Industrial Musicals by Twenty Thousand Hertz

This is Ad Infinitum . Ad Infinitum is the award-winning podcast solely focused on audio ads , the creatives who make them and or the latest thinking that informs them how the space is evolving . And , my favorite part , a roundup of recent audio ads with analysis by yours truly , Stew Redwine , and each episode's guest .

I feel all teeming inside .

As Wayne Brady put it on a recent episode of Ad Infinitum , music is the best conveyor of message and comedy . When it works , it's catchy , and that's what you want as an ad . You want it to be catchy At Oxford Road . We've seen this firsthand .

We once built a full-on miniature musical for a client I can't name , but I can play you just a sample .

We also created a spot for Tommy John last year called Sending you a Message . Here's a little bit of that .

Is it just me , or does it sound like the universe is sending a message ?

We're excited that that spot was accepted as a Mercury Award finalist for 2025 . And we'll let you know if we ended up being a winner . The point is , you know , we're not afraid to take a swing when music can say it better . So , with that spirit , enjoy this episode of 20,000 Hertz .

You're listening to 20,000 Hertz . I'm Dallas Taylor .

Are we ready to go ?

I'm ready and you have the big red light going .

Yeah , it's going yeah .

Excellent . Recently I sat down with producer Amelia Tate . Okay so we're here to talk about industrial musicals today Dallas .

Okay , Interesting . In fact , before I even explain what an industrial musical really is , I'd like to set a scene , if you wouldn't mind . I'd love for you to imagine that you're a salesman and it's 1972 and you work for Lipton Tees .

Okay .

Are you in the mindset ?

72 , big hair . The color of the world is a little bit more just like brown , and I am selling tea .

And it's not going that well . You know it's a hard gig . Your competitors are muscling in on your territory , so you go to the company's annual sales show and then you hear this but it's the lived and live , and I love it , I love it and live it every day .

I love the lived and live and I'm glad of it . Sing it , fellas . I wouldn't have it any other way .

I mean you're motivated , right .

I'm motivated , yeah .

Yeah , you want to sell tea . I mean it's a hard job selling Lipton tea . So , in a nutshell , an industrial musical is a performance put on by a corporation for a purely private audience of employees .

Liability , working capital , profit , gross and net Making profits . With good finance you bet .

These glitzy productions started in the 1950s .

With the new Ford tractors , the future's looking fine . Now's the time to roll your sleeves up .

Because if you rise and shine and they continued to be popular through the mid-80s Back to the future .

A great petite future that starts right now .

And it was designed essentially to kind of motivate people and move them and sometimes teach you a few selling tricks as well .

This is a wild , wild world .

Yeah , I mean it goes so deep . So yes , I've got another little motivational ditty in the queue here for you , which is the 1963 song Xerox , the Name by Xerox , the Copying Company .

Are we back at a convention center , I guess ?

We're still in the convention center . Yeah , there's women kicking their legs high with red lipstick . Wow , motivating you , although I think this one sounds a little bit more like birds should be singing it in a Disney movie . Like it's a little bit more sweet .

We're getting dizzy , dizzy , dizzy , being busy , busy , busy at the Xerox company . There's a crisis here a minute , but we're happy to be in it at the Xerox company .

I feel like it would be more shocking than anything . You know the hard life of a tea salesman and you're just like whoa . It'd be awesome if you give me like a three cent raise , but it's cool that you put on this very expensive production Right .

I mean , that is the thing about these and why they're such a fascinating bit of history is that a lot of them were really big budget , bigger budget than actual Broadway musicals .

Wow , and it's just like for one performance .

One performance yes .

You come home and you're gonna be like they put on a full on Broadway musical at the company meeting and everyone being like no , they didn't , you're exaggerating . No , they did and they like have to take that to their grave .

But while some employees might have faced skepticism from their friends and family , others went home with Proof , a souvenir record with all the songs they'd heard that night .

I have a very strange record collection which consists of records I was never supposed to own or listen to .

That's Steve Young , a comedy writer and collector .

There are musicals about selling and servicing diesel engines , the triumphs and tragedies of being a Coca-Cola bottler , the exciting year ahead for the marketing department at a sunscreen company , or kids' sneakers .

Steve has been collecting these records for over 25 years , and today he's pretty much the leading expert on the genre .

The full-fledged industrial musical seems to have come up in post-war America by the early 50s . You had Broadway musicals like South Pacific and Oklahoma that were enormous , popular , mainstream , middle-class entertainments .

Oklahoma , where the wind comes sweeping down the plain .

And gradually some people in the big corporations realized , you know , we could just borrow this entire form for our own purposes .

Who else but Whirlpool could ever be First of all ?

in the industry . First with the products that serve so well , first with the features that sell , sell , sell .

I think what I'm struggling to get my head around is what the plots were .

Some industrial shows were reviews and you had just strings of songs and stagecraft to highlight different points .

For instance , a refrigerator company might make a song to help their salesman remember the most important selling points .

They've got features . To talk about Features , you should all remember Magnetic doors , revolving shelves , convenient things that sell themselves .

But the most ambitious of these did go down the road of let's make a full book musical with a character and a plot , and oftentimes it was something about a McDonald's manager or an American Motors dealer who had kind of fallen into a slump and was gloomy .

I manage a Kenny's shoe store . I do it every day .

I do it every day and then something would happen , whether it was a sort of Dickensian ghosts of the past , present and future , to show how great the coming products were going to be in the marketing or some other jumpstart to make the main character and , by extension , everyone in the audience feel wow , I think I've got my mojo back . Pull yourself together .

The audience feel wow , I think I've got my mojo back . We're so together . A kinny manager's life is one of action and with each sale there comes a satisfaction . So , despite the madness we must face each day being right on target is the only way Right on target is the only way , so it might be hard to pick no-transcript .

Oh boy , yeah , that's hard Like oh , which of your children do you love the most ? Well , anything from Diesel Dazzle is pretty great .

Detroit . Diesel is dazzling . Diesel is dazzling . Diesel is dazzling now . Dazzling sales , dazzling growth .

The other one that you always have to mention is the crown jewel . Just in terms of conceptual craziness as well as quality . Just in terms of conceptual craziness as well as quality .

Oh yeah , so here we go . This is my bathroom from 1969's . The bathrooms are coming .

My bathroom , my bathroom , oh god this is this is amazing is a private kind of place .

Sure is very special kind of place .

Sure is .

Very special kind of place .

It's a woman just singing this confessional song about how the bathroom is where she can be herself and feels free and feels at peace in a troubled world .

Now at last I can you tell me a little bit when ?

I wash and where I cream .

So can you tell me a little bit about how you did first hear these and how you first got into collecting industrial musicals ?

I was a writer for Late Night and then Late Show with David Letterman .

From New York , the greatest city in the world . It's the Late Show with David Letterman .

And one of the bits on the show was called Dave's Record Collection , in which Dave Letterman would hold up real , unintentionally funny record albums and we'd hear a sample . He'd have a snarky remark .

Ronald McDonald visits America . Let's listen to a little bit of this . Hi there , I'm Ronald McDonald , and you and I are about to discover America . Together , we'll visit all the states and travel thousands of miles , and then we'll find out what a clown smells like after six days in a van .

At the time , part of Steve's job involved going to record stores and thrift shops to look for more weird records to play on the show , and digging through those dusty record bins , he came across something strange .

I began coming back from my hunting expeditions with these mysterious corporate souvenir records and I just thought this is comedy gold before we've even heard one second of the audio .

But once he did start listening , it felt like he had discovered a secret portal to another dimension . It was this quirky chapter of American history that no one seemed to know about or remember . On top of that , the songs were often surprisingly good .

You would think they would just be sad and ridiculous and some of them were not so great , but a few of them really got my attention because of the production value and the talent and just the catchiness of the songs .

My insurance man .

Is that what they call you ?

My insurance man . Is that what they say ? Are you sure that you're recognized as the man who's organized To make the most of every ?

single day . Soon enough . Steve was hunting down these records everywhere he could .

I started going to record shows , networking with other record collectors and dealers . It was very , very slow because almost no one knew that these records existed .

But that scarcity just made these albums even more enticing . So Steve kept tracking them down . Today he has over 200 of them . This is my absolute favorite one , the one I want to play you next . I asked Steve what he thought was the weirdest one , and he told me about BF Goodrich , the tire dealerships 1979 industrial musical which was called the Great Life .

Oh .

And he's going to lose his soul and his tire dealership if he doesn't sell enough tires in a month .

That is dark .

It's dark right .

Oh , time's running out to sell tires . He's got tires to sell , oh gosh , he's got tires to sell .

If he doesn't sell them , the tires will sell .

That's terrifying If he doesn't sell them the tires will sell 5 , 10 , 15 in these people to sell tires .

I mean it's interesting because this is 1979 . So maybe you know we've had about 20 years of industrial musicals by this point . Maybe they're like the happy clappy stuff didn't work , let's go straight for the threats of hell . They're like look we need to sell tires .

What do we do ?

Yeah .

Oh yeah , threaten their eternal damnation . Note the BF Goodrich company has never explicitly threatened employees with eternal damnation for not selling enough tires .

There's a job I've gotta do if I'm gonna hold my own . Gotta sell a load of tires . Gotta hit the road for home . I've made a crazy deal and it's really been a thrill , but the piper will be paid and it's not your average bill .

Sometimes the salesman's wives were also invited into the audience , which did mean that some of the songs were actually kind of geared towards them .

I bet this is going to be culturally dated .

Yeah , yeah , it's a little , so here is An Ex-On-Dealer's Wife from 1979 .

Oh .

Yeah .

Yeah , she is .

It's true .

Steve started his record collection because he found songs like this hilarious . But as he delved deeper and deeper into this world , he realised that there was a lot more to it than he expected . First , steve co-wrote a book about industrial musicals . Then filmmaker Dava Wisenant made a documentary about them , with Steve as the main subject .

What started as just a snarky can you believe this is for real morphed over time . I started tracking down writers and performers who'd done these shows and I learned about their lives .

For more than 25 years , Steve Young has been hunting down recordings of industrial musicals , and as his collection grew , he decided he wanted to share it with the world . So in 2013 , Steve co-wrote a book called Everything's Coming Up Profits the Golden Age of Industrial Musicals .

CEOs , profits and sales with top hats and tails . Corporate music , corporate musical show .

Through the documentary , steve finally got to meet the people who made the music that he'd been listening to for decades . For instance , he met composers like Hank Beebe and Sid Siegel , who worked on a bunch of these shows . Sid wrote the industrial musical gateway drug my Bathroom .

I heard them say that silicones provide protection from the heat and , in practically the same breath , from the heat and in practically the same breath . I heard them say that silicones provide protection from the cold .

For Steve , meeting the guy who wrote the silicone song was like meeting a rock star .

I worked at the Letterman Show for 25 years and there were famous people coming on the show every day . I generally didn't go out of my way to try to meet them , even though I might have liked their work .

But for these artists , Steve's enthusiasm came as a bit of a surprise .

When I would track someone down , there was confusion . How can you possibly know about the diesel engine show or the standard oil show or whatever ? Simply know about the diesel engine show or the standard oil show or whatever . They were so sure that no one in the outside world would ever hear about this or talk about it .

Here's composer Hank Beebe in the documentary .

They were never publicized , there was no advertising , there were no tickets sold or anything like that .

It was like we were CIA agents .

There was also worry because I was the comedy writer from the late night TV show . Oh no , are we about to be made fun of ? Are we being set up somehow to be mocked ?

But Steve didn't want to mock these artists . He wanted to celebrate their work and learn what inspired them to do it .

There's so many that said we only had one setting use all our talent and make it as great as it can be , even if it's a lawnmower show that's going to be heard once at 8am in a hotel ballroom , because that's just the reason they got into this world of work was because they enjoyed making things great .

Some industrial musical composers actually went on to become quite famous . Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote Ford's 1959 musical Fordify your Future .

Go fast , go slow you'll be shifting on the go . Here is any speed for any need . Here is any speed for any need .

A few years later , these same composers went on to write songs for Fiddler on the Roof , Matchmaker , matchmaker make me a match , find me a fine , catch me a catch . But most of these composers never found mainstream success or appreciation .

When the documentary came out , hank Beebe said when I used to do industrial shows in New York I was called the king of the industrial shows and it was meant as an insult because it was seen as not legitimate work and certainly not worthy of the respect of the Broadway world .

These artists might have been ignored or even mocked by their mainstream peers , but when their work was heard by the right people , it could really move them .

I've heard stories from veterans from this field saying they would be in the wings watching the audience and seeing tears streaming down the faces of salesmen and managers . Just the feeling that somebody gets it . Somebody knows what we're up against out there in the field .

These songs were made for a very particular time and place , but some of them can still resonate today .

There's one from the Detroit Diesel Engine Show called One man Operation , sung by a woman who is recounting how her husband was the sole proprietor of this diesel engine business and he was running himself ragged Work days holidays .

They all became the same 18 hours every 24 .

15 hours every 24 . 50 years later , people who have no connection with this world of what the company was doing still can feel that human drama coming out of these songs when they're done right there for the longest , while I never saw him smile .

Now his smile is what he's famous for .

The thing that is the most surprising is just how objectively incredible some of this musicianship is . I mean even the one that's real creepy about sell , sell , sell , or you know .

Or you'll go to hell .

Yeah , even that one is . It reminds me of just an incredible , you know Broadway musical .

Yeah , I mean . It's interesting though , because I had that discussion with Steve , which is can corporate art be art ?

I think we're at the point in history where we don't automatically disqualify something from respect just because of its commercial origins . I tell people , for example , that Michelangelo did not paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling because it was a hobby or a passion project .

Sadly , Sid Siegel passed away in 2015 and Hank Beebe died in 2023 . But Steve is grateful that he got to know them and that he could bring some attention to their work while they were still alive .

These people became my friends and mentors and in some cases even collaborators . They got to look back from a different perspective on their own careers and it was a great vindication for them .

So what happened to the industrial musical ? Why isn't your company commissioning one for your next sales meeting ?

It ran pretty well for several decades , I would say by the early 80s it was no longer a novelty and you had a different generation of people in the workforce who did not necessarily grow up thinking musical theatre was cool . So you had some rock and roll , industrials and disco .

Good morning dance fans and welcome again to 79 Fever , the world's first sales meeting with a disco beat . There's not one other office furniture manufacturer that hustled through 1978 the way we did .

But the wheel was turning and the golden age I call it was really done by the mid 80s .

I immediately think that it must be a million times easier just to bring in an established artist , instead of making a whole production from scratch .

Right , I mean , that's probably what they do now . Right , like Beyonce will do a private corporate gig .

Yeah , I saw like a clip from somebody's cell phone of Kevin Hart doing something for the Walmart corporate event .

Well , right now , man , I want to say good morning Walmart .

Good morning , wow , wow .

In the modern era , industrial musicals are critically endangered , but they're not totally extinct .

It continued into the 21st century and has never completely gone away . I know State Farm Insurance has continued to do big musicals every couple of years .

So Walmart did one in the early 2000s , which . I am desperate to listen to , but do not have any evidence of online , sadly .

See , because somebody at Walmart went , there's this thing called the internet , that's really blowing up . And maybe we just keep it right here .

We don't record it . Yeah , after bathtubs over Broadway came out , some of these companies started reaching out to Steve .

I did one not too long ago where a production company said we think we can convince this pharmaceutical company to do a musical opening number at their big sales meeting . Would you be interested in working on that ? And I said you bet I would . I've been training for 25 years for it .

Industrial musicals were almost lost forever , but Steve has now ensured that they can be discovered and enjoyed by an entirely new generation . So why has he put so much hard work into preserving this forgotten corner of pop culture ?

Because these shows were so ephemeral they were really meant for one specific time and place and it had such a short shelf life . Nobody thought it had any value beyond that one event , and I said I think it does have value .

Find out more at defactosoundcom .

This episode was written and produced by Amelia Tate .

It was story edited by Casey Emmerling . With help from Grace East .

It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt .

And Jesus Arteaga . Thanks to our guest , Steve Young . These days , Steve tours the country doing shows that include live music , storytelling and exclusive clips from long-lost industrial musicals . Learn more at steveyoungworldcom .

That was 20,000 Hertz and their episode Industrial Musicals . It's easy to laugh at singing salespeople and odes to bathroom fixtures , but it's harder to dismiss how powerful these productions really were . People remembered them , they were moved and they sold more product because they were so inspired . The question for us decades later isn't why did they do that ?