Keener 13

“Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?” This Detroit newspaper add from today in 1969 features the Buick Special at the low-low price of just $2562.00, $17,529 in today’s dollars. The Special nameplate was used on lower-priced intermediate-sized Buicks through the 1969 model year. In 1970, the end of the Special came about when the Special Deluxe was dropped too in favor of the slightly upscale Buick Skylark. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/11: They Don’t Make Em Like They Used To” →

Earl “Madman” Muntz made the front page of the May 27th, 1967 edition of Billboard Magazine, which reported the grand opening of his Detroit tape cartridge retail store at 15268 Gratiot Avenue. The former Kaiser-Frazer used car salesman was a marketing visionary, creating innovative products and selling them with crazy costumes and outrageous sales pitches. Muntz invented the Stereo-Pak 4-track tape cartridge, the direct predecessor of the Stereo 8 cartridge, developed by Bill Lear.

His Detroit operation, which ultimately sold both 8 track tapes and the automotive stereo gear that played them launched in a former Nash Rambler dealership in the heart of the Motor City’s “Auto Row” of car dealerships.  The concept soon spawned competitors. 27 year old “Crazy Jack” Frankford’s Michigan Mobile Radio and former Detroit DJ Mickey Shorr were two of the names we often heard advertised.

Entertainment in our automobiles in the 1960s was still primarily consumed through the AM radios that were ubiquitous since the Gavin Motor Company first introduced the idea in 1930. By 1967 FM was becoming popular in our homes and many of us spent a month’s pay on expensive stereo systems to render the increasingly complex production that went into the albums we bought. Continue reading “When Car Stereo Shops Ruled” →

“It’s Farmer Jack Savings Time!” Remember when you would hear that unique sounder followed by the slogan and a price point? “Special cut rib-eye steak, just 88 cents a pound, through Sunday at Farmer Jack!”

Aside from the prices, a lot has changed across the Detroit area grocery landscape. Companies like A&P, Wrigley’s, Chatham and Great Scott have all fade into history. The big box stores like Kroger, Meijer and Walmart dominate. Cashiers hand entering the price of food items into a cash register has transformed into scanning systems that instantly calculate the price and adjust the inventory so management can know the status of daily sales volume at any moment.

When was the last time you wrote a check for groceries? Although not totally abandoned as a payment method, we are now sliding debit cards into chip readers or tapping our iPhones to pay the bill. Continue reading “Grocery Shopping 50 Years Ago” →

50 Years Ago Today: “W.T” from Oak Park asked The Free Press action line, “Is there really a Wichita Lineman?”

The Glen Campbell tune, written by the Jimmy Webb in 1968 was a hit that fall, but still on the minds of Detroiters on February 8, 1969. Here’s their answer:

Yep. But he sings ”I’m a lineman for Kansas Gas and Electric.’· Sedgwick County (Wichita.) doesn’t hire guys to ride around singing songs and looking for electrical overloads. Wichita is the second city Jim Webb and Glen Camp­bell have spotlighted. “By the Time I Get to Phoe­nix” started it and there’s a big country to cover. Next will be “Galveston”.

Under The Covers: Back in the early days of rock and roll, it was a common practice to expropriate the work of others. Original artists, many African American, didn’t have the savvy or the money to protect their work. In time, that changed, but imitation of the originals is still the sincerest form of flattery. Sometimes “Cover Tunes” are better. Sometimes they are worse. Here are a few originals and some remakes we thing land on the cool side of the scale.

Originals:
Big Mama Thornton – Hound Dog (1952)
Richard Berry & the Pharaohs – Louie Louie (1957)
Remakes:
Rod Stewart – Day After Day (2006)
Huey Lewis & Gwyneth Paltrow – Cruisin (2000)
Eric Clapton – Layla – Acoustic (1982) Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/8” →

50 years ago today, irate Ann Arbor commuters, accused the Penn Central Railroad of trying to drive them away and kill the train service that ran from what is now the Gandy Dancer Restaurant to Detroit’s Michigan Central Depot. Two years later, Amtrak would take over national passenger rail service. Continuing to provide a ride to Detroit until January 6, 1988.

I bought my wife a year of Amazon Unlimited music for Christmas. It jogged some memories of what life was like in the era of Record Clubs, K-Tel and the cut-out bin.

Record clubs made their margins on “stiffs”, giving you a list of LPs to choose from each month that included a lot of  stuff you didn’t necessarily want. Supply was limited. Demand was high. We often ended up with more than a few marginal albums among the more enduring selections in our collections.

And there was always the problem of getting stuck with a knock-off, a re-recorded version that was not at all like the tune we heard on the radio. The most excruciating for me was Free’s album version of “All Right Now“. The single mix (Hear it Here) was what we played on Top 40 Radio. It was totally different and light years better. You have to dig deep into the Amazon library to find it among the dozens of inferior album versions. It’s worth the work. If you liked the tune, you’ll know why the minute you hear it. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/7” →

50 years ago today, The Federal Commission first proposed a ban on cigarette advertising on Television. It would take another year before there was a consensus in Congress, but the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act took effect on April 1, 1970. In the final year of cigarette advertising on the air, the industry spent$205 million of their $314 million budget on television. As the politically incorrect Virginia Slims jingle used to say, “We’ve come a long way, baby.”

It’s Countdown Wednesday and this week we’re looking at the WKNR Music Guide from February 6, 1967. It was a week when the enduring music that still populates oldies station playlists was first being created. Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” had it’s chart debut. The monster Turtles hit, “Happy Together” was headed toward it’s chart topping run. The Monkees’ first double sider, “I’m a Believer” and “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” was dislodged from the top spot and on its way down. Iconic artists like Elvis, Sonny & Cher, The Young Rascals, The Association, Johnny Rivers, Spenser Davis and the 5th Dimension, shared airtime with “Middle of the Road” acts like Ed Ames and Cannonball Adderley. Motown artists were in evidence and the chart reflected a good deal of Michigan Talent, including Terry Knight and the Pack, The Underdogs and Bob Seger. The commonality? Every song is something you will remember if you had a radio on today in 1967. Find out more about Detroit’s most popular 60s rock radio station at Keener13.com. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/6” →

Back before the internet and on-demand video, back before cable brought us CNN and MTV, we watched television over the air. As I was working on today’s digital visit with you all, I brought up Detroit Free Press columnist,  BetteLou Peterson’s TV article from today in 1970. Here’s a real trip back in time. What were Detroiters watching?

On Monday night, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was at the height of its popularity, the most popular program in town. Mod Squad owned Tuesday nights. On Wednesday the competition between The Virginian, Glen Campbell, and the Sally Field’s Flying Nun was fierce. Family Affair and Daniel Boone were the winners on Thursday night. Ranch opera programming was also popular on Friday night, with High Chaparral beating the Brady Bunch. Jackie Gleason was still on the air in 1970 and in the front spot on Saturday nights with My Three Sons, and Lawrence Welk trailing. The Wonderful World of Disney was still in the lead on Sunday night with The FBI close behind.

With three networks still dominating our viewing, Fred Silverman’s concept of the “least objectionable alternative” was in full bloom. It’s still a valid concept today. Think about how you manage your Netflix queue. But those of us who were growing up back then still, occasionally, look back wistfully on the days when huge audiences turned to our TV sets to be entertained, en mas. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/5” →

50 years ago today, the front page of the Detroit Free Press carried a UPI story detailing the hijacking of Eastern Airlines Flight 7. It turned out that Candid Camera host Alan Funt, his wife, and his two youngest children boarded the flight in Newark heading to Miami. The plane never made it. Two men hijacked brandished weapons and demanded passage to Cuba. Some of the passengers, having spotted Funt, thought the whole thing was a Candid Camera stunt.

We’ll learn soon if Super Bowl 2019 was the snoozer I thought it was. They lost me during the boring Maroon Five halftime show. On the flipside, Gladys Knight‘s rendition of the National Anthem (Video) was one of the best. Netflix may have lost 32% of their typical audience during the first half, but they gained at least one set of eyeballs after: Mine. If you slept through any of the game, we’ve got all the commercials, HERE.

The best TV of the day was the poignant interview CBS Sunday Morning did with Linda Ronstadt (Video). She is still just as feisty and funny as always and I was glad to see that she is repurposing some unseen live show content for a new album release. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/4” →

1939 was a memorable year for classic films. Take a look at the list of top grossers and see how many you’ve seen. It was the height of the popularity and power of the studio system. Iconic stars were being born and burnished. The first “franchise” films were on the runway. TV was still a decade away from disrupting the universe. People went to their local theaters weekly to escape the lingering Depression, the spectre of war and the challenges of day-to-day life.

Today, we have more ways to consume multimedia content than ever before. I own many of the films on the list at left, some of which are also in circulation on Netflix, Amazon Prime and linear channels like Turner Classic Movies.

Seattle’s Cinerama Theater does a booming holiday business, showing classics like “Christmas Story”, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Love Actually”. More and more venues are seeing the potential value of screening the classics. Continue reading “Old Movies on the Big Screen” →

50 years ago today, all seats were 75 cents at Detroit’s suburban theaters for a showing of “Thunderbirds are Go“. The 1966 British science-fiction adventure film was based on the 60’s TV series Thunderbirds,  starring marionette puppets. The plot focused on the futuristic spacecraft Zero-X and its manned mission to Mars. When Zero-X suffers a mechanical failure during re-entry, it is up to International Rescue, with the aid of the Thunderbird machines, to save the astronauts on board before the spacecraft is obliterated in a crash landing.

This January 16th article in the New Yorker features a conversation with Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, who talks about the appearance of an unexplained object, speeding by us in space. Conversations about UFOs have been happening since the humanity first documented science. In America, it was the atomic age that sparked popular interest in the phoenominon.

The earliest known film about aliens was “Aelita“, a Russian made silent in 1924 and edited for American audiences as “Revolt of the Robots”. 1953’s telling of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”, the first starring role for Gene Barry with Anne Robinson as the love interest gained additional traction when it’s television distribution happened in parallel with the sales boom in color TV sets. Many like it followed, some really good, like Robert Wise’s “The Day The Earth Stood Still” and many more really bad, as noted on this exhaustive Wikipedia list.

During my own college years, we watched “2001 – A Space Odyssey” more than once, sometimes in altered states of consciousness. Later, Stephen Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” & “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” awakened a new generation to the genre. With the launch of the Star Wars franchise, “Space Opera” became a well worn word in the Hollywood lexicon. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/1” →

50 Years Ago Today: Daylight Savings Time was headed for its second defeat in Michigan. With 55 Upper Peninsula Precincts yet to be tallied, the measure was failing by a 500 vote margin. Proponents asked for a recount after the proposal was defeated by 1,501 votes. In 1967, the Michigan Legislature adopted a statute, Act 6 of the Public Acts of 1967, exempting the state from the observance of DST. The exemption statute was submitted to the voters at the General Election held in November 1968, and, in a close vote, the exemption statute was sustained. Michigan did not observe DST from 1969 through 1972. Hence the classic CKLW time checks, “It’s 4:30 in Detroit and 5:30 in Windsor!” In November 1972, an initiative measure, repealing the exemption statute, was approved by voters. Michigan has observed Daylight Time ever since.

Up Front: What makes something go viral? We’ve all been talking about how cold it is up north. Yesterday, my buddy, Fred Jacobs had enough. Some would consider his tweet NSFW, or Not Safe for Work. But it instantly generated a ton of positive engagement. Interestingly, his friends in other southern markets asked him things like, “Can you include us Texas A$$wipes, too?” Fred told me later that the ultimate irony was that he was sitting in a Florida coffee shop when he tweeted it. I was on my treadmill up the way in Jacksonville, laughing out loud.

What constitutes engaging content? Naturally the Twitter Business Unit has some advice. Mining other content (retweet with your own context added to it), using visual assets, hashtags and referencing other Twitter handles are all part of Social Media 101. Social Pilot adds some sauce to the goose by suggesting that you engage influencers and popular brands active on the platform, always including a call to action and sharing a weblink. They also touch on selective use of humor, which is at the center of Fred’s tweet. Best in class companies engage super connector firms like Izea to help them amplify their messaging. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/31” →

50 Years Ago Today, Detroit was feeling the effects of a 1965 German Measles epidemic. Mothers who developed Rubella while pregnant, many without knowing it, leading to an increase in birth defects. 5 years later, the number of children in need of special services due to hearing loss more than doubled in the Motor City. A vaccine was not developed until 1971 when Maurice Hilleman invented the MMR vaccine measles, mumps and rubella in a single shot followed by a booster.

When Talk Radio was truly entertainment. A generation has now grown up listening to the echo chamber of political opinion that passes for “talk radio” these days. But once upon a time, talk radio was enlightening, entertaining and attracted loyal followers in every market where it aired. Joe Pyne, John Nebel, Jean Shepherd, and Jerry Williams were among the first to explore the medium in the 1950s. KMOX, 1120 AM in St. Louis, Missouri, and KABC, 790 AM in Los Angeles— both claim to be the first to adopt an all-talk show format in 1960.

If you grew up in Boston, you stayed up with WBZ’s Larry Glick. In Miami, Larry King‘s act attracted the attention of the Mutual Broadcasting System where his show was broadcast from coast to coast. Many of my generation remember late nights listening to Larry interview the nation’s most notable personalities, interspersed with personal stories (Click the links to hear his classic Carvel Ice Cream and Incorrigibles tales) and inside radio bits that those of us who were chasing broadcasting careers totally understood. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/30” →