Your First Phonograph/Stereo - Part 2

Click here for Part One

The Night That Disco Died

34 years ago tonight in Chicago, Radio DJ Steve Dahl of Chicago rock station WLUP put a glorious end to the disco music craze of the '70s called "Disco Demolition Night" when he and another DJ came up with the idea of the Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979. Dahl, who was never a fan of disco had been fired from rock station WDAI-FM 94.7 the previous Christmas Eve when that station changed it's format to All Disco.

That was the last straw. This meant war.

Dahl was hired by WLUP almost immediately and the anti-disco backlash had officially begun.

Fans who brought a disco record to the ballpark this night 34 years ago were admitted for 98 cents, a number which closely matched WLUP’s 97.9 MHz dial position. The event took place at Comiskey Park between games of a White Sox/Tigers double-header. Early fears of embarrassingly low attendance were squashed when 90,000 disco-haters converged onto a stadium that held 52,000.

After the Sox lost the first game 4-1, during which time the increasingly rowdy fans got drunk and crazy, the real fun began. Steve Dahl wore a combat helmet and rode around the ballpark in a Jeep. In center field a giant box was packed full of disco LPs and blown up which left a hole in the playing surface. People who didn’t get their Village People, KC & The Sunshine Band and Sister Sledge records in the box used them as frisbees and began flinging them through the air. Thousands of fans then swarmed the field, lighting fires and starting small riots. The bases were stolen, the batting cage was destroyed and chaos ruled. Chicago police in riot gear finally cleared the field which was so badly damaged that the second game could not be played. It was later determined that the White Sox would have to forfeit the game to the Tigers because they failed to provide acceptable playing conditions.......

After the Disco Demolition Night promotion, disco began to lose its popularity. Rapidly.

Steve Dahl on the other hand still worked anti-disco sentiment, even producing a parody record of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" (one of the first ever "parody" type records which "Weird" Al Yankovic would later become famous for) called "Do Ya Think I'm Disco". He recorded it as a single on the independent Ovation Records label (one of the smaller national indie labels of the time that was based in Chicago.)

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2007/11/306_14_Steve_Dahl_-_D%27Ya_Think_I%27m_Disco.mp3



As for disco, it had completely left the pop charts by fall of 1980. It was replaced by an even more tedious form of music called "adult contemporary" and acts like Barbara Streisand (one of the very few acts to have disco hits and survive the backlash) and Neil Diamond began filling the airwaves along with the arena rock bands (Foreigner, Journey, Rush, Loverboy, etc, etc.)

However, disco never REALLY died. It went back underground to the gay dance clubs and R&B charts where it started for most of the early '80s and resurfaced as pop with the Madonna craze of the mid-'80s. It exists today as a specialty genre simply called "dance music". A brief nostalgic revival in the '90s of '70s disco brought a lot of the older music back into the mainstream......

She's Got Balls

Headbanger Problems

"She Drives Funny Cars"

Sears Catalog Pitcher

 

 

Your mom may have owned one of these. And I still do.

This was iconic. And pretty much a late '70s/early '80s giveaway from Sears for applying for their credit card. It originally came with four matching plastic tumblers (the tumblers were the same colour as the pitcher and did not have the catalog printing.)

I still use mine for Kool-Aid.....It just isn't summer without it.....

Your '70s Bathroom

 

 

 

 

ABC Records Labels of The '70s

Like RCA, ABC Records had a series of matching record labels in the '70s (many labels seemed to have some kind of corporate matching scheme....)

Automated Radio Stations

Many people have a disgusted view of radio these days. And who can blame them? They lament the lack of personality, the bland repetitive playlists, the high commercial loads per hour and most annoyingly, the "liner cards" (trust me, the jocks more than anyone HATE these. They know you're not stupid and it's embarrassing on both ends.)

Seriously, what the fuck is "Now Playing An Even Better Mix of Continuous Lite Favorites With More Variety and Less Talk....."

How many of you have heard something like that on the radio and screamed back at it "Well DO WE, NOW? DUH!"

(Please remember it's all radio program director ego masturbation and does not represent the opinions of those who are/were forced to say it, strictly verbatim, to keep their jobs.)

Many of us will look back at the radio industry deregulation of the '90s, which lifted ownership caps on how many radio stations one corporation could own in one city from one AM and one FM to 8 total (5 FM and 3 AM stations. Or vice-versa) as the beginning of bland, stale, canned sounding radio. And to some degree, they're right - it just went south on a MASSIVE scale after that. But corporately programmed, bland boring radio been around longer than you think.

When the FM radio band was finally established in the late '40s it had a really slow start. One was most stations were co-owned with major local AM stations and simply simulcasted their AM programming on FM 24/7. Others simulcasted most of the time and would produce nightly programming. And the rest were upstart independents that focused on their music. Mostly classical music and easy listening/show tunes. Always accentuating the "high fidelity" of FM. 

When FM Stereo debuted in 1961, it wasn't much of a game changer at first. Few stations adopted it immediately and it wasn't until the early '70s when most stations did. So apart from a few daring originals, FM was stagnating.

So in 1966, the FCC decided to do something about it. It wasn't in the back pocket of lobbyists at it is today. So it mandated that all AM/FM combo's FM stations have a mandatory minimum of separate programming from their AM stations.

The radio industry was not happy. Many AM/FMs actually didn't even have separate studios for their FM stations. But they had to get something - ANYTHING to fill all this new airtime. This meant hiring people who will work really cheap, which led to the progressive rock era OR.....

Enter the radio automation machine.

It was first invented in the 1950s, but it didn't work very well because the very first ones played 45 RPM records using a jukebox-like mechanism. The selector mechanism that put each record on the platter had to be cleaned and well lubricated. Often. Otherwise, the selector would not properly retract and as the powerful motor moved the player on to the next selection, the selector would ride along, happily SMASHING every record it encountered..... SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!.

Back to the drawing board.

By the late '60s, they had improved to the point of enough stability (or at least less destructiveness) to make them a viable option for most of the bigger FM stations.  
 
Here's how it worked (in the TM Stereo Rock format):

"Hi..."

First, you panic a little.

Next you opened up four boxes of two track reel, one sided  tape and threaded them accordingly. The 100 Series was for currents. These were newer hits were in sets of two songs, back announced with "That was (last song played) and before that (the first song)"

The 100 series reel was also where the announcer lurked.

The 200 Series were the oldest songs in the format. The 300s were recurrents (songs released in the last 7 years that people still like.)  There was also a 400 series for nighttime airplay. It featured more album cuts and newer or "buzz" material, each back announced with not only title and artist, but also album the song came off of.

New music reels were shipped out to replace older reels several times a year. Currents were replaced every two weeks, recurrents four times a year and oldies twice a year.

And these tape reels needed constant changing, so it was usually up to the jocks in the AM studio to rewind them. These reel to reel machines had POWERFUL rewind motors, they were a marvel to watch the tapes rewind so fast. But you had to make sure the reel hubs were on tightly or the reels would wobble off and fly across the room projectile (and they HURT) and replace them in mid-airshift.

This was also the era of the 2-3 minute pop song, which meant they had to work fast - VERY fast (one can only imagine the horror of hearing "White Rabbit" through the hallway AM air monitors approaching it's end and you're still trying to get a tape threaded in the machine and just as Grace Slick starts singing "Feed your head!......Feed your head!", race back to the AM studio to open the mic before the very last note faded out.)

And under NO circumstances were you allowed to break a sweat.

TM Stereo Rock subscribing stations were required to return the outdated reels back to the company (the metal reels themselves were pretty expensive.) But this left a narrower playlist, so stations often held on to older reels to add more variety.

Next, you put the jingles, commercial spots, PSAs, weather and time checks and mandatory hourly station identification on cart tapes.

Carts are essentially similar to 8-Track music tapes. More about them here.

Then, came the fun part - Programming the beast. Each system was different. Some were computerized, some used switches. And when you're done (and hopefully done right), you had something that sounded like this (This isn't TM Stereo Rock, this is the Drake-Chenault Hit Parade.......)

WRAL 101.5 FM, Raleigh, NC (1974)

As the '70s progressed and FM became more dominate, many automated FMs went live and some used the automation for AM programming.

Like many automated radio stations, KISM-FM's jocks often pre-recorded their shows prior to airtime.

But automated radio never went away. In fact, it's status quo. But using computers today. That big wall of tape machines can all be done from a laptop computer today. Very few stations today have live announcers physically playing the music.

Pizza Hut Electric Baking Oven

From the late '70s.....

K-Tel Superstar Game

 In 1973, K-Tel International got into the board game business with this cool little offering.

Players are rock stars and collect gold records to win. Roll dice to spiral in the player counters from the start to end square on the board. Squares have events for players to collect or lose money or release an album, which may turn out to be a hit, a dud, or break-even. Game comes with a 45 RPM which must be played when any album is released. A random track determines the success of the album.

Granted, K-Tel never signed an actual exclusive recording contract with anyone, they licensed the music for their compilations from major record labels.    

This is the only known 45 RPM record K-Tel ever released.....

Lumière Gramophones

The Lumière gramophones may be just forgotten audio artifacts from the early 1900s, but look closer.

Their strange paper diaphragms (instead of horns) led to the invention of the audio speaker...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_NCbXypjGc

Plan 9

I once installed this on my Dell Inspiron 3700 laptop (circa 1998) in the waning days of 2009 and promptly sent it back to 1990 (as you can see from the screen shot.)

Plan 9 has some things in common with classic UNIX, some old-school UNIX commands are recognized, but everything else goes way off the beaten path. There's a whole different learning curve to Plan 9. 

A whole different learning curve.

The documentation goes on extensively how Plan 9 sets out to be different from any other operating system out there you've used and on that, they have succeeded. 

Giving Plan 9 commands (after a few years of working with terminals, it's pretty simple. It's just that your average Windows non-geek is going to shit a twinkie when faced with the expectations of Plan 9) on how to run programs, how to mount writable media, how to display pictures and play games and read man pages and HTML files, how to copy and paste. Copy and paste is actually "snarf and paste" in the Plan 9 OS. Different, it is. Other than that, it's about as functional as Congress.

Plan 9 replaced UNIX at Bell Labs as the organization's "primary platform in the mid '80s for research and explores several changes to the original UNIX model that facilitate the use and programming of the system, notably in distributed multi-user environments." 

But it doesn't do Flash.

It was first released to the public in 1992. But next to Windows 3.1 or Mac of the time, it looked awfully primitive.

And it still does. Not the big seller in the world of modern computing. I shudder to think how this will even handle a mere DOS emulator, to say nothing of a simple MP3.....

Here's a video of Plan 9:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJZMsaxaNIo

Plan 9 was really just a massive headache to me. But if you're a budding programmer/developer who really wants to get in on the ground floor of something in relatively uncharted waters and make it work, then hit the manual on Plan 9.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/index.html

But here's a handy tip if you're an average computer user who likes to easily surf the web. download anything and easily summon up music. photos and documents on Plan 9 - FORGET IT.

I just wish Plan 9 would get rid of that fat, jelly-bean like rabbit as it's mascot. Find a better logo....PLEASE! 

Like I said, Plan 9 is out there and ready for some SERIOUS R&D. But otherwise, it's not going to amount to much more but a computer hobbyist toy. But that's a one-up in itself: Ever heard of a virus that attacks a Plan 9 computer yet?