Our mantra this week: If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.
Did you know George Carlin started out as a DJ? So did his first partner, Jack Burns, who eventually teamed with Avery Schreiber. There’s no shortage of DJs who cut comedy records.
In the early ’70s, the hottest such comedy team was Bob Hudson and Ron Landry, who worked mornings on KGBS in Los Angeles. Their on-air act was so good that they did four records.
The Hudson and Landry albums were recorded live at the Pomona National Golf Club, most likely in the bar. Judging from the gales of laughter, it sounds like a well-oiled crowd.
(They also filmed an episode of “Get Smart” there in 1969. That’s where this screen grab is from.)
Having listened to three Hudson and Landry albums, I’m not sure there was four records’ worth of material. Even so, some of their bits deserved all those big laughs from the friendly folks in the lounge. Here are two. Not sure you could do the latter today, but things were different in 1972.
“Ajax Airlines” and “Bruiser La Rue,” Hudson and Landry, from “Losing Their Heads,” 1972. It’s out of print, but both cuts are available digitally.
Bob Hudson retired from radio in 1988 and was 66 when he died in 1997.
Ron Landry became a TV comedy writer, working on “Flo,” “Benson,” “The Redd Foxx Show” and “Gimme A Break” among others, in the late ’70s and into the ’80s. He was 67 when he died in 2002.
Speaking of passings: Peter Bergman, another Los Angeles radio guy who became a comedian, died today. He was 72. To those hoping to hear some Firesign Theatre here, my apologies. Neither I nor my friends ever got into it.
I used to be able to do several Hudson and Landry routines from memory, some off this album. As for Firesign Theater, I always found them funnier in small doses (like their commercial for Bear Whiz Beer—slogan, “It’s the Water”) than in their dense, long-form pieces. But what an artifact of the late 60s/early 70s: comedy as Beatle-inspired, multitracked art.
I remember listening to Hudson & Landry on KGBS in L.A. in the early 1970s. That station had a great lineup — Hudson & Landry, Bill Ballance and Dave Hull. Bob Hudson was a legendary LA DJ, but the H&L stuff seems like watered down Lohman and Barkley, another LA DJ act at the time.
Anyway, thanks…I haven’t heard them again in years, I enjoyed listening to this.