Television pioneer Ron Popeil died last week at 86 years old.
Popeil is perhaps best known as the person who gave us the infomercial. Whether that was a blessing or a curse is, I suppose, up to you.
Popeil’s first foray into TV marketing was in the 1950s with his Ronco Chop-O-Matic. It quickly spread nationally and made him millions. By the 1960s, his infomercials were part of the TV landscape, and as Americans became increasingly hooked on TV we couldn’t avoid his ubiquitous sales pitches.
Was there a viewer in the United States who hadn’t heard about The Popeil Pocket Fisherman, Great Looking Hair formula No. 9 Hair in a Can Spray, Mr. Microphone (“Hey, Good Lookin’, We’ll be back to pick you up later!”) and other Popeil merchandise?
Popeil and his company Ronco gave us catch phrases that entered the language and settled in our psyches. “Set it and forget it,” “Now how much would you pay?” and the subtle disclaimer “Less shipping and handling.” As a personal favorite I have to go with: “But, wait! There’s more!” which is impossible to say without exclamation marks.
I admit I was not one of the millions of viewers who actually purchased Popeil’s products. I never felt a need for a pocket fishing pole or a device that chops vegetables without all the mess. I considered Popeil something of a huckster. I was wary that the merchandise these loud, fast-paced commercials peddled would turn out to be worthless. That was until I learned Ronco also sold records.
In addition to being a typical TV watching American, I was a typical record-playing, pop music lover as well as a budding guitar player. I was pleased beyond belief when I discovered a Ronco compilation album. These were LPs which included as many as 20 tracks by 20 different artists.
Instead of spending my hard-earned dollars purchasing an album by a singer or a group that I was curious to hear, I could spend those same dollars on an album with a variety of opportunities to satisfy my musical explorations.
It is not clear that Ronco was the first to issue compilation albums, but Popeil’s company certainly got the ball rolling. A Canadian company, K-Tel, soon started selling compilation LPs and even some of the big players, Warner Brothers Records, for example, got into the mail-order compilation LP game. The 1970s was a great decade to sample the smorgasbord of up-coming musical acts.
Because ways to buy and listen to music began to change in the 1980s, compilation records became less of a thing. I lost most of my LPs in a flood in the 1990s, but an old Ronco LP I managed to salvage came to mind, and I dug out “Street Level: 20 New Wave Hits.”
It has a date of 1980, which is about when Ronco started to get out of the business. By that time, “New Wave” was already an established musical genre. One track that was new to me, and I particularly liked is ”Reasons to be Cheerful Part III” by Ian Drury.
Turns out, my skepticism about Ronco might have been a little justified. Ronco and K-Tel apparently figured out a way to sell records on the cheap. See, on a conventional 12” record you can put about 23 minutes of music on a side with the grooves cut at a normal depth and width. When you try to squeeze more music onto a side, the grooves have to be narrower and sound quality suffers. So the buyer is getting more tunes, but less quality. Since my goal was a greater number of artists rather than better fidelity, I was willing to pay Ron Popeil’s price.
Back then, compilation records were my way of exploring new music and artists. The title of a 2013 Forbes column, “K-Tel records: The Spotify of the 70s,” could describe that part of my musical journey that started with Ronco and K-Tel.
These days I use Spotify. I will stick with it until someone says, “But Wait! There’s more!”
