[78-L] Not ONE mention..

[Cary Ginell]

After the debacle at KLOS, I ran over to the Tower Records on the Sunset Strip. It was probably around 6 pm when I got off my shift (Elvis had died in the 2:00 hour, California time) and there was not one solitary record left in the Elvis bins. The bins were about four deep and four across and it was blank. Just the title cards that read ELVIS PRESLEY were left. I have not seen anything quite like it ever since - even the deaths of John Lennon and Michael Jackson paled in comparison to the frenzy people had to buy ANY Elvis record they could find as quickly as possible. Yet it still astounds me that KLOS had nothing they could do because they were so centered on what was current that they had forgotten where rock 'n' roll came from in the first place.

Cary Ginell
On Aug 16, 2012, at 9:13 PM, David Lennick wrote:

> It was definitely mentioned on a couple of other lists but amazingly, not on 
> good old 78-L. As it happened, I had been spending the afternoon in a storage 
> room full of old transcriptions and tapes, a few floors below the station I was 
> working at. That was the day I found 3 complete sets of "The Cinnamon Bear" 
> among other treasures. So I didn't hear about The Pelvis till I emerged around 6pm.
> 
> dl
> 
> On 8/17/2012 12:05 AM, Cary Ginell wrote:
>> Well, I did mention it on Facebook when the subject came up. I recalled working at KLOS, L.A.'s number one rock station at the time. I was an intern who worked as a fill-in engineer during the NABET strike. I was working with J. J. Jackson, later one of the first MTV "VJs" when the news guy yelled through the talkback that Elvis had died. The news guy being a known screw-up and flake, nobody believed him until I went across the hall to check the UPI wire, and sure enough, Elvis had gone to that great Heartbreak Hotel in the sky. J. J. screamed through the talkback "GET ME AN ELVIS RECORD!!!" I dropped the UPI wire copy and dashed into the music library and came up empty. I thought it was quite ironic and sad that even though Elvis was currently on top of the charts with the song "Way Down," there was not one Elvis record to be found in the entire library of the number one rock station in town. And this was 1977 - when the birth of rock 'n' roll was not all that distant.
>> 
>> Cary Ginell
>> On Aug 16, 2012, at 8:59 PM, David Lennick wrote:
>> 
>>> 11:59 PM and not a single mention of the 35th anniversary of the death of
>>> you-know-who!
>>> 
>>> Amazing.
>>> 
>>> dl
>>> 
>>> _____________________________________
> _______________________________________________
> 78-L mailing list
> 78-L at klickitat.78online.com
> http://klickitat.78online.com/mailman/listinfo/78-l
>