Bob Dylan Banned!

We have all read variations on the tale.  Bob Dylan's music was banned on a radio station in Texas, sometimes specifically El Paso, in 1968 or sometimes 1970. The ban is not because he was a red, or a subversive, but just because he was unintelligible. They feared that he might be obscene or profane and them be unable to detect it through his nasal warbling of the English vernacular. In most versions of the story the station continued to play recordings of other artists covering Dylan’s songs. The story appears in numerous contemporary books:

Parental Advisory - Eric D. Nuzum (2009) 
Influences: Music and Society - Joshua Hanes (2006)
The Rough Guide to Cult Pop - Paul Simpson (2003) 
The Joy of Swearing - Alison Maloney (1999) 

But if you go backward another decade the references get more specific. Both a 1993 Issue of Colorado Libraries and a 1991 issue of School Library Journal go a step further and carrying an article that quotes original source material in the story. This time accusing the Dylan lyrics of being "indecipherable."  High school literature students may not be able to use quote marks correctly, but library trade magazines certainly can. Regardless, this is still more than 2 decades after the event supposedly occurred. The gap strains incredulity. It's also worth mentioning that zero of his many biographies even mention the event.

The 1968 date also stands out as plausible. While it was the year between his release of  John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline (1969,) the former was released on December 27th and any reaction to it could easily have occurred in the following year.But how much rock n' roll was even on the El Paso radio band in 1968?  El Paso had only three FM stations by then: 88.5 KTEP, 94.7 KPAK, and 99.9 KTSM. The AM band was more filled out: 600 KROD-AM, 920 KELP-AM, 960 KHEY-AM, 1590 KINT-AM, 1150 KIZZ-AM, and 1360 KTSM-AM. There were also some border blasters like XEROK, and others, but generally speaking border blasters didn't ban anything... it was part of their charm.

You can eliminate many of them as candidates, KHEY was a country station in the sixties as was KROD for the most part. KTEP was  a college station and KTSM was a CBS affiliate playing a lot of syndicated talk programming. Of the whole group I find only one at all plausible. KELP was a Top 40 station and in 1968 John Wesley Harding went platinum. I don't have a lick of proof but that's my thesis. It's not the first time Dylan would have been censored.  Just five years before, censors forbid him to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". He walked out on them.

Tom & Doug

Tom and Doug may have more listeners on Youtube than they do on the radio but they are in fact carried on three terrestrial radio stations 90.7 WAZU-FM, 107.9 WRFA-LP, and on 89.1 KHOI. Their chatter is so comic, by all rights they should have a wildly popular morning zoo show somewhere. Their songs are even funnier than that. If they didn't already have day jobs this probably wouldn't be hypothetical.

They met in 1985 and in 1986 with Eric Schopf and Dan Meyer they started a band called Norm and the Standard Deviates. They went on to form and play in other bands, do theater, and perform in virtually any capacity wherever either or both of them could find an audience. It was their comic music that first got them attention before their comic antics.

In the summer of 1999, Dee Snider (of Twisted Sister) launched his radio show "Dee Snider Radio" on 104.1 WMRQ-FM. Snider used Tom and Doug's jazz cover the Twisted Sister song "We're Not Gonna Take It" to be his show's theme. He played it daily until his program was cancelled in 2003. He later invited Tom and Doug to perform on his program. They agreed and in December of 1999 appeared live. After being cancelled in 2003 Snider revived his program for another year on 93.3 WMMR in Philadelphia and continued to earn the duo teeny tiny royalty checks.

In 2005 Tom and Doug began to do a semi-regular  podcast on their website. It began with odd-sized segments with mixed hijinks and music. Shows varied in length but were anywhere from 12 to 25 minutes. In 2012 they broke form and adopted a more radio-friendly weekly half-hour show. This change was made with KHOI in mind, and was picked up by other stations.

Transcription Mystery Disc #190

This is a 6.5 inch, metal-core Silvertone brand transcription disc. One side is labeled "Iowa Gang 7-25-43." The label on the other side has been torn off. the recording is of my favorite sub-sub genre.. drunk singing people. This one is a total classic. It's introduced with the words "Two songs will be dedicated to George and Pete who are home threshing."

Iowa Gang



Women in the background giggle and cat call them men before they break into a ardent version of "Wagon Wheels". You might know the Eddy Arnold version or the Sons of the Pioneers version, or even the Mary Robbins version. The men peter out and the ladies sing "Put On Your Old Gray Bonnet" in better harmony though they're further from the mic and a bit harder to hear. This is probably a recording of some college kids, a good find.

Venus Equilateral

It's often the case that science fiction precedes science non-fiction.  Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke envisioned satellite communications long before it was a reality.  In this case Clarke wrote a serious proposal called "Extra-Terrestrial Relays" for geostationary communications satellites in 1945. You can read that here. But he had been inspired by the Venus Equilateral series of short science fiction stories by George O. Smith. The first of these were published in 1942.  The Smith stories concern the Venus Equilateral Relay Station, an interplanetary communications hub. Smith had the idea 3 years before Clarke and 20 years before the Telstar 1 satellite was launched on July 10, 1962.

Prior to the use of communication satellites, we had only two systems to defeat the curve of the earth. We had terrestrial wired systems, and we had microwave relay systems with towers on hilltops about 30 miles apart. But these systems were not great. Spanning just the North American continent took 107 hops by microwave relay. Prior to 1954 transatlantic cables were mostly fiscal and/or technological failures. Until the 1950s transatlantic telephone service was primarily radio-based. Technology had to catch up to the idea, but in the years after Clarke's proposal, the world began considering another approach. (Which we ironically reversed over the last decade)

Sputnik I was launched by the USSR in October of 1957, and the USA launched Explorer I in 1958. These were satellites, but not communication satellites.  In December of 1958 we launched Score under the Defense Department's ARPA program (Advanced Research Projects Agency). It was a shiny metallic mylar balloon 100 feet in diameter. It was in the spirit of, if not the design of some passive reflector design proposals written by J.R. Pierce around 1954. The actual unit was designed by Kenneth Masterman-Smith.  It contained two tape recorders (for redundancy) and four antennas two for transmission and two for reception. The frequencies used were 150 MHz for the uplink and 132 MHz for the downlink. Its batteries lasted 12 days and it then burned up on re-entry in January of 1959. It broadcast the first human voice communication from space on December 19th. President Eisenhowers words were as follows:

"This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you via a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America's wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere."

That's what he said, but what he meant was the U.S. now had the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon from space. The Russians took this poorly. More here. AARPA moved on with a project called Advent and Echo to mixed success. Echo was another 100ft passive reflector mylar balloon this one launched in August of 1960. It remained in orbit until May of 1968. Echo II was a bit more interesting. It was bigger at 135 feet in diameter, and was launched January 25, 1964. It came down in 1969. Following Echo, passive communications satellites were abandoned. Telstar 1, the first production active communication satellite was launched on July 10, 1962.

The Nature of The Universe

For Fred Hoyle the term "Big Bang" was one of derision. Hoyle proposed a theory that the universe didn't have a beginning, it just always had been.  He called it the "Steady State Theory. " In 1948 he, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold espoused their idea that the universe is always expanding but maintaining an average constant density, because matter is being continuously created to form new stars and galaxies at the same rate that others become too distant to observe. As it turns out, this was completely wrong, but it was a dominant theme until about 1960. But how does this relate to radio?  Despite the intuitively gaping problems in the theory Hoyle manged to advance it through the use of radio.

In 1947 Hoyle was a lecturer at St John's College in Cambridge.  Despite the day job Hoyle's finances were stretched. So when the BBC offered Hoyle a payday as a radio lecturer, he took it. 1948 was a year of solar maximum, and BBC hired him to lecture on sunspots based on a paper he wrote. So on New Years eve he recorded his first radio program. It was broadcast January 8th, 1948 on the program Science Notebook.  The gig went so well that BBC producer Dr. Archie Clow asked him to expound on the talk for the BBC Third Programme. That revamp was broadcast live on February 12th, 1948. It went so well that he was still answering letters from the listeners of the BBC overseas service in July. (There was some delay translating letters from listeners writing in foreign languages)

Clow asked Hoyle again to lecture in March of 1949. This deal was agreed to by BBC Producer Peter Laslett. This time he was invited to lecture on the latest developments in 20th century cosmology."  Hoyle chose a topic had helped originate: the Steady State Theory.  The introduction to the program started with “In this talk Fred Hoyle gives his reasons for thinking that matter is being created all the time, so that the universe must have had an infinite past and will have an infinite future." The scientific establishment went apeshit.

The BBC received letters from esteemed and respected scientific and academics who demanded (politely) that the BBC air a lecture posing a competing view. The BBC froze in a convulsion of excessive politeness and fear. Nobody wanted to go out on a limb and make a decision. If they said yes then that would allow the guest lecturer to contradict Hoyle. If Hoyle was perceived to be wrong then that meant that BBC was also discredited by proxy.  But if they refused then it was possible that they would undermine Hoyle's argument causing the same problem. Hoyle made a weak argument that that a rebuttal would be too technical and boring. In the end Laslett in the end heeded the advice of Sir Harold Spencer Jones of the Royal Observatory. Sir Jones suggested that since the lecture had been prefaced as the views of Hoyle, that it required no rebuttal program. Thus Hoyle could be wrong on his own and the BBC have no stake in it. With guilt now politely reassigned to Hoyle the BBC proceeded to ignore the situation.However this did leave the BBC's science program more-or-less vested in the steady state theory being fact. More here.

Despite the vigorous exchange of letters, the public accepted Hoyle as a voice of authority on matters of science. In 1950, the BBC decided to air science lectures every Saturday evening, to which Hoyle contributed five lectures. The series was called “The Nature of the Universe.”  These were collected in the book The Nature of the Universe. Hoyle did little more in radio, but his academic career had benefited. In 1967, he became the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. But in 1965 the tide started to turn against his ideas. That year discoveries based in radiation measurements by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs which supported the big bang theory.  Hoyle retreated into writing science fiction.

Hoyle was knighted in 1972 and resigned his professorship and began writing books.  He even wrote a science fiction book called "the Black Cloud" which he later worked into a BBC television series co-written with John Elliot. But behind him the dominance of the Big Bang seemed to grow. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the noble prize for their discoveries. Hoyle fumed.

But by 1993 he backpedaled slightly with a new clunky theory called quasi-steady state cosmology which was utter bunkum.  In 1997, while hiking in West Yorkshire, Hoyle fell down into a steep ravine and lay there injured for 12 hours. He was found by a search dogs but was hospitalized for two months with hypothermia, pneumonia and shoulder injuries related to the fall.  It was said that he didn't mentally recover. He died in 2001 following a series of strokes.