Mea culpa and all that, but I gotta crow a bit. My four most favorite radio commercials are ones that I produced myself. In 1972-73, I worked for a radio station in Pasco, Washington (just down the road from JenEllen's stomping ground). I did everything: board announcer, newscaster (actually, news director for a time), copy writing, and commercial production. This is a excerpt from a draft of the "memoir" I'm working on; the hiatus between the late Sixties and the late Seventies when I was doing "day jobs" and not singing very much. With your kind indulgence:—

        One of my favorite activities at KORD was commercial production. This gave me a chance to exercise a certain level of creativity and ingenuity. The station manager often had serious doubts about what I was doing, but the clients—those who paid for the commercials to be produced and aired—seemed to like my stuff. In my general defense, I never ever did what I refer to as a "shouter" commercial (the type favored by many discount furniture stores and used car dealers) even when it was expected of me. I hate them. And although some clients seem to like them, I think most listeners hate them as much as I do.
        My first triumph was a commercial for a local floor covering store. The commercials that KORD had been doing for them were shouters, stressing that these carpets were bargains: "Buy now! Today! And save, save, SAVE MONEY!" I was assigned to do their next commercial. I was to write it from the fact sheet the store had provided, then record what I had written. I cringed.
        Then I read over the fact sheet. They were stocking a couple of new lines of carpeting, and although some of it was ersatz oriental, I could tell from the brand names that this was quality stuff. I decided that a shouter just wouldn't be appropriate. Although the fact sheet mentioned that they were selling for well below the usual price, in my copy I mentioned that only casually toward the end, and spent most of the time stressing the fine quality of the product. "Top quality for the usual low, low prices." [In commercials, prices are never just "low," they're always "low, low."] I dug through KORD's rather sparse collection of classical music records and selected a cut from the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra playing an instrumental arrangement of music from Madame Butterfly (by an Italian composer, but the most exotic and Oriental sounding thing I could find in the record library). I read the copy as a "prestige" commercial, with the music playing softly underneath. When I played it back, I thought it sounded pretty good. I dubbed it onto a cartridge, labeled it, took it into the control room, and put it in the rack.
        The following morning during my air shift, at the time appointed in the log, I stuck the cartridge in the machine and hit the button. That was the first time my commercial went out over the air. It still sounded pretty good to me. But a few moments later, Roger Clawson [the station manager] walked into the control room. He was not entirely happy.
         "That's not the kind of commercial we've been doing for them," he said. "It's not what they want. And where did you find that music! It sounded like a dirge!"
        He was warming up to give me a good chewing out when the intercom rang. I picked up the phone. It was Merna [office manager]. "It's Snow's Floor Coverings," she said. "They want to speak to Roger."
        Okay, I thought. I'm dead. I handed the phone to Roger.
        As the person on the other end spoke, Roger's eyebrows went up. After listening for a few moments, he said, "Okay, thank you. I'll tell him. And I'll see to it."
        I'm really dead, I thought.
        Roger hung up the phone, then looked at me with a crooked smile.
         "I'm sorry . . ." he said.
        Dead and buried, I thought. I guess I'd better go home and pack.
         ". . . for popping off like that," he continued. "I guess you knew what you were doing after all. They like it. In fact, they like it so much that they want you to do all their commercials from here on."

        Shortly after that, I got another exclusive from Hanford House, the big motor hotel up in Richland. They were introducing a new French menu in their dining room and they had a flamenco guitarist playing in the lounge. I started out with "You don't have to go to the Côte d'Azur to enjoy the good life . . ." and fortunately my high school French and my penchant for telling dialect jokes armed my well for reeling off a sample listing of the menu items. I wound it up with the something about dining to the passionate rhythms of Ricardo's flamenco guitar. I backed the whole thing with a chunk of one of my own flamenco records that I'd brought with me: the opening segment of a Soleares. The segment ran exactly thirty seconds, perfect timing for the commercial. Hanford House called a few minutes after the commercial ran for the first time, said they loved it, and they, too, asked Roger to be sure I did all their spots from there on.
        It's nice when you can make points with both the clients and the station manager by having fun putting something together in the production room.
        One I was really proud of was a spot I did promoting KORD's upcoming coverage of the Atomic Cup hydroplane race the year after I first went to the Tri-Cities. It was to be just a straight announcement. But that seemed a little bland to me. Too bad we didn't have any tapes of previous races, because sound effects would have made it a whole lot more exciting.
        But—Elektra, a company that got its start recording folk music, had recently come out with a set of a dozen or so sound effects records. The station had them on the shelves in the production room, but nobody ever used them. I rummaged through the records, found a couple of sound effects that made my eyes glow, and I went to work, making use of some fancy multiple dubbing.
        I read the straight announcement, with an appropriate degree of excitement. But in the background you could hear crowd noises and a voice saying, "And there goes Bill Muncey. He's pulling out of the pits and heading onto the course. . . ." It was my voice again, but slightly muffled and off-mike. Under this, you could hear the roar of a powerful engine coming to life, revving up, then moving swiftly off into the distance, with the sound of water sloshing against its hull. Beautiful! Exactly what I was aiming for.
        About thirty seconds after I first played it over the air, Bill Wippel (the new station manager) came into the control room.
         "Where the hell did you find that?" he said. "I looked all over for a tape of last year's race, and I couldn't find any."
         "It was just something I put together myself."
        He looked confused. "Put together? What do you mean?"
         "You know that stack of Elektra sound effects records?"
         "Uh . . . no, I didn't know we had any. You mean there's a sound effect of a hydroplane on the records?"
         "No. But I did find a seaplane starting up, taxiing, and taking off."
        He stared at me for several seconds with his mouth open, then burst out laughing.
        The magic of radio.
        I made good use of those records. One of my more startling commercials used an effect that, I learned years later, was one that Jac Holtzman, the head of Elektra Records, was most proud of. In his fascinating book, Follow the Music, in which he details Elektra's trek through the music world, he mentions the making of the sound-effects records. For this one particular effect, he describes how they took a old junker car out on some back roads, repeatedly took the car up to speed, then hit the brakes, recording the sound of screeching tires. Then they took the car to a junk yard, lifted it on a crane, and dropped it again and again, recording the sounds of the car being demolished. The result of subsequent editing was a long, nerve-shattering sound of tires screeching on pavement, culminating in a crash that seems to go on forever.
        A local car repair shop had a special on tires and brakes. For their commercial, I used the car crash track twice. The first time, I let it go all the way. It was starting and horrifying, and you wondered when it was ever going to end. The second time, I recorded about a second and a half of screeching tires, them put my thumb on the edge of the record, stopping the sound abruptly. I opened the commercial with the full-length crash. Then I read the copy, warning about the dangers of bald tires and/or faulty brakes and recommended a trip to the car repair shop to take advantage of their special—before it was too late. I ended the commercial with a brief screech of tires, no crash. I tagged it with, "Now, that's better, don't you think?"
        They sold a lot of tires and did a lot of brake jobs that week.

With this kind of stuff, it's a lot more fun to be the one behind the mike.

Don Firth