Bob’s Jingle Pilgrimage
Bob’s Jingle Pilgrimage
I’m writing this in Dallas.
Those are five words which, when I stumbled across those silly little songs we call jingles all those years ago, I never expected to write.
But here I am.
And - no doubt to the disbelief of those heathens who don’t appreciate the craftsmanship and spiritual joy of a great sung jingle (shame on them!) - I’m here on a jingle pilgrimage. (Watch my subsequent video here).
I am with Jon Wolfert (aka JMW), someone I wrote to as a radio-obsessed teenager aged 15, asking about Radio 1 and Radio 2’s jingles.
He was and is President of Jam Productions in Dallas, and I already knew - ‘knew’, notice - that his company made the best jingles in the world. I was hooked.
Thus my life would never be quite the same again, and - despite an interregnum when real life, career and family intruded - jingles have never been far from the surface.
Even flying in to Dallas, thirty thousand feet over an obscure Canadian landscape and then across US cities that were familiar, it was the jingles that ignited the memories.
Tracking our flightpath on the onboard entertainment system, I couldn’t spot a city without it triggering a radio station name, a musical logo, a jingle. There was Buffalo (WKBW); there was Detroit (WNIC); there was Chicago (WLS), and so on for several thousands miles.
It’s testament to the power of the sung jingle.
So here I am in Dallas.
And what I’m doing is visiting places - places of historical interest (inevitably, the places associated with the shooting of JFK), but also of radio, and specifically jingle, interest.
And, eventually, I’ll illustrate the visit with plenty of photos and some audio interviews.
But first, a disclaimer. This is my visit. It’s my audio. It reflects me and no one else. If the photos are bad, that’s because I take bad photographs. If the audio is poor quality, it’s because I’m not an engineer and I’m using a cheap, simple MP3 recorder.
That sense of it being a personal quest may, I hope, add to the charm - just one ageing, balding collector spending time with someone whose work I have followed with fascination from afar and who now relishes the chance to see the sights and to ask some questions that have been part of my psychological landscape for 35 years.
It’s important to point out that my time at JAM and visiting some jingle sites with Jon Wolfert is not part of some kind of jingle ‘package tour’ that’s widely available. It results instead from our having known of one another for more than thirty years and over the past ten having corresponded pretty regularly.
I’m sharing my reminiscences here out of a genuine sense that I’m in a privileged position to be spending time with a person and in a place that others won’t have chance to do: my blog therefore is written to share some of what I find - in words and pictures and sounds and (later) video.
This page will be fluid. I use a clunky old program for uploading text, and it’s not great at handling pictures. But I will from time to time be adding new links to pictures and, in particular, some audio.
Sometimes in the text you will find references which - later - will have an audio link. On this first day there is just one. The foot of this page will track the updates so that you don’t miss them.
My aim with the audio is to ask Jon questions about the different places that jingles were made, about some of the people involved then and now, and about the processes of how a jingle is written, how singers are selected, and suchlike. I shan’t be asking anything controversial or provocative or intrusive, wanting instead just to get inside the jingle-making process.
This, for me, is the mystical stuff - the enticing knowledge of a world I glimpse into, like some starving pauper peering through the steamed-up windows of rich people in an unfamiliar house. I want to see what goes on in their world.
With JMW’s permission, I hope our interviews may illuminate the art of real jingle making for those of us who still value the care and attention that goes into working with real writers and musicians.
Day 1: Saturday 16 February, 2014:
I touch down in Dallas at 2pm, having left behind a waterlogged and wind-battered Britain. Here the sun is shining and the air is balmy. This bodes well. I queue for a long time at immigration, while being entertained by the charming people. The guy who checked my passport asked me breezily what kind of food I was intending to eat. This wrong-footed me: I hadn’t planned in quite that detail.
I was greeted by Jon Wolfert who had said that he would be in the arrivals hall holding something appropriate. He was: a sign saying ‘Geoffy B’ which was quickly switched to one saying ‘Bob Dinan’. It was like coming home.
What followed was a tour by car of the city, including a visit to the Insurance Lane building which had been home to JAM when many of us discovered their work.
The pilgrimage proper, however, would start the next day.
Day 2: Sunday 17 February, 2014
We return to Insurance Lane where JAM began. This unprepossessing squat office block had been converted to studios by Sundance Productions, a company that was primarily in the record and studio business, and which did jingles for a little while.
In 1977 JAM bought Sundance's audio equipment, took over the building and then, as the business took off, expanded in to the building next door.
One quirky feature of this expansion was that to get from the offices to the studios there was no connecting door (the buildings were owned by different people) so whatever the weather you had to walk outside the building and then back in off the street
Here’s some audio interviews (sorry that it’s all at low volume. I hadn’t quite got the hang of the audio recorder on day one, which is embarrassing, given who I’m with):
- Audio A: JMW describes early days at Insurance Lane
-Audio B: JMW’s recollections of making jingles at Insurance Lane
-Audio C: JMW’s memory of the parking lot at Insurance Lane
Next stop would be essential for any serious collector who is hoping to understand the jingle business an address imbued with historical magic. We head down Office Parkway until we reach 4141 - the home of PAMS Productions from (I think) 1961 to their demise in 1978.
In this interview (again, sorry it’s quiet), JMW describes memories of working at PAMS.
I visit downtown Dallas itself, spending time seeing sites of historical interest, before my first visit to what is now affectionately known as JAM Towers. This was an overwhelming experience.
I’d seen the photographs, endlessly trawled the website, followed their work - but to be here, to walk in to reception, through offices, and then to studios and the production room - this was an extraordinary experience for me.
In this interview, I sit with Jon Wolfert in JAM’s reception area and he describes where we are and we begin a tour which won’t finish until the next day.
First, we go into studio B. In this interview, JMW describes its use. Listen out for him answering my stupid question about lead singers by playing the WABC logo on the piano.
And then to studio A where there is a grand piano. Jon heads over to it, sits down at it, and describes an instrument which was first owned by the Sundance Organization, then purchased by JAM, and - as he says - has featured on so many familiar JAM cuts ever since. This bit of spontaneity demonstrates the magic of this visit.
Day 3: Monday 18 February, 2014
Today was spent seeing various sites of Dallas. Later in the day I headed back to JAM to watch a solo session with the wonderful Benita and listened to some beautiful cuts being sung. After dinner we continued the tour we had begun the previous day.
This included looking at letters sent over the first twenty years by clients, seeing the way packages were presented to clients - the logos, the magazine advertisements - and then ... into the first of two vaults. This was where all the first generation copies are stored - everything JAM has ever recorded.
Into the JAM ‘vault’.
Photographs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Day 4: Tuesday 18 February 2014
A day in the studios at JAM. It begins with JMW collecting me from my hotel to drive to JAM Towers. We get slightly delayed by heavy traffic and a slow-parking truck.
So we listen to the radio where - sitting next to the person who has made many of the world’s greatest jingles for 40 years - I hear the top-of-the-hour cut on KLUV which was made by the person sitting next to me. I ask an obvious question.
We get to JAM where a four-hour vocal session is scheduled. Here are the photographs I took, including better ones in the vault and ... (cue another roll of drums) ... in the room containing all the PAMS masters.
The first part of the day is a vocal session with five singers: Kay Sharpe, Cheryl Cleavenger, Johnny Hooper, Les Farrington and Jeff Oxley. They sing various jingles for four hours with a twenty-minute break. I am sitting at the back of the control room behind Brian (aka ‘Brain’) and Jon Wolfert.
As the singers stack up layers of voices, JMW explains to me what we are seeing and hearing. I’m particularly interested in what a five- versus seven-group means, a theme we will return to later. Then he takes me into the studio to meet the singers and to listen to them ‘in situ’.
There is audio of all of this process, and I’ll post it once the jingles have all been mixed and delivered to the client. Meanwhile, some current audio ...
During the singers’ break, I walk into the studio where Les Farrington is playing the piano. I talk to him about how he became a jingle singer.
Jon and I spend the evening in the control room of studio A talking about why we like jingles. He plays me a particular favourite of his - a KFI cut written by the legendary Dick Hamilton. Listen to the cut here. Be warned: the discussion itself lasts 90 minutes: we just talk.
Sitting at the piano, we talk about chords. JMW also reveals how the award-winning shotgun Logoset cut 10 was made. Listen to Logoset here.
Talking jingles: sitting in the control room to studio A at JAM, JMW plays further cuts by Dick Hamilton in the early 70s and we discuss them. Be warned - this is a long conversation (90 minutes), and the sound quality isn’t brilliant.
But the most obsessive aficionados are likely find it of interest.
Day 5: Wednesday 19 February 2014
My last full day in Dallas.
I spent the afternoon at JAM with Jon in the studio A control room where he was mixing cuts ready to deliver to the client. These were sports jingles for a full service station and there seemed to be lots - I mean, lots - of shouts, each of which had to be dropped over the track at various points.
The attention to detail is extraordinary, and I watched the process - cleaning up tracks, establishing the stereo, getting each element (rhythm, brass, strings, voices, etc) into the right balance in the overall mix, preparing for upload/CD, creating the written master log, making the reference CD copy for JAM as well as the client’s final copy, which Jon would then neatly label in his own handwriting.
It was an amazing process to watch, truly painstaking, and checked at every stage at every level. If something wasn’t right, it was attended to.
It made me think of a certain Latin phrase that means ‘It takes time to make things’.
Photos: I’ve posted some photographs taken during the afternoon, and I have specifically included a picture of one of the two control room speakers to illustrate what Jon refers to in the interview below.
Audio: Jon talks about the quality of the speakers, and the fact that the mixing desk has two intentionally inferior speakers: an important part of the process in checking that the audio sounds great through world class speakers but also through the kind of equipment many listeners may have in their home or car. Jon demonstrates.
The process takes around three hours, and he and Brian (the engineer) are back at it the next day.
On the journey home from JAM we are again talking jingles with the radio on in the background, and we have another of those surreal conversations that gets punctuated by a jingle. Oh, and I liken JMW to God.
Audio: Three generations of Mr Wolfert
Day 6: Thursday 20 February 2014
Before leaving Dallas, I spent several hours with Jon Wolfert in studio A at JAM Towers (as the studio and office complex is affectionately known).
Conscious that my audio recordings earlier in the week had been too quiet, I made some ham-fisted adjustments which have rendered those that follow too loud. Indeed, they frequently distort, especially when JMW is playing the piano.
So there is a kind of delicious irony that I am sitting at the epicentre of top-end production values recording something that sounds akin to a distant AM radio signal on the most sunspot-blighted night of the year.
Still, that’s my fault, and I hope you’ll forgive the audio quality once you listen to the content of these extended discussions. They really are extended: most last twenty minutes or more.
Here goes:
Sitting at the desk in his office, Jon reveals what happens when callers to JAM get put on hold.
We discuss the origins and intricacies of radio station logos.
From station logos, we get into a discussion of how the ‘JAM Song’ - which contains more logos than you could possibly imagine - was put together.
We discuss the origins and development of the BBC Radio 1 and 2 jingles from 1976 onwards.
That was supposed to be that. I had, after all, a plane to catch. But we started talking again, and so I turned back on the recorder and discussed the ‘feel’, the ambience of different jingles.
JMW makes particular reference to this cut from “It’s Nice” which he wrote. You might want to listen to it before the interview.
And then, with breathtaking ease, he demonstrates how jingles are written. It was one of the most extraordinary moments in an extraordinary visit. It culminates in this audio clip, started in February 2014 and finished in May 2014: at the piano JMW tells me how he might go about creating a jingle for ‘The Geoff Barton Love Songs Show’. It is so bewitching that I ask if he might make it, using those high male vocals associated with the grat Marv Shaw era at PAMS.
JMW chooses a track he got to mix as a young rookie at PAMS - from their little-known ‘Beautiful But Beautiful’ package. So we get a track from the early seventies with backing vocals from that period combined with the singers at JAM and the characteristic attention-to-detail of Mr Wolfert in putting it together.
I hope you love this jingle sequence as a fitting tribute to an extraordinary visit.
Oh, and then there’s the video I subsequently made of the visit.
Conclusion
So that’s it, my JAM odyssey. And I can honestly say it was one of the most memorable and special experiences of my life. There I was - humble jingle collector of many years -sitting with the actual creator of these little songs that have been a joyful soundtrack to my life for 35 years. I was allowed to ask many naive questions, and to start to look beneath the surface of this fascinating specialist industry.
When I arrived, Jon had said he hoped that seeing behind the scenes wouldn’t spoil the magic for me.
It hasn’t. If anything, the opposite has happened. I am even more in awe of the depths of talent and the layers of work, the sheer craftsmanship, that go into producing each jingle.
Those jingles - whether playing in rich splendour from the studio into the control room speakers, or playing from smaller speakers in our homes, cars and on our computers - they all convey a kind of magic.
And being there and seeing the process for myself - that has been magic too.
My thanks to Jon and Mary Lyn and all the people I met at JAM and talked to on the phone while there: thank you for the music; thank you for the jingles; thank you for the magic.
Long may it continue.
Bob Dinan
Monday 17 February 2014: 7:20 GMT
Last updated Friday 21 February,12 noon
Video added to this site Saturday 13 February, 2016
Updates:
18 Feb 2014, 7:58:
Rewrite of early text.
New audio added of visit to the ‘vault’.
18 Feb 2014, 13:40
Extensive rewrite. Audio from day 2 added.
Links added to Facebook pictures.
19 Feb 2014, 8:40
Start of Day 4 blog added.
15:15:
Day 4 blog continued and audio from yesterday added.
20 February 2014, 12:55
Day 5 blog and audio added; day 2 reference to Insurance Lane amended for accuracy.
21 February 2014, 12 noon
Final audio added; conclusion written
22:10: text tidied up, plus addition of audio conversation between JMW and me (Day 4).
23 February 2014, 17:05:
Audio links tidied up; blog clarified in places.
21 May, 2014, 6:07:
Audio added of finished ‘Beautiful But Beautiful’ jingle
13 February, 2016 12:10
Video links added
Bob.
Monday, 17 February 2014
Bob’s Jingle Pilgrimage