Writing tonight exhausted on the train home from a way fun Personal Democracy conference.

I've been reading Before The Storm, Rick Perlstein's book on Barry Goldwater and The Rise Of American Conservatism. An old hat to some readers, I know, but totally new and interesting to this compsci/theater major. Plus Jon Chait called it the bible of the left-wing blogosphere, so I figured I had better check it out. Plus I'm reading it simultaneously with this crazy anthology of space opera, and so am finding all kinds of exciting Goldwater/Heinlein Libertarian/Militarist parallels.

Here, an excerpt, a fascinating intersection of political history and audio production history. It's in the discussion of the LBJ campaign's awesome 1964 Daisy Girl Ad, which, watch it if you haven't:

When DDB (LBJ's ad agency) scraped its civil rights spots... it was Tony Schwartz whom they called upon. Schwartz was a sui generis American genius, a sculptor in sound, a manufacturer of moods. He was the inventor of the first portable tape recorder, with which he took to the streets to produce LPs that were celebrations of all things audible: cabdrivers' chatter, Times Square at rush hour, Jamaican songs sung by a shop girl at Macy's. He also produced commercials. His masterpiece was a series of radio spots for American Airlines. He sold the romance of America's great cities by crafting the aural equivilant of skylines. For one spot, Shcwartz waited for an overcast day in his West Side Manhattan neighborhood and recorded Hudson River foghorns while hiring a local hobo called Moondog to walk around with the bells, drums, and pots and pans he perpetually carried on his back: instant San Francisco. The commercials brought an immediate spike in the airline's bookings.

(Perlstein cites this NPR profile as his source, which I havent listened to yet.) It is way reminiscent of Ramyond Scott, another intense American musique-concrete pioneer of the 1960s whose work focused on radio-ad production.

And Schwartz was the brain behind the Daisy Girl. It's similarly stunning to remember that there was a time in US politics when both candidates contested to see who could appear more ANTI war, rather than today's basically-unquestioned who-can-appear-more-militarist contest.