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Lyric censorship - KLIF Dallas

JeffM said:
To Firepoint: As for the Beagles, there actually was an album and singles by a studio group by that name; connected with the soundtrack of a Saturday morning cartoon show, "The Beagles," which was the last series made by Total Television Productions (the Underdog folks.) It aired on CBS and the records came out on Columbia. They did not cover "We Can Work It Out" or any other actual Beatles songs as far as I know though, so the record your pal had was something else.
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Been looking at youtube, and I see some examples from the cartoon to which you are referring. No actual Beatles covers, but some very Beatlish tunes just the same. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery....

I came across footage of a Mexican group performing some Beatles tunes under the name the Beagles. The clip that I listened to actually wasn't half bad, but the sound quality wasn't all that great, either. It was someone capturing a live performance, probably on a camcorder. I was not able to view it in high enough resolution, but it appeared that they had taken a Beatles banner, and had crudely made the "T" into a "G." At any rate, the footage appeared to be much too recent to have been anything from the '60s or '70s.
 
firepoint525 said:
David, I hope you know that I have been "pulling your chain" for most of this thread. You don't usually post a lot of stuff with typos, so when you did, naturally I assumed that you had posted your memo exactly as written. Doing otherwise would have been an editorial judgement. I know nothing about scanning outside documents onto this site, so when I have material of that nature to post, I usually post a link to another site. I know that this site frowns upon posting entire documents here, probably for copyright infringement reasons, and will usually come back to edit something, instead opting to replace with a link to an outside site. They have done that with material that I have posted here before.
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There is more to taking an old document and making it into text than what you mention.

In this case, I had a TIFF scan of a bad copy of the original. I used PhotoShop to improve contrast, then converted it to a readable PDF using CVision PDF Compressor and then capturing the text layer and pasting it into the post. The document was ratty to begin with, and while I improved formatting I left the OCR misreads intact as the original was not clear enough to be certain in some cases. As you say, half the songs were not hits... and we know that not getting on a few stations like KLIF could doom a song.

The only "blast from the past" that I looked up was Gordon McLendon, and even that was only because my political side (which hardly ever comes out on this site) piqued my curiosity. I saw similarities between him and George Flinn, radio and TV exec from Memphis who made a run for Congress from the 8th district of Tennessee (basically northwest TN) a couple of election cycles ago.
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McLendon ran for office some 20 years after he first bought KLIF in the late 40's. By the time he ran, it was because he had "done it all" in radio with stations at some point in markets like Dallas, San Antonio, Shreeveport, Houston, El Paso, Los Angeles, Lousiville, Chicago, San Francisco, Buffalo, Chicago and others I am sure I have forgotten. McLendon was one of the original two promoters of the new Top 40, but he also "invented" modern Beautiful Music at KABL, did the US' first all news station at XTRA News Over Los Angeles and even tried an all classified ads FM in LA in the early 60's. He was an innovator and a promoter and was one of the people who lead the way in reinventing radio when TV took over the drama, comedy and variety show positions.
 
DavidEduardo said:
As you say, half the songs were not hits... and we know that not getting on a few stations like KLIF could doom a song.
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But about a third of them were hits, albeit minor hits in some cases, songs that are not played much now, but used to be. Seems like he didn't quite have the power to kill off ALL of these songs, so mixed bag at best. I am guessing that some of these songs were shopped around to other stations as well as, or instead of, the Dallas station. If we banned everything that even hinted of drug references, there would not have been much in the '60s left to play. I am aware that "Puff the Magic Dragon," "Eight Miles High," and "Along Comes Mary" were all, at one time or another, banned because of "drug" references. Some of these "bans" got downright stupid.

So did he pick up on these previously "banned" songs that went on to become hits, or did he continue to ignore them? A look at their surveys from back in the day would probably answer that.

Jeff, I have heard "Kind of a Drag" "mondegreened" into "Canada Dry," one of the better "mondegreens" out there (reference to another thread). Still, I must wonder about those who can't even get a song title right when it is right there in front of them!
 
I found the document to be interesting reading. I enjoy looking at old radio music surveys, particularly the lower reaches of the charts to see what non and lesser hits were aired. This internal document was very nice. I know 11 of the songs. Thank you for posting. I hope you will post other things you may find.
 
firepoint525 said:
Jeff, I have heard "Kind of a Drag" "mondegreened" into "Canada Dry," one of the better "mondegreens" out there (reference to another thread). Still, I must wonder about those who can't even get a song title right when it is right there in front of them!
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Mon, what a mondegreen! Back in the 60's soda companies got a lot of pop singers (pun intended or not) to cut jingles; I'm surprised now that Canada Dry didn't latch on to that!
 
raccoonradio said:
Harry Rag was by the Kinks, not Kings--and it's British rhyming slang for what they call a cigarette...also seen as a derogatory term for homosexuals. I don't know if Harry Rag was released as a single, prob not
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It was the B side of a stiff called "Mr. Pleasant".

At the center of all this was KLIF, a station that went on new music aggressively and was followed by hundreds of Top 40 stations across middle America and much of the Southwest. As I look back at it, it is likely provable that KLIF made or helped make more hits than stations like WABC and WLS did (besides being in the format much earlier).
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How influential was McLendon in 1967? I associate him more with the pre-British invasion era.
 
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