This is all about the world’s most beloved jingle company, PAMS. This mini-documentary includes interviews with the company’s founder, the late Bill Meeks. Also featured: Terry Lee, the distinctive voice heard on many PAMS classics; some background on Sonovox, and samples of some of the best Top 40 radio jingles ever made.

Thanks to Jon Wolfert for the background on this bootleg.
Back in my PAMS days, I thought it would make a good promotional give-away to do an album (there were no CDs in 1972) containing the history of PAMS. See, even then I was trying to do what we finally accomplished with “The Magic of PAMS” set in 1999! Anyway, I started to research and write the thing, and put together a few of the sections in a very rough form. I didn’t use real announcers, and it wasn’t a final mix, but I was trying to get them to commit some bucks to the project by showing them what it would sound like. PAMS being the way it was, nothing ever happened.

I did do a “good” mix of the “rough draft” for my own collection (which I still have), but no copies were ever sent out. My mistake was that I didn’t take home or erase the 16-track multi-track master where I had assembled it. Years later, after the PAMS tapes were sold and auctioned off to different people, someone came across that multi-track. They thought it was cool, made their own (HORRIBLE) mix, and made copies. To make matters worse, they often attached my name to it.

Well, not only was that production not in a finished form, it wasn’t even in contiguous pieces. In other words, I had assembled a piece here and there but there were large sections missing in between. This person just edited the pieces together as if they WERE continous. Argh! Some of the information wasn’t even correct.

I think that “The Magic of PAMS” CDs and the 36-page booklet tell a much more complete and accurate history of PAMS than that earlier tape… I’d rather that it disappear completely… Could you please post some explanation and some of these disclaimers? Or at least use a better copy?

[ Curator’s Notes :]
Fidelity apology: This feature was always a “bootleg”, consequently, the fidelity is very poor.

“This is the history of a company called PAMS – the Creator of the Jingle..” Beginning in 1947 when Bill Meeks left WFAA for KLIF and The Circle 5 Ranchhands, we hear Series 1 – touted as the first radio ID series; a rare sample of Series 7 for R&B station KNOK in Dallas; comments from Terry Lee, who sang Series 8 for 400 stations; Series 14 in 1960, marking the introduction of “the variable logo”; Series 16, “The Sound of the City”, featuring “record-length” jingles; Series 18, the introduction of the Sonovox, with comments from long-time PAMS performer Dan Alexander; the 1962 move to 4141 Office Parkway; Series 23; Series 25, “The Happy Difference” (1963); Series 26, the first package created specifically for WABC in 1964; Series 27, “Jet Set”, featuring Glennie Rutherford; 1965, Series’ 29 and 30, and 1966, Series 31, “Music Explosion”.

It’s incomplete where it ends – and that’s all there is.

When this feature first went online in September of 1999, we did not know who created it. (Some of the COMMENTS on this exhibit may reflect that.) We learned in January of 2000 that the original concept, interviews, writing and production was created by Jon Wolfert of JAM Creative Productions who worked at PAMS in 1972. Jon did not, however, create this mix, never released his own, and this is a genuine “bootleg” that was passed around for many years. Jon says that what he was trying to do with this was finally achieved in 1999 with The Magic of PAMS.