History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
The telephone "gossip bench" was a throwback to the early days of the telephone. They were often found in hallways and foyers for privacy. They had space for a telephone and sometimes a directory or drawer space. They typically date from the 1900s to the 1960s (but I remember seeing a few in department store catalogs as late as the 1980s.) But as more people began getting their own phones in their own rooms and private lines, they became obsolete.
However, they've found new uses today as a book nook or laptop/netbook desks.
Remember real shopping music? Before the music over shopping mall PA systems became a mishmash of Adult Contemporary recurrents and tired, overplayed '80s oldies? The
music was always more welcoming because it was agnostic. It wasn't
someone's favorite music. Or anyone's. It was that stuff that you heard
just slightly below the general din of a typical day inside a shopping
mall.
You don't know headaches until you've just heard Bon Jovi music playing in the echo chamber of an empty shopping mall. You just don't.
Because the malls acoustically are/were the worst places for contemporary pop/rock music of ANY kind. I soon realized this after the malls started changing their background music from easy listening to pop music from 1987 to 1990. And I soon had a renewed appreciation for orchestras with pianos and lots of big brassy instruments.
Because shopping malls have/had hard surfaces. The glass storefronts, marble floors and walls, fountains, the weird metal abstract art sculptures and high vaulted courtyard ceilings all reflect sound. Acoustically, they were just better tempered for low volume Percy Faith than mid-volume Paula Abdul. Pop/rock booms in malls with a cathedral-like echo that's sometimes disorienting. Some people can't process that and the person next to them talking through the echo as well as the older easy listening and I'm one of them. Now get off my lawn.
But now you can relive that golden sound as you browse through the Amazon app on your smartphone! Mall Of 1974 is essentially a nifty compilation of classic mall PA music. But also with added echo and reverb to simulate the sound of a shopping mall, circa 1970s/early '80s.
If there's one thing that pairs up with a great cup of coffee, it's great radio. And for a few glorious decades from the 1930s to the 1950s, people in the Capital Region of New York got both from the legendary WGY Radio.
WGY is one of the pioneering radio stations in America. Broadcasting continuously since 1922, it was home to many firsts in broadcasting, including the first remote broadcasts, the first radio dramas, the first high powered broadcasts, the first experimental TV station and one of the very first FM radio stations, among them. It's local reputation as a media powerhouse also lent itself to some unusual diversifications.
With the blessing of WGY's ownership (General Electric), WGY Food Stores was launched in the 1920s.
How WGY entered the grocery business isn't like how you would expect. WGY Radio itself never directly handled the grocery business. Instead, they licensed their "brand" (i.e. their call letters) to a local distributor and chain operator for a cut of the profits or a set fee.
This arrangement, plus the chain's whopping 130 stores in the full blast of it's signal (a full 75 miles around Schenectady!), gave both operators an advantage. The grocer had an instantly identifiable brand and the radio station had instant free advertising and a great promotional asset.
Because radio was a marvel for people in the 1920s and it's tie-in with anything sold well.
Though best known for it's coffee (as evidenced by the many WGY coffee tins that circulate in the antique underground) WGY Food Stores also offered other branded products, such as canned evaporated milk (as mentioned in the ad above), fruits and vegetables, spices and tea. There were likely other WGY branded products as well.
WGY was still operating in the grocery business as late as 1958. But with the 1960s came the first waves of distributor consolidation and grocery stores became supermarkets. But the WGY stores seemed to be smaller stores, which were fading away to the supermarkets.
WGY Coffee jar, 1940-50s
But WGY could be considered the Amazon of it's day. It's one of the earliest examples of how one could get both their staples and entertainment from the same source (in name.)
Today, WGY has been long out of the grocery business. But still broadcasting to to the Capital Region.
If you've never heard of this album, you might not be ready for it.
You may have grown up in the 1960s and thought you heard everything the 1960s had to offer. But if you haven't heard this album, you still haven't heard it all.
The Shaggs were Dorothy "Dot" Wiggin, Helen Wiggin and Betty Wiggin (and later, Rachel Wiggin), four sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire. They were formed as a group not under their own initiative, but by their dad, Austin Wiggin Jr.. His mother predicted Austin would marry a strawberry blonde woman and they would have daughters who would become a world famous music group.
The first two predictions came true. Austin married a strawberry blonde woman, Annie. And they had daughters. So Austin Wiggin Jr. set about making the third come true. He bought his daughters a drum kit and two guitars. And that was it. No formal lessons in playing or singing. They were on their own musically.
As a result, The Shaggs evolved, um, differently....
The Shaggs played live around the Fremont area. But the audiences weren't exactly thrilled by what they heard and often threw things at the band. It didn't matter. Austin Wiggin was going to make his girls stars. So he took the next step; Recording an album.
Austin Wiggin pulled out most of his savings to finance the album. They went to Boston and recorded Philosophy of The World on the independent Third World Recordings label. They pressed 1,000 copies of Philosophy of The World.
And 900 of them promptly disappeared. As with the head of Third World Recordings. Most of the remaining 100 copies went to radio stations, some of which escaped into the wild (as radio promo copies of albums often did.) Only one single was released, "My Pal Foot-Foot"(Foot-Foot was the name of Dot Wiggin's cat.)
To this day, no one knows what happened to those 900 missing album copies (or Foot-Foot.)
Or (as some wonder) if they were even printed.
Philosophy of The World has been called one of the worst records of all time. But Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain called Philosophy of The World
one of their favorite albums of all time. But who would even unleash
such an album? Beat timing? Song structure? Performing on key? Big
production? Artistic lyrics? FAH! Overrated.
But the reality was the Wiggin girls only went with what they honestly knew, which wasn't much. But they made the best of it to appease their father (although one could imagine the conflicts that must have went on between the girls and their dad at times were as bad as their music.) And the fact they weren't pretentious or egotistical lyrically (the song topics were about pets, sports cars, Halloween and random musings) made them just as inspiring. They became the godmothers of DIY punk and outsider music.
It's been said The Velvet Underground and Nico had 30,000 initial copies pressed and everyone who bought a copy started a band. The Shaggs pressed 1,000 copies of Philosophy of The World, lost 900 of them and still had the same effect. But Philosophy of The World, by all odds should never have survived.
The few copies that escaped quickly became collector's items initially not for their value, but for their weirdness. And their rarity has made the original LPs extremely valuable.
The Shaggs stayed together as an act until 1975. They did make an unreleased second album and on this one, there was studio help at last Their act had become famous once again when Boston rock station WBCN began playing tracks from Philosophy of The World as a joke, the album began getting renewed interest. Comedy radio host Dr. Demento also played tracks from Philosophy of The World on his syndicated radio show, which further interested/shocked listeners. When the jazz group NRBQ discovered them, they talked the Shaggs into re-releasing Philosophy of The World in 1980.
