A long, long time ago. . . .

Did you write the book of love,
And do you have faith in God above,
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock ’n roll,
Can music save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?

-- Don McLean,
'American Pie'

The frightening '50s

You want to know what those love letters in the sand said?

"I want to eat your brains!"

The Billboard: It wasn't fit reading for the faint of heart.

Vivian Maier, genius

Read this.

(And this.)

See that.

(And that.)

'50s sound: It's a thing of renown

What happens when you play a 1958 pressing of a 1956 LP on a 1955 Webcor record changer? Something like this.

What you see and hear here is the real deal. And it's a lot more fun than an iPod. Or iTunes. Or even an iYiYi.

(Yes, there is such a product.)

The first part of the audio is from the crappy microphone on my Nikon digital camera. Then I fade into the WAV file being recorded of the Les Brown LP on the studio computer. The audio file has been synched to the video.

This is what it really sounds like, folks. I did absolutely nothing to the audio other than adjust the volume.

Compact discs, my foot.

Now sit back, relax and enjoy your visit to the world of 1950s high fidelity. Up next, Les Brown and His Band of Renown with "Meanwhile, Back on the Bus" off of the Capitol Records album "Les Brown's in Town."

And note, please, that hipsters today are paying $28 for 180-gram LPs that fall far short sonically of what was the $2.98 norm in the 1950s and '60s.

The House of Hi-Fi . . . today

Sigh. Today, what was the House of Hi-Fi is now Omaha's house of anti hi-fi.

Obviously, I was born too late . . . and not in Omaha.

Still, Google Maps is an amazing tool for taking what was and seeing what now is. Now if I can just manage to step inside that 1964 edition of Billboard like a hot-tub time machine, I could do some serious shopping.

And were "ifs" and "buts" lots of fruits and nuts . . . oh, what a feast we'd have!

Good night, House of Hi-Fi, wherever you are.

3 Chords & the Truth: The hits in hi-fi

All I need is a nice vacuum-tube hi-fi, some nifty record albums and a record changer, and I'm in business, Hoss.

Well, and a time machine. That would be nice.

What do you think is on sale at the House of Hi-Fi this week? Let me jump in my Big Show time machine and find out.

While I'm there -- sometime around 1962 -- I'll see what kind of radio gig I can pick up to earn enough to keep me flush in LPs and hi-fi equipment. Food, too. Food is important.

AND YOU know what? While I'm back in the early '60s, buying neato electronic toys and spinning the hits somewhere or another, I'm going to see how 3 Chords & the Truth translates to "back in the day."

This should be fun -- or is that "koo koo, Pally"?

Ring-a-ding-ding, and all that jazz. Because I'm hep to all that, cats.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Come listen with me

This not only looks right, but it sounds right, too -- vintage Sinatra on a vintage hi-fi record changer.

I've probably entered the realm of irrational antique audiophile fandom, but there's something about these old LPs that just sounds a lot better on an old turntable. Technically, it probably has something to do with a slightly vintage cartridge that carries a bit more "pop" (as opposed to pop and crackle) than usual, as well as running with a bit more tracking pressure than a new, expensive cartridge could handle.

Or maybe it's just '50s magic.

But let me leave you with this: I really, really wish the microphone in the upper right-hand corner of the photo was Frank Sinatra's beloved "Telly," a Telefunken (Neumann) U-47.

The Campagna blue jay

In the summer of 1950, in a kitchen somewhere in south Omaha, I know why the caged bird sang.

The Campagna blue jay was having breakfast, courtesy of his human friend, Sam. And, believe me, you haven't heard anything until you've heard a hungry blue jay. 

I know all this because Sam's son, Anthony, was recording it all, cutting a slice of life from a different America -- a different Omaha -- into the acetate blank locked onto the spinning turntable of a home disc recorder.

So, who were Anthony and Sam Campagna . . . and why did Sam have a blue jay in his kitchen?

I don't know.

Neither do I know why a couple albums of Campagna-family home recordings were there for me to find at an Omaha estate sale last year. I guess it's the same reason I saw an unwanted album of family photos -- some dating to World War I -- at another estate sale on Sunday.

I DO know this -- there's the story of America in that recording.

You can hear it in Sam's Italian-immigrant accent. You can hear it in Anthony's unadorned, typically unaccented Midwestern accent.

You can hear the story of the American Dream on that 61-year-old recording, because la famiglia Campagna had enough disposable income to buy itself a fancy disc recorder. Not everybody did -- such things were not cheap in mid-20th-century dollars.

You can hear that there still was an American Dream back then.

MOST OF ALL, you hear an old man, a son and a moment of levity sent via acetate disc far into the future. Oh, yeah . . . you hear a hungry, squawking blue jay, too.

Hang on to your hats

Now that I have this new addition to the 3 Chords & the Truth studios, God only knows what's going to start showing up on the Big Show.

"This" is a 1955 Webcor component record changer. Back then, this would have been part of your expensive and cutting-edge "hi-fi system."

I just call it my "midlife crisis" purchase.

But now that I can play 78 RPM records in the studio just like anything else (in glorious monophonic sound, might I add) . . . watch out.

Is what I'm saying.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Tragic songs of life

When you're young, you tend to stagger through life, thinking you know it all, that you're all that and then some, and that there's not a damned thing you can learn from the old folks.

This is why, when you get a little older and know a little better, you tend to tread wistfully through a youth-obsessed culture and mutter about youth being wasted on the young.

When I was young, the above masterpiece by the Louvin Brothers was known as "hillbilly music." We wadn't about no damn hillbilly music. Well, at least we couldn't admit to being "about no damn hillbilly music."

Unless one was at the Cotton Club, just north of LSU on Highland Road, and you were just a little bit liquored up and oyster po-boy'd up, and it was a mixed crowd -- in other words, not your typical college bar -- and your resistance to all those Patsy Cline records on the best jukebox in Baton Rouge just fell to pieces.

And you had to admit it: Yes, Don Kirchner, there was musical life before the Beatles.

ABOVE, on film from the Grand Ol' Opry, is a vintage 1950s performance of one of the greatest musical acts of all time, the Louvin Brothers. Here is another, straight off the record:


WHAT COULD WE possibly learn from the likes of the Louvin Brothers?

As it turns out . . . plenty, as recounted today in Charlie Louvin's New York Times obituary:

Mr. Louvin achieved his greatest fame with the Louvin Brothers, the popular duo that modernized the close-harmony singing of Depression-era acts like the Blue Sky Boys and the Delmore Brothers and that anticipated the keening vocal interplay of the Everly Brothers.

Typically featuring Mr. Louvin on guitar and lead vocals and Ira, his older brother, on mandolin and high tenor harmonies, the Louvins’ 1950s hits also left their mark on the country-rock of the Byrds and others.

“I just could not get enough of that sound,” the singer Emmylou Harris said of the Louvin Brothers’ music in an interview with The Observer, the British newsweekly, in January 2010. “I’d always loved the Everly Brothers, but there was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers.”

Ms. Harris’s breakthrough country hit was a 1975 remake of the duo’s “If I Could Only Win Your Love.” Resolutely traditional in approach, Mr. Louvin and his brother, who died in an automobile accident in 1965, were proponents of the high, lonesome sound of the southern Appalachian Mountains, where they grew up. Some of their best-known recordings were updates of foreboding antediluvian ballads like “In the Pines” and “Knoxville Girl.” Other material centered on the wholesome likes of family and religion, including “The Christian Life,” an original that later appeared on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” the landmark Byrds album featuring the singer Gram Parsons.

Also falling under the duo’s sway were alternative-rock acts like Elvis Costello and the band Uncle Tupelo (which recorded a version of the Louvin Brothers’ cold-war plaint “Great Atomic Power” in 1992).

Despite their conservative cultural and musical leanings — their initial ’50s hits were recorded without drums, which were then commonplace in country music — the Louvins’ greatest acclaim came with the advent of rock ’n’ roll, when rebellious sentiments and loud backbeats were in ascendance. Their biggest single, “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” was a No. 1 country hit for two weeks in 1956. They also reached the country Top 10 with songs like “When I Stop Dreaming” and “Cash on the Barrelhead” during this period and were headliners in a touring revue that included Elvis Presley.

CHARLIE AND IRA LOUVIN were giants during an era of young titans who recognized the greatness of a couple of purveyors of "hillbilly music." Who decided there were things to be learned from the masters.

Now Charlie Louvin is gone, and one can hope a great, great act has been reunited on the other side of life. One also can hope that the Louvins' legacy will live on, passed down from those who were brave enough to embrace it in the first place. Who were smart enough to realize that beauty is timeless and oughtn't be wasted on a museum.

Maybe I'm naive. But when I stop dreaming. . . .

3 Chords & the Truth: The kitchen sink

Come on in.

Grab a cup of hot tea and sit yourself down at the kitchen table. We'll talk. We'll play a lot of music, too.

Hell, we'll play everything but the kitchen sink.

No . . . wait. I think the kitchen sink's on the playlist, too, this week. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure it is.

Yeah . . . there it is. "Kitchen Sink." It's K42 on the jukebox.

YOU SEE, at 3 Chords & the Truth, our kitchen has a jukebox. It's got thousands and thousands -- and thousands more -- songs on it. That why we call what we do here the Big Show.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Sit yourself down over there at the table; I've got some cool music I've been dying to play for you all week.

The tea's hot . . . and so is the music, right here on the Big Show. Got the best jukebox in town -- you'll see. Or hear. Whatever.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords & the Truth: Goodbye, cruel world

Goodbye cruel world . . .

I'm leaving you today.
(To lose myself in 3 Chords & the Truth)
Goodbye,
Goodbye,
Goodbye.

Goodbye, all you people,
There's nothing you can say
To make me change my mind.
(The world is still behaving badly, and
I'm looking for good stuff on the Big Show)
Goodbye.

(It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
Which means both hello and . . . goodbye.)

With apologies to Pink Floyd

3 Chords & the Truth: Desperate for d'lovely

Pardon me if I'm a bit fed up with shooting and anger and death and strife and mayhem.

It was a bad week in Omaha. You've heard why.

I don't know about you, but I've got to get away, and I'm doing my best to take 3 Chords & the Truth with me this week. I thought I'd start off about half a century or so ago and take it from there -- "there" being a time and place where we at least pretended to be civilized, and kids shooting up schools were unheard of.

An era of madmen could do worse than drowning its sorrows with a hi-fi full of Mad Men music.

Like I said, that's our starting point this week on the Big Show.

TO TELL YOU the truth, if all our popular culture can conjure anymore is booty calls, bling and poppin' caps in random ass, I may just take up permanent residence in the Wayback Machine. I gotta get away.

We gotta get away. We gotta learn a new way of living before all we know is dying.

I'll think about that later. Now I need to remember that times were simpler -- not perfect . . . just not quite as insane as today's default existence. Now I need to remember when lovely trumped angry, at least in the culture's official box score.

Back during a time when I still could be shocked.

I need to get away for a bit. Yes, indeed. I'm reckoning you do, too.

FOR SOME of you, this week's 3 Chords & the Truth will be a trip to a familiar and beloved destination, one where the rough edges have been smoothed out by the amazing grace of passing time. For others of you, it might be a journey of discovery.

But, at any rate, it ain't here. It ain't the fresh tragedies of a new year -- 2011 -- when you'd think we'd know better.

Welcome to a touch of class from years long past. Back when men wore hats . . . and it was really bad form to bust a cap in your neighbor's ass.

Your Daily '80s: Shakin' over Shirley

Welcome back to 1982.

In May of this year, Shakin' Stevens took this little ditty, "Shirley," to No. 6 on the British charts.

But for me, the original of "Shirley" hits a little closer to home.


WELCOME to 1959 -- two years before I arrived on the scene -- in my hometown, Baton Rouge, La. Then, "Shirley" was a little somethin' put to hot wax by John Fred and the Playboys.


ABOUT NINE YEARS later, John Fred and His Playboy Band had a No. 1 hit with another little something you might remember.

Big Mike . . . Big Bad Mike

Long, long ago, this feller named Big Mike ruled the airwaves.

Well, actually, back in 1954, this other feller named Todd Storz was wiping the floor with Big Mike and KFAB in the Omaha ratings . . . but roll with me, here.

Anyway, Big Mike was a big, big radio station in the Midwest Empire, and everybody knew you didn't give no lip to Big Mike.

Big Bad Mike.

Then decades later came a rumble way down in the ground. And the smoke and gas belched out of the broker's office.

Everybody knew it was the end of the line for Big Mike.

Clear Channel.

Now they never reopened that worthless pit; they just put Rush and Beck in front of it. The carnival geeks just rant and rave, paying no mind they stand on a grave.

Because at the bottom of this pit lies a big big man. Big Mike.


(With apologies to the late Jimmy Dean, and with gratitude to the archivist of wonderful old issues of Broadcasting magazine.)

The future will run on bull****

Broadcasting-Telecasting, Feb. 1, 1954, Page 70

As you sit in your neighborhood coffee emporium, reaching for your next free latté from the replicator next to your overplush chair as you watch a holographic YouTube video emanating from your atomic-powered iPad, perhaps it would be enlightening to ponder the origins of the technological nirvana of our present age.

Looking at this issue of Broadcasting-Telecasting from way back in 1954, we can see that RCA Chairman David Sarnoff was prophetic as he told the gathered press about the 20-year atomic batteries now powering all our portable electronic devices. About the clean, safe atomic batteries now powering our homes for years upon years -- absolutely free -- for just the low, low cost of the initial purchase.

Never again would the American homeowner have to suffer through a power outage. Never again would consumption or economic limitations be placed upon the American consumer.

Nineteen fifty-four. It was the beginning of not only Atoms for Peace, but also Atoms for Prosperity.

Honey! Hand me the ray gun, will you? No, the garden spider is trying to eat the dog again -- it's already crushed the doghouse trying to get at Rover.

ZAAAAAAAAAAP!

By the way, dear, that dress you're wearing really does something for your tumors. Yeah, the backlight effect on the fabric is really cool.

Good advice, like history, repeats itself

Extremists in politics, hunting for communists, trawl for votes on an ocean of fear.

Soon enough, we see that these demagogues will stop at nothing, just so long as the consequences make folks more fearful, more angry and looking to them for protection against . . . Them.

Soon enough, some journalist calls them on it. And then, the response to the allegation becomes another opportunity to throw red meat to the booboisie.

And the accuser is thrust into the ranks of Them.

Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Tea Party Patriots, Sen. Joseph McCarthy . . . they're pretty much all the same. And how do you deal with them when they try to turn you into Them?

Above is the advice the editors of Broadcasting-Telecasting had in the edition of April 12, 1954. It was good advice in the context of 1954 and Federal Communications Commission "equal time" requirements for broadcasters.

It's good advice now, too. We just need to adapt the principles to the age of the Internet and cable news channels.

Building empires upon the ether

In 1954, there was no brighter star on the Omaha broadcasting scene than Todd Storz' KOWH.

Back then, it was pioneering -- right here in the middle of the Middle West -- a revolutionary music format that we'd come, eventually, to know as Top-40. And everybody (or so it seemed back then) had his radio tuned to 660 on the AM dial.

KOWH was it. One KOWH contest back then had listeners searching for prize money hidden in a book at an Omaha Public Library branch. Station devotees ripped the branches -- and their books -- apart looking for the cash.

The compensation the station paid to the unamused librarians was a small price to pay for a big, big PR buzz.

Amazing stuff for a little AM station that had to sign off at sundown every day.

STORZ SOLD the little station that could in 1957. He, by now, had much bigger radio fish to fry -- 24-hour radio fish to fry -- in much bigger radio markets.

KOWH was never the same. In Omaha, the Mighty 1290 KOIL became the home of Top-40 goodness. Twenty-four hours a day.

And KOWH became KMEO. And then KOWH again. Before it was KOZN. And now it's KCRO, talking about Jesus all day long to a minuscule audience.

Jesus never gets the good formats . . . or the ratings.

Neither does 660 on your AM dial in Omaha. Because nothing lasts forever, and we're all tap dancing on thin ice.

The Red Scare: It's baaaaaack!

I was born into a world in the process of losing its . . . stuff.

We refer to this period of American history as the Red Scare. We were scared of Stalin -- and then Khrushchev -- over in the Soviet Union. We were scared of Castro in Cuba. We were scared of "infiltrator" Alger Hiss in the State Department.

The beatniks? Commies. Civil-rights "agitators?" Commies. Martin Luther King Jr.? Dangerous commie troublemaker. Race riots? Instigated by . . . commies.

The media were commies, college professors were commies, folk singers were commies, and the labor unions were commie through and through.

We were obsessed by The Bomb -- which we invented and first used -- because the commies had obtained it, too. In their nefarious, murderous Red hands, it was a weapon of mass terror.

In our hands, it was how God kept the world in line . . . and capitalism safe.

In the world of the Red Scare, rock 'n' roll was a communist plot -- the pinko sons of bitches invented the teenager, after all -- and Mick Jagger was the devil. (No, look at the man!)

HERE'S where we stood somewhere around 1963:




TODAY, the Soviet Union is no more. The Iron Curtain has fallen, and capitalism has seized the day. Even in "Red China." Markets are global, and the bankers really do have more money than God.

And the Red Scare is back.

Who is the Red Menace today? Well, I can tell you we seem to be quite concerned -- to put it mildly -- about the president of the United States. Who is a Kenyan Muslim communist tribesman (or something like that).

We likewise worry about the secretary of state, who's a fellow traveler. And the Justice Department. And, of course, we still get lower GI disturbances at the mention of those venerable pinko warhorses of modern history -- Castro, the media and the labor unions.

The Red Menace has been enshrined. It has ascended.

THEY TRIED to tell us in 1947. And 1957. And even 1967.

I guess we didn't listen.

Now it's up to tea-party members and other apoplexy victims like Glenn Beck -- he of the only non-commie TV channel out there, the Fox News Channel -- to lead the resistance. Lead the resistance against the government the commies and their fellow travelers TRICKED us into ELECTING in 2008.




ARE YOU STARTING to think you're seeing déja vu all over again?

Glenn Beck is to the Red Scare what the new Hawaii Five-O is to the old Hawaii Five-O, only with angry conspiracy theorists.

I withdraw that statement. The new Hawaii Five-O, I am told, has new scripts. The producers of the show aren't planning on a word-for-word rehash.

And nobody's trying to elect Dano to the U.S. Senate.

The frightening thing about this new Red Scare is the same frightening thing about the last one. The panicked, angry masses and their cynical zealots-in-chief are ready, willing and able to burn down this entire village in order to "save" it.

In their minds -- or at least in their tea-party rhetoric -- "socialism" is so God-awful that we ought to be willing to burn down the framework of constitutional rule and the civilizing influences of commonweal in order to protect a notion of "God-given" liberty that, in the fever swamp of the angry-mob mindset, comes out more like "Do what thou wilt . . . except what we don't like." And your mileage may vary.

"Communism" is so godless and evil that any extreme action to oppose it is not only justified, but perhaps mandatory. Ask J. Edgar Hoover.

LIKE THE paranoid times of my entry into this mortal coil, this present Red-baiting moment finds angry people making idols of what they see as the opposite of their devil. The "commie" devil.

If "socialism" is bad, doing away with all "government-run" programs and social safety nets must be good. If "welfarism" is bad, a laissez-faire dose of social Darwinism must be virtuous and right -- especially as we languish amid the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Not only that, but the Red Scare becomes cover for all our demons and prejudices. Civil-rights "agitators" were, back in the day, a bunch of America-hating Reds, after all. And kicking a man while he's down can be seen as some sort of virtuous act, because we all know that "social justice" and "social religion" are just snooty names for . . . communism!

Thus, condoning racism can be just another manner of expressing one's innate "Americanism." Ees thees gret country or vhat?

Commies bad. Saying the N-word 11 times straight on nationwide radio good, because you're just combating "political correctness."

Face it, when you're up against the Other, and the Other is a freedom-hating, pinko, commie godless Muslim, and you're fighting for your life -- literally, you've been told by that man on the television -- it's war.

And we all know what they say about love and war.

But that's OK. There are no atheists in foxholes -- especially not in this foxhole -- and the patriot surveys the carnage he has wrought upon civil society and the body politic, and he is at peace in the knowledge that God is on his side.

Almost -- BAAAAAAAAAWK! -- heaven

"It's 3 a.m. Announcers, do you know where your mynah birds are?"

Why yes, mine is right here, mimicking the Conelrad alert tone. If this were an actual Russian air raid, your announcer's feathery friend would not be saying "Hey, good looking! Give Cletus some bird seed!"

It's July 7, 1958, in Charleston, W.Va.