The Nockley Files, Part 1

You may recall Arthur H Nockley, American broadcaster and spiritualist, best known for his pirate radio broadcasts from Lake Michigan in the 1940s.  

 

We recently obtained a collection of the "Moment of Inspiration" commentaries he broadcast every morning, while starting the transmitter for a large mid-western radio station, until they caught him.  (He was merely supposed to announce the usual FCC statement at the start of the broadcast day.)

 

Besides being very brief, most of them are fragmentary; Nockley's archive was presumed lost when his broadcasting studio (a converted tugboat, the Trudy) sank in a storm, only to be located by researchers decades later.  

 

 

These recordings were recovered from a waterlogged box containing Dictaphone belts.  Next, they'll be painstakingly assembled and cleaned; that's our job here at the institute. 

 

Our first example is inexplicable, but won't take much time.  He apparently just flipped open the microphone at the transmitter one morning, and started babbling away.  Listeners were stunned.

 

Play (1:14)

 

 

Mission Preposterous

 

MAD Magazine

Barney Collier was one of my early influences.  But not as much as Mad.

 

Play (2:00)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...oops, forgot the pictures:

El Presidente

Brutal dictator of a small Iron Curtain country

International crime kingpin

Peace activist imprisoned by the Reds

Money-man for the Syndicate

 

...yes, they're all played by Nehemiah Persoff.  Because of course.

Drive-in Ads

 

Thanks to the Internet Archive and its comprehensive collection of caliginous junk- uh, crusty old movie ads. They're not quite complete without the grainy, grimy, oh-so-good visuals.  That might be the next step.  

Play (2:28) 

Alternate history: James Stewart

Write-up day today, audio next week.

 

Starting to fool around with this stuff.

 

Seasonal Decor

Ok, let's get our decorations up.  Has anyone seen the plywood Santa?  

 

It doesn't rate a Sunday post because it's not new, but Open AI's version of Frank Sinatra, crooning a holiday hello, is the sort of Firestone Tires Songs of Christmas we like around here.  I especially dig the arrangements-- Nelson and the boys were really toasted.  A Christmas Song of Childhood Dreams.

 

Open AI: In the Style of Frank Sinatra (3:09) 

 

And for an antidote to all the musical cheer that's about to be inflicted on us, I recommend Les Wilson, who sings, as someone once said, like a tone-deaf person listening to music on headphones.  

 

Les Wilson: Deck the Halls (1:14)

 

We may continue to drop bizarre holiday music in here during the month.  

One Man

 

The problem with the Unitary Executive theory.

Play (2:08) 

Alexander Tsfasman, "The Guy From the South"

 

Here at last is a song about some guy.  

I was listening to a collection of Soviet jazz on Youtube, and found this unexpectedly Hot Jazz, with very little info.  

 

The subject of the song, a "man from the South", who's identified by "a big cigar in his mouth",  was totally irrelevant to the combo, who combined the styles of Raymond Scott, Fletcher Henderson and wild Betty Boop music.  This was Stalin-era Soviet jazz?  

 

play (2:20)

 

 

 

Alexander Tsfasman

 

The notes on the video were in Russian. I got the composer and title from that.

 

Alexander Tsfasman was a Ukrainian composer, one of the giants of Soviet jazz, and creator of the country's first jazz orchestra.  

 

The track is available at Apple Music- who stole a couple of my pieces from an anthology and refused to give me a penny AND I HOPE YOU'RE NOT BUYING MUSIC FROM THOSE CAPITALISTS (kidding of course.  If they had to pay people, maybe they wouldn't play anything.  I know I wouldn't.)  

 

The thing about their version, and maybe all the others except this one, is that it's screwed up-- there's like a half-beat missing from the intro.  See for yourself:

 

original intro

 

fixed

 

My guess is, somewhere along the way, a misguided music producer who didn't understand the time nature of music (fixed beats per measure and all that) heard a glitch on this recording and simply chopped it out.  So now there's a jump in the intro.  Because who notices that kind of thing, huh?  There's so many beats in an average song, you can probably throw out a few of them with no one noticing...

Why people with no rhythm sense end up producing music is a mystery to me.  The same thing happened with "Dr. Jazz" on the Bonzo's "Cornology" collection (EMI Records).  There's a drop-out during the bass clarinet solo, and they just removed that portion of song, and made it 7/8 for a bar.  If you want the track complete, it's on vinyl.  But the official CD version has an obvious glitch, and it's out there now, too.  (And this is from the people who make themselves the "owners" of the music.)  

I hope you enjoy what is perhaps the only restored version of this song.  (Sorry about the low volume levels.  When I made them louder, it got really distorted.  I'm only a simple country sound nut, with my little wind-up deal, here.)