Phil's doing well, and he has some airchecks to share with us. We'll get started with three short ones here (and more to come....).
The first is a collection of station IDs done by Gary Gears at the time Phil worked at KAAY:
(Click here to play stream.)
(By the way, you can hear a couple of additional examples of Gary's work at this ReelRadio page: http://www.reelradio.com/gb/index.html
Next, Phil sent us a couple of ads he and David Treadway recorded for "The Foot Store". In the first, you get a stirring rendition of the William Tell Overture in the background to get you hopping (to the Foot Store, that is); in the second, we hear Phil and David play the memorable roles of "your right shoe" and "the one that's left" as they tell you about The Foot Store's incredible selection:
(Click here to play stream.)
Well, it's hard to top that last one, but we will. We'll finish this session with an incredible collection of promos based on the "Faulk Monster". (In case you don't remember the famous Bigfoot monster of Faulk, Arkansas, you can read about it at the end of this post!) Here, Phil, David, and Mike McCormick do the voices on some wild-and-wacky skits that boil down to "deliver him ALIVE to KAAY for one-thousand-ninety dollars!" I hope you can tolerate obsessive alliteration and bad John Wayne imitations. If so, well, play at your own risk:
(Click here to play stream.)
Finally, about the Faulk Monster. He/she/it was a cousin to Bigfoot, which was a kind of cultural icon of the late 60's. Here's a quote from http://www.wintersteel.com/Bigfoot.html:
The Faulk Monster, made famous in the United States, in the 1970's, by the Charles B. Pierce film "Legend of Boggy Creek" is the "Arkansas Bigfoot". Allegedly sighted in the environs of the small town of Faulk, Arkansas, it supposedly bears a close resemblance to the Sasquatch and "Bigfoot" of farther North. Regardless of the standing of the Pierce film as a "cult classic", this creature is an absolute and undeniable hoax.
(Aw, rats --- I wanted that one-thousand-ninety dollars....)
Thanks, Phil, for these airchecks! By the way, can anyone give us some background about the "Faulk Monster" promotions? I suspect there are some good stories here....
---Dave S. (schmidt1953@gmail.com)
Much as I LOVE my boy Eric/Rico/Phil North, I frequently felt the need to correct his spelling (the only way I could come close to feeling equal with him!): that is FOUKE Monster, not Faulk. Fouke was (probably still is) a small town in Miller County, Arkansas, where the beastie was reported.
ReplyDelete"The Legend Of Boggy Creek" caused a bit of buzz around the state and I seem to remember KAAY hosting the Little Rock premiere of it with numerous ticket giveaways.
Naturally, we couldn't let it go at that; we had to pump it up to outrageous, cartoonish proportions. I suspect the reward for the capture of the monster originated with General Manager Pat Walsh--may he rest in Glory forever. He was all about what I call "Stupid stunts in public" because he well knew what kind of word-of-mouth these things generated. It was the kind of promotion that could not be bought.
So Pat came up with the reward money idea, and the rest of us ran (amuck) with it. We'd just get in the production room, roll tape and let it happen. It didn't matter back then whose ideas made it to the air: the whole was always, magically, greater than the sum of its parts. It invariably would come out better than we expected, due in no small part to Eric/Phil's utter wizardry and unflagging energy.
Yes, Virginia, there WAS magic on this Earth, once upon a time, and a big ol' chunk of it radiated through that Mighty 1090 transmitter at KAAY in Little Rock.
David B. Treadway
a.k.a. Doc Holiday
1971-72