As mentioned above, each box label links
to an exclusive montage of Jingles from that particular
package. Each box would have originally contained a demo
of the jingle package, featuring a pilot station (often
WABC), to demonstrate the package to other potential clients.
If you want to hear these demos in full, check out Jon Wolfert's
excellent "Magic of Pams" collection at www.pams.com.
However here, I am providing a sample of many of the resulting
packages that Pams syndicated to various stations worldwide,
with many variations of the ID Logo Melody plus clever
changes to the lyrics of many of the cuts, demonstrating
both the imagination of many station's PDs and also the
musical ingenuity & dexterity of Pams, actually
the true Magic of Pams.
So what you see below is in fact a wall
of sound representing the very best of Pams. Also since
the packages here are presented in chronological order, we have
captured the changing style of music through from
1960 to the mid 70s. The audio itself is a real piece of classic Americana,
and a taste of popular radio of the decade. You may notice
that often the packages sound as though they belong
to an earlier era, than the contemporary music against which
they were played. This was no doubt largely due to the big
band origins of key people like Bill Meeks. They still loved
that sound, and wrote that type of musical arrangement complete with sweet sounding close vocal harmonies, yet everywhere we hear audio innovation, from sound effects and sonovox, to moog synthesizer and theremin. This helped the jingles to stand out from the records, and
also actually helped the jingle's shelf-life, since if they
had sounded much like the hits of the day, they would
have dated just as quickly as the pop charts themselves. Nonetheless, you can often
hear pieces of popular hits cleverly incorporated into the
jingle composition. Also styles such as Henry Mancini's novelty themes and Ramsey Lewis for 1965's series #30 or The Beach Boys innovative sounds in series #33 in 1967. From series #34 onwards we hear Hard Rock along with Flower Power and the soft acoustics of folk music.
For all one can write about them, listening
to their material says so much more. My aim is to present
as much material as time, money and bandwidth will allow. It is a non-profit, though not inexpensive, labour of love for me to showcase this obscure but brilliant artistry to the very generation that grew up with it. More will follow, but I suspect what you see & hear below is already
the largest
audio resource of it's kind available on the worldwide web. Enjoy!
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