rand’s esoteric otr

Before I started collecting radio transcriptions, I really wasn’t that interested in Bing Crosby.  I enjoyed his early 30s recordings, especially with Paul Whiteman, but didn’t pay much attention to his later work.

Now that I’m hearing what Bing could do on a weekly basis in high quality sound, I’m beginning to understand what made him such a remarkable performer and a steady presence on radio for so many years.

Take, for example, the February 12, 1953 episode of “The Bing Crosby Show”, sponsored General Electric, originally broadcast on CBS.  It’s a prime example of Bing’s voice, smooth and cool, and his laid back style with guests sounding almost effortless and improvised.  Bing isn’t so much entertaining us as he is inviting the audience in for some relaxed fun.

In the show, it’s guest Jack Benny’s birthday and we finally discover Jack’s real age when Bing gives him a cake in an extended comedy sketch that takes up most of the show.  Bing sings “Glow Worm”, with special lyrics in praise of GE light bulbs, and Joe Venuti plays “Body and Soul” in the music segements of the program.  Ken Carpenter is our faithful announcer, giving us the pitch for GE ranges and engaging in banter with Bing about a series running in the “Saturday Evening Post” about Bing’s life.

The mp3 is a direct transfer from a rather odd disc I picked up recently.  It’s from a set of airchecks made of Bing’s show on KCBS/KCBS-FM in San Francisco.  They bear Radio Recorders labels and there are a couple of things about them that are strange.  Two are recycled parts from NBC reference acetates that have a blank side used for the Crosby show.  They’re cut with a microgroove stylus, rather than the usual 78 stylus, and have trail-off grooves at the end of each side that look like they were done by manually moving the cutting head.

Of course, Bing’s show was recorded on tape at the time - at the show opening, you can hear something go badly wrong with the tape.  (I’m sure that made some network and ad agency execs and Ampex employees cringe.)

In the recording, there’s also a brief incorrectly cut section of the transcription that skips over a line of Jack’s dialogue at the beginning of the second side - I never could get it to track right, so I just left it in “as is”.

More of this series of Bing’s shows will be posted in the blog in the coming weeks.

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The “Dennis Day Show” was broadcast in the late 1940s on NBC and sponsored by Colgate.  Day, a singer and comedian that was a regular on “The Jack Benny Show”, got his own sitcom where he played a down on his luck clerk in a drugstore.  The show is sometimes referred to as “A Day in the Life of Dennis Day”.

There are several episodes of this series that are lost, but I’ve been lucky enough to dig up one that hasn’t been publicly heard since it originally aired.  In this episode, broadcast January 8, 1947 from 9:00 to 9:30 pm, the government accidentally sends Dennis a tax refund of $100,000.  Dennis sings “My Pretty Girl” and “The Anniversary Song”.

There’s also a very special guest cameo about half-way through the show - I won’t spoil the surprise and just let you listen to find out who it is.

The program was transferred from an original NBC reference acetate numbered R-28131.

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