late Baby" both hit #1.

Coming up are those four songs from YouTube. So stand by.

 

[Rudy]

I'd had a tiny 3-inch (?) reel deck that I used for a couple of years until I got the GE portable cassette recorder. It took until maybe 1978 or so before I got a true cassette deck, which was the real deal for me. With the GE, I had recorded a few things from the television, but I wasn't a radio listener at the time. It wasn't until the late 70s that I'd start recording a few things from the radio, mainly due to not having yet purchased the 12" single or LP yet. There might have been a couple of times that I'd let the tape run its length (the closest thing to an aircheck I'd done) and I'd recorded a few of Casey Kasem's countdowns when I knew there would be some tunes I'd like. We also had a jazz station (WJZZ...not from the foot of Mt. Belzoni, of course) that would play an entire new album after midnight maybe once a week, and I'd try to stay up and record it if it was something I was interested in (like the A&M Seawind album).

 

[lj]

Eydie Gorme sings Bacharach's "To Wait for Love".

 

[lj]

Eydie Gorme sings Bacharach's "A House is not a Home".

 

[lj]

Eydie Gorme sings Carole King's "Goin Back".

 

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Eydie Gorme sings Carole King's "Oh No Not My Baby".