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