365 Days #105 - G.E.'s Meter Business Department - MBD, We're The Best (mp3s)

MP3:
01. MBD We're The Best (3:15)
02. Home on the Seacoast (3:40)

It's always fun to Google a record and come up empty. Such is the case with this interesting twist on the industrial musical-a single meant for employees. General Electric handed these out to the Meter Business Department in 1981, no doubt to satisfy some burning management crisis. Maybe there was talk of unionization. Maybe everyone in Somersworth was thinking of leaving because the Seabrook nuclear plant was about to go online. Maybe there wasn't enough budget for Christmas bonuses. Whatever the reason, someone in a suit thought that a couple of catchy ditties would send employee morale through the stratosphere.

It's a full on effort, combining every cheery production technique known to audio engineers in 1982.

Borrowing a piano riff from Billy Joel, "MBD, We're The Best," is the kind of hummable jingle that can't help but fill a line worker with pride. You can almost picture the workers singing through their day as meters roll off the line in a show-stopping Busby Berkley production number. It hits all the notes, from community to family to the impact their products have around the world. Makes me wish I worked in a factory.

"Home on the Seacoast" is an even bigger gem. Filled with the utopian 1980s optimism that reached its nadir in Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" political ads, this is the last gasp of Ward Cleaver's America in a world that's changed beyond the ability of cheery tunes to contradict. I can see forklift operators hearing this and saying, "You've got to be @#!$ting me!"

It doesn't help that it's sung by the same anonymous jingle singers who permeated commercial music in the early '80s, and it certainly doesn't help that whoever wrote the song clearly never set a foot on The Seacoast. It's about 10 miles long, if that, most of it occupied by a rundown, low-rent version of the Jersey Shore known as Hampton Beach, which now sits in the shadow of a nuclear power plant that nobody wanted. The only specific landmark mentioned in the song is Strawberry Banke, an artists' colony and home to high-end restaurants near Portsmouth.

There are no forests, no farmland stretching to the shore. And should the water be lapping at your back door, you'd better hope that the National Guard is waiting with an amphibious vehicle at your front door, because your house is about to be repossessed by the Atlantic Ocean.

It's a nice set of images, but it doesn't exist, in the same way that I'm guessing employee morale at MBD didn't exist.

- Contributed by: Derek Gerry

Images: Side A, Side B

Media: 45 RPM 7" single
Label: Continental Recordings
Credits: MBD, We're The Best: Written by R. & J. Rose, N. Tellier, R. Van Tassel; Arranged by Peter Hume. Home on the Seacoast: Written by R. Rose, N Tellier; Arranged by Peter Hume; Produced by G.E.'s Meter Business Department for its employees.

Comments

[craig]

'optimism that reached its nadir in Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America'"

i was gonna correct you and say 'zenith,' but doggone it, nadir is the perfect word there.........

[Ed Corcoran]

Speaking of Ronald Reagan and 45's that googling tells nothing about, I recently picked up "Khaddaffi Duck" by Ronnie and the Ray Guns. It sounds exactly like you'd expect. My guess is that it was recorded by some morning DJ and it got enough requests that they decided to press it as a single (with the same song on both sides). If there's any interest, I can rip it.

[Pinball King]

"We do what we do so well". Like building weapons of mass destruction, for example?

[Jonathan Ward]

Great post, Derek - thanks for sharing this one.

For some reason, corporations seemed to love the 45 and the 45 EP for musical motivation - sometimes for whole industrial shows. There's quite a few out there, but they're among the hardest industrials to find.

GE proper did another in-house 45 around this time called "Control Country" which is pretty frightening, too! Good stuff - thanks again -

[Hear It Wow]

Glad you enjoyed. To add a little more historical context, this was released at around the same time as the first draft evacuation plans for the Seabrook nuclear power plant. The Seacoast region had been tearing itself apart over construction of the plant for more than a decade, and the influx--and occasional abrupt departure--of thousands of construction workers and their families transformed the Hampton area and left a lot of locals wondering aboout the state of their community. I suspect this is aimed at stopping employees from quitting, and it's possible that the Meter division was involved in providing equipment for the plant, which would have set off a lot of criticism from the opposition.

[Daniel]

Where did you find this C.D.? I guess you just never know what's out there until it's brought to your attention.