The Legend-News

Monday, 1999 July 12 : Volume 2, Number 28

What A Difference A Day Makes
Most editions of the Legend-News carry a date of Sunday, but quite a few have been Monday'd. I've decided to stick to Monday from this point on, because I usually write the final copy on Sunday night while watching La Femme Nikita. Perhaps this will bring some consistency into my life.

No News
Absolutely nothing interesting happened this week. American Gramaphone hasn't released our dream box set of the Original Six albums, and with the recent death of Stanley Kubrick, all plans for "Convoy 2001: A Truck Odyssey" have been shelved.

(Them's the jokes, son.)

For those of you who have noticed oddities on the web site, like misattributed lyric credits, and at least two different styles of pages, don't worry. I'm working on it. Sooner or later -- hopefully, before Y2K sends the Sun crashing into the Earth -- I'll have the site looking perfessional.

Letters To Ed.
Not everyone who vists this web site or reads The Legend-News is a member of the Other Wild Places mailing list. (Hint, hint.) I get a lot of messages from C.W. McCall fans who have questions that I've answered before, either in personal letters or in back issues of The Legend-News. I plan to piece together an FAQ on C.W. someday, but for now I'm starting Yet Another Feature: letters to me, with answers from me. Maybe I won't need to type the same ol' stuff too often.

Our letter this week is from "booerjr", a name that I can't pronounce. :) He writes:

I am extremely interested in where I can find other copies of these albums and the other four original albums, as well as the compilations.

I covered this topic back in March, but it bears repeating.

None of the Original Six albums are in print, and probably will never be again. Yes, 1999 is the twentieth anniversary of Old Home Filler Up An' Keep On A-Truckin' Café, but greed and the law -- and probably a forecast of low sales -- keep American Gramaphone from releasing the good ol' stuff.

So, unless you can track down some vinyl, you're stuck with the CD compilations of the past few years. The Best of C.W. McCall and C.W. McCall's Greatest Hits are still available, and The Real McCall: An American Storyteller is once again available directly from American Gramaphone.

But what of spiral-grooved wax? Take these easy (yeah, right) steps:

Go to Ameritech yellowpages.net.
Search for "records" in your town, or elsewhere.
Then select the category "CDS, TAPES & RECORDS-RETAIL".
Start calling, or go visit.

Unpaid Advertisement: If you're in the Rockford, Illinois area, there's Toad Hall, at 2106 Broadway (which is really on the northeast corner of 17th and Broadway; Rockford house numbering is weird). Thousands of used records, books, and other stuff. The last time that I was there, there were copies of Wolf Creek Pass, Black Bear Road, and Wilderness.

You may want to search the Internet. It works for me, too.

Go to Altavista, or to another search engine of your choice.
Search for "used records".

You could add a +"c.w. mcall" to the Altavista search terms, but caution: most of the hits that you'll get are this site.

Speaking of search engines, I've got a new favorite: Northern Light. This isn't your usual robotic search engine; real people are at work here, attempting to categorize the sites in a useful manner. For example, searching for "c.w. mccall" finds mostly pages about C.W. McCall, not about realty firms in Idaho. In that sense, it's a bit like the Open Directory Project, formerly known as "NewHoo!".

I successful in finding C.W. LPs and singles at Record Finder and Memory Lane Records, but they're not the only sources. And check out eBay, where lately I've seen a lot -- relatively speaking -- of C.W. stuff. Warning: watch out for the bidder named "techren0". :) Other auction sites may have C.W. items from time to time.

The Bad News is that you'll probably need to search a lot of places, because no single one has a complete collection of C.W. Besides the Original Six albums, there are several singles, although I haven't noticed any variation of these releases from the album cuts. There's a rarity, though: the single release of "Kidnap America", which doesn't appear on any album.

There are also newsgroups for record collecting, though C.W. content is rare: rec.music.collecting.vinyl and rec.music.collecting.misc.

Thanks, booerjr, for your inquiry.

By the way, if I do respond to your letter in a issue of the Legend-News, I won't include your e-mail address. I get enough spam from having mine on the web page, and I don't want to send any junk mail your way.

Surfin' With The Rubber Duck
In this week's installment, I went looking for "old home bread". Unless you count the addresses of various locations of the Metz Baking Company, there's not much to be found. Here's the best of the bunch.

According to Western Iowa Tourism Region's "Fun Facts About Western Iowa",

In the town of Pisgah, one can find the Old Home Filler Up and Keep on Trucking Café, made famous by Old Home Bread commercials.

I'd heard that the place did exist, but this is the first proof that I've seen. Has anyone ever been there? Also,

During the CB radio craze of the 1970s, the smash hit song of Audubon's C. W. McCall was "Convoy."

But we already knew that.
Speaking of the Metz Baking Company, Brett Reed worked there in '93-'94, according to his resume.
Mrs. Blankenship's 5th Grade Class made a field trip to the South Dakota state capitol in Pierre (that's pronounced "peer"), and fed the ducks in Capitol Lake.
A brief advertising review from People of the Pavement Film Library:

TV Ads: Our Mini-Myths (17 min.) Stanford Summers

McLuhan-esque intertitles describing each persuasive technique introduce a series of 1970s commercials.
...
7. Trucker eats at a truckstop as a country jingle makes jokes and tries to sell Old Home Bread.
...

That's all, folks.

Song A’ Th’ Week
Looks like OfcBandit hasn't read his mail in the past week, 'cause he hasn't thwacked me for that dedication of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Truck Drivin' Song". (That occurred on the Other Wild Places mailing list, for those of you who were wondering. See the archives at <http://owp.listbot.com>.)

So Chris, here's to you and all a' them real truckers.

Wheels Of Fortune

(Terry Skinner, J.L. Wallace)

From the album C.W. McCall & Co..