Don Draper meets the Beatles

As if further evidence was needed that John, Paul, George and Ringo were sent here by a higher civilization to move modern culture forward, Revolver was released sixty years ago this week (August 5, actually). Their seventh studio album, covering a range of musical styles, was a trailblazer, earning praise ever since.

For a 2012 episode of Mad Men, its producers paid $250,000 for the rights to Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track on Revolver.

Throughout its run, Mad Men always made smart choices about its use of music, always period accurate and with a lyric that underscored plot or character development. Satisfaction, You Only Live Twice and I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing come to mind.

Here, Tomorrow Never Knows with its prescient title, serves as metaphor for Don Draper’s puzzled efforts to understand youth culture and for the episode’s chaotic final scenes of work colleagues smoking pot in the office afterhours, and others trying to grapple with the usual suburban sex shenanigans.

Draper’s younger wife Megan has bought the new Beatles album and tells Don, “Start here,” indicating Tomorrow Never Knows.

No.

You don’t read Moby Dick backwards or watch Citizen Kane starting with the last scene.

Don tries, but he seemingly has no patience for Tomorrow Never Knows. He turns it off before it ends. It’s noisy, distracting, like something turned inside out and upside down.

But what if he plays Revolver the right way starting with the opening track?

Well, for one thing it would have made for a boring episode.

Opening track Taxman reminds Don that he’s now making major money as agency partner and he’s overdue to check in with his accountant.

Here, There and Everywhere is nice, close enough in his mind to Patti Page’s Old Cape Cod, the standard he’s always had a soft spot for. He notes to himself that it could work as background music for a TWA commercial.

He knows Yellow Submarine from his kids singing the chorus endlessly when he had them over last weekend. Doesn’t like it.

Don refills his tumbler of scotch and flips the record over.

He likes Good Day Sunshine, it’s bouncy, happy, a throwback to the musical movies he watched as a kid when the audience followed the bouncing ball and sang along.

For No One is an emotional black hole, dredging up memories of first wife Betty, the “you stay home, she goes out” break-up song about “a love that should have lasted years.” Time to top off that tumbler.

Got To Get You into My Life is ad territory again. Punchy, with a memorable chorus that could work for any brand.

As Tomorrow Never Knows comes on, the booze is making a statement. He gets up and turns the record player off before the song is finished. He finds the bedroom and switches on the portable television. It’s August, nothing but reruns and a Mets game.

Turning off his mind, he relaxes and floats downstream.

The Incredible World of James Bond

On November 26, 1965, the day after Thanksgiving, NBC fittingly pre-empted The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to run The Incredible World of James Bond, an hour-long documentary that, given its sweep and licensing rights to all the Bond films made up till then – Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger and the upcoming Thunderball – survives as the definitive statement on a cultural phenomenon.

I watched the show when it originally aired, an eleven-year-old already stuck in the snare of Bondmania (not to mention Beatlemania and lurking around the corner in just four months’ time, Batmania) and it was a trip watching scenes from Goldfinger – the Aston Martin, Oddjob’s electrocution, the laser beam aimed at Bond’s family jewels – in our living room.

The full movie wouldn’t air on network television until September 1972.

The Incredible World of James Bond also gave us a rare glimpse of the very proper Ian Fleming wandering about Goldeneye, his Jamaican estate, in a safari jacket, cigarette holder clenched in his mouth, with a reminder that Fleming didn’t look any farther than his bookshelf for a name for his fictional spy, a nature guide titled Birds of the West Indies by ornithologist James Bond.

A segment on Bond tie-in merchandise included the elusive, only-rich-kids-can-afford-it 007 Road Race set and the 007 attache case, plus a line of men’s wear, perfect for lounging about after consuming the Bond’s room service breakfast in From Russia with Love (and shown in a segment covering his refined tastes) of green figs, yogurt and coffee, very black.

What recently triggered all this was the sudden appearance on YouTube of this ad which ran during the program and suckered me right in:

Here’s my original copy of the album, delivered on January 14, 1966 (according to my childish scrawl).

Adjusted for inflation, a single U.S. dollar in 1966 had the purchasing power of about $10.19 today, making the record, and factoring in the purchase of a bag of Fritos, a bit of a ripoff for the kind of budget LP found in supermarkets and bargain bids, but it seemed well worth it at the time.

The record found a place in my collection and came in handy when I made tapes for road trips in my 1973 Toyota Corona – standard model, no ejector seat – as one of my favorite tricks was to fade out the Bond theme into Johnny Rivers’ Secret Agent Man.

The album would have also made excellent background music while I watched the slot cars in that road racing set go around and round. Anybody who could afford the racing cars wouldn’t have thought twice about spending another buck on the record.

Ted Turner

Ted Turner died on May 6 at the age of 87.

Major league baseball owners today seem like a mostly faceless, bloodless lot, incorporated and data driven. There was a time, however, when an MLB owner meeting resembled field day at Arkham Asylum, a miserable crew including bullies (George Steinbrenner, Yankees), racists both obvious (Clark Griffith, Twins, and Marge Schott, Reds), and closeted (Tom Yawkey, Red Sox), the mercurial nouveau riche (Charlie Finley, A’s) and clueless traditionalists (Philip Wrigley, Cubs).

In 1976 they made room for Turner, who’d purchased the Atlanta Braves to a) keep them in Atlanta and b) provide content for his WTBS cable superstation, eventually giving them a nationwide audience and allowing them to be marketed as “The Atlanta Braves: America’s Team.”

Turner may at first have come off like a vulgar frat boy; sportswriters were quick to name him “The Mouth of the South,” but he brought a sense of humor and clever marketing. Braves players had their nicknames stitched on the backs of their uniforms. All except pitcher Andy Messersmith, who agreed to have the word CHANNEL over his number 17, a walking promotion for Turner’s UHF station on channel 17. The commissioner’s office put a quick end to that. In 1977, he took over as temporary manager of the Braves, complete with tobacco chaw, for one game (they were on an epic 16-game losing streak). The commissioner ended that move just as quickly.

Media magnate as manager

But even if you weren’t a fan of the Braves or baseball it was hard not to like Turner. He built a media empire that included for better or for worse CNN (thus creating the 24/7 news cycle we can no longer escape), WTBS (with its Saturday and Sunday afternoon marathons of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Wild, Wild West), the Cartoon Network (reviving the old Hanna Barbera cartoons) and, best of all, Turner Classic Movies.

He was also an ex-Republican who saw the light and went blue, publicly feuded with Rupert Murdoch, challenged the World Wrestling Federation (owned by Trump suck-ups the McMahons) with a rival league World Championship Wrestling, married Jane Fonda, championed healthcare reform, nature conservation and alternative energy resources.

Wait, you mean there was a time when you could actually admire a billionaire?

Masters of UHF

Before cable television there was UHF.

Usually accessed on portable televisions with a secondary UHF channel dial and rabbit ears – which seemed to make UHF viewing synonymous with childhood bedrooms and cramped first apartments – requiring one to navigate, Admiral Peary-like, through staticky snow while adjusting the antenna just so.

UHF was the bargain basement of television and an often-interesting alternative to what the networks had to offer. There were some UHF shows available to viewers in New Jersey that were not just fun to watch but offered a strong homemade vibe that made them feel like labors of love, an enthusiasm transcending their inexpensive sets, wobbly camera work and visible boom mics.

When the UHF Hall of Fame gets launched, The Uncle Floyd Show will be among the first class of inductees. Billed as a kid’s show (if “kid” means over the age of 15), it was a daily half-hour of puppets, sketches, corny jokes, double entendres, insider humor and Floyd’s barrelhouse piano playing. Floyd’s cast of regulars lit a fuse of anarchy that threatened every show with collapse before its thirty minutes was up.

In 1982, Zacherle, another king of the UHF dial, appeared on The Uncle Floyd Show:

After his host gig on Chiller Theatre on New York’s WPIX ended, the Cool Ghoul returned to the airwaves (albeit UHF) from 1965 to 1967 with Disc-O-Teen which answered the question, “What if American Bandstand had no budget and was hosted by a crypt-keeping undertaker instead of the clean-cut Dick Clark?”

Disc-O-Teen ran on weekday afternoons, broadcasting from a theatre in Newark. Kids danced to the latest records and hung homemade bedsheet banners around the studio while Zach introduced lip-synching bands like the Box Tops and Every Mother’s Son, asking them non-sequitur questions, addressing the girls as “my dear” and the boys as “old boy.”

The kids looked like the those you'd see in high school hallways between classes, not the Stepford-teens with clothing allowances of American Bandstand or the professional dancers found on Soul Train.

UHF was also the home of Rockers 80, as Jamaican deejay/veejay Earl “Rootsman” Chin showed reggae music videos and scored several impressive interviewing coups, including Bob Marley, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Parts of Chin’s interview with Marley can be found online, although it can be difficult to understand without closed captioning, given Chin and Marley's heavy Jamaican patois and it’s seriously laidback (aka sluggish) vibe, no doubt courtesy of ganja smoked before filming. The video clips omit the end of the interview as I remember it, with Chin telling Marley that he’s “the greatest,” to which Marley replies, “No, Jah is the greatest.”

The Jagger-Richards interview, circa 1978, is remarkable in that both seem to be enjoying themselves, possibly thanks to the Heinekens they’re knocking back throughout. It also marks one of those rare occasions when Jagger’s been filmed with a beard (which is pretty impressive):

Rockers 80 was sponsored by the Kew Motor Inn, which still exists in Kew Gardens, Queens. Nice to know that its "theme rooms', including the Safari Room, Chin would list in the ad copy are still available at, according to the hotel's website, “very reasonable short-stay rates” – a wink/wink, nod/nod phrase that could explain the allure of UHF TV: the potential for inexpensive fun.

Burke's Law: Who Killed Mr. X?

(This post is part of the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

Amos Burke (Gene Barry) is captain of the LAPD homicide division, and thanks to an inheritance lives in an 18-room mansion in Beverly Hills, wearing ascots around the house and tuxedos on dates with an endless string of girlfriends. He’s suave and sophisticated, although chaste (always flirting – with the occasional double entendre – never kissing), and shuns police cars for his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

Nearly all of the 64 episodes of Burke’s Law (1963 – 64) followed the same outline: someone either a) wealthy or b) famous is murdered, Burke is called in to investigate, he and his detective colleagues Tim (Gary Conway) and Les (Regis Toomey) question a list of quirky suspects with the means and motives for killing before Burke solves the crime and wraps up the loose ends.

(I could have chosen just about any episode of Burke’s Law since the show seldom strayed far from formula. A nicely colorized version of Who Killed Mr. X can be found on YouTube).

Aside from the gimmick of Burke’s wealth, the weekly slate of guest stars made Burke’s Law unique, a cornucopia of casting that blended veterans of the Golden Age of Hollywood along with current stars in roles that allowed for plenty of theatricality and over-the-top performances.

The list of guest stars for the show’s two-year run totals more than 100, from A (Mary Astor) to Z (ZaSu Pitts) and includes fathers and sons (Ed and Keenan Wynn), sisters (Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor) stars of silent films (Gloria Swanson and Buster Keaton) and beach party flicks (Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello), future Batman villains (Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, David Wayne, Ida Lupino, Eartha Kitt), Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and the Bride of Frankenstein (Elsa Lanchester).

In Who Killed Mr. X Elizabeth Montgomery, Barrie Chase and Dina Merrill play three kept women who’ve been signed to “exclusive” contracts by the late Mr. X, who has essentially locked them away in expensive homes and beach houses.

Montgomery flirts and trades snappy banter with Burke; Chase (Dick Shawn’s go-go girlfriend in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) guzzles martinis non-stop; Merrill (another future Batman villain) has turned to picking up strangers off the street and gets a big dramatic scene, smashing a mirror with a fireplace poker.

Barry and Montgomery: I'm sure this was unintentional positioning

The rest of the cast – suspects all – includes Ann Harding (nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 1931 for Holiday), Soupy Sales (at the time host of a local Los Angeles kids’ program), Charles Ruggles (with a film career dating back to 1915) and Jim Backus (ubiquitous on television and movies in 1963).

Amos Burke questions Soupy 

Shades of Sunset Boulevard color Who Killed Mr. X, and the murderer turns out to be the least likely of suspects who, in a clever turn, is done in by a studio headshot of Robert Mitchum hanging on a wall.

Before Burke’s Law, Gene Barry spent four years starring in the Bat Masterson series, another debonair crime fighter. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that in some fictional crossover universe, Amos Burke is related to Masterson, possibly even his grandson. Did Bat Masterson and Annie Oakley ever cross paths?

But watching the show today makes one think more of Batman than Bat Masterson: the often tongue-in-cheek campiness, a rich guy alter ego, Gary Conway as Tim, the boy wonder detective, and the Rolls, as much of a uncredited major character in Burke’s Law as was the Batmobile. In Who Killed Mr. X, the plot moves along in the car’s backseat as Burke takes a call on his clunky car phone, interrogates suspects and offers Elizabeth Montgomery her choice of music on tape.

Jazz or classical?

Burke’s Law died a sudden death in 1965 when it was rebranded at ABC’s insistence with a new format, titled Amos Burke, Secret Agent. The show was about as awful as the title suggests and was cancelled midway through the season. A revival in of Burke’s Law in 1994, with a 76-year-old Barry, lasted 25 episodes.

Show us your pizza rolls

If Super Bowl commercials were a thing in 1968, this ad for Jeno’s pizza rolls would have had people talking Monday morning:

It was written and produced by Stan Freberg, whose list of accomplishments in television, radio and comedy recordings is long and remarkable, although he may be best remembered for his inspired advertising work with such clients as Contadina tomato paste (Who put eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?), Chun King: (Nine out of ten doctors recommend Chun King Chow Mein) and Sunsweet prunes (Today, the pits; tomorrow, the wrinkles. Sunsweet marches on).

(The Chun King line of canned Chinese food and Jeno’s pizza rolls were both developed by the same guy, Jeno Paulucci).

The story goes that after one showing on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson remarked that the Jeno's commercial was the first to receive spontaneous applause from the studio audience. 

The ad is funny, memorable and works off a shared experience, something much more easily achieved in 1968 than today when we all watched the same handful of television channels and didn’t – couldn’t – mute commercials.

First, the ad plays off this then-ubiquitous Lark cigarette commercial:

Secondly, it works off the shared knowledge that, going back to the 1930s, the William Tell Overture served as the theme music for the Lone Ranger radio and television programs. Not to mention that nearly everyone who ever had a music course in elementary school knew that piece of music.

In other words, everybody got the joke.

The guy playing the Lark lurker in the Jeno's commercial is Barney Phillips. With 188 acting credits listed on IMDB, he’s probably best known as the diner counterman with three eyes in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone.

Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels reprise their roles as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a full decade before Jack Wrather, who owned the Lone Ranger character, obtained a court order prohibiting Moore from making future appearances as The Lone Ranger. There was a countersuit from Moore before Wrather dropped the lawsuit in 1984.

Snap it, pal

Two disparate anniversaries that occurred in early January, unfortunately and unexpectedly, converged with Floyd Vivino’s death on January 22.

January 8 marked Soupy Sales’ 100^th birthday. His daily show on WNEW Channel 5 in New York City was a quirky inside joke of comedy bits that often ran way too long, double entendres that went over kids’ heads, puppets lip-synching novelty songs and cheap sets – a format that Vivino would evolve, build on and turn into The Uncle Floyd Show.

The ten-year anniversary of David Bowie’s death was January 10. While performing in The Elephant Man on Broadway in the early 1980s, he watched The Uncle Floyd Show while in make-up, something that another fan of show, John Lennon, turned him on to. In 2002, Bowie wrote Slip Away, a nostalgic, almost melancholy homage to the New York City of the early 1980s, with Floyd and his puppets Oogie and Bones Boy as avatars.

From 1974 to 1998, The Uncle Floyd Show could be found, if you knew where to look, on cable, UHF, regional syndication or New Jersey public TV. All told, something like 7,000 shows total and always with Floyd’s bomb squad supporting cast of aspiring comedians and knuckleheads.

The immortal Oogie and Uncle Floyd

Go snap!

And his puppets. Bratty yet endearing Oogie, whom Floyd always introduced as his partner, was an off-the-shelf factory model named “Walter” produced by a British puppeteer. Bones Boy was an irritable and ill-tempered skeleton in a suit that looked as if he’d been a prize in a claw machine on a boardwalk arcade. His trademark phrase, “Snap it, pal,” captured Jersey attitude (or at least how the rest of the country perceives it). If Bones Boy stopped for breakfast at a diner, he would order black coffee and a hard roll.

Floyd’s career seemed to always be on the verge of something bigger than New Jersey. An Uncle Floyd Show album on Mercury Records was left to die in cutout bins. He had small parts in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Crazy People (1990), but a role in Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was cut. When The Uncle Floyd Show went into syndication, it was shown in New York City on NBC, but at 1:30 a.m.

But he persevered and never became one of those stuffed monuments to lower tier show business that used to populate Joe Franklin’s couch. He made seemingly thousands of personal appearances around New Jersey, acting as MC, playing Tin Pan Alley piano in restaurants; he played piano at a record show I attended in the 1990s.

New Jersey lost Bruce Springsteen to international stardom, but Floyd stayed and represented the uniqueness that once flourished in this state, although it’s slowly being squeezed: wooded acres losing ground to yet another townhouse development, dead zone shopping malls that all offer the same stores, CVS pharmacies every hundred feet. The Star-Ledger, Bergen Record and Jersey Journal all gone. Boarded up storefronts along Broad Street, Newark.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Bones Boy is taking names. Snap it, pal.

Yesterday once more

The ‘50s revivalism in the 1970s felt insincere, almost a parody. Pompadours, poodle skirts, Thunderbird convertibles and carhops on roller skates. Grease. Sha Na Na. Happy Days. Lame pastiches like Loggins and Messina’s Your Mama Don’t Dance and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock. The Carpenters’ maudlin doo-wop tribute Yesterday Once More.

But trends come and go and as the sun began to rise over Reagan’s America came the inevitable ‘60s revival.

Tie-dye came back into fashion. The improbable return of Monkeemania. Soap operas about photogenic upwardly mobile ‘60s survivors like The Big Chill (and its subsequent two-volume soundtrack), Thirtysomething and Almost Grown (and the much more realistic Return of the Secaucus 7). Career encores for John Fogerty and Dennis Hopper.

One aspect of the revival that’s relevant this month was the introduction of Nick at Nite. Older TV shows could always be found on television, mostly on independent stations and scattered throughout the morning or afternoon – I always associated I Love Lucy with sick days from school since it aired weekdays at 9 a.m. In July 1984, Nickelodeon borrowed the oldies radio strategy and launched Nick at Nite: block programming of old television programs, focused mostly on sitcoms.

Watching Hazel or Mister Ed from an adult’s perspective didn’t improve them much and your attention was bound to wander during the hour-long Route 66 but having all these old shows bundled together without having to change the channel was a novel concept for its time. If My Three Sons wasn’t your thing, stick around for Car 54 Where Are You. Or the occasional obscurity like Camp Runamuck or Lancelot Link.

As cable TV gained footing, and in desperate need of 

content, WTBS and the USA Network went the same route and programmed Saturday afternoon marathons of ‘60s adventure programs, like The Wild, Wild West, I Spy, Outer Limits and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., often with commentary from the shows’ original casts.

You could fall asleep watching the marathons, dreams narrated by the jazzy banter of Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott, James West fighting off ants with human faces, Ilya Kuryakin morphing into the scientist with six fingers and the overgrown cranium.

Today, of course, all this stuff is readily available online. What’s missing is the kick of nostalgia and the thrill of rediscovery that was a big part of the ‘60s revival.