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“Just north of the Sunvalley Shopping Center on Contra Costa Boulevard.”

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Here is another radio commercial from my original collection of tapes I found at a radio station transmitter site in the late 1970s. The original box and the tape are missing at this time and the name “Silvera” has been spelled “Silviera” as the digital audio file name. There are several websites indicating the company “Silvera Lumber” in Antioch, California has been “dissolved.”

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Direct WAV download or play original capture

This was captured several years ago when Richard Lyons was still living and I recently posted it on Twitter and Facebook. As requested, here is a high-quality, audio-only version. I’ve misplaced the original tape box and the original capture required substantial audio processing (mostly boosting of higher frequencies) for improved fidelity.

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Spot 3, # 3 Rhythm & Blues

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Spot 7, #11 T-40

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Spot 4, # 4 Rhythm & Blues

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Spot 8 # 12 T-40

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Mashup: Spot 3, # 3 Rhythm & Blues left side and Spot 7, #11 T-40 right side.


This is from my collection of open reel tapes. I can’t remember if this tape is from my original collection from the late 1970s or Ian Allen’s collection of tapes given to KPFA. My understanding is the collection that Ian acquired was from tapes that were to be erased and reused. Luckily, a lot of those tapes were saved thanks to Negativland.
There’s part of an instrumental version of this ad on Negativland’s third album from 1983, “A Big 10-8 Place” at about 3:10 on Part 2 (side 2) of the LP or about 16:32 on the CD.
I believe the term “Rhythm and Blues” means the ad was marketed toward African Americans and “T-40” likely means “Top 40.”

Direct mp3 download or play: Spot # 1

Direct mp3 download or play: Spot # 2

Here are two radio commercials from my original collection I found at a radio station in the late 1970s. More information about Fry’s is here and here. The music in these ads is by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Harry Breuer. More about these artists can be seen here, here, and here. The tape is now missing, but luckily when Richard Lyons and myself were beginning to digitize and archive our collection of old radio commercials in 2012 this ad was saved. I’m guessing these commercials are from the early 1970s.

Here’s the music featured on the commercials.

Direct mp3 download or play: Short Circuit

Direct mp3 download or play: Saturn Ski Jump

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This is one of the original open reel tapes a friend and I found in 1978 at the transmitter building of radio station KKIS in Collinsville, California. Go here for more information about these tapes. This article I found online I’m guessing may be the only information of Rev. Max Flickinger, referred to on this recording. There was nothing about “American Standard Time Company” online. This could be totally wrong. Comments are welcome.

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This is one of the original tapes I found at the transmitter site of a radio station in California in 1978. We (members of Negativland) are quite sure the interviewer is American character actor Vance Colvig. Here is a YouTube video from a friend.

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From my collection of open reel tapes, here is a 60-second radio commercial for Mayfair Markets, a grocery chain from the 1960’s and 70’s. My favorite line ,”The second thing that happens is that the butcher loses control.” More about this grocery store chain can be found here, here, and here.

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From my collection of open reel tapes, here is another radio commercial for White Front, a discount department store from the 1960’s. This one from my other reel of White Front radio spots is a little longer than 50 seconds. It is also from 1971. By the 1970s, White Front stores were in bankruptcy and these radio spots, at least to me, signal the beginning of the end for White Front. Go here for another White Front radio ad.
It’s very likely the words “Very Wierd” with “weird” being misspelled was not on the box originally.

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From my collection of open reel tapes, here is a 30 second radio commercial for White Front, a discount department store from the 1960’s. My parents and I regularly visited the Pleasant Hill, California store on Contra Costa Boulevard. More about White Front here, here, and here.

From my collection of open reel tapes, here is a recording known as a “music bed.”

Direct mp3 download or play:  Macy’s Warehouse Sale Tape 802

Macy’s Tape 802

Front of box- tape 802

Back of box-tape 802

Inside front cover-tape 802

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Direct mp3 download or play:   Macy’s Warehouse Sale Tape 890

Macy’s tape 890

Front of box-tape 890

Back of box-tape 890

Inside front cover-tape 890

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Direct mp3 download or play: Macy’s Tape 890-left channel – Macy’s  Tape 802-right channel

This is a comparison of the recordings. Tape 890 is on the left and tape 802 is on the right. Except for a little phasing and delay effects, they seem to be identical.
Go here for more on “music beds,” and how they are used in advertising.

Direct mp3 download or play:  This Is Stupid – Bee – bee beep – buh beep beep beep

This was my first attempt at making a tape loop. In 1974, I attended a class at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, called “Colloquy in Electronic Music,” and this is the result. It’s so dumb that it must be an insult to the entire institution of scholarly electronic music. You are not obliged to listen to the entire piece!

Direct mp3 download or play:  National Prevention Month

Here is another item from some old commercials I found at a radio station in the 1970s. The original box for the tape was lost and for some time I thought the tape was gone as well. Recently I located what I think is the original tape spliced onto a large reel of other material. More information about KABL can be found here and here. I always liked this one, thinking it was whimsical and sort of snooty.

Direct mp3 download or play:  Safeway Thanksgiving Specials 1981

This is from a collection of old radio commercials that I think were found at KPFA in Berkeley, California.

Original Tape

Safeway TV graphic from 1981 “Everything you want from a store and a little bit more.”

Direct mp3 download or play:  Test

Direct mp3 download or play:  National Emergency

Direct mp3 download or play:  Attack Warning

This is another item from my collection of tapes I found at a radio station in the 1970s.

Original Open Reel Tape

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Direct mp3 download or play:  Generic EBS Test Jingle 1970s

Direct mp3 download or play:  Singing EBS Test Jingle

A couple of fun items I found on the internet

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Direct mp3 download or play:  An Actual Attack

An Actual Attack

For more about “An Actual Attack,” you could look here and here. Have a Happy Rapture!

Direct mp3 download or play:   Hong Kong At Walnut Creek Inn With Scolding

Direct mp3 download or play: Hong Kong At Walnut Creek Inn Without Scolding

Walnut Creek Inn, Walnut Creek California

You probably will not know what to think after listening to this recording.  This was made in the early 1970s, probably 1971, while I was in the 11th grade at Alhambra High School in Martinez, California. I was friendly with a fellow student who had a distinctive voice and an interest in recording. My parents had just purchased a Sony  TC – 560D open reel tape recorder, the same machine that I used to record “Harry To The Ferry.”  So one day  I had my friend over to the house, and it didn’t take long to decide what to record. As soon as he spotted a copy of The Contra Costa Times newspaper on the coffee table, he knew just what to do or maybe not. But nevertheless he started turning pages and reading parts of sentences and then recombining them in all sorts of nonsensical ways. Some of you might recognize some of the names including Gary Bogue, the pet and animal columnist , Royal Pools, and  of course Walnut Creek Inn. The idea of Hong Kong being at Walnut Creek Inn  seemed very funny to me. Now I think that idea would be quite reasonable, such as an Asian restaurant being inside or somehow associated with a large hotel.

I recorded my friends voice using my Calrad DM-59HL dynamic microphone, plugged directly into one channel of the microphone input on the Sony tape deck at 3 3/4 inches per second. Years later I thought it might be fun if  I had the sound of an angry parakeet to go along with the voice. I already had recordings of my pet parakeet “Greenboy” and so I think (I can’t quite remember) I played a cassette tape connected to the other unused channel on the Sony. On the TC – 560D there is a record button for each channel so you can record one mono track on the left or right, and then rewind the tape and record the other side while listening to the first recording, and since there are only two heads on this recorder, syncing the recordings was never a problem. I think while I was still living in California, I digitized the voice recording to a 256 KBPS MP3. I know now that digital recording should have been made into a lossless file like .aif or .wav, but it still sounded okay, anyway. In preparing the recording for this post, I used Adobe Audition to process the stereo version (with parakeet squawking or scolding as I like to call it) with room ambience.  In the monaural version I used several types of compression to try to make the voice consistently as loud and clear as possible without clipping distortion. Also on this version, you might notice the fade up and the fade out have filters that open the high frequencies at the beginning and close back down at the ending.

I know all of that was a mouthful or whatever, but I hope you can enjoy and have a laugh!

Direct mp3 download or play:  K-Mart is Coming

This is the radio commercial, probably from the early 1970s, for the grand opening of this and other Kmart stores. The tape is from a collection of radio commercials I found at a radio station in the late 1970s.  This store is located at the intersection of Contra Costa Boulevard and Chilpancingo Parkway in Pleasant Hill, California, and was a favorite shopping destination of my parents. Often on Saturday afternoons, my parents baby blue 1974 Ford Maverick would be present in the parking lot, usually on the north side of the store in the lot adjacent Chilpancingo Parkway. They would enter the store using the garden shop entrance. My father thought that by parking in this parking area rather than the main parking lot, there would be less of a chance that someone would ding the finish on the Maverick.

Kmart-Pleasant Hill, California

Kmart-Pleasant Hill, California (garden shop entrance)

Kmart 1970s

Kmart Grand Opening Tape

Direct mp3 download or play:  Spot # 1
Spot # 1 Vancouver Island’s largest shopping centre – 2,736 parking spaces, mostly covered!

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Direct mp3 download or play:  Spot # 2
Spot # 2 “Shop at any one of the downtown stores displaying the big “D” on the door.”

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Direct mp3 download or play:  Spot # 3
Spot # 3 The store of the day: W & J Wilson.

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Direct mp3 download or play:  Spot # 4
Spot # 4 Downtown bonus days # 1 – “Victoria has never had it so big.”

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Direct mp3 download or play: Spot # 5
Spot # 5 Downtown bonus days # 2 – “The biggest sale Victoria has ever been party to.”

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The original tape

Here are a couple of views of the radio station where I found this tape. The top is a Google Earth image of the transmitter shack and three antennas of radio station KATD in Collinsville, California. Collinsville is near the Sacramento river delta area, northeast of San Francisco. The bottom image shows the transmitter shack (the small white building behind the trailer) and three antennas to the right. I don’t think the old trailer has any relationship to the radio station. In the middle or late 1970s, a friend of mine had a job checking the transmitter and recording meter readings. In those days, the station was called KKIS (K-Kiss). On several occasions, he invited me to accompany him to this location. One time, either inside the building or outside in a dumpster, there were a lot of open reel tapes. They looked as if they were to be discarded, so I grabbed a bunch of them, and one of them was “Downtown Victoria Spots,” most likely from the early 170s. By the way, two other tapes  from this find are featured on Negativland releases. On track 19 (start at 30:31) on the first record, listen for “The office of Civil Defense has issued the following message” from an Emergency Broadcast System tape. On the second Negativland release, “Points,” listen to “A Nice Place to Live.” The voice starting out with “Greetings from the Los Angeles County Fair, etc…” is another one of the tapes from Collinsville.

W & J Wilson Clothing Store featured in spot # 3

A few images of Victoria, BC

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Direct mp3 download or play:  Downtown

Lastly, here’s a rendition of “Downtown” by the Ray Conniff Singers.

Direct mp3 download or play:  Signal Generator Piece

Here is something I made in 1974 using two tape recorders, and either a homemade theremin or an audio generator. I honestly can’t remember some of the details or what instrument I actually used, because I have a habit of not labeling tapes. I do remember having access to recording equipment at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California because of a class in electronic music.
Located in a small room, was a recording setup with two tube type Magnecord tape recorders. They were very heavy professional units, which could handle ten and a half inch reels. One was a model 1028 and the other a 1048. They looked identical, except the 1028 had 7 1/2 and 15 ips and the 1048 had 3 3/4 ips and they were both half-track stereo. There was a professional looking Sony mixer with 8 or more channels. I think there were two Ampex amplified speakers with tubes similar to the one pictured. My setup for this recording was to feed the audio generator into a mixer input and have it panned to one side. Then the output of the mixer was connected to the ‘line in’ of one Magnecord recorder. Then I took the ‘line out’ of the recorder monitoring the third (playback) head and fed a stereo line back into the mixer. I made sure the audio signal was on the opposite side with respect to the audio generator input. This would create a ping pong (left/right) echo.  Next I ran the tape from the first recorder to the other recorder setup just to the right of the first machine.  The second tape recorder fed a stereo signal back into the mixer which would feed back the sound recorded on the first recorder a few seconds later.
With everything set up I could now begin recording. I very carefully started both recorders. They were both running at 71/2 ips with the first machine recording and the second machine playing.  Also the tape tension had to be just right to avoid breaking the tape or being too loose. While running this arrangement for a few minutes, I determined how high I could raise the faders on the mixer before the feedback would get out of control and become distorted. I then started fading tones from the audio generator up and down, letting the feedback from the two tape recorders process the sound. I recall being inspired to make this recording after learning about Brian Eno doing a similar and I admit a much nicer recording. I was also influenced by the sound effects of a favorite movie of mine, “Quatermass and The Pit.”  In addition, I’ve always liked the sound effects on “Doctor Who,” particularly the episodes from the late 60s through the middle 70s. I very much admire the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which made the sound effects and music for a good number of British TV series including Doctor Who.
After making the recording onto a 7-inch reel, the tape could simply be played back on a single tape machine, and what I have here is the result. I know this is a bit goofy, but it did give me goose bumps the fist time I heard it.

Magnecord Model 1028 Professional Tape Recorder

Eico Model 377 Audio Generator

Ampex Model 620 Amplified Speaker

Direct mp3 download or play:  Water – Hot & Cold Torture

Here is something that will smack you! It consists of a tape loop played on my Roberts 192FT tape recorder, featuring a children’s song about safety. The artist is Frank Luther, who recorded nursery rhymes and children’s songs and stories throughout the 1940s and mid-1950s. I have intentionally made this too long. That’s where the “torture” comes to mind.