Dan Ingram in 1993, when he was a disc jockey in WCBS-FM in New York. He first achieved fame on WABC-AM when it was a Top 40 powerhouse.CreditJim Estrin/The New York Times
By Richard Sandomir
25 June 2018
Dan Ingram, a popular disc jockey whose wisecracks and double entendres rippled through the air at rock ’n’ roll stations in New York City from the early 1960s to the early 21st century, died on Sunday, 24 June 2018, at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 83.
His son Christopher said he died after choking on a piece of steak. He had received a diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndrome in 2014.
Mr. Ingram preceded the era of shock jocks, but he was a quick-thinking, somewhat bawdy jester who mocked songs, singers, sponsors and the weather at WABC-AM, a powerful Top 40 station that grew in the ’60s with the popularity of the Beatles, the Motown stable of artists and others.
Later, at WCBS-FM, the groundbreaking oldies-station, he continued his drollery while exhuming the music he had played decades earlier.
“I like to have fun with my listeners,” Mr. Ingram told The New York Times in 1993, when he was at WCBS-FM. “I like them to use their minds. I like them to say, ‘I don’t believe he said that.’ But I don’t like to do sleaze.”
His irreverence was usually heard in short bursts, often during musical introductions before a song was sung.
In those exquisitely-timed moments, called “talk-ups,” he might ridicule a song by Rosie and the Originals (“And now, ladies and gentlemen, the worst record ever recorded, ‘Angel Baby’ ”), tinker with the title of Elton John’s hit “Someone saved my life tonight” (as “Someone shaved my wife tonight”) and refer to Herb Alpert’s group, the Tijuana Brass, as “the Teeny Weeny Brass.”
Once, giving the weather report, he said: “I love brief showers. They’re fun. Watch those briefs coming down!”
Allan Sniffen, who runs MusicRadio77, a website devoted to the Top 40 legacy of WABC-AM, called Mr. Ingram “the greatest of his generation.” In a telephone interview, he added: “He was technically the best. He could make the records fit together, he was funny, and he was the best ad-libber I ever heard.”
Mr. Ingram, Mr. Sniffen said, “inspired a generation of young listeners to become radio people.”
With a deep voice that conveyed mischief, Mr. Ingram addressed his fans as “Kemosabe” (the Native American character Tonto’s term of endearment for the Lone Ranger). He variously called his show the “Ingram mess,” the “Ingram flingram” or the “Ingram travesty.” And each day he named an “honor group” (like trombonists or garbagemen) and announced a word of the day, with a twisted definition.
“Contravene,” he once said, “is something that prevents babies.”
Daniel Trombley Ingram was born into a musical family on 7 September 1934, in Oceanside, N.Y. His father, John, played saxophone and flute for big bands, and his mother, Dorothy (Trombley) Ingram, was a cellist who led a chamber-music group, the Trombley Trio.
Smitten with radio, Mr. Ingram attended live broadcasts in Manhattan and entered a D.J. contest on Fred Robbins’s radio show at age 13. He finished last in a field of six. “The guy who won became a carpenter in New Jersey,” Mr. Ingram said in an interview in 2002 on the New Jersey FM station WFMU.
He attended Hofstra College (now Hofstra University) on Long Island but left before graduation to pursue a radio career, working at stations on Long Island and in Connecticut, Dallas and St. Louis.
He joined WABC-AM in 1961 as it battled WMCA-AM for supremacy among rock listeners in the New York market. The other personalities at WABC included Bruce Morrow, known as Cousin Brucie, Ron Lundy, Chuck Leonard and Herb Oscar Anderson (who died last year). Of them, only Mr. Morrow survives.
He joined WABC-AM in 1961 as it battled WMCA-AM for supremacy among rock listeners in the New York market. The other personalities at WABC included Bruce Morrow, known as Cousin Brucie, Ron Lundy, Chuck Leonard and Herb Oscar Anderson (who died last year). Of them, only Mr. Morrow survives.
Mr. Ingram stayed with WABC until it changed to a talk format in 1982. On his final broadcast, he signed off by saying, “The honor group of the day, my friend, is you, because if you hadn’t listened I would never have been here.”
After leaving WABC, Mr. Ingram held other radio jobs and did commercial voice-overs. But it was not until 1991 that he returned to prominence when he joined WCBS-FM, a powerhouse station built on playing classic rock ’n’ roll.
“I’m lucky as hell that there’s a place in New York where I can peddle my wares,” Mr. Ingram told The Times in 2002, a year before he retired. “Elderly disc jockeys aren’t exactly in great demand around the country.”
In addition to his son Christopher, who wrote a novel, “Hey Kemosabe!” (2014), based in part on his father’s experiences, Mr. Ingram is survived by his wife, Maureen Donnelly; four other sons, Daniel, David, Robert and Phillip; four daughters, Patricia Gavigan, Michelle Rydberg and Christina and Jacqueline Ingram; two stepdaughters, Laura Turetsky and Linda Ingram-Vargas; 26 grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.
His first wife, Kathleen Patricia (Snediker) Ingram, died in a car accident in 1962; his marriages to Anita Strand and Jeannie Weigel ended in divorce.
Mr. Ingram’s freewheeling, smart-alecky approach had its moments of anxiety. In 1993, he told The Times that a disc jockey’s job is filled with “moments of terror interrupted by long periods of utter boredom.”
“You talk for 10 seconds, the music plays, you’ve got nothing to do.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2018, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Dan Ingram, 83, New York Disc Jockey Who Spun Hits and Cracked Wise, Dies.
Archives 1993
On the air with Dan Ingram; 'Hi-yo, Kemo Sabe!' A King of Nostalgia
by Charles Strummay for the NYT
13 May 1993
It is 12:03 P.M., Saturday, on the 17th floor of the CBS building on West 52d Street, and the 'Ingram mess', as Dan Ingram himself calls it, has begun to spread out for 60 miles on the FM band.
The familiar beat of a 1965 Four Tops recording can be heard on the studio speakers. Mr. Ingram clears his throat, opens the microphone and speaks over the music: "This is the song of the midget and the smorgasbord, "I Can't Help Myself."
And so begins the first of three hours on the highest-rated radio program in its time slot in New York, reaching the big-spending, demographically significant 25-to-54 age group. Presiding over it all from a padded swivel chair in a room the size of a small studio apartment is Daniel Trombley Ingram, 58, the smart aleck who owns the afternoon.
Since 1961, when he became one of the Good Guys on WABC-AM, one of the city's legendary top-40 rock stations, Mr. Ingram has been the irreverent jester of choice for afternoon and drive time rock-and-roll aficionados.
At a time when many oldies stations have eliminated their roster of disk jockeys in favor of an all-tape format, WCBS does things the old-fashioned way, and Mr. Ingram remains the voice that stays the hand from turning the dial during humorless commercials or artless recordings.
Mr. Ingram, who returned to this familiar format two years ago (1991) after almost a decade pursuing a variety of other lucrative broadcasting ventures, is selling nostalgia. In fact, he is nostalgia. Like his WCBS-FM colleagues Bruce Morrow, Harry Harrison and Ron Lundy, he is playing the songs he helped popularize 20, 30, almost 40 years ago, a disk jockey with a very long memory for music meant to last about 3 minutes at 45 r.p.m. "It's my theory of minimum involvement for maximum return," he said. "They pay decent money for this sort of thing."
Over the course of the afternoon, he will exhume for his listeners the musical artifacts of rock's golden age, unleashing a stream of doo-wops, dip-dips and sha-na-nas from Ruby and the Romantics, the Mello Kings, the Beach Boys and the Dell Vikings.
To do this, Mr. Ingram makes a leap of faith into scriptless radioland, a void of airtime waiting to be filled with music and advertisements, all tied together by whatever Mr. Ingram can think of to say in 10 seconds or less.
In these narrow synapses he gently mocks anyone who crosses his mind, including himself and the songs he plays -- songs so much a part of popular culture that listeners who can't remember their mother's birthday can still lip-sync the lyrics as they drive to the mall.
"Lindbergh didn't know it, but when he was describing flying across the Atlantic he was actually describing doing a disk-jockey show," Mr. Ingram said during a commercial for Mounds candy. "Moments of stark terror interrupted by long periods of utter boredom. You talk for 10 seconds, the music plays, you've got nothing to do. You talk, read a paper. . . ."
And somehow, in that 10-second opening, Mr. Ingram has found a way to establish a rapport with his listeners, who have come to expect the unexpected. By his quips ye shall know him.
"Steve Allen once said that humor and humorous comedic effect involved what he called a jump shift," Mr. Ingram said. "That's to go from one mode of thinking to another so that the juxtaposition is funny.
"I'm either gifted or cursed with a mind that works in weird ways," he said.
He is the perennial joker at the back of the high school auditorium who has a wisecrack for almost every line of the vice principal's exhortation on school spirit. His larder is stocked with double entendres, some of them sophomoric or lascivious but some so cleverly subtle that it may be 30 seconds into the next tune by the time a listener has figured out what he meant.
He sees life through a prism that is part Jerry Seinfeld and part Lenny Bruce, but all peculiarly Dan Ingram.
But for a man so well known, he accepts what all radio personalities must: invisible fame. At 6 feet 3 inches and more than 200 pounds, with a black beard (which appears and disappears on a whim), he is whatever he sounds like. Mostly, he's a bear of a man in sports clothes who drinks tea, reads from note cards and trades barbs with his producer, Al Vertucci, a man who slings tape cassettes with the practiced hand of a short-order cook.
"I like to have fun with my listeners," Mr. Ingram said. "I like them to use their minds. I like them to say, 'I don't believe he said that.' But I don't like to do sleaze."
And so, with only a few seconds between a Petland Discounts commercial and the start of the 1958 recording "At the Hop," he says: "Danny and the Juniors. They're called Danny and the Postgraduates now."
Or a song by Three Dog Night: " 'Joy to the World,' Chanel No. 5 to Beverly Hills, of course."
Among his favorite introductions is one he has done numerous times for a plaintive tune sung slightly off key by Rosie and the Originals:
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the worst record ever recorded, "Angel Baby."
He is also the man who once added this afterthought to a commercial for discounted chicken parts at Pathmark: "Some assembly required."
All this banter is the adhesive for a carefully timed entertainment whose foundation is rock but whose heart is a computer.
When Mr. Ingram sits down at the microphone, he has before him two lists, both computer generated. One is a roster of advertisers and the hour and minute when their commercials must be broadcast. The other list, three pages long, contains 50 songs, chosen by the computer according to a secret recipe concocted by the station's program director, Joe McCoy.
For example, the third song of the day was "Runaway," by Del Shannon. On the play list, this comes out as 61 (the year); 34 (a file number for storage); the artist's name; 07 (the length in seconds of the musical introduction, if any); the letters F or C, depending on whether the song fades out or ends cold, and the total playing time, in this case 2:12. A digital timer on Mr. Ingram's desk keeps track for him.
"Ah, yes, a runaway," he tells his listeners. "That's where an Italian stripper works. On CBS-FM, 101.1, America's most-listened-to oldies station. Increasing clouds, breezy, chance of showers today."
Then, targeting what he perceives to be unholy nepotism at WCBS-TV, he takes one of his frequent shots at the father-son forecasting team of Frank and Storm Field.
"Showers," he says. "A Dr. Frankenstorm forecast, the Channel 2 weather monster."
None of these shenanigans were learned at the famous broadcasters' school. They were absorbed in suburban New York.
Mr. Ingram was born in Oceanside, L.I., and grew up in Flushing, Queens, and Malverne, L.I. His father was a big-band studio musician - saxophone, clarinet, flute - who also played with Toscanini. His mother was a concert cellist. In high school, he read bulletin-board announcements over the public address system and, when he was 13, finished dead last in a disk jockey contest on the Freddy Robbins show.
After attending Hofstra College on a drama scholarship, he apprenticed with stations on Long Island and Connecticut before heading out to KBOX, "the voice and choice of dynamic Dallas."
It was there, at the station named for its owner, John Box, that he discovered the phrase that would become the closest thing Mr. Ingram has to a trademark: kimosabe. (Tonto's pet name for the wounded man he nursed back to health -- the Lone Ranger.)
It came off a promo for the station, Mr. Ingram recalled, that included the well-known conclusion of the William Tell Overture that most people know as the "Lone Ranger" music. "Just for kicks, I did an Indian voice," he said. "The word kimosabe was on the promo. It worked."
In July 1961, Mr. Ingram became a WABC Good Guy (later, they were WABC All Americans, after WMCA somehow appropriated the Good Guy label). He was 27 and at the top of his form, with a house in Woodbury, L.I., and a family of five children, including infant twins. Four months later his wife was killed in an automobile accident. He was off the air for several weeks.
"Who knows how you cope with things like that," he recalled. "I finally went back on. The station had announced what happened. I thanked everybody and said there was no way to answer all the cards and sympathy messages. I started playing the music again, and that was it."
Today he looks west and south from the 44th floor of the West 57th Street apartment he shares with the fourth Mrs. Ingram, Maureen Donnelly, a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild. He quickly acknowledges that she is more adept than he at remembering how to spell the names of his nine children.
With time and money no object, the Ingrams decided against buying "a little house on the hill somewhere." Instead, they travel -- to Europe, Australia, Russia.
These indulgences seem appropriate for a man who once promised vast powers to his listeners through a device called a "kimosabe card."
For a time, in the 1960's, WABC-AM mailed the cards to anyone who wrote for one. The bearer, it said, was empowered and authorized by Mr. Ingram "to dance in the surf in your bare feet," among other things. Eventually ABC gave up the promotion because it cost too much.
Such were the diversions of old-fashioned top-40 programming, which no longer exists in radio's highly diversified market.
"There's music a little better, there's music pristine, there's music untouched by human hands. When you're tuned to CBS-FM, you know what you're going to get. It's like everything else. Ten percent is spectacular and the rest . . ." He sighed. "This is music for the moment."
And suddenly most of those moments are gone for the day.
With less than four minutes left, four recordings remain on the play list. Mr. Ingram discards the Channels, Roberta Flack and the Happenings, whose recordings are not timed to fit comfortably with the last commercial and a farewell from the host. He chooses, instead, Elvis Presley's "Return to Sender," with a two-second introduction, a fade finish and a running time of 2 minutes, 36 seconds.
In his deepest Frederick's of Hollywood voice, Mr. Ingram intones:
"Elbow. Parsley." The music begins. It is 2:56 P.M.
A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 1993, on Page C1 of the National edition with the headline: On the air with Dan Ingram; 'Hi-yo, Kemo Sabe!' A King of Nostalgia.
Archives 1993
On the air with Dan Ingram; 'Hi-yo, Kemo Sabe!' A King of Nostalgia
by Charles Strummay for the NYT
13 May 1993
It is 12:03 P.M., Saturday, on the 17th floor of the CBS building on West 52d Street, and the 'Ingram mess', as Dan Ingram himself calls it, has begun to spread out for 60 miles on the FM band.
The familiar beat of a 1965 Four Tops recording can be heard on the studio speakers. Mr. Ingram clears his throat, opens the microphone and speaks over the music: "This is the song of the midget and the smorgasbord, "I Can't Help Myself."
And so begins the first of three hours on the highest-rated radio program in its time slot in New York, reaching the big-spending, demographically significant 25-to-54 age group. Presiding over it all from a padded swivel chair in a room the size of a small studio apartment is Daniel Trombley Ingram, 58, the smart aleck who owns the afternoon.
Since 1961, when he became one of the Good Guys on WABC-AM, one of the city's legendary top-40 rock stations, Mr. Ingram has been the irreverent jester of choice for afternoon and drive time rock-and-roll aficionados.
At a time when many oldies stations have eliminated their roster of disk jockeys in favor of an all-tape format, WCBS does things the old-fashioned way, and Mr. Ingram remains the voice that stays the hand from turning the dial during humorless commercials or artless recordings.
Mr. Ingram, who returned to this familiar format two years ago (1991) after almost a decade pursuing a variety of other lucrative broadcasting ventures, is selling nostalgia. In fact, he is nostalgia. Like his WCBS-FM colleagues Bruce Morrow, Harry Harrison and Ron Lundy, he is playing the songs he helped popularize 20, 30, almost 40 years ago, a disk jockey with a very long memory for music meant to last about 3 minutes at 45 r.p.m. "It's my theory of minimum involvement for maximum return," he said. "They pay decent money for this sort of thing."
Over the course of the afternoon, he will exhume for his listeners the musical artifacts of rock's golden age, unleashing a stream of doo-wops, dip-dips and sha-na-nas from Ruby and the Romantics, the Mello Kings, the Beach Boys and the Dell Vikings.
To do this, Mr. Ingram makes a leap of faith into scriptless radioland, a void of airtime waiting to be filled with music and advertisements, all tied together by whatever Mr. Ingram can think of to say in 10 seconds or less.
In these narrow synapses he gently mocks anyone who crosses his mind, including himself and the songs he plays -- songs so much a part of popular culture that listeners who can't remember their mother's birthday can still lip-sync the lyrics as they drive to the mall.
"Lindbergh didn't know it, but when he was describing flying across the Atlantic he was actually describing doing a disk-jockey show," Mr. Ingram said during a commercial for Mounds candy. "Moments of stark terror interrupted by long periods of utter boredom. You talk for 10 seconds, the music plays, you've got nothing to do. You talk, read a paper. . . ."
And somehow, in that 10-second opening, Mr. Ingram has found a way to establish a rapport with his listeners, who have come to expect the unexpected. By his quips ye shall know him.
"Steve Allen once said that humor and humorous comedic effect involved what he called a jump shift," Mr. Ingram said. "That's to go from one mode of thinking to another so that the juxtaposition is funny.
"I'm either gifted or cursed with a mind that works in weird ways," he said.
He is the perennial joker at the back of the high school auditorium who has a wisecrack for almost every line of the vice principal's exhortation on school spirit. His larder is stocked with double entendres, some of them sophomoric or lascivious but some so cleverly subtle that it may be 30 seconds into the next tune by the time a listener has figured out what he meant.
He sees life through a prism that is part Jerry Seinfeld and part Lenny Bruce, but all peculiarly Dan Ingram.
But for a man so well known, he accepts what all radio personalities must: invisible fame. At 6 feet 3 inches and more than 200 pounds, with a black beard (which appears and disappears on a whim), he is whatever he sounds like. Mostly, he's a bear of a man in sports clothes who drinks tea, reads from note cards and trades barbs with his producer, Al Vertucci, a man who slings tape cassettes with the practiced hand of a short-order cook.
"I like to have fun with my listeners," Mr. Ingram said. "I like them to use their minds. I like them to say, 'I don't believe he said that.' But I don't like to do sleaze."
And so, with only a few seconds between a Petland Discounts commercial and the start of the 1958 recording "At the Hop," he says: "Danny and the Juniors. They're called Danny and the Postgraduates now."
Or a song by Three Dog Night: " 'Joy to the World,' Chanel No. 5 to Beverly Hills, of course."
Among his favorite introductions is one he has done numerous times for a plaintive tune sung slightly off key by Rosie and the Originals:
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the worst record ever recorded, "Angel Baby."
He is also the man who once added this afterthought to a commercial for discounted chicken parts at Pathmark: "Some assembly required."
All this banter is the adhesive for a carefully timed entertainment whose foundation is rock but whose heart is a computer.
When Mr. Ingram sits down at the microphone, he has before him two lists, both computer generated. One is a roster of advertisers and the hour and minute when their commercials must be broadcast. The other list, three pages long, contains 50 songs, chosen by the computer according to a secret recipe concocted by the station's program director, Joe McCoy.
For example, the third song of the day was "Runaway," by Del Shannon. On the play list, this comes out as 61 (the year); 34 (a file number for storage); the artist's name; 07 (the length in seconds of the musical introduction, if any); the letters F or C, depending on whether the song fades out or ends cold, and the total playing time, in this case 2:12. A digital timer on Mr. Ingram's desk keeps track for him.
"Ah, yes, a runaway," he tells his listeners. "That's where an Italian stripper works. On CBS-FM, 101.1, America's most-listened-to oldies station. Increasing clouds, breezy, chance of showers today."
Then, targeting what he perceives to be unholy nepotism at WCBS-TV, he takes one of his frequent shots at the father-son forecasting team of Frank and Storm Field.
"Showers," he says. "A Dr. Frankenstorm forecast, the Channel 2 weather monster."
None of these shenanigans were learned at the famous broadcasters' school. They were absorbed in suburban New York.
Mr. Ingram was born in Oceanside, L.I., and grew up in Flushing, Queens, and Malverne, L.I. His father was a big-band studio musician - saxophone, clarinet, flute - who also played with Toscanini. His mother was a concert cellist. In high school, he read bulletin-board announcements over the public address system and, when he was 13, finished dead last in a disk jockey contest on the Freddy Robbins show.
After attending Hofstra College on a drama scholarship, he apprenticed with stations on Long Island and Connecticut before heading out to KBOX, "the voice and choice of dynamic Dallas."
It was there, at the station named for its owner, John Box, that he discovered the phrase that would become the closest thing Mr. Ingram has to a trademark: kimosabe. (Tonto's pet name for the wounded man he nursed back to health -- the Lone Ranger.)
It came off a promo for the station, Mr. Ingram recalled, that included the well-known conclusion of the William Tell Overture that most people know as the "Lone Ranger" music. "Just for kicks, I did an Indian voice," he said. "The word kimosabe was on the promo. It worked."
In July 1961, Mr. Ingram became a WABC Good Guy (later, they were WABC All Americans, after WMCA somehow appropriated the Good Guy label). He was 27 and at the top of his form, with a house in Woodbury, L.I., and a family of five children, including infant twins. Four months later his wife was killed in an automobile accident. He was off the air for several weeks.
"Who knows how you cope with things like that," he recalled. "I finally went back on. The station had announced what happened. I thanked everybody and said there was no way to answer all the cards and sympathy messages. I started playing the music again, and that was it."
Today he looks west and south from the 44th floor of the West 57th Street apartment he shares with the fourth Mrs. Ingram, Maureen Donnelly, a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild. He quickly acknowledges that she is more adept than he at remembering how to spell the names of his nine children.
With time and money no object, the Ingrams decided against buying "a little house on the hill somewhere." Instead, they travel -- to Europe, Australia, Russia.
These indulgences seem appropriate for a man who once promised vast powers to his listeners through a device called a "kimosabe card."
For a time, in the 1960's, WABC-AM mailed the cards to anyone who wrote for one. The bearer, it said, was empowered and authorized by Mr. Ingram "to dance in the surf in your bare feet," among other things. Eventually ABC gave up the promotion because it cost too much.
Such were the diversions of old-fashioned top-40 programming, which no longer exists in radio's highly diversified market.
"There's music a little better, there's music pristine, there's music untouched by human hands. When you're tuned to CBS-FM, you know what you're going to get. It's like everything else. Ten percent is spectacular and the rest . . ." He sighed. "This is music for the moment."
And suddenly most of those moments are gone for the day.
With less than four minutes left, four recordings remain on the play list. Mr. Ingram discards the Channels, Roberta Flack and the Happenings, whose recordings are not timed to fit comfortably with the last commercial and a farewell from the host. He chooses, instead, Elvis Presley's "Return to Sender," with a two-second introduction, a fade finish and a running time of 2 minutes, 36 seconds.
In his deepest Frederick's of Hollywood voice, Mr. Ingram intones:
"Elbow. Parsley." The music begins. It is 2:56 P.M.
A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 1993, on Page C1 of the National edition with the headline: On the air with Dan Ingram; 'Hi-yo, Kemo Sabe!' A King of Nostalgia.
No comments:
Post a Comment