For more than three decades, it was common for American companies to put on “industrial musicals” for their employees. These elaborate productions could rival Broadway shows, and featured original songs about the company and its products. And while this music was never intended for the general public, once you hear it for yourself, you might just get hooked. This is a story about bathroom remodeling, corporate art, and one man’s obsession with a forgotten corner of pop culture. Featuring comedy writer and collector Steve Young.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Circus Coming to Town by Ludwig Moulin
It’s A Good Thing by Martin Landstrom
Salesman's Sonata by Lipton
Makin' Profits by York Air Conditioners
Lemon Squeezy by Martin Landstrom
When A Plan Comes Together by Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
My Insurance Man by Continental Insurance
Call and Respond by Elvin Vanguard
Freudian Slip by Bladverk Band
Little BeeBee by Arc Du Soleil
April’s Fooling No One by Martin Landstrom
Did Your Prince Ever Show Up? by Magnus Ludwivsson
Lazy Art by Martin Landstrom
The Time of the Year by Niklas Gabrielsson with Martin Landstrom
Wet Sock by Martin Landstrom

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View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I’m Dallas Taylor.

[music in]

Amelia: Are we ready to go?

I'm ready. And you're, you have the big red light going?

Amelia: Yeah, it's going. Yeah.

Excellent.

Recently, I sat down with producer Amelia Tait.

Amelia: Okay, so we're here to talk about industrial musicals today, Dallas.

Okay! Uh, interesting.

Amelia: 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.

[music out]

[clip: Martin Landstrom - It’s A Good Thing]

Amelia: Are you in the mindset?

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

Amelia: And it's not going that well. You know, it's a hard gig. Your competitors are muscling in on your territory.

Amelia: So you go to the company's annual sales show. And then you hear this.

[music under into clip: Lipton - Salesman's Sonata]

Amelia: I mean, you're motivated, right?

I'm motivated, yeah!

Amelia: Yeah. You want to sell tea.

I mean, it's a hard job selling Lipton tea.

[music resumes: Ludwig Moulin - Circus Coming to Town]

Amelia Narration: 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 theater, 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 Makin' Profits by York Air Conditioners.

[music under into clip: York Air Conditioners - Makin' Profits]

Amelia Narration: These glitzy productions started in the 1950s...

[clip: Ford - Golden Harvest]

Amelia Narration: …And they continued to be popular through the mid 80s.

[clip: Pepsi - Back to the Future]

Amelia: 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.

Amelia: 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's the Name” by, you know, Xerox the copying company.

Are we back at a convention center, I guess?

Amelia: We're still in the convention center, yep. There’s women kicking their legs high with red lipstick, motivating…

Wow.

Amelia: 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.

[clip: Xerox - Xerox's the Name]

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

Amelia: Yeah.

And you're just like, “Whoa! Um, 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."

Amelia: 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.

Amelia: 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.” Like, “No, they did!” And they, like, have to take that to their grave.

[music in]

Amelia Narration: 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 second-hand stores. And eventually, people started to find them. Or at least, one person did.

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

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

Steve Young: They're 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 uh Keds sneakers.

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

[music out]

Steve Young: The full fledged industrial musical seems to have come up in post war America. By the early fifties, you had Broadway musicals like South Pacific and Oklahoma that were enormous, popular, mainstream, middle class entertainments.

[clip: Oklahoma]

Steve Young: 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.”

[clip: Whirlpool - Who Else But Whirlpool]

Amelia: I think what I'm struggling to get my head around is what the plots were?

Steve Young: Some industrial shows were revues, and you had just strings of songs and stagecraft to highlight different points.

Amelia Narration: For instance, a refrigerator company might make a song to help their salesmen remember the most important selling points.

[clip: GE Appliances - Features to Talk About]

Steve Young: 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…

[clip: Kinney Manager's Song]

Steve Young: 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!"

[clip 2: Kinney Manager's Song]

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

Steve Young: 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.

[clip: Diesel Dazzle]

Steve Young: 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!

Amelia: Yeah. So here we go. This is “My Bathroom” from 1969's The Bathrooms Are Coming.

[clip 1: My Bathroom]

Oh god, this is, this is amazing.

Sure is.

Steve Young: 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.

[clip 2: My Bathroom]

Key change!

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

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

[clip: David Letterman intro]

Steve Young: 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…

[clip: Dave's Record Collection]

Amelia Narration: 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.

[music in]

Steve Young: 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.”

Amelia Narration: 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.

Steve Young: 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.

[music under into clip: Continental Insurance - My Insurance Man]

Amelia Narration: Soon enough, Steve was hunting down these records everywhere he could.

Steve Young: 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.

Amelia Narration: But that scarcity just made these albums even more enticing, so Steve kept tracking them down. Today, he has over 200 of them.

Amelia: 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 dealership's 1979 industrial musical, which is called The Great Life. I'm just going to say it, ‘cause it's so amazingly dumb: a tire dealer makes a deal with the devil.

Oh!

Amelia: 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.

Amelia: It's dark, right?

[clip in: BF Goodrich - Tires to Sell]

Ooh. Time's running out to sell tires.

Oh gosh. That’s terrifying.

[clip fade out]

That is really putting the fear of God in these people to sell tires.

Amelia: 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?

Amelia: Yeah.

Oh! Uh, yeah threaten their eternal damnation.

Disclaimer: Note: The BF Goodrich company has never explicitly threatened employees with eternal damnation for not selling enough tires.

[clip 2: BF Goodrich - Tires to Sell]

Amelia: 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.

Amelia: Yeah yeah, it's a little. So here is “An Exxon Dealer's Wife” from 1979.

[clip: Exxon - An Exxon Dealer's Wife]

Oh!

Amelia: Yeah.

Yeah. She is.

It's true.

[music out]

Amelia Narration: Steve started his record collection because he found songs like this hilarious. But as he delved deeper and deeper into this world, he realized that there was a lot more to it than he expected.

[music in]

Amelia Narration: First, Steve co-wrote a book about industrial musicals. Then, he decided to make an entire documentary about them. These projects brought Steve into contact with the people behind this music. And hearing their stories changed everything.

Steve Young: 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.

After the break, Steve meets his industrial musical heroes.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Amelia Narration: 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 Comin' Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. Along with the book, he compiled three collections of these songs, and put them online.

[music out]

Amelia Narration: A few years later, he starred in a documentary called Bathtubs Over Broadway, about his journey with this music. The film even features original, industrial musical-esque song and dance numbers.

[clip: Bathtubs Over Broadway - It'll Change Your LIfe]

Amelia Narration: While working on 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.

Amelia Narration: 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.

[clip: General Electric - Paradox]

Amelia Narration: For Steve, meeting the guy who wrote the silicone song was like meeting a rockstar.

[music in]

Steve Young: 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.

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

Steve Young: 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.

Amelia Narration: Here's composer Hank Bebee in the documentary.

[music out]

Hank Bebee: They were never publicized, there was no advertising, there were no tickets sold or anything like that. It was like we were CIA agents.

Steve Young: 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?"

[music in]

Amelia Narration: But Steve didn't want to mock these artists. He wanted to celebrate their work, and to learn what inspired them to do it. Here's a clip from the film of actress Patt Stanton Gjonola, the singer of “My Bathroom,” along with co-star Sandi Freeman.

Patt: I think we knew that we weren't going to become stars doing this, you know.

Sandi: Right.

Patt: But it was just a wonderful way to pay the rent and to…

Sandi: To do what we loved. Yeah.

Patt: Continue doing what we loved.

Steve Young: 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 AM in a hotel ballroom." Because that's just the reason they got into this world of work was because they enjoyed making things great.

[music out]

Amelia Narration: Some industrial musical composers actually went on to become quite famous. Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote Ford’s 1959 musical, Ford-i-fy Your Future...

[clip: Ford - Any Speed for Any Need]

Amelia Narration: A few years later, these same composers went on to write songs for Fiddler on the Roof.

[clip: Fiddler on the Roof - Matchmaker]

Amelia Narration: But most of these composers never found mainstream success or appreciation.

[music in]

Steve Young: 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, ‘cause it was seen as not legitimate work, and certainly not worthy of the respect of the Broadway world.”

Amelia Narration: 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.

Steve Young: 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.”

[music out]

Amelia Narration: These songs were made for a very particular time and place. But some of them can still resonate today.

Steve Young: 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...

[clip 1: One Man Operation]

Steve Young: 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.

[clip 3: One Man Operation]

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

Amelia: Or you’ll go to hell?

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

Amelia: Yeah, I mean it's interesting though because I had that discussion with Steve which is: Can corporate art be art?

Steve Young: 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.

[SFX: Holy chanting]

[music in]

Amelia Narration: Sadly, Sid Siegel passed away in 2015, and Hank Bebee 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.

Steve Young: 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.

Steve Young: 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 silicones songs or the diesel engine songs and thinking, 'This is crazy, but it's also really very good.’"'

Steve Young: And he just never thought that there would be any respect. And it felt great to see that respect coming in for these folks.

[music out]

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

Steve Young: It ran pretty well for several decades. I would say by the early eighties, 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…

[clip: Three Days in Eight MInutes]

Steve Young: 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 rather than making a whole production from scratch.

Amelia: 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.

[clip: Kevin Hart at Walmart event]

[music in]

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

Steve Young: 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.

Amelia: So Walmart did one in the early 2000s…

Wow.

Amelia: …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.”

Amelia: We don’t record it.

Yeah.

Amelia Narration: After Steve's movie came out, some of these companies started reaching out to him.

Steve Young: 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."

[music out]

[clip: Niklas Gabrielsson with Martin Landstrom - The Time of the Year]

Amelia Narration: 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?

Steve Young: 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 unselfconsciously of a moment, for a purpose, and yet are made with great craft and precision."

Steve Young: And so I just love that they exist, and that I found them, and that I… I am still listening to them decades after they were supposed to be forgotten.

[music out]

[clip: Martin Landstrom - Wet Sock]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defactosound.com.

Amelia Narration: This episode was written and produced by Amelia Tait.

It was a 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 Steve Young World dot 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.

[music out]