The Place: The outskirts of Norristown Pa.
The Time: Winter of 1976-1977
The Channel: 10 or 5
Recorded With: A Sears cassette recorder from a Midland 13-885
The Characters:
Cheryl: Girlfriend of Uncle Albert, but one who also likes to flirt with other guys on the radio. First person heard on the tape.
Wild Country (Joe): The latest object of Cheryl’s flirtations, and the focal point of Uncle Albert’s contemptuous jealousy. Joe comments that Uncle Albert’s scheme "Has to be the dumbest plan".
Capt. Kidd (Dave): Records the fun, and needles Uncle Albert when the opportunities present themselves.
Uncle Albert: First heard saying "I can't help it if I’m so powerful".
Love Machine: An innocent girl who becomes the pawn in Uncle Albert’s game of jealousy and revenge. Heard right after Uncle Albert’s first comment.
Tom: Comes in much later complaining about bleed over from my "powerful" Midland, with the Turner +2 desk mike.
Background: Teenaged love, as it were, was often fraught with problems. Teenagers are just discovering these "grown-up" emotions and usually do not yet know how to effectively deal with them. This situation was a classic example. Uncle Albert, having had very few girlfriends in his time (He wasn’t the most "manly" guy and, at age 16, his voice hadn’t even fully changed), was somewhat possessive and intensely jealous whenever any of them even talked to other guys. But this is CB radio, where the guys outnumbered the girls by something like 7:1, so he had his work cut out for him. Uncle Albert's current girlfriend Cheryl had, on more than one occasion, passed up opportunities to meet up with him on their pre-assigned channel in order to talk to Wild Country, a new guy on the radio who had captured her interest. This irritated Uncle Albert to no end (see this related clip). Having had finally enough of this, he devised a "plan" whereby he found another girl by the handle of Love Machine on another channel and pleaded with her to come up to the channel where Joe and Cheryl were talking, unannounced, and profess some level of affection for him. This would then hopefully make Cheryl jealous. At least that was how it was supposed to work. But thanks to annoying little details like bleed over (We were all within 1/2 mile of each other, and Uncle Albert was a scant 7 doors away from me), the finer parts of these intricate plans often get revealed before they can be put into motion. Needless to say, the prematurely discovered "plan" now becomes the object of ridicule and Uncle Albert, with little dignity left, finally resorts to more "direct" approaches to his dilemma. My only regret during this whole affair, was that it took too long for me to get the recorder set up, and I missed Love Machine’s initial declaration of "love". Though it's probably a given, that I couldn’t have done what Wild Country had suggested when he said, "You could’ve sold that and made millions". But what I did have managed to make it into the archives where it will live on in infamy.
Uncle Albert Approx 4 min, mp3 format.