COLLECTORS’ CORNER: Denver Radio: Inner View Interview
By Chris Wood
Publisher
Chris Wood photos
After the Packers song compilations made, “The Hit Parade at the Library of Congress,” as local columnist Kendra Meinert so eloquently put it at the time, the media machine cranked into high gear to spread the good word!
Since the Super Bowl Champion Packers were making their second consecutive trip to the big dance and were the odds-on favorites to beat the Denver Broncos, all things Packeresque were news in both Wisconsin and Colorado, not to mention the rest of the USA, for that matter.
The story was picked up by both the Associated Press and United Press International, and I received several calls requesting interviews. One of the more interesting ones came from a Denver radio station, who wanted to do a live interview on the Friday before Super Bowl Sunday during afternoon “Drive Time,” when they had their largest daily audience listening on the way home from work.
They called Wed., Jan. 21, to set it up. I had seen a half-page ad in the Green Bay Press-Gazette Super Bowl Week special section two days previously from a Denver radio station championing the Broncos. However, the “GO BRONCOS, BRONCOS ARE #1” piece also contained a cleverly-hidden, nasty message for Packers fans, ala the old Mad Magazine inside back cover feature. The monthly magazine’s inside back cover in the ‘60s had always been a miniature poster of sorts about something very topical with some namby-pamby copy written therein that would be offensive to no one; however with three vertical folds, the image changed to reveal a completely different take on the subject, usually irreverent as hell!
It was good to be aware of this dirty little trick that had been played on Green Bay fans by radio station KBPI, but since it wasn’t the same one that would be doing the interview, I wasn’t too concerned. Since nobody at The Press-Gazette had caught it before it ran, Denver had gotten one up on us in the good-natured(?!) jousting going on between the two teams and towns in the week leading up to the big game. I agreed to be available at home on that Friday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. when the afternoon jocks at KRRF (aka Ralph Radio) – Gus Mircos and Kent Groshong – would call to conduct the interview. The call came as scheduled and I picked up the phone to hear “The Title’s Back in Titletown,” my latest Packers composition playing in the background. After three verses, during which one of the jocks was whooping it up and whistling along to the song (and not very well, I might add!), they came on the air with lead man Gus Mircos (GM) and his sidekick Kent Groshong (KG) full of spit and vinegar!
GM: “Boy, you can tell I’ve been to a lot of German weddings, right?”
KG: “Is that what that was!”
GM: “Yeah, well let’s get Chris Wood on. Hey, that’s a great song, Chris!”
CW: “Well, thank you.”
GM: “I like it!”
CW: “I appreciate that.”
GM: “Yeah, a little fun to – well, I think it’s more polka than waltz, isn’t it?”
CW: “Well, we’re calling it a waltzolka, but it’s got elements of both in it.”
GM: “Yeah … I think that’s better than calling it a paltz; you could have gone that way. Well, what’s amazing about this song is that it’s at The Library of Congress at the American Folk Center! Uh, explain to us all how you got that done … ”
CW: “Well, what happened was … ”
GM: “You paid a lot of money to, you paid bribes to the person that runs the place, right?”
CW: “No, no, not exactly; what happened was I’m a record collector in my spare time and I had an old recording that had come out of The Library of Congress in the ‘40s by a McKinley Morganfield – a.k.a. Muddy Waters – before he signed on with Chess and was known. The library had released a number of recordings in the ‘40s that had been done by these fellows, Alan and John Lomax – or had been edited by them, rather – and I had gotten a hold of one of these. I wanted to find out more information about it, so I called there last summer and they had connected me with the Folk Archives. I was speaking to a woman named Judith Gray there; she was answering my questions and then she said: ‘I’ll send you some more information; give me your name and address.’
“Once she got my address, she said: ‘Oh, you’re from Green Bay.’ “
“ ‘Well yes, I am.’ ”
“ ‘Well, I’m originally from Wausau,’ she told me and very quickly the talk drifted to the Packers as it usually does for us people who are originally from this area …”
GM: “Yeah, cause there’s nothing else to do!” (Laughing, both of us).”
CW: “Well, there’s actually a little more than that, but at any rate, once she found out that I had made these two tape compilations of goofy Packers songs like the one you just heard … ”
GM: “Yeah … ”
CW: “She said, ‘Would you send me a copy of those tapes, just to listen to and then I’ll send them back.’ ”
“I said I’d be happy to send copies, ‘You can keep for your very own,’ and then I did that. I didn’t hear back from her until New Year’s Eve, when I got a very nice card saying that she really enjoyed the tapes and especially enjoyed tormenting Washington, D.C., fans with them (GM laughing). She indicated then she was going to enter them as a permanent entry into The Library Archives, which I thought was kind of unusual. She explained that because there were something like 46 songs in the collection and because these represented a group of people in the United States, that being Packer fans, she was really interested in that element of it. She couldn’t imagine there being that many songs for any other team, so she felt it was worthwhile in doing that and has done it.”
GM: “Hmn, boy, it’s too bad I didn’t know her, because there was a time I had literally a big, box full – I must have had, uh, I’ll betcha 50 cassettes, uh, 30 45 rpm records, uh, reel-to-reel tapes that numbered a couple of dozen, about the Broncos.”
CW: “No kidding!”
(My B.S. detector had automatically activated itself.)
GM: “Yeah.”
CW: “Are you serious?”
GM: “But they weren’t – you know, most of – I mean, yours is professionally done, most of them were, you know, people recorded them in the studio or in their basement or their living room or something like that.”
(B.S. detector beating faster and harder.)
“But, but yeah, the number of songs, had I thought about it, had I known I could have gotten them into The Library of Congress, I would have saved all those things. But, oh, well, hindsight’s 20/20, it uh, it’s, it’s neat to know you got that all done up there!”
(B.S. detector going off the scale.)
CW: “Yeah, that’s very interesting on your end because as I said, she was not aware and I was not aware there was any other team that had that kind of variety of music recorded about it. And as a matter of fact, I’m making a third Packermania tape, which is what the first two were titled – Packermania and Lambeau Loonacy. I’ve got enough for probably about another somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes, and that will be entered in with the other two, so it will be a three-volume set.”
GM: “Okay, you want to pick the game, Chris? You’re picking the Broncos to win by how many?”
CW: “Well, I’m sorry, I cannot pick the Broncos to win but I … ”
GM: “Yes, you can – this is a Denver radio station, Chris!”
CW: “And actually, I used to live in Durango; I went to Fort Lewis College there… ”
GM: “Boy, everybody from over there used to live here!”
CW: “You know, I’ll tell you; I had a wonderful three years there and nothing but fond memories, and … ”
GM: “Flunked out, huh?”
CW: “No, I didn’t flunk out; actually, that’s where I learned how to write songs – for better or worse! (Laughter in background from both guys.) At any rate, it was a good place for me and I really enjoyed it, but I’m originally from Green Bay and I, eventually, came back to where my roots were. That’s how it worked out. But I’ll tell ya, I’m going to call it the Packers 27 to 24!”
GM: “27 to 24, all right, and in honor of your song, if the Packers lose, we’re burning the CD!” (Laughter all around.)
CW: “Okay, well, I guess that’s fair enough – what about if they win?!”
GM: “We’re still going to burn it!”
KG: “No, then we’ll play it!”
GM: “We’ll play it on Monday.”
CW: “Okay, great – that sounds like a good deal to me!”
GM: “Okay, uh, don’t count on it, though, Chris!”
CW: “I won’t be able to check up on you guys, because we can’t get you here, obviously, you know that.”
GM: “No, that’s true, yeah. But we really appreciate you coming on with us and we all, everybody around here’s been remarking, ‘Gee, the people from Green Bay are really nice,’ and you were no exception to that. Thank you very much!”
CW: “Thank you very much!”
GM: “Have a good day.”
KG: “See you later, Chris!”
Two days later, the Packers lost to the Broncos in Super Bowl XXXII 31-24. It was the first and only Super Bowl the Packers played in and haven’t won.
In 2004, I happened to be in Washington, D.C., for a week-long conference. Somehow, it seemed like the right idea to go over to The Library of Congress, where I was able to check out the collection and listen to several of the songs. And, since then, we have added numerous Packers songs to the collection. We will always do so as long as they continue to appear on the Wisconsin scene, football, musical or other!
(Editor’s note: The interview was slightly edited for brevity’s sake.)