El-Kabong

Not to hijack the thread, but there was a pizza place in Seattle that did something like that too, called Pizza and Pipes. The resturant was this HUGE one room affair, with a gigantic pipe organ at one end, live musical accompanyment to the silent films that constantly looped against one wall. On the other two wall were anamatronic animals and Roaring 20's memorbilia. P&P was *THE* bomb when I was a kid.

Sadly, like all things cool, they went out business years ago.

Damfino

I've been to a Pizza & Pipes in Fresno, California a long time ago. I think that one is still open.

illennium

This is so a Danol thread.

SmackDaddy

Coming back from Mardis Gras (the Galveston version) we (the drunken dudes) were sequestered to the back seat by our girfriends in the hopes we would pass out during the drive home. But nooooooo....we sang Convoy all the way back home for some odd reason.

Buford T Pusser

It's odd that when I do a search for threads I've posted in the old ones from the Music Forum don't show up, just the recent ones.

Hondo

Not to be picky, but Chip Davis while playing drums in the band and co-writing the songs on the album, was not the voice of CW McCall. His name was Bill something-or-other. He was actually an actor who played a trucker named CW McCall in a series of bread commercials. When "CW McCall" became popular, they had to create a whole persona and career for him.

Don't ask me how I know this. I'm actually scaring myself!

Buford T Pusser

You're right. It wasn't until later that I kept reading that Chip Davis was CW McCall and I always thought that the look wasn't the same but that all of the articles must be correct.

Just came across this site:

http://www.narrowgauge.org/4x4/cw_pa...l/cw_main.html


Couldn't have said it better. C. W. McCall is the greatest natural born storyteller of our time. If you were old enough to know what a radio was in 1976, then you know the song that most people associate with him ...Convoy. While he had fun with Convoy, and the other truckin' songs, it was the songs about Colorado ...and about nature ...and about life, that were most important to him. The fame and fortune never changed who he really was, and what he loved most ...his family and his mountains.

Billy Dale Fries was born on November 15th, 1928, in Audubon Iowa. Yup... Billy Dale. He later changed it to William Dale, and went by William D. Fries. Bill's parents were musicians, who played for silent movies. As a child he showed musical talent, playing the clarinet, and singing, but was more interested in art and graphics design. In high school he was the drum major of the marching band. During his time at the University of Iowa, Bill continued to study music, and played in the concert band, but his main interest was still art, and he eventually changed his major to commercial artwork. After graduation, he was employed by an Omaha, Nebraska TV station, doing their artwork. By the time he had worked there five years, he had his own show, drawing caricatures of celebrities. Anybody out there got tapes, or better yet the drawings?

In early '60s, Bill went to work for an Omaha advertising agency as their art director. It was also at this time, in 1961, that Bill first visited Ouray, and fell in love with the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.

Bill created C. W. McCall while working for the Bozell Jacobs advertising agency in Omaha. By 1968, Bill's musical talents had surfaced again. He had combined writing, music, and art to win numerous awards for various advertising campaigns, and was made the creative director for the agency. One of Bozell & Jacobs clients at the time was the Metz Baking Company, of Sioux City, Iowa. They asked B&J to create a new kind of ad campaign for their Old Home Bread. Bill set to work, not having any idea where this assignment would lead.

The ads featured the CB jaw-jackin', smokey teasin' trucker, and his girlfriend Mavis Davis, a waitress down at the Old Home Fill'er-up an' Keep On-a-Truckin' Café. Bill couldn't find anyone to do the voice of C.W. McCall to his satisfaction, so he did it himself. People loved the ads so much, they would call up the TV and radio stations to request them, like you would a favorite song. The local TV schedules listed when the ads would run. The advertising industry liked them too, giving Bill the prestigious Clio award, not once, but twice. In 1974 Bill received the Clio for the Best Television or Cinema Overall Advertising Campaign, and in 1976 got his second Clio for the Best Television or Cinema Advertising for Packaged Foods. Check out the Clio's website, www.clioawards.com, and go to the archives section to check out all the particulars for yourself. If anybody has tapes of these ads, please, Please, PLEASE share them with us.


A recent pic w/the man himself in the middle:




Hondo-you're really in Bay Village?

Hondo

Yep. Been here for 12 years now.

Adam Tyner

Necrobump in honor of it being the sixth of June, a.k.a. International Convoy Day.

Josh-da-man

tommyp007

Man, lotta long lost friends in this thread.

Greg MacGuffin

There was an article on NPR yesterday.

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/06/531749...came-a-70s-hit

Buford T Pusser

Still in Bay?

Sonny Corinthos

I was a little kid when this song came out and it seemed like everything you turned on the radio, it was on. I used to love it back then. I haven't heard it in ages.

Alvis

Weekday breakfast before getting on the school bus in the '70s. My mom always had country music on.

Buford T Pusser

RIP ole CW. He's gone to that great truck stop in the sky.

Bill Fries, who had No. 1 hit as C.W. McCall with ‘Convoy,’ dies at 93

He was an advertising executive whose spoken-word songs about truck driving and CB radio became unlikely hits in the 1970s.

By Matt Schudel
April 1, 2022 at 9:18 p.m. EDT Bill Fries, an advertising executive better known by his stage name, C.W. McCall, who had hit country records in the 1970s about long-haul truck driving during the height of the citizens band radio craze and whose song “Convoy” inspired an action film directed by Sam Peckinpah, died April 1 at his home in Ouray, Colo. He was 93.

The death was confirmed by his son Bill Fries III. Mr. Fries announced in February that he was in hospice care for cancer.
Bill Fries, better known by his alter ego's name of C.W. McCall. He had several hits in the 1970s with novelty songs about trucking, including “Convoy” and “Wolf Creek Pass.” (GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images)After creating the character of C.W. McCall, a truck driver in a series of commercials for a Midwestern bread company, Mr. Fries (pronounced “freeze”) adopted the name as his alter ego and recorded several humorous, freewheeling songs about renegade long-haul truckers.

He had top 20 country hits with and about two truckers hauling a load of chickens down a mountain:
I says, Earl, “I’m not the type to complain
But the time has come for me to explain
That if you don’t apply some brake real soon
They’re gonna have to pick us up
With a stick and a spoon”His best-known song was “ ,” which became a No. 1 country and pop hit, pushing aside the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” at the top of the Billboard chart in January 1976.

Mr. Fries wrote the words of “Convoy” and delivered them in a deep, fast-talking twang. The song helped popularize the lingo that truck drivers used over their citizens band, or CB, radios and is almost incomprehensible without a glossary of CB terms.

The name, or “handle,” of the song’s central character is Rubber Duck, and he chats with another driver, Pig Pen, hauling a load of foul-smelling hogs, which becomes a running joke throughout the song. They join up with a driver in a “cab-over Pete with a reefer on” — a refrigerated Peterbilt truck with the cab above the engine — headed east out of Shaky Town, or Los Angeles, and “Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy.”
“I’m about to put the hammer down,” Rubber Duck says, meaning he’s going to drive as fast as he can, while keeping an eye out for “smokies,” or highway patrol officers in flat-brimmed hats like the ones worn by Smokey Bear. As more trucks follow along, McCall chants, “We gonna roll this truckin’ convoy ’cross the USA.”By the time they get to Tulsa, there are 85 speeding trucks, and “them smokies is thick as bugs on a bumper. They even had a bear in the air” — a police helicopter. As they move east through Chi-town (Chicago), the trucks go faster and the tales grow taller, as the convoy plows past the “reinforcements from the Illi-noise National Guard”: “Well, we shot the line and we went for broke with a thousand screamin’ trucks … we crashed the gate doing 98, I says, ‘Let them truckers roll.’ ”

It was not the first song about evading the police on the open road. Chuck Berry had recorded “ ” in 1955, and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen had a hit in the early 1970s with a remake of the old rockabilly tune “ .” But “Convoy” came along when truckers faced rising fuel costs and a nationwide 55 mph speed limit, and the use of CB radios was becoming widespread.

“It was timely,” Mr. Fries told the Associated Press in 1990. “Back in 1975-76, that craze was sweeping the country. The jargon was colorful, and the American public liked that, too. It was laced with humor, but it had a rebellious feeling about it and people responded to it.”
“Convoy” sold an estimated 7 million copies and became an unexpected phenomenon, spawning Peckinpah’s of the same name, starring Kris Kristoffersen. During the same period, Burt Reynolds’s “Smokey and the Bandit” movies were box-office hits, and the “outlaw” country music of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson was gaining popularity.“We always took ourselves seriously, but we never thought it would get as big as it has,” Mr. Fries said in 1975. “I’m flabbergasted by the success of ‘Convoy.’ It spread like a grass fire.”

Performing as McCall, Mr. Fries had five other top 20 country hits, including the sentimental 1977 ballad He sold about 20 million records before largely abandoning his performing career in the late 1970s.

Wearing jeans, a vest and a battered cowboy hat, Mr. Fries performed as McCall on network television programs, including Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” and headlined national concert tours.“People came out to see me but didn’t know what I looked like. They just knew my voice,” he told the Associated Press. “So I had to learn to be a face. This meant a lot of rehearsing and learning the business of stage shows: how C.W. McCall was supposed to act and look. It was an identity crisis.”

“People came out to see me but didn’t know what I looked like. They just knew my voice,” he told the Associated Press. “So I had to learn to be a face. This meant a lot of rehearsing and learning the business of stage shows: how C.W. McCall was supposed to act and look. It was an identity crisis.”

Billie Dale Fries was born Nov. 15, 1928, in Audubon, Iowa. His father was a foreman at a company that manufactured farm buildings. Both of his parents played musical instruments, and Mr. Fries had early aspirations of being a classical musician.

Mr. Fries — who later legally changed his name to William Dale Fries Jr. — played the clarinet in bands at the University of Iowa and later studied art and film production.

He moved in the early 1950s to Omaha, where he was an artist and set designer at a television station before joining the Bozell & Jacobs advertising agency in 1961. He eventually became creative director and vice president.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Fries was asked to devise an advertising campaign for Old Home bread, which was sold in several Midwestern states. He created the characters of C.W. McCall and a gum-chewing waitress named Mavis at the Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On-a-Truckin’ Cafe.“Tell me, truck man, what’s your name?” Mavis says — mouthing the words spoken by Mr. Fries — in the first of 12 Old Home commercials in the series.

“C.W. McCall, and I haul for Old Home. You can call me C.W.”

The commercials became so popular that viewers called TV stations asking when the spots would air, and they won a national Clio Award for advertising in 1974 for the best U.S. television campaign.

Mr. Fries’s musical partner was Chip Davis, a Bozell & Jacobs jingle composer who wrote the music for most of the C.W. McCall songs. Davis became the creative force behind Mannheim Steamroller, a Grammy-winning group that blends classical and New Age musical elements.
Mr. Fries left Bozell & Jacobs in the mid-1970s and stopped performing as C.W. McCall by 1980. He recorded a few other songs over the years while living in retirement in Ouray, Colo., which he called “a mining town with mountains all around and a population of 680 when we are all here.” He served as mayor from 1986 to 1992.Survivors include his wife of 70 years, Rena Bonnema Fries; and three children, Bill Fries III, Mark Fries and Nancy Fries; a sister; four grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandson.

“Well, mercy sakes, good buddy, we gonna back on outta here,” C.W. McCall says at the end of “Convoy,” with a slight alteration of a trucker’s farewell: “Keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your … tail.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obitu...w-mccall-dies/

rexinnih

RIP. I do enjoy that song.