Art for Money's Sake

The round, owl-eyed oddball in hornrimmed glasses had never seen fit to set foot in Omaha before, but one day last week the town turned out as if he were a returning hero. The Junior Chamber of Commerce met him at Union Station; he was taken on a tour of Boys Town, paid his respects to the archbishop, visited a convent for errant girls, and was named Chief Charging Buffalo by the Omaha Indians. The excuse for all the excitement seemed as zany as the celebration itself: Stan Freberg, visiting comic-turned-adman from California, had come to town to lead the Omaha Symphony Orchestra through a 6 1/2-minute singing commercial of his own composition.

Called Omaha! ("shortest musical comedy and longest radio commercial ever produced"), it liltingly celebrates the joys of Omaha and only incidentally those of Butter-nut Coffee, which is packed there. After the orchestra swung through Freberg's lighthearted, tuneful spoof of Oklahoma!-type musicals, even skeptics who had come to hoot remained to hum. The mayor is recommending the adoption of the rollicking Whatta They Got in Omaha? as the civic anthem, Capitol Records has put out a recording with I Look in Your Face and I See Omaha on the flip side. More important, from Freberg's point of view, Omaha! has already sold a tremendous lot of Butter-nut Coffee.

Simple Notion. The son of a retired Baptist minister, Stan Freberg began to learn the tricks of beguiling an audience when he was only eleven. His uncle was Conray the Magician, and young Stan served as "coat stuffer" for that old vaudevillian. By 1955 Freberg was well established as a minor comic in TV and a far-out satirist on records. His liveliest: a drama of passion whose only dialogue consisted of the words "John" and "Marsha"; St. George and the Dragonet, a take-off on Jack Webb's Dragnet, which sold 1,000,000 records in three weeks.

Not content with such modest fame and fortune, two years ago Stan turned his satirist's eye on TV and radio commercials, arrived at a simple notion: Why kid commercials when with a little effort the commercials and the kidding can be wrapped up together? The soft-selling, satirical commercial had been tried before, and except for a few engaging specimens such as Bert and Harry Piel of Piel's Beer, had fallen into limbo. Stan was undeterred. Incorporating himself in Los Angeles as Freberg, Ltd. ("but not very"), he took a Latin motto ("Ars gratia pecuniae"--Art for money's sake) and put his talents on the market ("bizarre sales ideas, at a bizarre fee; but worth it").

"Wet-Rock People." A few admen were impressed, and Stan began to collect accounts. Today his clients range from Pictsweet Frozen Foods to the Bank of America. The Pictsweet plug catches the writer of a commercial in mid-job, humming, "Pictsweet, something, something, something, something, something--and quality, too." The Bank of America plug brings two spacemen to life with the line, "We'd like to see something in earth money." During the one month that the ad ran on radio, the bank reported that time-plan loans were up 33%. One Salt Lake City station was so impressed with Freberg's words and music that it put on a half-hour show consisting of nothing but Freberg commercials.

Success, says Stan, has unfortunately brought an upsurge of censorship. "We hear first from the organized pressure groups, then the idiot fringe that is made up of the unorganized wet-rock people--who behave as if they've just crawled out from under wet rocks and accuse me of being a Red for poking fun at Johnnie Ray, Lawrence Welk, Jack Webb, the whole State of Nevada and hearing aids." At the prices he now commands, Freberg reckons he can stand the complaints.

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