Industrial Musicals: The Golden Age of corporate showtunes

Here's something embarrassing, but true, about me.

I wear a plain black t-shirt every single day.

For me, it's just one less thing to think about.

Then recently, a friend was telling me about Merino Wool.

It's a high-quality fabric that's naturally antimicrobial.

Now, my wife is a longtime fan of Quince.

It's a company that sells durable, stylish clothing, as well as jewelry and home goods for very reasonable prices.

So I ordered a few things from Quince, including a Merino wool black t-shirt.

And you know what?

It's fantastic.

It's incredibly soft, and even after a long, active day of wearing it, it doesn't feel grimy.

I think I may have finally found that one black t-shirt to rule them all.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash 20k for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's quince.com/slash slash 20k.

For free shipping and 365-day returns, visit quince.com slash 20k.

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 Teas.

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 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 of life, and I love it.

I love it.

And live it every day.

I love it, live delivered, and I'm glad of

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.

We are talking full-on musical theatre with sets and costumes and singing and dancing and most importantly, original lyrics about the company, its products, and its workers.

Here's a song called Making Profits by York Air Conditioners: Liability, working capital, profit, gross, and net.

Making profits with good finance, you bet.

These glitzy productions started in the 1950s.

And they continued to be popular through the mid-80s.

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, you know, Xerox the Copy and Company.

Are we back at a convention center, I guess?

We're still in the convention center.

Yep.

This women kicking their legs high with red lipstick,

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,

I feel like it would be more shocking than anything, you know, the hard life of a tea salesman.

Yeah.

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 going to 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.

But 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.

These albums were never intended to be sold to the public, but over the decades they found their way into garage sales and secondhand stores.

And eventually, people started to find them.

Or at least, one person did.

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.

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

This is going to be a great motivational, educational, entertainment element for our conventions.

And our folks are going to be blown away by getting into the convention hall and seeing a musical about their lives and their work.

And they're going to be so fired up to go out and sell, sell, sell.

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 salesmen 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 I manage a kidney shoe store.

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.

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.

So, it might be hard to pick, but do you have an all-time favorite song then?

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.

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

American Standard, the Plumbing Fixture Company, put out a musical in 1969 to get the plumbing fixture distributors fired up about bathroom remodeling.

And it's called The Bathrooms Are Coming.

And the song that I call the gateway drug of this whole genre is called My Bathroom.

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 amazing.

Is a private 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 really be me

in my bathroom.

My bathroom

is much more than it may seem

where 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.

Ronald McDonald.

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, and 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 B.F.

Goodrich, the tire dealership's 1979 industrial musical, which is called The Great Life.

I'm just going to say it because it's so amazingly dumb.

A tire dealer makes a deal with the devil.

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.

Oh, gosh.

He's got tires to sell.

He feeds us and stars.

The times is hell.

That's terrifying.

The times is hell.

5,

That is really putting the fear of God 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 tires.

Look, we need to sell tires.

What do we do?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Threaten their eternal damnation.

Note, the B.F.

Goodrich Company has never explicitly threatened employees with eternal damnation for not selling enough tires.

Sometimes the salesmen'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 Exxon dealer's wife from 1979.

Oh.

Yeah.

Yeah, she is.

Yes, an Exxon wife is a woman through and through.

It's true.

Helping out my baby, cause I love him, I do.

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 Wisinant made a documentary about them, with Steve as the main subject.

These projects brought Steve into contact with the people behind this music, and hearing their stories changed everything.

What started as just a snarky, can you believe this is for real, morphed over time.

I started tracking down writers and performers who've done these shows and I learned about their lives.

After the break, Steve meets his industrial musical heroes.

Riverside is one of those tools that you might try for one reason and then realize that it can do so much more.

Because in today's digital world, remote recording has has so many uses.

You might need to capture work meetings or training videos.

You might be recording interviews for a podcast, YouTube series, or documentary.

You might be live streaming to your dedicated followers, or even saving family stories for future generations.

With Riverside, every person is recorded on their own device, and the files upload to the cloud while you talk.

So if anyone's internet lags or drops out, you won't lose anything.

Once you're finished, Riverside's AI editor can fix eye contact, polish the edit, and even create highlight clips with captions that are ready to post on social media.

It's almost like having a full production studio right in your web browser.

Try Riverside for free at creators.riverside.com/slash 20k.

To unlock the full set of features, upgrade to Riverside Pro.

Before you check out, click the I have a coupon button and use promo code 20k for 20% off your subscription.

There's also a direct link in the show notes of this episode.

Congratulations to Luna Spivey for getting last episode's mystery sound right.

That's the language spoken by the aliens in the film Arrival.

To create these sounds, the sound designers went to the mountains of New Zealand and recorded a variety of exotic birds.

Then, they pitched these bird calls down and combined them with recordings of didgeridoos, bagpipes, and a so-called lung that they made from rice paper.

And here's this episode's mystery sound.

And here it is again.

If you know that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.20k.org.

There's also a link in the show notes.

Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win one of our super soft 20k t-shirts.

One of the most important decisions you'll make in any business is who you hire next, because the right person doesn't just check boxes.

They bring clarity, energy, and momentum to everything you're building.

But finding that person, that's where things get tricky.

Fortunately, there's Indeed.

Indeed takes the entire messy hiring process and distills it into a simple, streamlined platform.

You can post a job, get matched with candidates, schedule interviews, and manage the entire pipeline all in one place.

And with their sponsored jobs option, your post jumps to the top of the page for relevant candidates so you can reach the right people faster.

There's no need to wait any longer.

Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.

20,000Hertz listeners will get a $75 job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com/slash hertz.

Just go to Indeed.com/slash H-E-R-T-Z right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.

Indeed.com/slash Hertz.

Terms and conditions apply.

Hiring, indeed, is all you need.

In a world of emails, your business phone is still more important than you might think.

It's the voice your customers hear when they call with a question.

It's the text thread where a deal gets hashed out.

And it's often the first impression someone gets of your company.

But if you're using your personal number or juggling multiple lines, things can get messy fast.

That's where OpenPhone comes in.

OpenPhone gives you a dedicated business line that works across your computer, tablet, or phone.

You can call, text, and even send files all from one inbox that can be shared with your team.

That means you and your team can collaborate on conversations, follow up faster, and never miss an important lead.

Plus, OpenPhone's AI agent can be set up in minutes to handle calls and answer questions after hours.

OpenPhone is offering our listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com slash 20k.

That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E

slash 20k.

And if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge.

Open phone, no missed calls, no missed customers.

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.

Along with the book, he compiled three collections of these songs and put them online.

A few years later, filmmaker Dava Wisenant made a documentary called Bathtubs Over Broadway about Steve's journey with this music.

The film even features original industrial musical-esque song and dance numbers.

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.

And here's a song that Hank wrote for a General Electric production called Gotta Investigate Silicones.

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 boy, was I excited when I finally got to meet Sid Siegel or Hank Beebe.

People who I felt were maybe not well known in the world or not known at all, but I knew their work and I wanted to hear more about their stories.

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?

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.

Here's a clip from the film of actress Pat Stanton Jonola, the singer of My Bathroom, along with co-star Sandy Freeman.

I think we knew that we weren't going to become stars doing this, you know, but it was just a wonderful way to pay the rent and to continue doing what we loved.

There are 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 8 a.m.

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.

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.

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.

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, although he may have been passionate about it.

He was doing a corporate messaging gig for the most powerful corporation in the world.

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 back from a different perspective on their own careers, and it was a great vindication for them.

Sometimes someone like Hank or Sid would say, you know, until you came around, I hadn't listened to that Ford truck show or whatever in 40 years, and I pulled it out last night.

It was very good, wasn't it?

And now people who weren't born when any of that happened are listening to the General Electric Silicon's songs or the diesel engine songs and thinking, this is crazy, but it's also really very good.

And he just never thought that there would be any respect.

And it felt great to see that respect coming in for these folks.

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 theater 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 Beyoncé 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.

Unreal.

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.

Maybe I'm a weirdo.

Well, we're quite sure I am actually, but I think there's something even more beautiful about these things because they are so unself-consciously of a moment for a purpose and yet are made with great craft and precision.

And so I just love that they exist and that I found them and that

I am still listening to them decades after they were supposed to be forgotten.

20,000 Hz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Find out more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Amelia Tate.

It was story edited by Casey Emerly.

With help from Grace East.

It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt.

And Jesus Alteaga.

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 steveyoungworld.com.

In the show notes, you can find links to bathtubs over Broadway, as well as three albums of these crazy songs.

And if you know someone who would get a kick out of this episode, then tap that share button.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.