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!
The last time we saw Weezer a couple weeks ago, we didn’t actually see them because they weren’t in their own video clip, instead having other people parody them. I sense a theme here because this week, once again, they’re not in their own video clip.
Instead, we’re taking a trip back in time through the magic of acting, and meeting Weezer’s lead singer’s teenage band as they perform the big hit of the day, A-Ha’s Take On Me.
As it happens, I actually prefer this rendition of the song over the original. The original is an irreplaceable classic, of course, but this one makes me want to turn the volume up and hear it a few more times in a row!
(You, of course, are free to not do that if it is not your desire…)
We’re off to Africa again this week. Unfortunately something went awry in translation so it’s not entirely clear where we’re going, but at least the catering is good, well, some of the time…
I’m sure you’re familiar with Toto’s song “Africa”. Well a few years ago a more modern group, Weezer, produced a cover version of it after a campaign on Twitter requested it for reasons which aren’t particularly clear to anyone whatsoever.
To make matters even more peculiar, the video clip which they produced to go with it features Weird Al Yankovic acting a parody of Weezer lead singer Rivers Cuomo in what is apparently a send-up of a much older Weezer video clip for a song which I’m not really acquainted, plus some extra Weird Al accordion weirdness.
I’m not much of a fan of Weezer’s own work, but their covers of other people’s songs tend to be quite good. This is no exception.
Something a little bit different for you this week.
Canberra pianist David W Green plays at a number of venues around Canberra from time-to-time, and in the leadup to Christmas in 2022, David made regular appearances at Westfield Woden to entertain the shoppers as they went about their busy shopping days. I was fortunate enough to be in attendance on a couple of those occasions, and by David’s invitation captured this clip of David taking a break from the Christmas tunes by playing one of his own compositions titled “River of Stones”.
I’m reliably informed that the management of Westfield Woden received quite a bit of positive feedback about David’s appearances, and it was evident on the day of this video when a crowd gathered around as well as watching over the handrail of the floor above to enjoy David’s music.
David has a wide repertoire and has played at many venues around Canberra including The Ainslie Football Club (another place where I was lucky enough to see and hear him play), The Hyatt Hotel, and The National Exhibition Centre. I’m sure that if you have an event in the Canberra region which could use a piano player, you could contact David via his website and he will probably be interested in attending. While you’re there, check out David’s many photos of his many trips to many places. David is a keen photographer in addition to a skilled pianist.
Back in the early days of this blog, I started a feature called Samuel’s Musician(s) Of The Week where I would feature a musician and one of their songs each week. Over time I went through a lot of the music I like and featured many wonderful songs, and I have decided to continue this but with a bit of a change to the format.
The category is now called “The Sunday Share” and will expand a little bit beyond music. At first I think a lot of what I will post here will continue to be music that I wish to share with you, but I will also share other videos with you which have interested me and possibly even articles or documents.
This week I am sharing with you a video by musician Malinda Kathleen Reese who has, in addition to her own music, produced many videos of various well-known songs with their lyrics translated many times by Google Translate. Automated translation tools are a bit hit and miss at the best of times, and once you take a translation and re-translate it and keep going with that process, you end up with some rather unusual and amusing results.
This one is not my favourite of her work, but it’s the first one I came across and it is very good. The amount of effort put into the production alone is impressive. Also, the song in question, The Sounds Of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel is one I am quite fond of. It was even the first item on Radio 2CC’s emergency tape at one stage which kicks in after 30 seconds of silence…clearly whoever set that up had a sense of humour.
I will share a few more of Malinda’s very good and amusing translation videos in future.
While I’m in the US I intend on focussing this weekly feature on not just American artists, but music which in some way is particularly American. Also, so as to not hurt my brain too much, I’ll be running it on Sunday in the US rather than Sunday in Australia.
This week I’m going with a song by Merle Haggard for a reason. When I was driving from Petaluma to Las Vegas the other day, I drove through Bakersfield and right past a road called “Merle Haggard Drive” which pretty much settled my decision as to which artist to run this week.
Then came the question of which song to choose. Well, that was easier than I thought it would be. Merle has a lot of great songs but in keeping with the theme of the road named after him, Bakersfield is in Kern County which contains the Kern River so the obvious choice is the song “Kern River”.
Oh I’ll never swim Kern River again.
It was there that I met her,
It was there that I lost my best friend.
Now I live in the mountains,
I drifted up here with the wind.
I may drown in still water,
But I’ll never swim Kern River again.
I grew up in an oil town,
But my gusher never came in.
And the river was a boundary,
Where my darlin’ and I used to swim.
One night in the moonlight,
The swiftness swept her life away.
Now I live on Lake Shasta,
And Lake Shasta is where I will stay.
There’s the South San Joaquin,
Where the seeds of the dust bowl are found.
There’s a place called Mount Whitney,
From where the mighty Kern River comes down.
Well, it’s not deep nor wide,
But it’s a mean piece of water, my friend.
I may cross on the highway,
But I’ll never swim Kern River again.
Oh I’ll never swim Kern River again.
It was there that I met her,
It was there that I lost my best friend.
Now I live in the mountains,
I drifted up here with the wind.
And I may drown in still water,
But I’ll never swim Kern River again.
