Whenever we run across any WABC or Dan Ingram airchecks, we have to go through the vast archives here at this repository first, before even bothering to work with it, to ensure that we haven’t run across it before. Well, here’s yet another gem that turned up in the archives of our biggest Contributor, Big Apple Airchecks.
We use the ‘fair use’ clause of U.S. Copyright law. This website museum recognizes the generally accepted standard of approximately 7 (seven) seconds of music to be in the public domain. There are valid reasons that we claim this, among other things, presenting a recording made ‘off the air’ from a broadcast radio station, without the associated few seconds of “music” material, the voices of the radio disc jockeys alone would be heard out-of-context. The content on this website is presented FOR HISTORICAL ARCHIVAL PURPOSES ONLY. We will address this entire subject in a section of its own on this website shortly.
Ok, that out of the way, the second thing to note, is this aircheck came from an aircheck “skimmer” machine. When an aircheck is recorded on a ‘skimmer’ machine, that process leaves a sound like a “whoooop” where the machine stops recording (when the studio mic turns off) and when the studio mic is turned back on (and the machine is wired to start recording again). Now, that, and the THIRD thing, the quality of this recording is EXCELLENT, tells me that this tape originally came from the WABC studios and is, in fact, an authentic Dan Ingram original aircheck! No small feat in obtaining one of these!
Between Matt and the owner of this museum, Steve West, we’ve removed the whoops out of the recording… but another thing is, this was digitized before it arrived at Airchexx and some of the jingles got chopped. We’re not sure at what point in the life of this aircheck that happened, but there aren’t many of those chops, and while slightly annoying to jingle purists out there, I think you’ll find the overall quality of this aircheck to be outstanding – considering this was recorded 54 years ago this Summer!
As for the subject of this exhibit – “Big” Dan Ingram is very much his silly self here. Imagine listening to this stuck in Manhattan traffic, unable to move. Dan easily can make one laugh, and his own self-deprecating humor surely must have made the aggravation of drive time in the Big Apple much more bearable. And, I gotta make this point and keep driving it home to the radio powers that be – They don’t do radio like this anymore. What a shame they dont!
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