Your Boss Sings The Hits

When we look for employment, even in record stores, the last thing you expect to get is a free record (that came later in your record store career ;) ....)

Until the '80s, when video tapes and later in the 2000's when DVDs became standard, many employers used records to either train employees or boost morale (in that special way only a nameless, faceless and often clueless mega-corporation can.)

When this practice started, it's hard to say. Instructive records and messages from employers to workers of some sort have been around since the 1890s (and on wax cylinders!)

It wasn't until the 1920s did the major record labels set up custom record divisions. They were initially for businesses or organizations with a large nationwide or regional subscriber/client/employee base, but later allowed their presses to be used for smaller regional music record labels. 

If you were a lucky McDonald's employee in early 1979, you got this Eva-Tone soundsheet to prep you for the latest summer advertising campaign blitz for McDonald's.

I'm not sure what the message is here. Are the employees supposed to remember the lyrics of this jingle?

Z-Rock Radio

Remember these guys?

Z-Rock was a national hard rock radio network from the late '80s to December 1996. Z-Rock was very popular with the headbanger metal crowd. They were heard over some FM stations, but most of Z-Rock's affiliates were third tier local AM stations that didn't find much success in any other format.

Z-Rock's days were numbered once the Seattle Grunge Revolution hit nationwide in 1992 and music tastes started changing towards alternative rock. In October 1993, the network further exacerbated their demise by pulling the plug on their AM affiliates and going FM only. As the network dwindled, so did their remaining affiliates until Z-Rock was taken off the air by their parent company, SMN Networks. However, the remaining local affiliates were allowed to retain the Z-Rock logo and imaging for their stations.....

It Seemed Like A Good Idea - Part 2

Now here was a disaster waiting to happen: The packaging was nice, a prepackaged gourmet meal (utterly the biggest oxymoron) and a little bottle of wine. There was just one problem. The wine wasn't for drinking, it was for preparing the meal with....

Yes...THIS existed in the '70s too.......

An actual food product of the '70s.....Gerber Singles.....for ADULTS.....

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......