Jerry Malauskas loses his radio show after being required to re-audition for a program and not making the cut.
This bit is Jerry calling Chris and Dave to explain what all went down. After all, who else would be sympathetic to the cause?
There is a story behind the infamous bell that you hear on the Chris and Dave show. It actually started in late 1982 shortly after the HPs came on the show and did their “Mr. Brown Can Moo” tune. Chris went over to a band member’s home to watch them rehearse. Chris saw a bell that someone had as a part of a board game. Chris mentioned that it would be nice to have a bell for the show whenever we did our game shows. The HPs then donated the bell to the show.
But after a few weeks, Chris and Dave wanted to move on and not have the HPs on the show anymore, but they kept calling us. When we were a bit more forceful about it, they demanded their bell back. I’m not exactly sure how it all escalated from there, but apparently somebody’s mom became involved. Due to the hassle of wrapping, getting to the post office and paying shipping costs to mail the bell back, there was a standoff in getting the bell returned. Eventually another devoted fan of the Smorgasbord Show donated her bell to Chris and Dave – and that one was for keeps and is an entirely separate story altogether.
This recording is a series of snippets highlighting the on-air banter about the bell.
Another classic excerpt from late 1982, the first season of the Chris and Dave Smorgasbord. I believe Dave was attending a Rush concert on this particular Saturday, so I asked Jerry Malauskas to fill in for Dave that evening.
Earlier that week, Jerry had found a memo in the radio station that someone on the WDGC staff had typed up as a joke to the rest of the staff warning everyone to be on alert for a “man in red hair seen spreading a disturbing odor across the area”. I realize about half way through the reading of this who they were referring to in the memo.
This was one of the earliest recordings I have on record of Jerry Malauskas doing his own radio show. Jerry had accidentally left his hat behind in the studio one day and I learned that someone on the staff had gone “number one all over it”. I phoned Jerry to tell him about it.
The next weekend, I turned on his radio show and he was actually talking about this incident in great detail. Fortunately I had a tape recorder on hand and I captured the bit. I love how at the beginning of the story Jerry says he doesn’t want to “name any names”, but he pretty much reveals everyone’s identity as the story unfolds.
Absolute Nonsense
Baba Gonesh Double Feature: “Thought for the Day” and “Comedy Camel”.
Dave learns to cook with Judy the Child.
This is the first show that used pre-recorded material after Fred Moore imposed new rules on our program. This was recorded in Chris’s home studio.
This is the bit that got us in big trouble toward the end of our 3rd show. Listening to it now, it is quite tame relative to the other things we did, but I don’t think Fred Moore had warmed up to us quite yet. Plus, this predates all our other questionable bits so maybe we were still operating at a low baseline.
I had finally managed to create a 7-second delay system to prevent any profanities from going out over the airwaves when we put callers on the air. I created the delay system using two reel-to-reel tape decks. The first tape deck recorded the on-air comments live. I then fed the tape from that machine over to the second tape deck that was used for playback on the air. It took about 7 seconds for the recorded tape from the first tape deck to reach the playback heads of the second tape deck.
This allowed us to take phone calls live on the air by recording it. If the caller swore or said something inappropriate, we would be able to stop the tape before it got on the air. Well, we abused the technology and this is what it sounded like. This is actually a re-broadcast of the original bit during our final show on the air. We followed it with a re-enactment of Mr. Moore calling us to deliver his 9 commandments.
This is a clip from one of our more favorite on-air moments from Season 1. This enthusiastic bunch of pre-teens called up on our second show. Their band was called the HPs (abbreviation for Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss). This gave us the idea that the phone should be used more during our shows making the program more interactive with the audience.
It was strange many years later when I had a child of my own, I would read this story to my daughter and I found myself delivering the lines in the same rhythm as this band’s delivery here. In fact, 28 years later we re-created the song in our own style.
This bit is from Chris and Dave’s debut broadcast. “Homework Hotline” was designed to help our listeners with their homework assignments.
During our first broadcast, we received a call from a sophomore student at Glenbard South High School. She phoned in with some tough Algebra problems. Nothing was too tough for Dave Jackson who had already completed Advanced Algebra the year before.
Some Smorgabord history trivia: This caller ends up making a significant contribution to the Smorgasbord radio program on a number of levels: 1) She donated the game show bell that you hear repeatedly throughout all three Smorgasbord Radio Show seasons, 2) She was one of the two girls on the “Date Line” broadcast from 03-03-84 who chats with the 43-year old man and 3) Chris ends up dating her for the next three years.
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