I recently read Joseph Lanza’s excellent book from 1994, “Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Musak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong.” I’ll have more to say about this book in a future post, but for now I just had to share this bit I noticed on page 53:
Lyndon Baines Johnson owned Muzak franchises in Austin during his early senatorial days.
Wow. Just wow. If Veronica Geng had only known this when writing her hilarious story. You know the one. Just think how Johnson could’ve riled up Shaw by piping Muzak into his bedroom. In true LBJ-as-recounted-by-Geng style, the senator would’ve put the volume control in some hard-to-reach place behind the sofa so that the elderly playwright would’ve had to contort himself to turn it down, making him feel even more foolish.