Re-imagined

Like anyone with a somewhat artistic temperament, once I create something I am never finished with it. Recently, we warmed up the old Gospel Aircheck studios to revisit an ancient piece of copy I wrote in 1984 for the inaugural Christian Youth Skate we discussed last time. The script became a 30 second spot that I also provided the voice-over for. The Music bed was an overlap mix of two songs our management restricted from airplay because they were judged too hot. It’s hilarious that Water Grave by the Imperials and Home of the Lord by Sandi Patti (duet with Russ Taff) were taboo because they sounded a lot like rock music on a mostly Southern Gospel station that in reality played everything from the Happy Goodmans to Amy Grant. Gospel 90 had an inconsistent standard when it came to music selection, to say the least. Label the format more “psycho variety” than anything else.

Anyway, the point is that I used my music bed selection as a deliberate stab against this hypocritical system. Somehow, if a song had a strong drum beat or an electric guitar solo, it was a no-no.  The Youth Skate gave me license to rock (yeah, right.)

Back to the present: not necessarily in this order, I remixed the original music bed, taking bass licks and drum beats, digitally enhancing and looping them. Next, I added stereo effects (laser blast stingers) and manipulated the sound by re-panning some of the original elements until the music sounded unlike it ever did before. I didn’t use my 1984 reading of the copy. We used a Sennheiser MD-421 mkII (mid-90’s vintage); the same type microphone I had at the station for the new vocal track. In 27 years my voice has changed quite a bit, so it can be considered a completely reimagined version done just for the heck of it. The 1984 original can be downloaded here and the newly redone skate commercial here. Or just click below. See what you think.

1984 Original Christian Youth Skate, press play

2011 Reimagined Christian Youth skate, press play

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Stay Tuned

Today in Yesterday

Previously on the peanut Whistle…

I found the song, inspired by the Lennon and McCarthy original Yesterday, called Calvary. The Winans rearranged the words in a delightful gospel version to the unmistakable tune of the Beatles classic. It seems that the family of singers had grown up singing it, but, to the best of my knowledge had not recorded it. In the early 90’s the entire Winans family, including Bebe and Cece, were special guests on the Oprah Winfrey Show Christmas special. I thought they had sang without musical accompaniment although there was a grand piano providing the music. See the very brief video on YouTube, just search “Winans – Calvary”.

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden. The Peanut Whistle Blog. All rights reserved.

Muzac of Your Life

Does anyone remember elevator music? The company most famous for providing innocuous string arrangements of popular tunes was Muzac®. These sleepy arrangements could be heard in doctors’ offices, banks, grocery stores, and of course elevators.

Today I continued my audition of several cassette tapes made by my late father. His hobby was recording reel-to-reel and cassette audio tapes of anything and everything. He captured music, conversations, sermons, airchecks, sound effects and spoken word diaries. He was blind so printed labels of the tapes were not a priority. You can imagine the challenge it has been weeding through his hundreds of tapes over the past 19 years following his passing. Just a moment ago I was listening to myself as a teen discuss training my 12 year old sister how to drive. My mother, panic stricken in the backseat threatened, “I’ll jump out, if you let her drive!” My dad loved to record us with our guard down a la Allen Funt and his Candid Camera approach to recording conversations.

Some of his tapes are a hodgepodge with no apparent theme or direction. A sermon on one side then on the next side a section of conversation, some things recorded off radio. He never left a moment blank on a tape. Usually he’d put some dreadful elevator music at the end of a side for no reason other than filling out the tape. It was not your usual Muzac® fare. No, these elevator gems were popular hymns and gospel songs he found on a long forgotten FM Christian radio station owned by Moody. They were apparently an automated not-profit broadcaster bent on putting listeners to sleep. My dad was a fiery Pentecostal preacher whose musical leanings were more upbeat; I will never understand why he listened to this station. Maybe he had found an insomnia cure.

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden. The Peanut Whistle Blog. All rights reserved.

E93

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My first misadventure with Gospel 90 behind me, I returned to thoughts of life after high school. I was wrapping up the 11th grade supposedly college bound needing some sort of diversion for the coming summer vacation. Returning home from one of our—probably last minute—tape delivery runs to the radio station that spring, my dad and I began listening and talking about the broadcast we had only recently started airing on WEAS-AM.

We noted that the DJ was running a phone-in contest involving listeners guessing the number of eggs contained in his imaginary Easter basket. They would offer a guess then he played a tape of a presumably randomly generated number. The DJ was prone to stammering and often at a loss of the right words that he delivered with a slight lisp. Knowing of this DJ’s skill with the English language my dad asked, “You think you could do that, Neal?” It was a loaded question for sure. I didn’t know weather to be honored or insulted. He obviously lacked the skills of the FM DJ’s I was accustomed to.  “I guess so,” I replied weakly. “Well, if you’re interested, then I can talk to the ‘acting’ station manager for you.”

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“If Neal wants the job, then it’s his,” the manager later phoned Daddy, “So I can [honestly] tell this other guy that the position’s filled.”

She had listened to the voice-over introduction I had taped for the Jesus is Lord Broadcast and claimed to like it. Retrospectively, I was a cheaper button pusher. The Easter Basket DJ trained me. Much of what he taught took me years to un-learn, especially when I moved to the Atlanta market four years later. Only the basic mechanics of radio were part of his curriculum.

We became fast friends, though. We could talk shop for hours visiting each other at work over the years. I last saw him on a return trip to the new studio facility in 1988 when I had considered coming back to my original radio home. I never saw him or any of the AM jocks equal to our counterparts at our sister FM, E93.

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Magic E-93, as it became known, was the consistent number one radio station year in and out. Its music format appealed to the market’s predominant population. Featuring  songs by the Gap Band, The O’Jays, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, The Commodores, and Prince, E-93 brought soul to all the Coastal Empire.

In those days prior to the invasion of Rap and Hip Hop I actually listened. The initial appeal of working with my Gospel 90—ironically, a mostly white Southern Gospel station—was that it shared quarters with a station I secretly tuned in at home.

I witnessed first hand the likes of E-Man, Don “Casanova” Jones and “Stormin’ Norman” Wright weaving word tapestries of Funk, Rhythm and Blues. I was star-struck.

Like the famous reveal in the Wizard of Oz, I eventually saw behind the curtain. But, that’s another story.

Stay tuned

We will take an extended break from radio topics for the time being and delve into more relevant fare, next time…

©2010 Neal Rhoden, The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved

Heaven's Jam

Well, here's the new Gospel Rewind podcast. It's a good one!

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©2010 The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved.

The Truth with My Hand Up

My hand to God this is the truth. If it had not happened in church to someone I know and trust. Yada, yada… In my last post I spoke of some gospel lyrics near and dear to my heart; this next song is especially touching to a car guy such as myself (the actual words from my cousin Ray):

Actually it’s...Jesus, he will be my snow tires, in the winter he’s my anti-freeze, when I need him, he is my oil filter, and he's my windshield when there is a breeze!!! C'mon, sing it this time if ‘ya know it!!.. (true song....written by a well-intentioned, but hardly mentally gifted girl from my childhood)

At least it rhymes. Thanks Ray! She took a metaphor and ran with it. Now on to something completely different.

I first met gospel comedian Wendy Bagwell in 1983 at a big gospel music show in Savannah, Georgia. He was over six feet tall with curly dark hair. The only man I have ever met named Wendy. Like Johnny Cash and his Boy Named Sue I believe Bagwell would have had a great story to tell with the origin of his name. This was about the time he first told his Three German Police Dogs story about the disruption that ensues when a yellow cat is introduced to three seeing eye dogs belonging to a group of famous blind singers at the Ebenezer Freewill Baptist Church all day singing and dinner on the ground homecoming. “Those blind folks didn’t know what was going on,” he said, “They just thought they done took that job too cheap.” His theory was that the blind group, unaware of the ruckus, assumed the crowd had broke out in an old fashioned shouting revival.

It turns out that Mr. Bagwell was quite the shrewd businessman as well. He owned Bagwell Sales in metro Atlanta, Georgia. My parents, who were both blind, did business with his furniture store several times over the years. My mom, who is not the least bit shy, confronted Wendy about his comments in the famous bit. “I’m blind, but I know what’s going on,” she commented to him. “I know you do,” Wendy replied with a broad smile and a wink in his voice. “This is the truth what I’m telling you with my hand up,” he would often say before one of his stories which were probably slightly exaggerated. Stretchers, if you will, were his calling card. He was a master showman of the Gospel world. Wendell “Wendy”Lee Bagwell died in 1996 and now has a stretch of US 278 in Georgia, our home state, named after him. Rest in peace.

Stay tuned.

nealrhoden@thepeanutwhistle.com

We’re Douglas Country!

Radio home number three has been very hard to write about because it ended in a bitter divorce. Just like the child, little J-O-E, in the famous Tammy Wynette song I needed shelter from the awful truth. I realize now, 18 years later, having survived a bad first marriage in real life a decade ago this radio separation thing was a walk in the park. Both marriages lasted only 10 months.

Third time around was another unique situation. This new owner held a General Radiotelephone Operator License (GROL). I was impressed with his credentials and his engineering background in both radio and TV. The honeymoon soon ended when I discovered his hardnosed, dictatorial approach to managing our staff. This radio home was now owned by one individual owner operator not a corporation or church organization like my previous employers. Imagine Fidel Castro rolled up into Adolf Hitler. So as not to defame the dead, I’ll call him Bill.

The church that had owned WSPZ had become desperate to unload this albatross hung around their neck. So desperate, in fact, that Bill wound up paying less than a tenth of the original asking price of the station less the studio building, which he’d lease from April until we moved the following summer of 1990.

Bill, 58 years old, entered with flattery, focusing his attentions on my office of program director. He seemed to value my role and appointed me architect of the new image. What an ego expedition this turned out to be for me. I came up with the new call letters WDCY-AM, representing We’re Douglas County. We realized the focus of the former owners was too broad. They had assumed our 2,500 watt signal would penetrate the Atlanta environs and marketed us as such. We decided to do a heavy local push by adding a news director and field reporters, making our presence known in the business community, covering nearby high school sports events and doing live remotes ad nauseam. Bill had some great ideas; made some tough adjustments to staff and bruised many egos along the way, but I must say that it was never boring. Bill and I were just too different. He never had a proper understanding of our Southern Gospel music format often referring to it as Barber Shop Quartet. I was an impetuous 24 year old bent on winning control over the old man’s station. Boy, was I wrong!

I believe a pivotal moment for Bill was a Gospel concert he had masterminded, not meeting his expectations, although I saw it as a success during the culmination of Southern Gospel Music Month in September of ‘90. I pled the cause of Gospel music, but he seemed soured by the experience and preferred to go to what he called Country and Western. Who called Country that anymore? Secretly, I knew a secular format would not work for me and would probably quit should we change. Anyway, for the first time ever I was forced to take an on-air partner and produce a morning show modeled after the morning zoo fluff shows popular those days. The Mabry & O’Neal Morning Show was born around November with promotions director slash occasional news reporter, Angie Mabry. We both worked hard at it but the show was incompatible with our audience. We seldom ever referred to the Gospel music or religion at all.

By February of 1991 Bill had trimmed the now bloated air staff taking on some air time himself. This change put me on-air 6 days a week thereby stealing vital time away from the office and production room tasks necessary for perfecting our sound. The balancing act proved humanly impossible and I resigned during the inevitable and ultimately ill fated format change to country and a new slogan, We’re Douglas Country.

Stay tuned

Breakfast with Burl

  The radio station I listened to most as a kid was Z-102 in Savannah, Georgia. Now, I realize that the station was only another Z-100 New York clone. This CHR format over populated the FM dial all across the USA in the 1980’s. Yes it was derivative but I enjoyed the station and copied their style often when I became a Contemporary Christian Music DJ. One unique element of good old WZAT-FM was Burl Womack. His show “Breakfast with Burl” was on my car radio every morning on my way to high school. Burl was allowed to play Southern Gospel music along with Adult Contemporary and hits of the day. Strange combination of styles but it worked! Burl had the number one show on the number one station in the market for years.

  Womack was a mature man with an easy going style and mellifluous baritone. He’d get to a point in the show where he would pour another cup of coffee (a sound effect from a cart tape, no doubt) address the topics of the day, read the school lunch menu and, as best as I can recall, played his choice of Gospel music until at least 8:00 AM. He seemed to be actually having breakfast with you. The show was aptly named. To this day I wonder why he didn’t make the jump to television, he reminded me of David Hartman, one time host of ABC’s Good Morning America.

  I met Burl on two separate occasions once at at the Savannah Skate Inn roller rink where I hosted a Christian Youth Skate and then again a few months later when he emceed a Dixie Melody Boys concert at a private school auditorium in Garden City. What struck me most about the main was his vocal power in person. His speaking voice was laid back and boomed even though he spoke softly. I was intimidated and our exchange was minimal, after all what did I as an 18 year old upstart have to offer? It was a mystery to me why he was at the skating rink and at the time I felt he gave me the brush off although he was probably hurried or surprisingly, shy. A few months later at the Gospel concert he did a splendid job as emcee and I saw a humorous side to the man not always evident on his radio show. That night I was asked to stand as representative of my radio station during the concert. Typical of me I was embarrassed, quickly stood, waved, said nothing and sat down.

  Burl has been nominated in 2009 for a lifetime Career Achievement Award by the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame. Good luck to you Mr. Womack you deserve the honor. Your many years on the Savannah airwaves are fondly remembered by your fans and I am one.

Stay tuned.