Scrap of a Summer Mix

 

Looks like we'll be back on the radio on the night of May 30-31, through the courtesy of The Wiggle Room.  If nothing else comes along, I think I'll make some long-form audio collage here on the site, for that broadcast, and you can watch/listen.  Here's a few minutes I'd like to model for longer periods of late-nite weirdness.

Maybe radio at the end of May (2:36)

Maybe That Guy

This week, the sound of actors making livings.  Not exactly "before they were famous"; today's post looks at a few examples of work that might be by voices we know and love.  

Mel Blanc: 

The General in Gamera sounds a lot like a voice he did in Duck Dodgers (the original, not the 100 or so spinoffs they've done).  Mel was also working with Fibber McGee and Molly at the beginning of the 1940s- his Hiccuping Floorwalker is singularly adept- and doing commercials on that show, usually recognizable.  This one, not so much.  I'm not even sure it is Mel.  It's not a voice he used later.  I've listened to it carefully, and I still don't know- it's close enough for a qualified Maybe.

 

 Paul Frees: 

This clip was originally included in the Paul Frees anthology I broadcast 25 years ago.  It's the scene in Visconti's The Damned where Charlotte Rampling confronts an anonymous bureaucrat regarding her, shall we say, proposed emigration from the Reich.  The character's face isn't shown; Mr Frees did a lot of uncredited clean-up work on films, and his distinctively tinny baritone is frequently detectable.  

I thought that was the case here.  I made the call partly on the way he says "murder", which sounds pure Chicago (a frequent overtone with him).  But 25 years later, I'm not so sure.  The man was a chameleon.

For example, on a subsequent podcast I identified this clip from The Battle of Britain (1969) as a voice over by him, of a character played by Sir Laurence Olivier.  I've since concluded it probably really is Olivier.  I think.  Now, anyway. 

 

Jon Hamm: 

Oh yeah, that's our old buddy Draper.  (I cut out the sponsor's name.  This ain't Madison Avenue.)

It's an interesting topic.  Some well-known voices have dabbled in anonymity, plying their trade in the daily hurley-burley of show biz.  Probably a theme we'll come back to.

 

Ken Nordine, April 13, 1920

 "There was this guy who was a regular guy, who lived a regular life..."
 

Levi's Jeans ad, "The Stranger", 1971

Ken Nordine's birthday is today, April 13th.  

If you don't know about Ken, I'd describe him as something of a Cosmic Announcer, whose boundaries were limitless.  His bits start out like a commercial advertisement (with that voice, how could it be anything else?)- but then they turn aside, into a kind of story-space, where odd things happen, or sometimes just the sound of words washing into your mind...

For starters, may I suggest something from one of his Word Jazz records, perhaps "What Time Is It?" There's also his Word Jazz radio series.  (The Internet Archive has the whole thing?  Those people are amazing.)  And there's an animated film out there, too.

He also paid the bills with regular commercial work: ads, voice-over narrations.  The picture atop this post is from an ad he did for Levi's jeans, where he rewrote one of his bits to sell pants.  It's a living.  I heard him doing radio ads in the early 1990s, unidentified but with the recognition coming through, in the way the voice said "Countrywide". 

He lost that gig when Countrywide Mortgage ran into legal problems. It's a wild world out there in Working Announcer Land.   And he still had another 25-30 years to go.  (He died at the age of 98.)

 

One of the deejays at a radio station I worked at once sent him a fan letter, and signed it, "Your old buddy."  The reply came back from, "Your old buddy Ken".  

Here's a few items from my humble collection.

- a couple of commercials from 1963 (perhaps he wasn't as ubiquitous as Paul Frees, but I must have heard him hundreds of times before I knew who he was).  I'm pretty sure that's him on the Accent ad (there was another announcer who kind of sounded like him back then), but the ad itself seems like it has possibilities, if anyone wants to play with it.  The wiper blade ad sounds like something that went out to service stations.

- He also narrated those little filmstrips they had in grade school in the 60s.  I chopped one or two of them up for my America's Frontier Musical Heritage series.  Here's one of the sides, in the original.

Also, I should mention Fred Katz, whose music lent the Word Jazz series a degree of oddness.  Mr Katz was also a film composer, writing music for Wasp Woman that Frank Zappa apparently really liked, basically rewriting it and calling it "Uncle Meat".  The sincerest form of flattery.

The 60's: 1962 Missile Crisis

Soviet poster, Google

Another installment in the 60's story.  (Music at the end: Virgil Thompson, The River.)

Missile Crisis (5:46)