MP3: The Most Important Event of the Year (1965)

From WFMU's Beware of the Blog

This 1965 production was part of a series written and produced by Bert Tenzer. You'll hear the unmistakable voice of Mason Adams as the father of the Jacoby family. Each of the albums uses a mystery-drama concept to conceal the identity of the product being advertised, which is revealed with much fanfare near the end.

It's one of the most unique forms of advertising ever employed. Dealers were given a stack of these records, and customers could take them home and listen to them. In exchange for brining the record back to the store, the customer would receive a discount coupon for the product advertised. I've only come across three of them in my travels, but it's possible that more exist. Information on Tenzer and the records themselves is scarce, although this one turns up fairly frequently at record shows.

Link to MP3

[#1 posted by trr , June 11, 2008 3:16 PM]

That's the USS Skipjack on the album cover.

[#2 posted by earjerk , June 11, 2008 5:21 PM]

I am a pretty obsessive record collector. Not just music, but Spoken Word and oddities as well. I have a ten inch record like this one. It's called "The Screen of Blackness" and its about when everyones television screen goes black. (Gasp!) I can't even remember what they are advertising but it was exactly as you say, the idea was to bring the record back to the store for your free item... I think it involves some narration by Ken Nordine... will have to dig it out and check.

[#3 posted by TulsaTV , June 11, 2008 6:00 PM]

Mason Adams was well-known for his Smuckers commercials voiceovers, and as Ed Asner's boss on the Mary Tyler Moore show spinoff, "Lou Grant".

[#4 posted by jahknow , June 12, 2008 10:14 AM]

"I Can Hear It Now/The Sixties," a 3 LP set narrated by Walter Cronkite, is one of my alltime favorites.


A double-CD of sound bites from speeches, press conferences, broadcasts and the like from the 1960s, narrated by famed newscaster Walter Cronkite (who wrote and edited the album with Fred Friendly). Note that the history documented on I Can Hear It Now/The Sixties is very much that of the 1960s in the United States. There's some coverage of world events such as the 1967 Israel-Egypt Six-Day War and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, but the overwhelming bulk of it has excerpts from statements and speeches by U.S. politicians. Cronkite and Friendly also made a conscious decision to almost totally exclude coverage of the arts and some other forms of nonpolitical culture, as they make clear in their liner notes. The model for I Can Hear It Now/The Sixties was actually a previous album by celebrated journalist Edward R. Murrow, who compiled an album called I Can Hear It Now devoted to events of 1933-1945; Cronkite and Friendly had the advantage of many more source tapes, in much better fidelity, from which to choose. It sounds a bit staid and staged decades later, but this does include plenty of famous sound bites of the '60s: the Kennedy assassination, the Bay of Pigs, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, escalation of the war in Vietnam, the 1968 presidential election, the 1969 moon landing, Nixon's "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" speech, Woodstock, student demonstrations, and more. If you want this sort of thing, for the archives or actual listening, it's a good deal, containing about 75 minutes per disc. The fidelity is not always state-of-the-art, particularly in the early part of the 1960s, but never difficult to comprehend.

~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide