Art Laboe Taking Shots Back Stage Love Jam Concert
In Partnership with the Due south El Monte Arts Posse
"East of East" is a series of original essays about people, things, and places in S El Monte and El Monte. The material traces the arrival and departures of indigenous groups, the ascension and refuse of political movements, the creation of youth cultures, and the employ and manipulation of the built surroundings. These essays challenge us to recall nigh the place of SEM/EM in the history of Los Angeles, California, and Mexico.
Oldies stations are one of the nigh tried and true formats on the FM radio punch, seemingly ubiquitous if ofttimes absorbed subconsciously. Whether heard in the produce aisle at the local supermarket, planting an earworm for days, or while driving on the interstate through an unfamiliar city, "great hits of the '50s, '60s, '70s, etc." can reliably be plant - or discover you.
Depending on the depth of a station's playlist, a warm, cornball doo-wop track by the Penguins (featuring Cleve Duncan) might float by. Over the same stately chords as the Penguins' best-known striking, "World Affections," Duncan sings of lost love and happier times: "I'm all alone,/ Feeling and so blue,/ Thinking about you lot,/ And the beloved nosotros in one case knew;/And each time I do,/ Information technology brings back those memories,/of El Monte." What in the fleeting two:46 of a 45rpm vinyl tape seems similar standard sentimental Oldies fare, even so, turns out on closer inspection to be a fascinating artifact and reminder of the interethnic hope that early stone due north' roll held for the youth of Southern California.
Curiously enough, "Memories of El Monte" was penned past Frank Zappa, later a major figure in 1970s progressive stone with his band the Mothers of Invention, and arguably i of the nigh innovative composers of the American advanced. The doo-wop track for the Penguins was one of the first songs that Zappa wrote, and reflects his boyhood steeped in the fertile rhythm & blues scene of the greater Los Angeles area. When Zappa wrote the song in 1962 with friend (and future Mothers singer) Ray Collins, he had been listening to Memories of El Monte, a 1960 re-outcome compilation of singles from the mid-'50s heyday of doo-wop put out past Original Audio Records, the independent characterization of local radio celebrity and concert promoter, Art Laboe. Zappa in turn brought the song to Laboe, who agreed to pay to record and release it as a single on his label. Laboe used his connections to aid Zappa recruit the pb vocalist of the Penguins, Cleve Duncan, backed past tenor Walter Saulsberry and the Viceroys, some other local doo-wop group, with Zappa on the xylophone.
Always the shrewd, understated impresario, Laboe asked Zappa to include mentions in the lyrics of archetype doo-wop songs that also happened to exist tracks on the Original Audio compilation. As a result, the 2nd poetry, spoken by Duncan, is a poignant call-and-response recollection of dances by:
If only they'd have those dances over again,
I'd know where to find y'all, and all my old friends.
The Shields would sing..."¨'You cheated. You lied...'
And the Heartbeats... 'You're a thousand miles away...'
And the Medallions with "The Alphabetic character" stop... 'Sweet words of his bloodshed...'
Marvin and Johnny with 'Cherry Pie...'
And so, Tony Allen with... 'Nighttime owl...'
And I, Cleve Duncan, along with the Penguins, volition sing,
'Earth affections, World Angel, Will you be mine?'
At El Monte.
The resulting single is at one level a curious postmodern pastiche of the doo-wop genre, not out of place with Zappa's later affectionate parodies and homages to American popular music genres. Just the central role that Laboe played in its making too as the evocation of El Monte tap into a deep reservoir within the cultural history of Southern California, and in particular the Chicano community.
Beginning with dances he threw at El Monte Legion Stadium in 1955, through a half century every bit a beloved Oldies DJ connecting with his audience on a nightly basis, Art Laboe has become an iconic voice for Californians who do not fit the glamorous conception many Americans hold of Fifty.A. As author Susan Straight lyrically suggests, these are the people "cruising, boxing groceries, welding mufflers, changing tires, sewing prom dresses, picking oranges, education kids," and calling Laboe every night to dedicate songs to their loved ones.
By his own telling, Fine art Laboe grew up with the medium of radio broadcasting. He was born Art Egnoian to immigrant parents of Armenian descent in Common salt Lake City, Utah on Baronial 7, 1925, iii years later on Marconi start began regular wireless radio broadcasts of entertainment programming. From an early historic period, he remembers being "completely enthralled by the box that talked," a fascination that became a hobby and then a profession when he moved to Los Angeles in 1934 to live with his sis later on his parents divorced. Equally a teenager, Laboe became involved in ham radio circles and even started a station out of his bedchamber in 1938. As Laboe related the story in an interview with Josh Kun, it was during his service in the Navy Reserve during World War Ii that he received his start break in commercial broadcasting.
While stationed on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay in 1943, the young Art Egnoian showed upward one mean solar day at local station KSAN to inquire for airtime. Despite his inexperience, he was able to secure a 1-hour fourth dimension slot - 11pm to midnight - considering of a shortage of license-holding DJs due to the state of war; crucially he had caused the relevant circulate licenses during a cursory stay at Stanford to study Radio Technology. The station director at KSAN suggested that Egnoian change his proper name, so Fine art took the last name of a secretary working at that place, "Laboe." From his first plan at KSAN, Laboe stumbled upon the technique that has get the signature of his dissemination manner: the personal dedication. In 1943, there were few records played on radio, which and so focused on news, information, and live theatrical and musical performances. When there was airtime to fill, a station would play records, generally of big bands and pop vocalists, the task that fell to Laboe in his time slot. He speedily discovered that a prime segment of his audition were young women who would call in to dedicate songs to husbands, boyfriends, and brothers in the military.
For Laboe, and then as at present, the personal dedication was a tangible form of connection betwixt the DJ, alone with his microphone in his studio, and the invisible audience receiving his broadcast. But information technology also has helped to proceeds the loyalty and personal investment of listeners. When a listener calls to dedicate a song to a loved one, Laboe serves as an intermediary between his listeners, connecting two points across space, while offering recognition by his voice for a personal emotion or feel. Throughout his career, the dedication has been fundamental to Laboe'southward approach. Bridging the altitude of military machine service has been extended to other absences - for loved ones in prison, or those travelling for migrant labor, or fifty-fifty just the lonely worker on the graveyard shift.
Laboe'due south focus on taking requests also helped him - again fortuitously - to anticipate the groundswell of rock northward' roll inside postwar teen civilization in the mid-1950s. Subsequently the state of war, Laboe had a hard time finding work when more experienced DJs returned from the service. He bounced around stations east of Los Angeles in Palm Springs and the Pomona Valley before trying a mobile DJ booth for KPOP in Fifty.A. His almost popular remote location, and one that he would occupy for viii years from 1951 to 1959, was in the parking lot of Scrivener's Drive-In at the corner of Sunset and Cahuenga in Hollywood.
Merely a few blocks from Hollywood High, Scrivener's was the epicenter of L.A.'s effervescent teen culture, which combined automobiles, mass culture, and discretionary income to ready the standard for youth nationwide of a new mode of freedom through consumption. Laboe began at Scrivener's doing a late evidence until four am, broadcasting to cruising teens throughout the region. He eventually added an after-schoolhouse broadcast at 3 pm - what he called "tape hops" - taking vocal recommendations from the kids he interviewed. When the national craze surrounding the beginning rock due north' roll hits of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Footling Richard reached Fifty.A. in late 1955, Art Laboe became the outset DJ to play these singles on the West Coast, largely based on tips from his teen informants at Scrivener's. While standing to play the doo-wop and R&B records that had been the staple of his broadcasts until so, Laboe achieved local celebrity because of rock north' coil, every bit his evidence became the highest-rated on L.A. radio and served as a promotional destination for this new brand of pop stardom.
The runaway popularity of the Scrivener'southward broadcasts created traffic jams effectually the drive-in, disarming Laboe to organize "dances & shows" for his radio audience. This led him to El Monte Legion Stadium, a non-descript, somewhat rundown boxy auditorium with a 3000-person capacity, which had been built as a wrestling venue for the 1932 Olympics and subsequently hosted battle, professional person wrestling, roller derby, and jamborees. Laboe came to El Monte considering regulations in the urban center of Los Angeles did not allow public dances for patrons under 18, who formed the core of Laboe'south audience. Starting in 1955, Laboe hosted an event on every other weekend at Legion Stadium, drawing enthusiastic teenagers from all over the region. The events alternated dancing to records with live performances, both past local artists such equally rockabilly duo Don & Dewey and Rosie & the Originals, and ascension stars that included Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, and Ritchie Valens, the Latino heartthrob tragically killed in a aeroplane crash in 1959.
Laboe cemented a bond with his audience by going into the oversupply to meet people. He would talk with groups of teens and ask them about themselves and their favorite songs, as he had done at Scrivener'due south. Laboe also visited those waiting in line exterior to get into the venue. Shows at Legion Stadium typically cost $three, but when a large proper noun-act such as Jerry Lee Lewis or Jackie Wilson appeared, the cover went up to $iii.l, leaving some concertgoers short of the actress 50 cents. As Laboe tells it in an interview for the SEMAP archive, "I remember filling both my coat pockets with one-half dollars - there were a lot of one-half dollars around then - and I went exterior where everybody was waiting in line and went upwardly and down the line and I could meet who was trying to dig up some money - people were real honest nigh it - and I was handing out these half dollars to some of these kids." When the promoter chastised him for leaving the stage and giving abroad coin earlier the bear witness, Laboe replied that's how he wanted to do it, assuasive everyone the hazard to get into the show.
More Stories on El Monte
For the 6 years that Laboe put on shows in El Monte, he provided a venue for a spontaneous customs of youth that cut across ethnic, racial, and class lines. While the shows drew the more affluent fans from the Westside who had fabricated up the Scrivener'due south crowd, the cadre audience for the events was drawn from the local Mexican-American enclaves in East L.A., the San Gabriel Valley, and El Monte besides as black and white working-class neighborhoods s and east. As historian Matt Garcia has described, radios and automobiles helped facilitate an informal network across Los Angeles, united by Laboe's personality and love of the music, that converged at Legion Stadium for an intercultural exchange remarkably gratis of the racial tensions within social spaces that characterized their parents' generation. Laboe remembers that the events were meant to be "fun, fun, fun," and the atmosphere encouraged non-conformist fashion (due to lack of a clothes lawmaking), self-expression, and a general good will that seems almost utopian in hindsight. And memories of El Monte Legion Stadium - only the contempo past when Zappa wrote his single - have made a strong impression to this day on Laboe, the performers, and the youthful audience who went at that place. It remains an open question for further research whether the harmonious temper that Laboe and others call back reflects a nostalgic veneer or a genuine collective spirit that tolerated and maybe encouraged interethnic mixing, dancing, and dating in an era when crossing such boundaries was securely fraught.
As with many such conjunctures in American popular music, an incipient moment of hope proved to be fleeting, as the emerging record industry in Los Angeles absorbed, elaborated, and transformed the energy of early rock due north' scroll into a more predictable and manageable product. The El Monte shows had inspired a moving ridge of local bands who enjoyed success as live performers in dancehalls across the Eastside, but these groups were increasingly overshadowed in the '60s and '70s past the popularity of national acts on the radio. One grouping that emerged from the belatedly '50s scene to reach national success, and kept alive its multiethnic spirit, was War, whose 1975 striking, "Depression Rider," captures (if in caricature) one of the central elements of a nighttime out in El Monte. By the time Legion Stadium was torn down in 1974 to make way for a post function, the concerts at that place had truly passed into memory even as the music of that fourth dimension persisted on the radio with the emergence of Oldies stations.
Art Laboe's brand of nostalgia has never been rueful, nonetheless, and his career over the terminal four decades reflects the optimism and resilience that characterized his personality from the beginning. Laboe arguably invented Oldies equally a format, coining the term on a serial of compilations on Original Sound titled Oldies But Goodies, Volumes 1-xv. According to Laboe, he came up with the concept at Scrivener's Drive-In to refer to tracks merely three or four years old that his audience would yet asking. The key signal, in his words, is that "it's old but information technology'south gotta be practiced," which still serves as a core principle of his radio shows today. Laboe has too maintained longstanding "familial" relationships with several performers who appeared at El Monte, including the Penguins and Rosie Hamlin of Rosie & the Originals, acts whom Laboe continues to play on his show and presents at Oldies concerts in the L.A. area.
Through the many transformations of radio, from AM to FM to cablevision and into the era of Clear Channel, Laboe has always leveraged his popularity to retain full autonomy in the presentation of his prove. As of 2013, Laboe appears 31 hours over 6 nights a week on Killer Oldies and Art Laboe Connectedness, and remains a Pinnacle 5 draw nationally in the ratings. In an era when many Oldies stations are automated, sticking to a express, market place-tested playlist without DJs, Laboe draws on his ain deep cognition of pop music and the musical affections of his listeners to intersperse perennial hits with singles more obscure to a younger audience. Nevertheless, he remains popular across a wide range of age groups, and proudly takes dedications from ten-yr-olds equally well equally abuelas. As Laboe slyly notes, he puts people on the air "from womb to tomb."
It is this intergenerational appeal, built off his affable stewardship of the El Monte "dances & shows," that has made Laboe an honorary vocalization of the Mexican-American community in Southern California, his radio program providing a soundtrack of Chicano identity. State Senator Gil Cedillo vividly recalls cruising through Boyle Heights in the early '70s with Antonio Villaraigosa in the time to come mayor's canary yellow 1964 Chevy listening to Laboe, whom he likened to "everyone'southward favorite uncle in the neighborhood." Comedian Paul Rodriguez told the 50.A. Times that Laboe "is more than Chicano than some Chicanos, and everyone from the toughest vato to the wimpiest guy would say the aforementioned." Notwithstanding Laboe's reputation remains strong even amongst younger Mexican-Americans today, such as a 21-year-old educatee who told Susan Directly, "Art Laboe! Man, I grew up in Baldwin Park and the whole neighborhood listens to him! The women beloved him."
Laboe typically demurs at such suggestions, yet, and one has the sense that he is a universalist in his sense of the origin and appeal of Oldies: everyone chipped in over the years to make cracking music and have a good time. In the shark tank that commercial radio and the record industry tin can often exist, Laboe's serene, unassuming approach throughout his career is remarkably rare. Simply his longevity makes consummate sense in that he seems to have a wise understanding of the pregnant that the music has for his listeners - in their memories and their relationships - and he makes himself the conduit for that. If Art Laboe has led a charmed life in radio, he has shared it with many.
This piece was originally published on Tropics of Meta in Jan 2014.
Source: https://www.kcet.org/history-society/memories-of-el-monte-art-laboes-charmed-life-on-air
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