The FreakyTrigger TOP 25 BRANDS: 18: K-TEL

A pedant notes: Raiders of the Pop Charts was Ronco. Star Trax, however is K-Tel.

I own many, many, K-Tel 20 Chartbusting compilations of the seventies and early eighties. But there are always, always, yet more to be found. They are probably, the records that I listen to the most. Particularly cherished is Hungry for Hits, the gatefold lupine themed 1984 one-off attempt to compete with Now That’s What I Call Music – The Hits Album it is not.

Of all the many foodstuffs shown, only the banana appears to yield successfully to the Clever Cutter.

My K-Tel Top Three:

1. Sounds Spectacular – 20 World Wide Hits Produced By Phil Spector.
http://eil.com/shop/moreinfo.asp?catalogid=293695

2. 22 Dynamic Hits, Vol. II.
http://www.discogs.com/release/974222

3. Music Explosion.
http://bengobaz.livejournal.com/64819.html

Here’s the great story of K-tel:

In 1962, Philip Kives began hawking gadgets on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
He returned to Winnipeg that year, where he starred in what may have been the first infomercial: a five-minute spot in support of a non-stick frying pan, featuring Kives frying eggs live on loval TV.
In the winter of 1965, Kives purchased the Canadian rights for an album, “25 Country Hits”.
He included a Bobby Darin single as an additional giveaway to sweeten the album’s appeal; his first entry into the mail-order record business sold 180,000 pieces.
Kives moved on to new territory. “You can’t imagine what it was like”, he recalls. “I was being paid $1,000 per year to work the family farm in Saskatchewan, the next thing I’m on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, then I’m on TV, and then in 1965 in five months I made a million dollars in Australia selling the Feathertouch Knife. All of a sudden, I’m driving a Cadillac convertible, I was Big Time. From there I went to America and the record business”.
Kives’ second release was a rock ‘n’ roll package, “Groovy Greats”, bought from the same U.S. source and promoted on TV along with the names of music stores where it could be purchased, his hirst appearance at retail outlets. The big break came with “25 Polka Greats”; the compilation sold 1.5 million pieces in the U.S. alone.

International hook
Translating K-tel’s U.S. success to the U.K. market provided a rude awakening for Kives, who remembers, “I lived in London while I was putting together my first English compilation. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. For four months, they wouldn’t talk to me, they’d avoid me. They’d say, “do your kitchen gadgets, your choppers and slices, and leave the music to us”. Out of the U.K. came “Hooked On Classics”, the late-’70s medley of orchestral themes set to a dance beat that sold 8 million pieces. Kives bought the trade name along with the initial package, then expanded on the concept to create a “Hooked On…” format.
By the early ’80s, by Kives’ own admission, “We were flush with cash, and we invested in areas we never should have entered. We bought lot of real estate in oil country, and when the oil market crashed in the mid-’80s, we were in serious trouble. But the biggest mistake we ever made was buying Candlelight Music, which was our downfall. We lost $18 million in one year with that company [which sold oldies albums on a mail-order subscription basis].

Post-Chapter 11 gadgetry
“After Chapter 11 proceedings and reorganization, I put in $3.5 million in cash and wound up with 80% of the company, the rest divided between the shareholders, and concentrated on doing what we knew best, which was music”, Kives continues. “We cut back on TV in the States. By 1986, I started the gadget business again in Canada, took it to Europe, specifically to Germany and the Scandinavian countries and Australia”.

For anyone who watched TV in the ’70’s, memories of K-tel are indelible: An announcer furiously extols the merits of household products like the Miracle Brush or the Veg-O-Matic or several best-selling “Saturday Night Fever” -inspired collections (“Disco Fever!”), the song titles endlessly scrolling down the screen. The name K-tel became generic for “compilation album,” the ultimate compliment our culture can pay to a brand name.
Both gadgets and records are intrinsic to the K-tel success story.
In 1962, the company’s founder, Philip Kives, was demonstrating such products on the Atlantic City boardwalk, and soon was starring in his own (and possibly the first) infomercial, a five-minute TV pitch for a non-stick frying pan. His initial profits funded the first K-tel compilation album in his native Canada, and soon Philip Kives was in the music business with anthology packages like “25 Polka Greats”.
K-tel’s compilations then took on a trendier aspect, from “Psychedelic Mind Trip” of the late ’60’s through easy-listening early ’70’s pop (“Believe In Music” and “Out Of Sight”) onward to the disco era.

25 POLKA GREATS – K-tel NC 420
1971

Side One
Lichtensteiner Polka – Six Fat Dutchmen
Too Fat Polka – Frankie Yankovic
Pennsylvania Polka – Frankie Yankovic
Champagne Polka – Six Fat Dutchmen
Under The Double Eagle – Frankie Yankovic
Hoop-Dee-Doo – Myron Floren
Emilia Polka – Frankie Yankovic
Barbara Polka – Captain Stubby & The Buccaneers
Jenny Lind Polka – Myron Floren
Clarinet Polka – Captain Stubby & The Buccaneers
Ohio Polka – Frankie Yankovic
There’s A Tavern In The Town – Six Fat Dutchmen

Side Two
Beer Barrel Polka – Andrews Sisters
Friendly Tavern Polka – Lawrence Welk
In Heaven There Is No Beer – Whoopee John
Mother In-Law – Johnny Bomba
Blue Skirt Waltz – Sokach-Habat Orchestra
Oneta Polka – Roman Gosz
Beautiful Brown Eyes – Dick Rodgers
Who Stole The Kishka? – Walter Solek
Whoop Dee Doo – Gene Wisniewski
Helena Polka – Frank Wojnerowski
Cuckoo Waltz – Whoopee John
There’s A City Called Hamtrack – Russ Morgan
Bring Out The Little Brown Jug – “Happy” Harry Harden

If you grew up in certain households in the midwest in the early 1970s, it’s likely you or your parents had a copy of this legendary album in the archives. Released in 1971, it was one of the earliest LPs from the Minneapolis firm of K-tel International. And it was a great demonstration of K-tel’s mode of operating in fitting over two dozen songs on an LP: edit the heck out of several of them, merrily slicing away choruses and entire musical passages in the process.

Here’s the autobiography of Philip Kives, the creator and owner of K-tel International:

I was born on a small country farm, near the town of Oungre, Saskatchewan, Canada -population less than 200. My parents originally came from Eastern Europe. But, because of the hardships suffered by the Jewish people, the Jewish Colonization Organization relocated them, first to Turkey and then, in 1926, to a new frontier in Western Canada. Here, I was born in 1929, the third of four children. We struggled on our small farm, living on welfare for many years, as did other farmers in our area. It was ‘the dirty thirties’, where drought, grasshoppers and crop failure were common place, making farming almost impossible. We had no power or running water. I recall the difficulties of hauling drinking water over four miles, as there was always a shortage. I remember milking cows daily from the age of five and helping my family churn the milk by hand. We would then sell the cream and earn approximately $2.50-$2.80 a week. Whatever we grew in the garden, plus the butter and the cheese that we made, and chicken and eggs that we raised…was what we lived on.

I started my first entrepreneurial venture at the age of 8, when I set up my first trap line. Not only did I sell my own furs, but I bought furs from all the other kids in school and re-sold them at fur auctions. I made just enough money to buy my few clothes for the year.

By the early forties we got our first used car and tractor and things started to improve. I finished high school, but with all my responsibilities on the farm, I was not able to further pursue a formal education

In 1957 I left the farm for good for the lights of the big city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. I had various jobs: from taxi driver to short-order cook. Then I tried my luck selling door-to-door, such items as cookware, sewing machines and vacuum cleaners. I had difficulties making sales at first. But, in approximately six months, I became a top salesman and ran a crew of sales people of my own. In 1959, I made $29,000. This was like a million dollars to me, as only a few years earlier I was barely making $1000 a year on the farm.

By 1961, my brother Ted and I made our way to the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. I was demonstrating in the Woolworth Store facing the Boardwalk. This wasn’t quite as good as being on the Boardwalk itself, but it had the advantage of being protected from bad weather. I learned quickly that only the strong survive. If you did not produce, you were out of the Woolworth Store in a flash, as other people were waiting to take your place. I was a keen observer and learned the art of demonstrating a variety of products.

In the spring of 1962, I returned to Winnipeg and came to the realization that instead of demonstrating to a few people at one time, I could try television, where I would demonstrate to masses of people all at once. I made a live 5- minute T.V. commercial on a tephlon non-stick fry pan. To my surprise, sales took off at a remarkable pace. I quickly spread the T.V. advertising throughout Canada and this 5 minute commercial became the world’s first infomercial ever. (From that point, I always wrote and directed all of the K-tel commercials). Unfortunately, tephlon was a new product, and the tephlon peeled off the fry pan leaving a lot of tephlon- coated eggs. However, although this product had problems, I learned a valuable lesson… the power of T.V. advertising. I then bought some great products from a supplier named Seymour Propeil, who is the father of Ron Propeil of the company Ronco. I went on to sell these products, such as the Dial-o-matic, the Veg-o-matic and the Feather-Touch Knife, with great success through T.V. advertising.

In August 1965, I left for Australia and within 10 days I was on T.V. with the Feather-Touch Knife. I was a one-man show, and operated from a hotel room with no staff or office. However, the girls at the front desk of the hotel were very nice to me, and were kind enough to answer my business calls and take all my phone orders.

By Christmas I had sold one million knives and netted a dollar a knife. All I did was sell the product into the store and buy the television time. After the difficulties of farming, I couldn’t believe how easy this was. By the end of 1965, Seymour Propeil, said to me that he would not sell me any more products as I was getting “too big”. That was when I was forced to find and develop my own products. Consequently, I entered the music business.

In early 1966, I returned to Winnipeg from Australia. My father was ill and passed away shortly after. Around this time I released the first compilation TV record , ‘Twenty-five Country Hits’ with a Bobby Darren give-a- way. Then, I released a Rock album, followed up by the big hit ‘Twenty-five Polka Greats’, which sold a million and a half in Canada and USA.

In the late sixties I started my company K-Tel and the rest is history. My biggest selling product was the Miracle Brush, selling 28 million in the late sixties. My biggest music seller was ‘Hooked on Classics’, selling over 10 million… and it is still selling today. By the early eighties K-Tel sold over half a billion albums world-wide.

One of my special moments was being inducted into the (CPSA) Canadian Professional Sales Hall of Fame in 2002. I was honoured for creating the first infomercial and changing the face of advertising in the world. Today we continue to license our music catalogue of over 6000 tracks to other users. We have set up a digital distribution network with companies like iTunes, where our music is sold all over the world. I still go to work every day and love to put together a winning product. I am extremely active both mentally and physically and feel I am just too busy to get old.

I collect K-Tel albums. There, I got that out of the way so it’ll appear in a top-right box and might catch the eye of like-minded deviants.

Ronco and Arcade worked at a push, but the muddy brown circle with a weird white ‘K’ used to get my pulse racing faster. I couldn’t afford to buy that many singles in the 70s, so 20 in one hit for £2.99 was always going to work for me.

One I know I’m missing – Hit Action from ’76 (I think). Can anyone help? These things are so worthless they’re hardly ever listed on Gemm or ebay.

Sorry Tom, didn’t intend to turn this thread into Swap Shop. But I do have three copies of Believe In Music that need a home…

Cheers DJP. The Supersonic comp (non-K-Tel) has a GG photo on the cover that kinda jumps out as well.

Sounds like a good track list on Hit Action, and that confirms it’s ’76. Dunno the Silver Convention tune.

Mounting Excitement? Need one. Used to have it but it somehow got lost. It includes Racey’s extremely good non-hit Rest Of My Life.

I’m also fond of picking up non-UK K-Tels, an intriguing portal into, say, Dutch pop culture at a specific moment in the 70s. German comps seem to be generally German-language heavy, with Ronseal-efficient titles like “Black Music”.