[ratnobMember]

(From the Bob Dinan Podcast):

We complain these days about the limited nature of jingle lyrics. All too often, it’s just a quick slogan, if you’re lucky, and the name of the station – eg ‘This is Heart; this is Heart’.

But in reality lots of jingles since the 1970s have done little else than tell listeners the frequency and name of the station. I guess the shotgun era was the epicentre of this trend, but it’s never disappeared.

More interesting for me today is when jingles use singers to sing what we might call ‘non-lyrics’. The singers are singing, but they aren’t singing words.

You hear it on JAM’s ‘Beep beep beep beep yeah’ Radio One travel news jingle from 1976. But we can explain that as a clever passing reference to a silly Beatle lyric.

More distinctive are jingles that use non-words to create the sound of the station – singing meaningless words to a backing track.

These aren’t the same as the ‘Oh yeah’ lyrics we get over the ramps of so many modern talkover jingles. Instead, these are lyrics that bear no relation to English. They feel improvised, but they can’t have been. These lyrics must have been written down so that the singers all sang the same non-words.

Here’s what I mean (click on the pic above): the brilliant long voice-over bed from TM’s Design 70 package: bah bah bah bah bah …

It’s a wonderful jingle. It also reminds us of the art of writing the powerfully expressive non-lyric cut. It’s another reminder of the way jingles constantly surprise us.

http://www.geoffbarton.co.uk/files/_IDs/Design%2070.m4a
http://www.bobdinan.co.uk/Blog/Jingle_Podcast/Entries/2017/10/14_The_Joy_of_Non-Lyrics.html

[IainJohnston]

A VERY potentially deeeep topic Geoff!

Its worth remembering that TM cut was a [*cough*] “tribute” to Up Up and Away by the Johnny Mann singers
(or something like that), just as many TM Productions jingles were “by pure coincidence” similar to hits of the era.

Lots of non-lyrics abound – a quick rummage into PAMS Series 29 for starters?
Many more PAMS et all, could go on all night with examples!

However, I must admit THIS is one of my favourite “non-lyric” ones, and I’d like it resung as a Personal Cut some
day…in stereo from multi-track, with mixout layers galore…
https://soundcloud.com/allthebestjingles04/wwdc-babbabdoowow-pams

Oddly enough it appears to be in 2 versions – demo and air maybe?

(…and I wish to Gawd JMW would TELL US if any of those many EXCELLENT non-Series PAMS Top 40 / MOR cuts
are “available for re-sing” instead of us having to blindly ask about individual items (and yes I’ve bleated about this
topic more times than I can remember! Sorry!)

[mbMember]

Love that cut Iain its nuts but lovely!

[jonnoMember]

Love that cut Iain its nuts but lovely!

ditto!

[IainJohnston]

I collected that originally in the early 1970s as part of what I think was a number of small PAMS customs for the
Avco Radio Network (e.g. WWDC Washington, KOIT-FM/KYA San Francisco). Although Avco was a finance company
they had several stations and commissioned some quite unusual (for their time) cuts from PAMS.

Some appeared as WABC items but I’m sure Avco were the original client – although I’m quite happy to be corrected
by those with much better knowledge then mine :^)

[ratnobMemberAuthor]

Love that cut Iain its nuts but lovely!

ditto!

New to me and ditto again.

[PKMember]

AVCO was also the record label for The Stylistics and Van McCoy!

[IainJohnston]

“New to me and ditto again”

With the “Non-Series” thread running in a very strange direction at the moment, I’ll paste my
comment from that thread…

“So many PAMS non-Series and Customs from the early 1970s in particular before the “decline & fall”
deserve a lot more credit than they get today. Away from the Top-40-orientated “Numbered Series”
syndications that era of PAMS produced some VERY elegant MOR packages and “modern” Country
ones too”

I’d be happy to post a few further audio examples of stuff like the Avco cuts (some of which I was
sent direct from KYA all those years ago in the early 1970s in my “first wave” of jingle collecting),
but if I do I’ll be careful to NOT present them “in-the-clear” if there’s a “sensitivity” of some kind
about such material currently.

[IainJohnston]

Carefully & diplomatically keeping this away from “the other thread”…

https://soundcloud.com/allthebestjingles04/ij-avco-twelvesixties-wwdc-kya-pams

…a small selection of Avco 1260 AM WWDC Washington and KYA San Francisco PAMS material, much of it from
the above mentioned custom commissions. In “glorious mono”.

WWDC had Musical Odyssey, basically a 3-cut Grid Factory effort, Spring, Autumn, Summer (again a lot of grid
generated variants galore), Some Kind of Radio, and so on. The amount of cuts produced on the PAMS 10-track
system even for these two stations alone is absolutely daft!

But I’m sure it must have greatly “influenced” JMW towards the JAM “mixouts” approach to providing clients
with a “lot” of cuts for their money rather than the “traditional” just one “version” of each basic cut.

[Tracy CarmanMember]

Its worth remembering that TM cut was a [*cough*] “tribute” to Up Up and Away by the Johnny Mann singers
(or something like that), just as many TM Productions jingles were “by pure coincidence” similar to hits of the era.

Actually, it was “borrowed” from “The Jet Song (When The Weekend’s Over)” by The Groop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3kTBNsr-Gk

[bobgreenradioMember]

i recall that ‘up up and away’ thing being used by pepper. the now sound or its whats happening (?) 67? 68? and also the famous ‘up up and away; t w a’, a very classy cut indeed.

[PKMember]

Interestingly Tracy on trying to find out more information on the internet about that American band called The Groop (of which there seems to be very little info?) it also throws up an Australian Melbourne based band formed in 1964 also called The Groop which it seems were a forerunner to what eventually became the Little River Band!

[nleibo]

Re: https://soundcloud.com/allthebestjingles04/wwdc-babbabdoowow-pams –there’s a very similar cut for a “Learn to Play the Guitar” Company that PAMS was “bartering”-http://33revelations.blogspot.com/2014/09/learn-to-play-guitarthe-radio-jingle-way.html Audio: http://www.normanb.net/mp3/colourway.mp3

[TheBigCheese]

Nice. Very ‘of it’s time’. As also was ‘South American Getaway’ with all it’s ba-ba-ba’s

[Author]

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