Through the years, it seems there have been almost as many methods to learn guitar as there are people who want to learn it. There are Mel Bay books, private lessons, CDs, DVDs, even video games. But would you ever want to learn guitar from a company that made radio jingles? You could. But not many did.
In the mid '60s, all the action on radio was on the AM band. Giants like WLS in Chicago, KLIF in Dallas, and WABC in New York ruled the airwaves...and they all had one thing in common: their jingles were produced by the same company. That company was known as PAMS: Production Advertising Merchandising Services. Jingles were big business then: stations listened to each other to find out what package they were using and how they could one-up their competitors with the next package they bought. Some jingle packages were sold to as many as 400 stations in the US, Canada and England.
PAMS's founder and president, Bill Meeks, was never afraid to try new things. So in 1965, he gave arranger/guitarist Ray Hurst his blessing to produce a guitar lesson kit. This 2-record set was packaged with a book of color illustrations...and colored stickers for your fingers so you knew where to put them on the frets. That's the Colour-Way!
To judge a book by its cover, or more precisely, its contents, Colour-Way was a fairly standard method: play along to the public-domain songs as you hear them on the records and listen to Ray Hurst's instructions as you see them in the book.
But Ray Hurst was not the only instructor. An electronic instrument called a Sono-Vox was also on board to help. PAMS used the Sono-Vox, a sort of forerunner to talkboxes and vocoders, on many of its most popular jingle packages to sing call letters, DJ names slogans. The Sono-Vox could basically run a person's voice through any instrument with a pair of speakers held against the throat. PAMS liked it so much they actually trademarked the name. So no surprise it would show up here. The Sono-Vox's main role on Colour-Way was to help you understand time signatures: a whole note was signified by a "beeeeat," a half-note by a monotone "Doub-ble," a quarter-note by "three-to-make-a." And for 3/4 time, there was "three-even." Pretty straightforward, if maybe a little creepy.
To sell Colour-Way, PAMS made barter deals with radio stations: can't afford our sparkly new Go-Go jingle package? No problem! Just run these commercials for our new guitar course! Jingle expert and former PAMS library owner Ken Deutsch tells me, "These were mostly instrumentals, with a little sing at the end that said “you can play guitar the correct way, it’s the easy way to play, get Colourway! (Sonovox: “Get Colourway.”).
"The idea was for radio stations to customize these spots to sell the course to listeners. One such jingle was even produced in Spanish."
So did the barter deal work out? Well, not quite. The station got the jingles...but PAMS got a load of inventory that took a while to get rid of. Deutsch says, "PAMS predicted they would sell out right away, but it took three or four years to get rid of all the inventory of the albums that were pressed. I know this because each year in December, PAMS wrote a diary entry in a book that summed up the year. In 1968, they were getting rid of the last of the albums, I think."
Hurst and the gang at PAMS were optimistic. Maybe too much so: on the back of the Colour-Way book is a note to watch for the upcoming Colour-Chourds (sorry, Chords) book. Some die-hards may still be watching.
LINKS FOR LEARNING AND LISTENING
jinglesamplers.com
For TONS of great PAMS jingles, and even a couple of Colour-Way samples. Prepare to spend lots of time here.
Normanb.net
Scotland's own Norman Barrington, jingle collector extraordinaire, has a couple of the Colour-Way commercials as originally sent to stations. Click "Rarities" at the top of the home page, then scroll all the way down. Oh, and stick around to hear samples from every major PAMS jingle package!
You'll Find Out
A Youtube clip of the 1940 Kay Kyser movie that made the Sonovox famous. "You'll Find Out" how it works when you watch!
PAMS
P-A-M-S, PAMS of Dallas! Home to the world's best jingles. Now part of JAM Creative Productions, whose owner, Jon Wolfert, was a jingle collector who eventually worked for PAMS, left to start his own company (JAM), then bought the PAMS library.
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