Wide-Eyed in Dallas: My First Visit to PAMS

By Ken Deutsch

  It was July 28, 1971 when I first set foot inside 4141 Office Parkway in Dallas, one of the few addresses to be immortalized in a jingle. In fact, that “Disclaimer” would continue to be used on PAMS demo tapes for the next few years by just changing the copyright date at the end, spoken by bass singer Jim Clancy. And when I had my own jingle studio years later, we re-sang it for various clients right up through 1999. Little did Bob Piper know when he wrote “The preceding, was a copyrighted feature,” that it would still be heard so many years later.

  This adventure began back in Toledo several weeks prior to my visit, when I called (214) TAylor 7-0901 and asked for a sales person. At the time, long distance was only used for special occasions and was a bit pricy! After getting switched to a few people who were not able to help me (“This is Production! Oh, heck, you want sales! Hang on!”) I was connected to Dennis Meeks, son of PAMS president Bill Meeks. I told him that I was a big fan of his jingles and that I wanted to buy one for myself.

  “Oh, you must be one of those jingle freaks!” said Dennis. That was a term I had never heard before! He put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back on the line to tell me that this project would cost $175. That was a huge sum of money at the time, not that I cared. “We can probably have that done in a few weeks, so why don’t you send me your check?” he asked.

  I then said that I wanted to fly to Dallas to watch my jingle session. This floored him because at the time it was pretty unusual for anyone outside of a radio station or an advertising agency to buy jingles, let alone come down to Dallas. But a date was set, the check was mailed and then all I had to do was try not to crawl out of my skin with anticipation for about two weeks.

  Let me interject here that collecting jingles was quite uncommon in the early 1970s; the number of true collectors could be counted on one and a half hands. A few friends such as Jon Wolfert, Ron Harris and Ken Justiss appreciated this particular art form, and several others I did not know such as Ken Levine and “Wild Worm” were also involved, but I wouldn’t have any contact with those folks until later. We in the club used to trade reel-to-reel tapes. They were expensive to send, time consuming to dub, and each tape generation away from the original sounded hissier. But as we acquired new jingle packages from radio stations or production companies, we loved to share them within our small fraternity.

  We had no CDs then, no Internet, and in fact ours was an entirely analog world of tape recorders, razor blade splices and snail-mail. ID producers like PAMS, TM, Gwinsound and Pepper Tanner were not widely known to those outside radio.  

Ken Arrives in Big D

  As my plane came in for a landing at Love Field in Dallas (DFW would open three years later), I scanned the skyline for some sign that this was the most exciting place on earth. I didn’t see anything, but I do remember thinking upon disembarking that it was certainly the hottest place on earth! It was in the upper 90s and steamy as a rain forest.

  I knew no one in town, although unbeknownst to me, Jon Wolfert would get a job at PAMS and move down there a few months after my visit.

  I turned on the radio in my hotel room (AM of course) and heard a few local PAMS jingles, which only increased my anticipation. I would actually be visiting the sacred shrine where these amazing little IDs were created. I knew that there were only a handful of people in the world that would think what I was doing was cool or even within the bounds of sanity, but I just wanted to see the inner sanctum where PAMS magic happened.

  Dennis Meeks had told me to be at the studio by 10 a.m., so being the complete anal-retentive nerd that I was (and am), I showed up around 9:15. Almost no one was there except a receptionist and Toby Arnold, sales manager. There was a little marquee in the lobby that named the clients expected that day. It said in white letters on a black background, “Welcome KFDI.” Hmmmm. I asked the receptionist about this and after checking with someone else in the office, no one could find any evidence that I was supposed to be there. As John Cleese said many years later on “Fawlty Towers,” “Hello? Do I exist?”

  I told the secretary that Dennis Meeks had scheduled my session for that morning. She said he wasn’t expected until noon so she got on the phone. About a half hour later, Dennis arrived and introduced himself. I found out later that he had told no one about my arrival, including the arrangers, the singers or the engineer. But he assured me that my cut could be squeezed in there somewhere. “What did you want us to sing again?” he asked.

  By that time a few other people had wandered in and Dennis palmed me off on Marv Shaw, a singer-arranger. Everyone there had several titles. Marv was an older guy, thin and wiry. We found a tape recorder and I played him a Futursonic jingle with the all-male Four-Freshmen vocal blend I preferred. “Oh,” said Marv. “That’s Jodie on that package. Yeah, we can do that. Why don’t you just wait around for a while? The rest of the singers will be in about 10 or 10:30.”

  I wandered across the hall into the Studio A control room and introduced myself to Bruce Collier, the engineer for most of the vocal sessions. Bruce had dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses and had been at PAMS since the early 1960s. The room was amazing! At that point in my life I had only seen radio station consoles, and cheap ones at that. This was a real, big-time recording console, at least in my little geeky jingle-obsessed world.

  Bruce was in the process of locating some instrumental tracks for the upcoming KFDI session. All of the multi-track masters were kept on a shelf in somewhat alphabetical order right across the hall. I was happy to just sit in the client chair until I was bumped by some guy in a cowboy hat who moseyed in and said he was the program director of KFDI. Bruce and “Pecos Bill” let me remain in the control room and watch; in fact, they ignored me completely and may not have realized I was still there.

  Then the moment I had been waiting for: the arrival of the singers. I had been expecting some sort of gods and goddesses from atop Mount Parnassus to alight in the studio, based on the sound of Series 40, but was surprised to see four normal-looking guys in jeans and three women, one of whom was wearing hair curlers. Most were only about ten years older than I. They smiled and said “hi” to Bruce and the client, then took their places on stools on the other side of the glass. Could these possibly be THE PAMS singers?

  Three guys were on my left sharing a mic, one guy was on a mic all by himself in the center directly facing us, and the three girls had their own mic on the right. I later learned the names: (left to right) Billy Ainsworth, Charlie Thompson, Marv Shaw (whom I had met), Jim Clancy (the bass guy in the center), then Jackie Dickson, Libba Weeks and Carol Piper. But how could these mere mortals turn out the amazing jingles I heard on WABC, WLS and KLIF? I was about to find out.

It’s On Tape, Guys!

Bruce played the first instrumental track on big speakers in the room where the singers sat. They looked at their sheet music and nodded, following along. Then Bruce rewound the tape and played it again. This time the singers half-heartedly mouthed the words without really singing. Huh? That didn’t sound too good. Bruce rolled the track back once again and this time the singers sang along with the track and I knew that I had heard what angels must sound like. Each take got better and better, until one was deemed acceptable. Then they sang exactly the same thing again on another layer of the multi-track and the vocal became even thicker, more solid. Bruce played it back again on the speakers, this time with a little more reverb and voila! An official PAMS jingle. This is how the session went for the rest of the morning with just a ten-minute break each hour. The singers took as much time as they needed to get each jingle just right, often going back and fixing short phrases until all the layers were in tune and sung with great precision.

  Dennis Meeks had disappeared with no mention of when, or if, my jingle would be sung. But Fred Hardy, a portly and jolly guy, took “Mr. KFDI Hee Haw” and me to lunch at a Mexican restaurant near the studio. Strangely, no one talked about jingles! They discussed baseball, government, their kids and everything else. Was I the only one who understood the momentous importance of what was going on?

  After lunch I introduced myself to the singers, gushing to them profusely as if someone had cut the verbal artery in my throat. Words of praise spurted out of my mouth and I’m sure I made a fool of myself. However, they were very kind and seemed genuinely surprised and pleased to hear that someone appreciated their work. All of them were very low-key, except Marv, whose patience was running thin with the guy from KFDI who frequently slammed on the talk-back and shouted unhelpful comments in a loud voice.

  The session resumed when we returned and was still going on at 4:15. It was about that time that Dennis Meeks appeared in the control room and thrust the vocal chart for my jingle at Bruce and suggested he shoehorn it into the session as I was only in town for one day. Bruce distributed the sheet music to the singers, a slightly different configuration of folks now, because my jingle didn’t call for female voices.

  The lyrics I came up with were “Ken are many things, Ken R.,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that is what they sang. Had I written out “Ken buys lots of shoes, Ken R.,” they would have sung that with exactly as much feeling. Jingle singing is “work for hire” at its least judgmental.

  My cut was sung by (from top to bottom vocally), Marv Shaw, Chris Kershaw, Billy Ainsworth, Charlie Thompson and Jim Clancy. It is Jim’s deep bass voice you hear counting it off: “One, two, one two three….” Since the cut was short and easy, they only needed a few takes. Then Marv suggested they do one more version with just the last two words. The whole thing may have taken ten minutes, including the “stack” layer of vocals on each one. Bruce quickly mixed these two cuts to a mono tape at 15 ips. and sent me across the hall with it for the editing and dubbing. These latter procedures (making a 7 ½ ips copy and a 15 ips. backup for PAMS) were handled by a young man about my age named Ken Craft, whose Magic Marker writing is seen on the distinctive 7” white and red PAMS box label. I ended up with a copy of the two jingles at both speeds, separated by white leader on a clear large reel. This box sits on a shelf in my office to this day.     

Now there was one more tricky bit to be handled. All day I had been running back and forth between the control room and the dubbing room, which was also the room where PAMS kept the reference tapes (copies of packages they had produced) and the demos. The latter were usually 5” boxes with purple labels that illustrated whatever packages were currently for syndication. There were stacks of these on shelves, waiting to be sent out to prospective clients. I was drooling over all the tempting titles I saw such as “KRLD Custom,” “PAMS Grids,” and “WPTR” (which was actually just a bunch of a capellas that had been recently sung). I wanted one of every demo but was afraid to ask for that much. So I asked Bruce if I could take “a few” demos for my collection. He said that this would be OK, so I went ahead and helped myself to one of absolutely everything, plus a few other packages that Ken Craft dubbed for me. These were all put in a paper bag that I hid in a corner until I was ready to call a cab to take me back to my hotel.

  But before I left I had one last souvenir to pick up, my paid invoice from PAMS. Once again, Dennis came through with the level of service I had come to expect from him. He hadn’t made one! So, he simply took a blank invoice, rolled it down into his manual typewriter and tapped it out, spelling my name incorrectly twice, yet each time differently. I still have that document as well.      

  Much has changed since 1971 in the jingle and radio industries, and most of those changes have not been good. But some things remain. Instrumental background tracks are written and performed by talented people. Singers still listen to these tracks through headsets and sing into expensive microphones. Someone on the other side of the glass captures these performances and mixes them from many tracks down to a format suitable for airplay. These jingle producers and performers are still some of the most skilled and versatile people in the music industry, and some of the nicest.

  While I will never again be that wide-eyed young man, I still enjoy listening to jingles and admire what the creative folks at PAMS were able to bring together. “President For Life” Bill Meeks, rest his soul, assembled a superb group of musicians who had tremendous dedication, as well as that very human quality lacking in many jingles today. While the spirit of PAMS is still carried on by original PAMS employee (1971-1974) and now owner, Jon Wolfert, it will never be the early 70s again. It was a special time that I shall always treasure.

Ken Deutsch

Flying from Dallas to Toledo (by coincidence)

August 14, 2008