Art Bell was something of a pioneer of overnight talk radio in the US, with a format which has been emulated ever since. A lot of talk radio is political, but Art Bell found that the middle of the night was a good time to discuss more unusual things, and that the night-time audience was much more interested in such discussions than in a continuation of political talk. Art was a storyteller and was captivating when he could find a narrative to wrap around a discussion of the paranormal, the unexplained, or ideas which were outside the mainstream. Art didn’t stay permanently in the paranormal realm, often interviewing various musicians and actors, which probably explains why his show was such a hit as the subject matter, while often familiar, was never repetitive.
Art was also a very good listener, which made him a good interviewer. He could have guests on to discuss all manner of strange and unusual topics, and it really didn’t matter what Art believed on the subject, he was able to have an interesting and intelligent discussion with the guest, no matter how outlandish the guest’s subject or their claims, and get listeners involved as well. He was a true master of the theatre of the mind, and through the height of his popularity through the late 1990s and early 2000s, his show Coast To Coast AM was heard live in just about every market in the US and Canada, attracting millions of listeners in the wee small hours of the night.
After Coast To Coast AM was bought out by Premiere Radio, Art’s career was somewhat more checkered. Art semi-retired a few times citing various reasons for departing and coming back, and hosted weekend shows and served as a guest host on Coast To Coast intermittently for a few years, moving to the Philippines after he remarried and his new wife was not permitted entry to the US. Eventually after an on-again off-again relationship with Coast To Coast AM, he finally left the show permanently in 2011, and in 2013 started a competing show on Sirius XM satellite radio which lasted all of six weeks.
In 2015 he started an online show, again in basically the same format as his Coast To Coast show, this time called Midnight In The Desert. This show was picked up by a handful of terrestrial radio stations and seemed to attract a decent chunk of Art’s old audience who had come to the conclusion that Coast To Coast AM had grown stale without his presence. Indeed, the host since Art’s departure from Coast To Coast AM, George Noory, retained many of Art’s guests but tends to let them just talk for entire segments rather than engaging them in discussion. Art’s Midnight In The Desert show lasted about six months, with multiple technical issues along the way causing various shows to not air or be cut short. Eventually Art left this show after, it was claimed, people opened fire into his studio from the street, although the local police department never confirmed any of this.
Art suffered various health issues after this and died in 2018.
Midnight In The Desert and Coast To Coast AM continue to this day, and myriad of other paranormal-themed overnight shows have also appeared. It is now a thriving genre and a mainstay of US talk radio. Naturally some shows are better than others, and the ones where the host is a good storyteller and can engage in interesting conversation with the guests are probably the closest thing there is to a natural successor to Art’s legacy.
While Art was hosting Coast To Coast AM, Crystal Gayle performed a song called Midnight In The Desert which Art often used as his closing theme.
When Art launched the Midnight In The Desert show in 2015, he continued to use The Chase theme from Midnight Express as his opening theme, just as Coast To Coast AM continues to do to this day, but also continued to use Midnight In The Desert as his closing theme. Upon launching this show in 2015, he interviewed Crystal Gayle about the song.
As anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would know, I have some very peculiar dreams, and various characters from The Bill have been known to appear in them. Well, imagine my surprise when I came across this music video the other day and found actor Jeff Stewart (PC Reg Hollis from The Bill) in it. I don’t think I can make any sense of what’s happening in this video, but it really could be a scene from one of my dreams. It makes about as much sense as my dreams.
This is Sam Brown’s 1988 cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get A Witness”.
Courtrooms have appeared in my dreams before too. I had a dream where I was a prosecutor and mid-sentence forget absolutely everything about the defendant I was questioning and the case I was prosecuting. I asked the magistrate for a moment and referred to him as “your judginess” which prompted him to declare the defendant not guilty and find me guilty instead! Yep, makes as much sense as the courtroom in this video.
For most of the week, the majority of attention from the world’s news media was on a political conference in Milwaukee which showcased the likely next leaders of the American government. Of course, this all got wiped off the news agenda shortly after it finished when a very dodgy software update became the news, except that most news outlets were severely hampered by it and could barely report on it.
Anyway, the focus on Milwaukee reminded me of one my favourite performances by Jerry Lee Lewis, singing What’s Made Milwaukee Famous.
Apologies for not getting around to a Sunday Share post over the last few weeks.
This week we resume the series with one of my favourites. Longtime top-rating Sydney breakfast radio host Alan Jones had the very distinctive opening instrumental portion of this song as his theme music. Although only played briefly a couple times per day, there was no doubting what show you were listening to when this came on.
Although actually I did get confused one morning when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh as he was on around the same time as Alan and sometimes used this as bumper music. In my half-awake mode at the time I was slightly confused as to which station I had tuned into and why Rush was filling in for Alan!
As for why it’s one of my favourite songs. I am in awe at the effortless power and range of Laura Branigan’s voice. A marvel of musical talent.
For eleven years, John Kerr hosted New Day Australia on weeknights on a number of stations across Australia, headquartered at Sydney’s 2UE. For much of that time he used a very fitting song to end his broadcasts, with lyrics noting that “we’ve talked the whole night through”. It was the song Good Mornin’ from Singin’ In The Rain.
Later, when John hosted the weekend version of New Day Australia, he occasionally used the song to end the show, however for a lot of his weekend reign his show ended on 2UE earlier than it ended on the network so there wasn’t really an appropriate time to play the song. John moved to the Gold Coast while still hosting the weekend edition of New Day Australia and 2UE graciously paid for flights and accommodation in Sydney so he could continue to host the show, however eventually John retired from commercial radio. Thankfully John didn’t give up radio altogether and these days hosts an excellent country music show on Friday nights on Gold Coast community radio station 94.1FM.
Sean Hannity tends to have very very long openers for his show, combining clips of multiple songs with clips of various politicians and newsmakers. Unfortunately with the lengthy commercials breaks it does eat into the useful program time in each hour, but I digress.
For a few years around 2009, Sean used the chorus of Martina McBride’s Independence Day as one of the bits of music in his opener. It is a very powerful piece of music. I wish he still used it to this day, but alas.
Back when Jim Ball was the overnight host on Sydney’s 2GB, he used Paul Kelly’s “Sydney From A 747” as his theme song, at least until circumstances changed.
When Macquarie Radio made an arrangement with Pacific Star to turn Melbourne’s 3MP 1377 in to Melbourne Talk Radio MTR 1377, Jim’s show was networked into Melbourne and it became inappropriate for Sydney From A 747 to continue to be used for the show. Instead, he opted to use Peggy Lee’s “It’s A Good Day” which had previously been used as his closing theme.
There was a period of time where Jim moved to 2UE (where he was again syndicated) and then moved back to 2GB. My recollection of this is hazy but I think the Peggy Lee song continued to be his theme music during this time.
For the majority of Rush Limbaugh’s 30+ years on the air, th instrumental portions of this song greeted the airwaves at six past the hour, three times per day, five days per week. It became as much an icon of the American media landscape as Rush himself. There was a clever edit at about the 30 second mark to jump to another instrumental section around the 2:28 mark which was Rush’s cue to begin talking.
Rush picked this song as his theme song primarily due to its strong unique bass line, but the irony of a conservative using a very anti-conservative song wasn’t lost on him. There’s a funny loophole in the way royalties work in American radio that using a short clip of a song doesn’t necessarily result in a requirement to pay royalties for its use, so Limbaugh, albeit playing 40-ish seconds of the song across hundreds of radio stations, used the song royalty-free for many years. Eventually EMI issued a cease-and-desist order and Limabugh temporarily stopped using the song. However the song’s writer Chrissie Hynde was interviewed and stated her parents loved Limbaugh’s show and she didn’t mind her music being used in that way. It also helped that around that time, Rush was vocally opposing a plan by the EPA to test chemicals on animals, putting him in rare agreement with PETA which was one of Chrissie Hynde’s favourite organisations, so a payment arrangement was reached and Rush used the song forever more.
After Rush’s passing, the theme song continued to be used during the guest hosts which filled his timeslot and for about a year by Travis Clay and Buck Sexton whose show Premiere Radio moved into Rush’s old timeslot. They now use a different piece of music.
40-odd seconds of intro music might seem like an awful lot, but for whatever reason it has been the standard in syndicated talk radio in the US for a long time. My theory is that as they generally run on a 40 second delay, allowing them to dump a short portion of the delay if necessary without coming out of delay completely, having the long intro allows the show’s producers to be entirely sure they are in delay when the broadcast begins. It also allows affiliate stations to be a little bit late getting into the show without missing anything, and run their own idents over the intro. One of the best examples of this is from this clip from KXNT Las Vegas in 2009 (April 27, to be precise) where the board operator did a masterful job of crossfading the weather bed with Rush’s into under newsreader Kristen Flowers and putting a hybrid station ID / Rush show announcement to air over the intro before Rush began to speak.
“I saw a UFO and nobody believes me” and if you described seeing some of the odd alien creatures in this video, I’m not surprised they don’t believe you!
Jeff Wayne’s musical rendition of The War Of The Worlds is a true masterpiece. And I always get a bit of amusement from the assertions early in the piece from the expert astronomer that nothing could possibly live on mars, let alone be coming from there to invade.
There is a highlight right at the end in the epilogue where NASA have sent a rover to Mars and then lose communications with it and the rest of their facilities (including one in “Can-Berra” which great considering I live in Canberra) and another invasion begins.
Some songs are a real product of their time and a glimpse into the prevailing mindset of the day. This is one of them.
From a time when the cold war and nuclear armageddon seemed to be a real and imminent threat, and UFO sightings were a dime a dozen, along came a song from The Buchanan Brothers to combine the two with a dose of religious advice. A real time capsule of its day.
Somewhere around 2006 to 2008, a new and bizarre twist on the gameshow format took over the wee small hours of television both in Australia and the UK, maybe elsewhere too. It was a live-to-air interactive gameshow which tried to get viewers to call in to answer extremely simple questions for a chance to win cash prizes. The catch was that these shows were really there to make money for the networks by requiring viewers to ring premium rate phone numbers for a chance to get through, and most of the time the callers did not get through but were instead put on a callback list, and eventually when a producer decided enough money had been made, one of those callers would be called back at random…in the middle of the night, when the majority of the target audience was inebriated or crazy.
In between calls it was the host’s job, with some support from the crew, to fill time with whatever their imagination could dream up. Many many hours of filling airtime while the hosts slowly went as crazy as some of the callers.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well…one of the hosts of the British version of Quizmania, Greg Scott, was the subject of more than a few peculiar live-to-air moments and managed to roll with most of them very well indeed. This has been one of my favourite video clips on the internet for many years. My favourite moment is the caller who seems to have called the wrong channel with an answer to a question on a competing show on another network.
Eventually these shows died off almost entirely, although there was a studio in the Czech Republic churning out dozens of versions this type of show for various countries only a few years ago. As free-to-air TV viewership dwindles, it’s hard to see how this type of thing would make enough money to pay the bills these days. It was a strange form of fun while it lasted.
There are many more peculiarly translated songs that I could share with you, but I’m going to end the series of translated songs today, at least for a while, with this one which is my favourite of all of the translations. A translation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
I hope that you have enjoyed this and been very happy about these fabrics. A change of pace is upon us next week for The Sunday Share.
In recent weeks I have shared with you some videos of Weezer covering various songs while being impersonated by other people in the video clips. This week, for the last Weezer clip I will be sharing with you, the band will actually appear!
This is another cover which I prefer over the original. Pumped Up Kicks, originally by Foster The People. Unfortunately Weezer have never officially released a cover of this song and I wish they would, so a video from one their concerts where they have performed it will have to do. This one, despite Rivers Cuomo seemingly forgetting the words, is probably the best quality of the concert videos in terms of the performance combined with picture quality.
All I can say is: thank goodness ABBA had a good grasp of the English language and didn’t have to rely on dodgy automated translations.
Somehow I don’t think predictions about future digital video technologies or all-seeing wifi would have been received quite as well by the public. Brexit predictions at Eurovision would have been bold indeed!