Category: Music

New York Radio — Scott Muni

Original card provided by Dennis Rogers.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/GrasshopperJump.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/WABCBeatles.mp3]

The audio player has two sound clips:  Muni’s theme song, an odd instrumental from 1961 called “Grasshopper Jump,” and Muni’s promo for the WABC Beatles Fan Club.

I don’t remember Scott Muni as well as some of the other WABC disk jockeys, because he left the station in 1965.  Muni is better known as a pioneer of Rock music on FM radio, but he was memorable on AM as a presence during the initial, wild rush of American Beatlemania.

Scott Muni on WABC
Scott Muni on WABC, 1965

< 7° of Separation

Click the picture below to see the entire cover to the January, 1965 issue of a humor magazine called HELP! The Beatles’ movie HELP! wasn’t released until August, 1965, leading one to speculate what possible influence Terry Gilliam’s bit of airbrushed artistic whimsy may have had on the title. Yes, that’s Terry Gilliam the animator, director and Monty Python troupe member who is listed as contributing editor.

HELP! was the brainchild of Harvey Kurtzman. In an earlier posting I have a link to a gallery with one of Kurtzman’s early comic-book stories. Kurtzman is still remembered today as the man who started MAD Magazine. One evening, Gilliam, who had replaced HELP! staffer Gloria Steinem, went to an off-Broadway show that featured a performer named John Cleese. They met and Cleese was talked into performing a photo comic strip for the magazine. Look for that in a future posting. After HELP! folded, Gilliam later caught up with Cleese in London, and then there was something completely different.

Chicken Fat Attack

When I was kid, along with perhaps millions of kids in gym classes across America, I was forced to exercise to a song called “Chickenfat”. I always assumed the song was done by nobody in particular, but how wrong I was. “Chickenfat” was written by Meredith Willson and sung by Robert Preston, who had some slight success with something called The Music Man.

Isn’t this just great? Robert Preston was a one-of-a-kind talent. It isn’t so much the nostalgic kick of hearing this again that I appreciate, as it is Preston’s enthusiasm.