Update

 

Not sure what Google has in store for my little blog site after all these years. I have definitely slowed down on the posts and at this point find my blog being shut out of the Adsense world. Not a huge loss since I've never received a dime from Google during all my years here. The analytics people say I've earned a little over seven dollars for the number of views I've generated in total. I must confess I've been unhappy with the Google blog experience for some  time due to its clunky nature and refusal to allow any smooth and easy audio uploads. It no longer functions the way a social media site should function any longer. I have no interest in doing a youtube program, which is even more restrictive these days. 

Sigh.

Fits And Starts

                                                               

The stuff of dreams in August of 1987.

I was headed to Sacramento to oversee all the video purchasing and distribution for Tower Records as the new Video Product Manager.

How did this come about? 

 

 

That thought was on my mind a lot during this period of time when the nation had a President Ronald which rhymes with Donald and the country was embroiled in one political controversy after another. The time stamps on the USA clocks indicated this was Iran-Contra time. The days and months when President Ronald was funding secret military efforts through illicit & illegal arms sales to Iran in an effort to overthrow the Sandinista leftist government in Nicaragua by the Contras, who were operating in Honduras causing mass migrations northward. The Savings and Loan institutions were collapsing under the weight of the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volker, and his ramping up the discount interest rates the banks charged to other banks for borrowing purposes to halt the high inflation leading to almost a third of all Savings and Loan institutions to be closed in a decade's time. And if that were not enough, 138 Ronald Reagan Administration officials were ultimately investigated, indicted or convicted for their "public service" in the 1980s. The figure remains the highest conviction rate total on record for administrative members of any United States President. 

 

 

Up to this 1987 point on the historical flow chart, I'd recently worked for nearly six years at two Tower stores. I started as a clerk and moved up to assistant manager status before I found myself managing the video store on San Antonio Road. I worked under 3 managers Randi, Kenny & Kevin) during this period, one of which was a Regional Manager for the San Fransisco Bay Area Tower Records stores. I'd been part of the fledgling A-team crew setting up new stores on the video side in the mid-1980s. At this time, I was living in a two-bedroom condo in Mountain View with my wife and two young boys aged 5 and 2 as a Tower Video store manager when Jennifer interviewed and hired me for the open position at the Tower corporate offices in West Sacramento, CA. 

 

 

My wife at the time was the big bread earner while working in Silicon Valley as a risk management statistician. I had the fun job, and was determined to make a success of it at Tower's headquarters. Thus began an uneasy alliance between us as partners/parents/spouses that would unravel for period before finding the yarn to piece the relationship back decades later. 

 

 

I've been very lucky.

 

 

If you want to hear how lucky? Here is podcast interview I did with Bob Zimmerman in the fall of 2022 for his Oral History of Tower Records project. Interview.

We'll be back in a few weeks time with an update or two. See you.

 

View from theTower

View from a Tower

I took some time off from my little blog site to ponder what might be of interest to readers going forward on these pages of ether. During these past months several things have helped direct me to a new path here. Much of my life has been about the pursuit and consumption of pop culture in its many forms and the exploration of history. It has given me context, perspectives with both frustrations and comfort over the many challenging world environments I've witnessed in 7 decades.

 

 

One of the things that helped in the decision to move this blog into memoir/historical territory was that my sister recently sold her home. She lives in the mid-Atlantic region which is on the opposite side of the country from my home here in Nor Cal. She's lived in her little house with some acreage for over 25 years doing a variety of ventures but finally realized, as the years wore on, that the body was a little less forgiving now and small projects had become major ones. So, given the crazy real estate rise in prices throughout the country she decided this year was the time to sell. And, did so just in time. 

 

Moving is a big deal. I can tell you that because I've moved 20 times over my adult life. It has always been a pain in the ass leaving, deciding what stays with you, or what goes away, getting acclimated and then reliving the ordeal all over again. You begin to feel like Sisyphus rolling that stone over and over again. For my sister, one of the keepsakes that needed to go were boxes of old family photos. We talked on the phone and I asked her to send them to me. Some of the photos date back over 100 years but most were shot from the 1950s to 1990s and cover family from all over the country. I was shocked to find so many photos I'd never seen before (most of them to be honest) and I promised my sis that I would digitize the pictures and put them on a disc or stick and mail the shots back to her. As I type this, I've almost finished the project but it has taken over two months to do so, due to a lot of cleanup work necessary to get many of the old black & whites into decent looking shape. 

 

I did learn a little about the processing of photos from back in the day. The scratches or dots found in many old black or white pictures, which can look like little stars on a very dark background, can be caused in a variety of ways, but generally can be laid to processing problems in the dark rooms. Some occasions find small particles trapped in a camera or film mechanism within the camera to put a scratch across an entire roll, but that is a pretty rare instance.One of the things I had to remember, before blaming the photographers for their ill kept tools was that the home photo market was really quite new and exploding right after World War II with hundreds of labs and new "technicians" opening in a very short time.

 

This was a huge new business that Kodak came to dominate with labs and processing centers and that local small biz camera shops tried to compete in for a generation or two. New tech combined with the urgency for speed meant some scratches on many of the early prints. The factory processes to get the prices down and the product turned around more quickly has generally meant lower quality, which Americans have accepted along the way to get those lower prices. Polaroid developed the instant picture development process that arrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I still remember coating the finished pictures with a filmed goo that was brushed on lightly just after the picture developed after a minute or two.  For the camera enthusiasts, classes emerged all over the country to cultivate and nurture the craft and technology but very few I know today still practice the old art  and craft with the 35mm cameras and assortments of lenses to match.

 

Nearly all of my childhood, and most of my teen years, find the pictures in black & white. As I browsed through my family's pictorial history, I felt a little like an out-of-body mind-projection character from the silent film era. In my little cowboy outfits or other long gone fashion statements of yesteryear I could almost hear myself shout out, "Shane! Shane!" or some other plea to join a technicolor world with sound. It's a digital world we now live in but history is always with us. We should not forget the lessons we learned along the way. We should be able to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

 

Another reason for repurposing the SilverThreads blog to a historical memoir theme rather than a periodic observation site about current events came about with a request to do an interview about my career at MTS Inc. (Tower Records/Video to the world). Bob Zimmerman, a friend and former coworker at Tower, emailed me about doing an interview on his Podcast (2500 Del Monte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records). I was reluctant to do so for a couple of reasons, but thought about it and happily opted to contribute to Bob's exceptional podcast project.

 

My reluctance stemmed from a couple of incidents since I left the company back in the late spring of 2003. Colin Hanks and Sean Stuart made All Things Must Pass, a beautiful and powerful documentary about Tower Records that came out in 2015 to critical acclaim. I spoke to both Colin and Sean on the phone and we had a few e-mails during the time (2007-2010) they were making the documentary, but they decided to bypass the video aspect of the Tower story altogether due to time and budget constraints. Video was too large a category to cover given the limited parameters the film makers felt could be conveyed, and was never mentioned in the documentary. It was their vision and their call, which I respected and still do. I did not want to talk about the experiences for a long time afterwards, and just went on with my life

 

It has been 19 years since I left the MTS campus in West Sacramento and 16 years since the company was shuttered up for good. In those years, the retail landscape in America has been obliterated and especially so for those who offered music, video and book products to the public at large. Many of the adventurous and brave companies and people creating the content and distribution of the magic that music, film and print brought to the world have also been swept away without a trace.

So here we are,deciding finally to talk about some of my experiences and a few accomplishments Tower Records video footprint achieved during my time at the helm of that division within the company which was known as Tower Records/Video.

As Years Go By

 

 

I know this makes me a true geezer, but I still remain on an ancient Yahoo account for a lot of my e-mails. I check the box a few times a day, partially due to a ton of political junk that now arrives in my box hourly that I just go and clean out, but also for the rare stuff of interest I occasionally discover in this mail box.  On a recent trip to the Yahoo box, I was surprised that a news feed popped up a banner story on Marianne Faithfull commenting on her old Rolling Stones liaisons this time with Keith Richards. I thought those Wild Horses had been ridden and beaten to death over the decades, but I guess not if the participants remain as the high profile marks for our media of current click bait fate.This story came out just a week or two before a sad reminder of what the years ultimately reduce us to when it was reported that Marianne Faithfull checked in to a London retirement/assisted living facility this past month.

One of the true iconic characters of the 1960s, Ms. Faithfull got me thinking on how she has managed to not just survive all these years but how she thrived through them to this day.

If you want to make something you need a spark. Art, architecture, literature, music, war and widgets of all makes and sizes arrive through some form of inspiration. When I think of major inspirations throughout recorded history I think of all the gods & goddesses invoked from Isis, Shiva, Zeus, Allah and Jehovah with all their varieties of flavors first and foremost for inspirational assistance in getting tasks done. All those texts, exhortations, all those various scribblings and paint strokes on whatever-surface-would-do, all those notes played or sung and all those confrontations of conflict around the world going back thousands of years owe a great deal to the “Devotional” category of inspiration for moving our lazy butts to do something.

 

A subset of the Devine inspiration going back a long ways has been the elusive and ethereal Muse. Possibly, at least in the western world, Homer’s entreaty to Calliope for creative genius to guide his hand for both The Iliad and The Odyssey remains the most famous. Virgil, many years later, called on this same muse for The Aeneid.  Calliope for many historians remains as the chosen muse of these giants of literary achievement, although John Milton chose a different muse, Urania(muse of Astronomy and one of Calliope’s eight other sisters), for his epic Paradise Lost in the 17^th Century. And yet for Homer, Virgil and Milton the motivation of the main characters centered on the actions driven by the central woman in each poem. Helen, Dido and Eve truly set the tables for the poetic feasts of these epics.

We’ve come a long way from the days of epic poetry to today’s humble little world of pop music filled with poetic smatterings of love and hate, or the various takes on the current states of recent events. However, one constant for so many years in the pop/rock arena as the creative inspiration in so many songs and public commentary has been the varied nod to muses which motivated the artists.  Over my time on the planet Marianne Faithfull has been The Muse of choice for so many of the musicians I’ve followed. But as the years wore on her own voice began to match in quality the many great songs she inspired.

 

I think back to some obscure weekday night some 57 years ago being transfixed by a young blonde on NBC’s Hullabaloo Show singing As Tears Go By. This was a Rolling Stones’ penned tune they would not record until months later on the album December’s Children that this sweet and breathtakingly beautiful girl named Marianne Faithfull sang to perfection.  She became the It Girl of my young teen dreams and fancies and a big driver to get better on my new electric guitar.  G-Am-C-D and so on……

In the ensuing four years Marianne was married to Nicholas Dunbar, had a child and then divorced the man. She, also, had several minor pop hits, appeared in a few pop culture films of the day and began a tumultuous relationship with all things Rolling Stones, befriending Keith Richards’ girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, and becoming Mick Jagger’s lover. Then the drug bust happened for marijuana possession that was highly publicized with Marianne wrapped only in a bearskin throw when police and papers arrived. She seemed everywhere with Jagger through  the late 1960s appearing by his side in Morocco on a vacation and then with the Mahareshi Yogi and The Beatles during their India sabbatical in 1968, all the while contributing in “spirit” to a number Stones classics along the way to the end of the decade. 

The songs about or attributed to her influence during this period range from Sympathy For The Devil, No Expectations, Live With Me, You Can't Always Get What You Want, Wild Horses, Let It Bleed, You've Got The Blues, Bitch and Sway. She embodied the spirit of, what many argue, are the 3 best albums in the Rollings Stones illustrious canon of recorded music, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers.  

By the start of the 1970s Marianne Faithfull had said a bitter goodbye to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones circus. A long and protracted dispute took place over a songwriting credit for the song, Sister Morphine, which Faithfull wrote with Jagger. It took years to resolve the royalties and credit issue and for much of the 1970s she faded into a life of addiction and withdrawal. It seemed The Muse was dead, certainly for the Stones that glimmer had been lost. And yet, as the 1970s decade ended who popped up with a new voice and attitude but Marianne Faithfull. 

Her late 1979 released album, Broken English, launched a successful rebirth to her career and remains to this day an important and profound record to hear. Shel Silverstein's The Ballad of Lucy Jordan with John Lennon's Working Class Hero composition stand out for me along with the title track for piercing and provocative interpretations by Faithfull of brilliant and distinct songwriting. The scorching and X-rated song, Why'd Ya Do It remains a harrowing 6 minute opus on infidelity. The song, although many interpreted it being about her time with Mick Jagger, was actually written for Tina Turner regarding her relationship with Ike Turner. Turner declined  to record and release it. 

 

Since the debut of Broken English, Marianne Faithfull has released 16 albums, which makes a career total of 22 since Andrew Loog Oldham "discovered" the young lady. I remain especially fond of a Child's Adventure, Kissin Time and Vagabond Ways as adjuncts to Broken English. Marianne Faithfull at 75 years old still remains a social force.What a life.

As a closing little paragraph or two here, I offer up another Muse of those days and a bit beyond with the mention of Pamela Des Barres, the inspiration for Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous screenplay and movie. I just finished reading her incredible memoir, I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie, which is now 35 years old and still rocking the book business.Here is the story of a driven woman searching for ways to standout, achieve success, attain status and in love with the culture and stars of her day. 

 

I am no fan of the term groupie, but I understand how the word was coined. Pamela Miller in those 1960s & 1970s days was the supreme groupie, who astounded me over the pages of this book with the cast of characters she knew (and most biblically) in the world's entertainment scene. This book and story is a treasure trove of places and people populating Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s. Great portraits of people leaving their large or small impressions on the City of Angels and beyond fill the pages. From Frank Zappa and his wife Gail to Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page the book is a who's who of the music and movie world of those days and the places they frequented. 

San Francisco and London have always been the typical locales that get all the press for the cool and crazy or sad and violent pop culture days of hippiedom and rock excess. I loved this book because Los Angeles finally gets its due as the main driver for so much of what really went down back 40 to 60 years ago and remains in the consciousness of so many to this day. If you want a fun and informative reminder or historical reference of the counter culture of those long ago days I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie truly delivers the goods. It's a little salacious, which I love.

Thanks for stopping by, this past month was a busy one. Hope we catch up again soon.

 

Where Did All The Mystery Go?

 

 

A few years ago, I remember a boring and empty evening at my condo in Antelope trying to decide on what to watch for some less than memorable hours to pass the night.  I had recently cut the cord with Comcast for its cable service, but still was connected to the internet line the conglomerate carrier provided.  The price for both internet and cable, with its feeble TV offerings provided to me at exorbitant rates while I was on a strict fixed income, was unsustainable.  I discovered a viewing service on the web, and decided I’d give Britbox a go. Amazingly, this new entertainment option worked out beyond my wildest expectations. 

Over my lifetime a funny thing had happened to American television, and especially to programs broadcast on the public over-the-air waves: TV became almost unwatchable for maybe 22 out of every 24 hours on any given day for any sentient creature who had a life and modest mental faculties. A combination of advertising time becoming a 50/50 proposition on any show, and that a half-hour sitcom was now reduced to three 5 minute segments to convey a minuscule idea and get a laugh had become too painful for me. Also, the vast majority of programming broadcast on the public air-wave front was now pseudo entertainment talk or fake reality, phony sports crap selling dreams and nightmares of tormented fabricated drama with only money as its goal. Original drama, comedy and all of their sub genres of fiction had all but disappeared from the television broadcast landscape of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC here in the US of A.

There had been cable, but during the last 10 years cable offerings had gotten very sparse, too sparse to keep the service. The glory days of channels like FX, TNT and AMC on cable with shows like Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Castle, Bones, Rescue Me, Damages, Breaking Bad and Mad Men to watch just a little over a decade ago were gone. The last vestiges of that era close this year with the ending seasons on Killing Eve and Better Call Saul.

 

It is all pay per view streaming now with rates on the inevitable sharp incline by a few big companies controlling the pipes where the flotsam/jetsam flows. And so, I go on to streams like Britbox , Amazon Prime & Netflix for most of my viewing now. One of the interesting programming notes these days on American broadcast and cable television (to me) is the total lack of mystery fare. Tons of law enforcement cop shows of all stripes with heavy doses of doctor & hospital hours sprinkled with comic book episodes but no real mysteries that happen anymore.  What I find truly pitiable is seeing the original Law & Order series resuscitated after being put out of its misery in 2010 after 20 years on air.

So, streaming off the cable grid it is.

Britbox and Amazon Prime have remedied my television/movie mystery fix and have given me some great authors of fiction to explore heavily over these COVID years of confinement.  Georges Simenon created Chief Inspector Jules Maigret in the early 1930s and wrote the last Maigret novel (Maigret and Monsieur Charles) in 1972. The books are all superbly written with keen observations on the human condition. Over the last several months I’ve read around 15 of the 78 Maigret novels Simenon produced currently and all are focused on various individuals entering the orbit of the famous French detective.

Two different interpretations of Simenon’s detective creation are found on Britbox. Michael Gambon played Maigret for 2 seasons and 12 episodes in 1992 and 1993. I played them all and they held my attention. They were good, not great but that might be due to how different television looks today versus 30 years ago. Gambon certainly looks more the part of the character Simenon envisioned and is an outstanding actor. Good television, even after all these years. However, I was stunned to watch the latest British version of Maigret, which originally aired from 2016 & 2017, with Rowan Atkinson in the lead role.

Atkinson has been a brilliant comedic star for decades through iconic characters like Mr. Bean and the Black Adder. I had never seen him in a dramatic role, and thought when I first put this latest Maigret on that a Peter Sellers type of performance might be in the offing. Spoiler alert! Wrong, wrong and wrong. Rowan Atkinson was the perfect Maigret in temperament, delivery, style, nuance and mood that anyone could ask for. He became Maigret. Sadly there are only 4 episodes, but they do run approximately 90 minutes in length instead of the 50 minute episodes from the early 1990s. These 4 Maigret stories I found exceptional from the screenplay and performances to the great camera work and sound.

Those two seasons became my motivators for reading the Simenon novels, for which I’m eternally grateful.

 

 

Another long running detective series from British television on Britbox is Inspector Morse, who was played by John Thaw throughout the show’s run (1987-2000). The crimes are usually all set in the area of Oxford colleges in Oxford City. The TV show episodes are mostly 90 minutes in length and are very well done and interesting but, for me, the books hit it out of the park.

Inspector Morse is a bit like Sherlock Holmes, brilliant but not a pleasant person to be around if your lamp is burning a bit low. Morse’s Watson is Inspector Lewis, although Lewis is not the chronicler of the tales. Morse is a serious language specialist, crossword puzzle expert and classical music buff who found Wagner the ultimate classical composer. Holmes addiction was cocaine, while Morse pursued classic ales and single malt Scotches throughout every investigation with more relish than his pursuit of the criminal adversaries. I loved every book in the collection. The television series, being older video fare, looks and feels its age, although I thoroughly loved the pilot, or first Morse installment, The Dead Of Jericho,Very unique story with camera work, and, curiously, not the first Morse novel.

Funny, although Inspector Morse is one of those prominent fictional literary figures which helped tell and sell the Oxford Colleges’ story for nearly a thousand years, the author, Colin Dexter went to Cambridge. Apparently, in the early years of these two educational forces existence around the 13^th century, a group of educators from Oxford felt compelled to leave and start up a rival college, and hence Cambridge came into existence. Side notes, Rowan Atkinson is an Oxford alum.  John Thaw, aka Inspector Morse, died at 60 years of age just 2 years after the show’s last episode. This may account for the fact there were no more Inspector Morse novels coming from the author. Both Colin Dexter and Georges Simenon lived 17 years after closing down their famed detectives.

An American detective that has seen some video love from a streaming source other than the broadcast/cable tunnel of despair is Hieronymus Bosch from the LAPD. Michael Connelly has authored 23 books featuring the eccentric single-minded detective plying his genius in greater Los Angeles.  Connelly also has created novels from various principle characters found in several of Bosch’s investigations, such as Rene Ballard and Mickey Haller, The Lincoln Lawyer. 

I have to admit, many of these characters I find much more interesting than the indomitable and singularly driven Detective Bosch. Bosch is named after the Dutch painter who plied his talents during the 15th & 16th centuries with some startling devotional paintings depicting good & evil at play. It's a clever and great literary device to get into the personality/mind of the character we follow on the hunt. The Bosch stories both as novels and 7 seasons on Amazon Prime are more studies of police procedure than mysteries per se. Titus Welliver is exceptionally good as Harry Bosch and the supporting casts through the seven seasons are all top notch. I must say, quite a few alums from The Wire appear over the years, which always tells me a high level of production and skill went into the shows. 

 

 

As I started writing this latest blog chapter, I started thinking about the many detectives in books or on film I've enjoyed over the years and wondered why here in this country we've almost murdered the genre currently. I grew up as a kid reading The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Sherlock Holmes & many of the cheap paperbacks my mother had read featuring Hercule Poirot or Perry Mason. My mom was a sucker for both Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner who-done-its. By the time she went through a Mickey Spillane cycle I was on to Ian Fleming's James Bond. In the 1970s, I caught the Sam Spade, Nick Charles and Phillip Marlowe bug from the pages of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I found Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer as an exceptional private investigator who understood human motivation and reality. I've reread those mysteries a few times. P.D. James arrived shortly after that on my radar with her policeman detective/poet, Adam Dalgliesh, and then Walter Mosley with Easy Rawlins, both of whom I enjoyed a lot. And then came Bosch.

As I mentioned above, today's menu options of televised mystery material is sparse to nil currently. After the decades of Columbo, Murder She Wrote, Monk etc going all the way back to Perry Mason in the 1950s to only have the banal offerings of "Cupcake" mysteries on the insipid Hallmark Channel is a mind boggler to me, particularly since British television is chock full of mysteries in every stripe. If it is not a comic book hero, a police/government law enforcement hero or doctor hero it cannot be on the air in the USA seems to be the rule of the hour. Pathetic. 

A final observation regarding the near death status of the American mystery genre. The French Chief Inspector Jules Maiget has empathy in all his stories for both victim and criminal. Many of the mysteries are filled with subtle nuances of motive and deep looks into the real or imagined actions of the characters found surrounding the crime. The English Chief Inspector Morse finds solace in classical music, crossword puzzle expertise, fine Scotch single malts with craft ales while also having a keen sympathy for both victims and perpetrators in the Oxford surroundings of the novels. 

You find no sympathy or empathy from Bosch, as either a private investigator or as a police detective working the homicide beat in Hollywood or the great L.A. basin. Bosch loves jazz & maybe his daughter while having an encyclopedic knowledge of Los Angeles, just no appreciation for anything in the city except the view and takeout menus. His various love interests in the books all seem sterile, and the various escapades feel doomed from the start without gaining any true personal insights other than career matters most to all the characters. The books and series are excellent procedural reports which are far far removed from the Marlowes, Spades and Archers of yesterday. Maybe America will get a great detective with some humanity once again, but for now Bosch reigns over the mystery landscape finding the worst in his and our surroundings. 

Thanks for the visit. March has been busy but we'll visit soon again.