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Chapter 1: What is a Flexi Disc and why is it significant?
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You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. 1969 was a great year for music. Songs like Honky Tonk Women, Elvis' Suspicious Minds, and Neil Diamond's classic Sweet Caroline topped the charts. But one song outsold all those classic tunes. It was named the Song of the Year in 1969. But here's the thing. The group behind the song didn't really exist. And that was 20 years before Milli Vanilli.
Don Kirshner was a music promoter. He had a talent for spotting talent. He and a partner started a publishing company called Alden Music. At various times, Alden had some of the top songwriters under contract, including Carole King and Jerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, and Bobby Darin. Kirshner was also a music consultant for a number of TV shows, including the Monkees sitcom.
From his stable of writers in the Brill Building, Kirshner had hits written for the Monkees, including Last Train to Clarksville and the Neil Diamond-penned I'm a Believer. When the fictional Monkees began to get irritated at being micromanaged by Kirshner, it led to a clash that got Kirshner fired. Kirshner still craved creative control, but he didn't want a repeat of the Monkees fiasco.
Then one day, he had an idea. Kirshner decided to create a group that didn't exist. He had been hired as a music consultant to the new Archies cartoon series. So Kirshner struck a deal with the producers. He would supply songs to the show, and he would create a fictional band called the Archies, ostensibly made up of the animated Archie characters.
but the band would actually consist of studio musicians and session singers. If anyone rebelled, Kirshner could easily replace them. The first song Kirshner supplied was Bang Shanga Lang, which went to number 22 on the Billboard chart. Next came Feelin' So Good, which didn't feel so good, peaking at number 53. Then came a huge hit composed by Jeff Berry and Canadian Andy Kim.
It was titled Sugar Sugar. Sugar Sugar zoomed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for four straight weeks, hip-checking honky-tonk women off the top spot.
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Chapter 2: How did Flexi Discs revolutionize marketing strategies?
According to some reports, Sugar Sugar sold upwards of six million copies. It was named the top song of 1969. Part of the reason the song became such a monster hit had to do with an unusual marketing strategy. A cardboard flexi of the song was embossed on post-serial boxes of Sugarcrisp, Honeycomb, and Alphabits. So kids could cut the flexi out of the actual cereal box and put it on a turntable.
The cardboard cereal records gave Sugar Sugar a huge boost, as it's estimated the song was put on over 5 million cereal boxes. FlexiDiscs hold a unique spot in the world of marketing. These razor-thin, poorly-sounding records became a cheap way to sell a lot of products. Flexis also helped sell a lot of records, as Flexis would often be the very first records that kids ever owned.
FlexiDiscs were also a novel way to promote contests. And in one of our stories today, a family won a million dollars and a million heartaches. You're under the influence. The Flexi Disc is an unusual little item. They are ultra-thin, flexible vinyl sheets, sometimes round, often square, records, the size of a 7-inch 45.
They have poor sound quality, can only be played a small number of times before wearing out, and you usually needed to place a coin on the Flexi to add weight so it would spin at the same speed as the turntable. For all its drawbacks, flexis were a powerful marketing tool. Believe it or not, flexi discs have been around for more than 100 years.
Back in 1903, European inventors took out patents on something they called talking postcards. They were actual postcards that had a thin, almost transparent piece of resin attached to it with a spindle hole punched into the middle. A short voice message could be recorded onto the phonographic grooves of the resin. The postcard could then be mailed and played back on a turntable.
And the light weight of the postcard didn't cause any appreciable increase in postage costs. They were a hit in Germany and the UK. A few years later in the United States, patents were filed for something called phonogram cards. These were small cards with miniature thin phonographs attached. But unlike Europe, they were mostly used for advertising purposes.
They were cheap to produce and easy to ship. In the 1930s, the Durium Company created a hit-of-the-week series of very popular cardboard records. Even though they only sold for a couple of nickels at newsstands, the first golden age of flexi discs was stopped in its tracks by the Depression.
The post-World War II boom brought many manufacturing companies back to life, including the recording industry. This time, instead of selling the Flexi discs, companies saw them as inexpensive yet powerful promotional tools. For just pennies apiece, Flexis were an ideal way to get an audio message out to the masses. The best thing about Flexies was how flexible they were when it came to formats.
They could even be stamped onto old X-ray films. Because there was a vinyl shortage behind the Iron Curtain, black market entrepreneurs transferred the forbidden music of the West onto X-ray films that had been discarded from hospitals. Called bone records, the grooves of the audio were imprinted into the thin x-ray film.
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Chapter 3: What role did the Archies play in the history of Flexi Discs?
I love McDonald's, good and great taste, and I get this all at one place.
The tune was based on a 1974 hit song titled, Life is a Rock, But the Radio Rolled Me. To roll out the contest, McDonald's ran a commercial telling people that they were putting special coupons and a FlexiDisc inside local newspapers.
McDonald's has put something amazing in this week's newspaper. Valuable McDonald's menu song food coupons that might win you thousands of dollars. And a free record of McDonald's menu song. Just listen to it and you could win a million dollars instantly. McDonald's million dollar menu song and menu song food coupons in this week's paper.
The flexi-disc featured a teacher telling a class about the contest.
Good morning, class. Today we're going to learn the McDonald's menu song and give a listener out there a chance to win a million dollars. So, repeat after me.
The class learns the song, then the teacher asks them to sing it back.
Got it? Got it! Okay, now you do it. Big Mac McDLT, a quarter pounder with some cheese fillet. Cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese. Ah, too bad.
And here was the key detail. McDonald's sent out 80 million Flexies. 80 million. But only one single Flexie had the class singing the menu song all the way through with no mistakes. So the chances of winning were one in 80 million. For context, 80 million flexes outnumbered Michael Jackson's Thriller album, which is the biggest-selling album in history with 70 million sold.
In other words, this was a big promotion from McDonald's. One cold February day in the small town of Gallax, Virginia, a 13-year-old boy named Scotty Landreth was looking for something to start a fire with in his family's old wood stove. His mother, Charlene Price, had chucked a bunch of old Gallax Gazette newspapers into a box for burning, so Scotty grabbed one.
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Chapter 4: How did Flexi Discs contribute to the success of the song 'Sugar Sugar'?
In an interview recently, Scotty said that the only reason he put the Flexi on the turntable that fateful day was because he didn't own any records himself. And if he had, he probably would have thrown the Flexi into the fire. When we come back, Jack White literally launches a Flexi into the sky. Flexi discs still take flight in promotions to this day.
Three weeks before the release of Jack White's debut solo album, Blunderbuss, his label, Third Man Records, was looking for an inventive way to launch the album and decided to take the word launch literally. They made 1,000 flexi-disc copies of the album track Freedom at 21, then attached the flexis to 1,000 biodegradable helium balloons.
Hi, I'm Ben Blackwell at Third Man Records. For a long time, we've been excited about non-traditional forms of record distribution. So it's with great excitement that we released Jack White's Freedom at 21 on a flexi-disc Only available via helium balloon launch from our headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee. Hope you can find one.
With that, 1,000 helium balloons were launched from the record company's Nashville office. It was an unusual idea. The balloons attracted press, and it was a novel way to get the record into the hands of people who don't visit record shops. Seventeen days later, a Jack White Flexi sold on eBay for $4,238. It was the highest price ever paid for a Flexi.
For a flimsy item with plenty of drawbacks, the humble FlexiDisc has an honorable place in the history of marketing. It has helped sell cars, hit songs, chewing gum, Beatle records, soap operas, million-dollar contests, and alien plush toys. Flexies were more than flexible.
They existed on razor-thin vinyl, on postcards, paper, cereal boxes, plastic cottage cheese lids, and even discarded x-rays. Above all, Flexie discs offered two key aspects that marketers loved. First, they were cheap to make and easy to ship, could be slipped into a thin envelope, or go airborne with a balloon. But the second and most seductive thing about FlexiDiscs was the fact they were free.
And everybody likes something free. And when something's free, all you have to do is scratch the surface to find the marketing. When you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the Terrastream Mobile Recording Studio. Producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Chief Sound Engineer, Jeff Devine. Research, Shea Grinden. Theme music by Casey Pick, Jeremiah Pick, and James Ayton.
Tunes provided by APM Music. Follow me at Terry O'Influence. This podcast is powered by ACAST.
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