Smoke Ring |
Surrealism and Fraud in Tobacco Advertising
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Complete reel (6.5 mins)
Smoke Ring:
Background on Video Segments
Tobacco manufacturer Liggett & Myers of Durham NC first began sponsoring radio broadcasts of musical shows in 1932 and used music aggressively in their early campaigns. The Chesterfield jingle, composed in 1937 by songwriter John Klenner with radio music directors
Ted Steele and Lloyd Shaffer, fairly painted the airwaves with smoke. (As music directors often did in the radio days, Klenner, Steele and Shaffer later re-worked this jingle into a hit song, Smoke Dreams.) By the time The Chesterfield Supper Club debuted on NBC in 1944, Liggett & Myers had become the industry leader in cigarette advertising trends. True to form, the new radio show introduced to a nationwide radio audience three crooners who would come to dominate mainstream pop music in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Perry Como, Jo Stafford, and Peggy Lee.
This project, Smoke Ring, was initially sparked by a search for a good recording of the Chesterfield jingle. Radio broadcasts prior to 1948 would have been recorded simply by placing a disc recorder in front of the radio speaker. There were relatively few practioners because the process was expensive, the product was all but impossible to edit, and the resulting audio quality was generally poor. Typically, recordings that survive from this period were just short "airchecks" — samplings of broadcast quality, which rarely included complete musical performances. Recordings of radio broadcasts from this period are thus quite rare, and the sound quality often substandard. Not surprisingly, only one such recording of the Chesterfield jingle turned up, from a 1940s aircheck. The audio quality is typical; broadcast noise, disc noise, and inconsistent platter speed added up to a great deal of audio "cleanup" just to hear this short excerpt in a consistent key.
Based on this aircheck, I created and recorded a new arrangement of the product theme, then edited together several 20-second television "stingers" using footage from 1958 and 1961 campaigns.
Ted Steele and Lloyd Shaffer, fairly painted the airwaves with smoke. (As music directors often did in the radio days, Klenner, Steele and Shaffer later re-worked this jingle into a hit song, Smoke Dreams.) By the time The Chesterfield Supper Club debuted on NBC in 1944, Liggett & Myers had become the industry leader in cigarette advertising trends. True to form, the new radio show introduced to a nationwide radio audience three crooners who would come to dominate mainstream pop music in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Perry Como, Jo Stafford, and Peggy Lee.
This project, Smoke Ring, was initially sparked by a search for a good recording of the Chesterfield jingle. Radio broadcasts prior to 1948 would have been recorded simply by placing a disc recorder in front of the radio speaker. There were relatively few practioners because the process was expensive, the product was all but impossible to edit, and the resulting audio quality was generally poor. Typically, recordings that survive from this period were just short "airchecks" — samplings of broadcast quality, which rarely included complete musical performances. Recordings of radio broadcasts from this period are thus quite rare, and the sound quality often substandard. Not surprisingly, only one such recording of the Chesterfield jingle turned up, from a 1940s aircheck. The audio quality is typical; broadcast noise, disc noise, and inconsistent platter speed added up to a great deal of audio "cleanup" just to hear this short excerpt in a consistent key.
Based on this aircheck, I created and recorded a new arrangement of the product theme, then edited together several 20-second television "stingers" using footage from 1958 and 1961 campaigns.
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Smoke Dreams -- Original Radio Jingle (1944)
:15R 1944 |
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Smoke Dreams
:20TV 1958B ("Legal") |
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Smoke Dreams
:20TV 1961B ("Of course") |
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Expert Professionals
(60 seconds) |
Expert Professionals comes from a live, "host-selling" ad. The music was inspired by the conventions of the period and the absurdities behind tobacco marketing.
Created from a kinescope ca. 1950. Video and audio quality reveals defects in the original source. |
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Snow Job is a heavily edited composite of five Chesterfield ads from the early 1950s; the primary motif comes from spots aired during episodes of the long-running police show Dragnet. The show's star Jack Webb, in character as "Joe Friday", references a "report" (suggesting a police report but actually a bogus "medical study") read in a separate spot featuring George Fenneman. The music follows conventions of "film noir" and classic 1950s television shows like Dragnet and Perry Mason. (The raw footage was a bit sketchy on the meaning of "accessory organs").
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Snow Job
(90 seconds) Created from filmed spots ca. 1950-55.
Video and audio quality reveals defects in the original sources. |
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Journalism
(60 seconds) Created from a kinescope ca. 1951.
Video and audio quality reveals defects in the original source. |
Journalism finds "one of our Chesterfield Tobaccoland reporters" asking the same questions of tobacco farmers all over North Carolina. The voiceover was read by a then-obscure radio actor, Raymond Burr, who later appeared as the heavy in Hitchcock's Rear Window and then as the definitive Perry Mason. This musical treatment was inspired by videos of Publio Delgado (a/k/a/
The Harmonizator) and Henry Hey, in which instruments track or shadow the "melodies" of human speech. |
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With A Record Like This also uses musical "speech shadowing".
The ad copy begins by quoting from an FTC ruling invalidating a claim used in an ad by a competitor, conflating a commercial restriction with a medical finding. Whether that finding was in favor of Chesterfield, or against its competitor, is unknown and apparently irrelevant, for this verbal slight-of-hand hides the collapse of the entire spot into the fog of propaganda. Kinescope footage ca. 1952. Sound quality reveals defects in the original sources. |
With A Record Like This
(60 seconds) |
Early television production techniques were meager — often just a few shots with no music. This also applied to commercials, which included celebrity endorsements, "host-selling", overhyped claims, shady sources, emotional manipulation, and Fourth Wall-breaching cross-references between the product and the show. In the 1950s, television sponsors even asserted creative control over scripts of the shows they were sponsoring — often using their power to gain product placement in the programs, essentially a form of free advertising. All these tactics were especially common in tobacco advertising, which dominated American radio and television until being banned at the end of 1970.
In 1998, as a condition of a massive legal settlement with 46 states, tobacco companies released all proprietary documents from their marketing operations (including the ads themselves), and surrendered all their copyrights to the public domain. This document dump exposed longtime patterns of deliberate, systematic deception, fraud, and other sordid corporate behaviors, as well as the crude manipulative tactics that are the basis of advertising.
Given the centrality of music in the tobacco companies' marketing strategies, it is odd that many of their early television ads had no music at all. It seemed to my ears this was a missing element...so I provided it. Given the obvious vintage of the video, it seemed logical to compose music generally in the style(s) of the 1950s. Rather than "complimenting" the commercial message, however, I instead composed music intended to subvert the direct messaging and draw attention to the absurdities, shadowy tactics, and shocking claims made in advertising campaigns.
In 1998, as a condition of a massive legal settlement with 46 states, tobacco companies released all proprietary documents from their marketing operations (including the ads themselves), and surrendered all their copyrights to the public domain. This document dump exposed longtime patterns of deliberate, systematic deception, fraud, and other sordid corporate behaviors, as well as the crude manipulative tactics that are the basis of advertising.
Given the centrality of music in the tobacco companies' marketing strategies, it is odd that many of their early television ads had no music at all. It seemed to my ears this was a missing element...so I provided it. Given the obvious vintage of the video, it seemed logical to compose music generally in the style(s) of the 1950s. Rather than "complimenting" the commercial message, however, I instead composed music intended to subvert the direct messaging and draw attention to the absurdities, shadowy tactics, and shocking claims made in advertising campaigns.
Created entirely from public domain footage.
All music composed and produced by Gates Thomas,
except for the Chesterfield jingle, composed by John Klenner, Ted Steele, and Lloyd Shaffer.
No cigarettes were harmed during the making of these videos.
All music composed and produced by Gates Thomas,
except for the Chesterfield jingle, composed by John Klenner, Ted Steele, and Lloyd Shaffer.
No cigarettes were harmed during the making of these videos.
Copyright ©2021 by Gates Thomas. All rights reserved.