How to promote your record

When I was a little kid, my favorite little kid rock band was Paul Revere and the Raiders. I liked lots of bands, of course, from the Beatles to the Dave Clark Five, anything on KXOK in St. Louis was usually pretty good for me. But Paul Revere and the Raiders were the best, before the Monkees came along, because they had a show on TV called "Where The Action Is", everyday, at an after-school time of day if I remember correctly. Mainstream pop music used to be naturally marketed to kids, back when it was successful. Seems like the more they strive to position music for adults and college kids, the less of it they sell. Because the music companies are all staffed by brain-dead losers who know nothing about marketing.

Paul Revere and the Riaders had plenty of hits during the short life of that show and another one, plus frequent appearances on all the variety shows that were on everywhere in the 60s, 720 appearances in all. But around about the time of their last few albums they kind of went out of style. A lot of big bands were going psychedelic, and were growing quickly as musicians and songwriters. Mark Lindsay, the front man for the Raiders, had one of the best rock voices on the radio, effortlessly crooning or shouting as aggressively as anyone out there, but their songwriting chops were starting to sound a little weak in comparison.

I recently bought a couple of their later albums, both from 1969, through a reissue record company out of Germany called Repertoire. I bought "Alias Pink Fuzz" and "Hard 'n' Heavy (With Marshmallow)" because I had never heard of them before and became more and more curious the more I thought about them. Repertoire has a bunch of interesting and obscure CDs that you can't find anywhere else, like stuff by Family and a few excellent Spirit CDs, among many.

Both albums have a couple of decent songs and a few surprises, but nothing too insanely great, outside of the forgotten hit "Let Me." But what really intrigued me was the inclusion, in a sneaky way, of two radio commercials promoting the album that show either a desperate attempt by Columbia Records to goose sales on a failing cash cow, or a typical method of promoting an album from a time when record companies actually tried to promote their product, instead of suing their customers for stealing. The two commercials were stuck on the end of a demo song, with no track of their own, and were unremarked upon in the liner notes.

Here they are, for you to hear:

Download Paul Revere and The Raiders Commercial 1.


Download Paul Revere and The Raiders Commercial 2.


There was also, on "Hard 'n' Heavy (With Marshmallow)", this Pontiac GTO commercial:

Download Paul Revere and The Raiders Pontiac GTO Commercial.