Back in 2012, I did a posting entitled "Have You Never Been Mellow", which was about a local radio show that had been saved to the Internet Archive. That show ran on the Minneapolis radio station KLBB (1400 and 1470 AM) from April 1998 to May 1999 and was hosted by two DJ's: Chuck Tomlinson and Joel Stitzel. The show ran initially on Saturdays from 9-11 PM, then later on Sundays from 8-10 PM. The whole theme of that show was playing retro-music from the 1970's to the 1980's (hence the show was named after the 1975 Olivia Newton-John hit "Have You Never Been Mellow").
Anyway, it seems that the Minneapolis-St. Paul area has always enjoyed radio programs featuring older music as that show proves. "Have You Never Been Mellow" may have ended in 1999, but the idea of the show continues in another Twin Cities radio station which is what today's post is about.
The show I'm referring to is called "Crap from the Past" which airs on the Minnesota community radio station KFAI https://www.kfai.org/program/crapfromthepast/ (90.3 FM in Minneapolis and 106.7 FM in West St. Paul). The show currently airs on Friday nights from 10:00 PM to midnight. "Crap from the Past" is hosted by DJ and radio personality by Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber.
While the show's name is a bit cheeky, the content of the show is hardly irreverent. The station itself uses block programming, hence "Crap from the Past" is one of the station's more enduring programs (having aired since 1992 although it began in the town of Rochester, Minnesota, but has held its Friday night time slot since October 2002, and has been syndicated worldwide since November 2002). Since August 2017, "Crap from the Past" has been a full, 2-hour show (having been expanded from an original length of 90 minutes).
As noted, its now syndicated too, running in Tuscon, Arizona and has aired on about a dozen different stations over the years, including on stations in Germany, the UK, Singapore (in addition to a few Internet radio streams). Its most loyal and long-standing affiliate is a station in New Zealand, where the show continues to air regularly.
"Crap from the Past" is even "branded" with its own distinct logo and website at http://www.crapfromthepast.com/. The logo (shown below) uses the same typeface and looks a lot like the trademarked Compact Disc Digital Audio logo that was used for the 1982 introduction of the compact disc (or CD) which was co-developed by Philips Electronics and Sony. The show's website is very reminiscent of early internet websites before html programming enabled more dynamic graphic designs to be part of modern websites.
Show logo aside, the Minnesota community radio show "Crap from the Past" describes itself as "a pop music radio show for people who already know plenty about pop music." Or, simply, "a graduate-level course in pop."
Naturally, with its innovative retro-themed content, the show is also saved on Internet Archive (see https://archive.org/details/crapfromthepast for the Internet Archive's page), the content is certainly the type that has found a loyal audience. The links above provide several places to find and listen to old episodes of "Crap from the Past" so I won't repeat them again. The host admits that he's a middle-aged dad in his fifties, which perhaps not ironically describes me, too (minus the dad part). Still, there are evidently enough people in the Twin Cities area to drive a 2-hour show with this content for 2 decades (27 years to be precise), plus, as I noted, a predecessor show that ran on another Twin Cities show even before that suggests the content is far from dead yet. The name "Crap from the Past" is perhaps fitting. Have a listen to the show that aired on March 1, 2019 below, or by visiting https://archive.org/details/cftp-2019-03-01.
As of 2018, sex is fairly ubiquitous in the U.S. media, but for decades, the environment was much more of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" when it came to any form of sex in the United States. In spite of humanity's continued perpetuation in the U.S. (proof that people were, in fact, having sex), open discussion of sex was still considered evil, at least when it came to conversations, or even having knowledge of sex.
But before 1980, open discussion of human sexuality or anything related to it, were seldom if ever done in public in the U.S., except perhaps for when discussing zoning requirements (usually restrictions) for pornographic movie theaters, or maybe a debate about public school funding for sex education. That was at least part of the reason that the incidence of teenage pregnancies, subsequently abortions, and later HIV/AIDS infections were all so prevalent in the U.S. at the time, because too many people really did not know any better. Ignorance was NOT bliss.
The late 1960's brought with it the era of Baby Boomer-led feminism (aided by the introduction of the first female birth control pill). Although the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment had stalled by the mid-to-late-1970's (and failed to secure the necessary state votes to amend the U.S. Constitution), there was nevertheless a newfound awareness of female sexuality in U.S. society. A vibrant publishing industry led the way with books including "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and "The Joy of Sex" (catch my post on that at http://hgm.sstrumello.com/2017/02/joy-of-sex-our-bodies-ourselves-became.html for more) as well as various magazines, including Playboy whose nude centerfolds first premiered in 1952, but were aided by the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. California that dramatically narrowed and simplified the definition of obscenity, which resulted in a new, nationwide subscriber base for the publication and dramatically fewer obscenity prosecutions nationwide. Beyond that, events such as the Stonewall riots also happened in 1969, ushering in a new era of LGBT visibility and demands for Constitutionally-protected legal rights which gained steam in the 1970's which were non-existent when the group remained closeted and invisible.
But times were rapidly changing; with new attitudes and perspectives upending decades of religious dogma that had infiltrated U.S. laws from communities to the country as a whole. We can attribute at least some of it to the massive Baby Boomer demographic cohort. Along with them, Boomers helped introduce the U.S. to women's liberation, widespread birth control, gay rights and a host of other issues that were previously never even acknowledged. The stage was set for more a honest dialogue about human sexuality.
In 1980, WYNY (a now-defunct radio station) was a struggling New York City Adult Contemporary station which had recently gone through a makeover in an attempt to build an audience. Part of this rebuild was adding specialized talk shows to the evening and weekend hours. In September of 1980, WYNY launched a 15-minute pre-recorded segment that aired on Sunday nights after midnight. The segment was called "Sexually Speaking" and it featured a unique host who was a German immigrant who had lived in Switzerland, Israel, and France before immigrating to the U.S. in 1956. One year later, it became a live show, and it was so successful that the station expanded it to a one-hour show airing at 10:00 PM on which Dr. Ruth Westheimer (or Dr. Ruth, as she became known) answered call-in questions from listeners.
Below is a recording of Dr. Ruth Westheimer's original New York radio broadcast from 97.1 FM on WYNY recorded in June 1982. The recording is below, or you can listen by visiting https://youtu.be/Oy3-WNv3AI0:
Dr. Ruth, who is a psychosexual therapist who helped to pioneer the field of media psychology with her original radio program, "Sexually Speaking". As noted, she was born in Germany in 1928, but she was sent to a children’s home in Switzerland at the age of ten which became an orphanage for most of the German Jewish students who had been sent there to escape the Holocaust. At age 17, she went to Israel where she fought for that country's independence as a member of the Haganah, the Jewish freedom fighters. She then moved to Paris where she studied at the Sorbonne and taught kindergarten. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1956 where she obtained her Masters Degree in Sociology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School of Social Research. In 1970, she received a Doctorate of Education (Ed.D.) in the Interdisciplinary Study of the Family from Columbia University Teacher's College.
Although Dr. Ruth did not have a classic radio voice, she certainly had the expertise, the candor, and a disarming personality that made her an overnight radio star (she was already a medical doctor, so she really did not need radio as many other radio hosts do). In a truthful, direct, and entertaining way, she truthfully answered blunt and honest questions about sex and sexuality that WYNY listeners called in (see some of the New York Times archived coverage from the mid-1980's at https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/04/style/a-voice-of-sexual-literacy.html and https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/01/magazine/merchandising-dr-ruth.html for more).
Within a year after the fifteen-minute midnight program began in New York, "Sexually Speaking" had become so popular that it was expanded into a daily, one-hour live call-in show. National syndication followed soon thereafter, and then the U.S. was introduced to the charming, irrepressible, and transparent Dr. Ruth. A very nice article can be found at Interview magazine at https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/dr-ruth-westheimer-westheimer-cecile-richards-april-issue-2018-interview which covers her evolution as one of the country's (and indeed, the world's) foremost sex therapists from her early work in the U.S. working at Planned Parenthood, to her latter day celebrity.
Dr. Ruth's celebrity status eventually landed her a national TV show (some archives of her old TV show can be found at ShoutFactoryTV http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/series/dr-ruth in which she speaks with Burt Reynolds, Joan Rivers, Richard Simmons to name a few of Hollywood's celebrities the diminutive celebrity sex therapist has gotten to know over the years.
Dr. Ruth also helped pave the way for a somewhat similar program that originally ran on Canadian television known as the Sunday Night Sex Show (which was branded as Talk Sex with Sue Johanson in the U.S.) with host Sue Johanson, who was also an older talk show host who was a Registered Nurse (rather than an MD, as was the case with Dr. Ruth). The latter show lasted until 2008, but it was carried on U.S. cable television. On May 11, 2008, the last live episode of Talk Sex was broadcast. After 174 episodes of the phenomenally successful show host, then at the age of 76, decided to hang up her dildos and depart from television. But she still maintains a website at http://www.talksexwithsue.com/ even though she is now retired.
Regardless of their similarities. the original Dr. Ruth herself has never disappeared.
Far from it.
But perhaps Dr. Ruth has established older women as experts in the field, whereas men dominate in most other areas. Indeed, she seems to revel in her role as celebrity sex therapist to the masses.
Today, Dr. Ruth still maintains a very active presence as a frequent guest on daytime television in traditional media, and in the online world, with a YouTube show at https://www.youtube.com/user/drruth (which I previously referenced HERE) and she also maintains a very active presence on Twitter as well at @AskDrRuth. Her goal was always to educate Americans about sex, because she believes that education can solve many issues that can become problems without an open dialogue. Her early years on the radio revealed that many women and men alike had questions about sex, sometimes easy-to-answer, but often lacked a viable outlet to address those very basic questions.
Below are several links, both historical and current, giving a sampling of the tiny woman's huge presence on the topic of American sexual literacy over the years. At age 89, Dr. Ruth shows no signs of slowing down. Many Americans remain eternally grateful this height-challenged (indeed, Dr. Ruth Westheimer's height is just 4'7") fan favorite has left an indelible mark not only on sexual literacy, but popular culture as well.
Author P.S., July 13, 2024: Many media outlets reported that Dr. Ruth Westheimer (born as Karola Ruth Siegel) passed away at age 96 at her home in New York. See the Associated Press obituary for her at https://apnews.com/article/ruth-westheimer-dies-6d4af57b5f034bf9a90977de41b88735 for more). AP described her as the "diminutive sex therapist who became a pop icon, media star and best-selling author through her frank talk about once-taboo bedroom topics" during the 1980's. While she had slowed down considerably since her heyday in the 1980's, she remained a force with a robust online presence even after her radio and television shows ended. To a large extent, her contribution to U.S. sexual openness helped generations of people who lived after her contributions.
In the days of analog music (tapes, which were preceded by vinyl albums), getting to a particular track on an album could be a real hassle. In that regard, vinyl was actually superior to tapes which pretty much replaced vinyl (although no one could play vinyl records in their cars, hence the evolution of music formats away from vinyl to tapes) because someone could clearly see the breaks between songs, whereas tape listeners had to rely on counters built-into their cassette players, and those were not standardized so the listener had to find the start and end points for whichever tracks they wanted. Using counters often required writing the counts down on the packages, combined with a time-consuming rewind or fast forward process. Clearly, digital music had solved the problem of immediate access to only the tracks we wanted to listen to far better than any preceding technology.
But, as American Public Media's Marketplace reported on Monday, December 10, 2012, that a recent article published in Billboard magazine (see http://bit.ly/TobGJ5 for the Billboard article) suggests that the spot in which a track appears on an album seems to play a HUGE role in how many downloads of a given song will achieve and Billboard's Gary Trust wrote that the earlier a song appears on an album, the more likely it is to be listened to. Have a listen to Marketplace interview below, or by visiting Marketplace at http://bit.ly/U53Hmq:
Contrary to what Marketplace suggests, Apple's iPod was NOT the invention to disrupt the idea that the order songs appear on an album has no significance on sales. For the record, that distinction really belongs to the non-Apple software engineers from Fraunhofer IIS, University of Hannover, AT&T-Bell Labs, Thomson-Brandt, CCETT, and the others who actually invented the MP3 format which Apple was merely the first to successfully commercialize (well, Apple followed the lead of Napster which was merely filesharing which has since been displaced by Torrents and others, but convinced the music industry that this was their best way to sell music in the future). Today, Apple's dominance in music faces growing competition (often based on much lower prices) from Amazon.com, Google and others who also sell digital music.
Billboard reports that the record labels (and artists, although how much influence the artists have remains to be seen) might want to revisit the importance of songs' locations on albums.
Billboard wrote "... Mumford & Sons' sophomore set 'Babel' which debuted atop the Billboard 200 (with 600,000 copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan), 11 of the 12 cuts on its standard edition roared onto On-Demand Songs. More noticeably, the order of the songs on the album almost mirrors that in which they bowed on the subscription streaming tally that week. Such data suggests that the earlier a song appears on an album, the more likely a listener is to stream it. At the same time, a music consumer's attention span may be even shorter than any artist wants to believe."
Record Label Beancounters Could Soon Dictate Track Order of Albums
Historically, as Billboard reported, "an album's track order has often been based on what has caught an artist's fancy, shaped by such elements as feel and flow, quoting country singer Taylor Swift who explained in the cover story of the October 27, 2012 issue of Billboard 'I never like to put two happy songs in a row or two of the same kind of sadness in a row' explaining how she decided the order of cuts on her recent Billboard 200 chart-topper 'Red.'"
But we all know short consumer attention spans seem more prevalent today, and new technology has actually enabled consumers to utilize media in ways that better suit their needs, rather than the needs and wants of musicians or record label executives.
The concept that better-selling tracks tend to appear near the top of the list means that record labels (and artists) might (potentially) be able manipulate which songs become big hits and which ones become the throw-aways by virtue of WHERE a track is placed on an album.
Money Talks
Will the artists, divas and others allow this?
That may depend on who the artist is, but we all know when it comes to the entertainment business, money usually talks loudest and has the most influence.
Madonna Live Nation Contract As Precedent?
In 2007, Madonna dumped her long-time record label (Warner Music Group Corp's Sire Records) which helped make her a star for a plum deal worth about $120 million over 10 years according to a person who told Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Key in the decision was that Warner Music refused to match the Live Nation deal, which encompassed future music and music-related businesses (Madonna was under contract to release one more album with Warner Music which she delivered), including the Madonna brand, albums, touring, merchandising, fanclub and Web site, DVDs, music-related television and film projects, and associated sponsorship agreements, the official statement said.
At the time, Madonna said in a statement that she was drawn to the deal with Live Nation because of the changes the music business has undergone in recent years.
"The paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and a businesswoman, I have to move with that shift," Madonna said. "For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited. I've never wanted to think in a limited way and with this new partnership, the possibilities are endless."
Madonna's business savvy aside, the good news is that albums aren't necessarily dead.
"The best lesson to take from studying albums' track sequences may be that even in an era of streaming, in which listener behavior seemingly reflects a tendency to sample only portions of releases, the album format appears to have a bright future," writes Billboard's Gary Trust. He advises bands to put their best material up front -- where a public with an ever-shortening attention span might hear it.
Which songs become the biggest hits have potential to be manipulated in the future by factors like statistical modeling which could potentially dictate WHERE songs should be placed on a given album in order to maximize sales. Just how much influence traditional radio responds remains to be seen, which had long effectively dominated music popularity, but today faces competition from nimble startups like Pandora radio. Much of broadcast radio is increasingly corporatized anyway, with giants like Clear Channel snapping up local affiliates across the country, so they may be more than willing to play along.
The mere fact that radio remains in existence (in spite of its now old technology) proves that the radio industry has managed to evolve to stay relevant over time. But, exactly WHAT radio plays may soon be dictated by things other than popular opinion (or maybe it has already?).
For my readers who weren't aware of it, just because a website is no longer around any more doesn't necessarily mean the content from that site is gone forever (although some companies have worked very hard to prevent archiving of their sites' content with robot.txt documents, typically these are companies that have content they wish to hide). A July 27, 2005 Wall Street Journal (see https://on.wsj.com/2HVBH4D for the article) chronicled just how the web has started to leave some more "permanent" records, much to the delight of lawyers (although the archived Web content is available to everyone and I've already featured some archived content on various posts). The following quote was featured:
"The Web, seemingly one of the most ephemeral of media, is instead starting to leave permanent records. Through the Wayback Machine, and similar services offered by companies such as Google Inc., it's now easy to retrieve all kinds of online material, from defunct Web pages to old versions of sites. While these databases have caught on among historians and scholars, they are proving particularly enticing for lawyers."
Beyond cached copies of millions of websites, the Internet Archive also has a multimedia section, although the extent of the content there is fairly limited, thanks in large part, to media conglomerates' desire to control where their content resides. However, they do have a collection of what it calls "Moving Images" (basically, Flash videos) and "Audio" which is mostly MP3s covering a wide array of content.
One of my earliest discoveries on the Internet Archive's "media" collection (they have both audio and video, FYI) is a now-defunct radio show with the groovy '70s name "Have You Never Been Mellow". The DJ's Chuck Tomlinson and Joel Stitzel hosted this retro-radio program on Club 14 KLBB (1400 and 1470 AM) in Minneapolis. The program aired over a decade ago already, from April 1998 to May 1999. The show ran initially on Saturdays from 9-11 PM, then later on Sundays from 8-10 PM.
Still, the content on this program is something one might envision Marcia Brady, Laurie Partridge, or maybe one of the Bradford kids from "Eight Is Enough" listening to! The name of the program, perhaps aptly, is taken from Olivia Newton-John's 1975 hit "Have You Never Been Mellow". That followed another mellow tune: "Please, Mister, Please". Remember, this is long before Australia-mania of the 1980's (ushering in Australian artists like Rick Springfield and Men At Work) took off, and even before the movie "Grease" permanently engrained Olivia Newton-John as an American pop culture icon of the era.
As for the music on this show, well, it's mellow, but like taking a step back in time.
That seemed to be a trend during the 1970s. Even soft-drink giant Coca Cola introduced a soda they called Mello Yello (note the spelling) which they launched in 1979. Apparently, it's still offered, but you'd probably only find it in a retailer or convenience store that has a wide variety of sugary soft drinks. As I understand it, it was yet another citrus-flavored soft drink, not quite Sprite and far sweeter, it was supposed to be a rival to Pepsi's highly-caffeinated Mountain Dew, and yes, Mello Yello has a higher-than-normal amount of caffeine.
"The smooth citrus taste of Mello Yello has refreshed people's thirst for over two decades. Its unique taste and confident, in-control style sets it apart from other soft drinks. Mello Yello highlights the smooth choices in life – because when you drink Mello Yello, everything goes down easy."
Gee, that sounds really groovy, maybe even mellow. Not having tasted it, I cannot say whether it tastes anything like a sweet version of Fresca, but the website indicates they now offer a zero calorie version of the product called Mello Yello Zero (I guess now that the core market for the product is pretty old, these things matter), although it's limited in terms of availability, mostly to the Great Lakes states. Anyway, I can say the brand was part of an entire attitude during the seventies: mellow (which was often induced by marijuana, as head shops where people could buy rolling papers, bongs and various pipes used for recreational drug use popped up in small towns across America). Nowadays, that's no longer a teen subculture, but has gone kind of mainstream with "Medical Marijuana" distributors emerging in many states.
Anyway, the "Have You Never Been Mellow" radio show is certainly worth listening to if you care to relive the mellow days of the seventies. For me, it kind of reminds me of going to the dentist's office. My dentist growing up was a pedriatric dentist, but his secret was nitrous oxide. In other words, he'd gas the kids up and get them higher than a kite, then do his work. He always played a mellow, adult rock station that played the kind of music featured in Chuck Tomlinson's and Joel Stitzel's "Have You Never Been Mellow". I can just hear Dionne Warwick singing "Deja Vu" now (which, incidentally, is on the playlist below) ... if only I had some nitrous oxide to go along with it! No, I've never really been into drugs, but the line seems to go with the direction the U.S. was taking back in the '70s and '80s – before Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign paved the way for modern-day First Ladies to spearhead such public service initiatives.
Have a listen below for one of the "Have You Never Been Mellow" broadcasts below, or by visiting http://archive.org/details/hynbm-playlists. There, you'll find a bunch of shows that have been recorded as playlists. By the way, the broadcast included below is from July 11, 1998 (see http://archive.org/details/hynbm-1998-07-11 to access that archived broadcast directly).
Writer, speaker, brother, son, friend, spouse, advocate for people with autoimmune (type 1) diabetes, thinker, dreamer. Reading and writing is becoming a lost art, but we can learn a lot from reading the medical and scientific literature before drawing conclusions. The press publishes abbreviated facts to fit into limited space, I don't mince words or omit facts.
