Fred Seibert's Blog

Steve Tompkins in his Nickelodeon writing office, with The Gashlycrumb Tinies poster

If this gets too complicated, I’m sorry about that…

Last week I was walking by the office of one of Fanboy & Chum Chum’s executive producers, Steve Tomkins*. I noticed his cool poster of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which he was obviously very proud of and it got me to telling him of my unusual, casual run in with Gorey’s work back in the day.

My soft spot for Gorey comes from a particular circumstance. In 1976, I was working with the composers and musicians Michael Mantler (who I posted about last month) and Carla Bley, when Mike released his LP which used Gorey’s writings as the libretto for his compositions called “The Hapless Child and Other Inscrutable Stories.”

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Culture Music music poetry

I’d never heard of Gorey (his Amphigorey hadn’t quite crashed into the mainstream), and Mike had always had a taste for interesting authors he liked to compose to (like Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett.  And Mike’s always unique casting had me quadruply intriqued (Robert Wyatt for the prog-rockers, Mike (on trumpet), Carla, Steve Swallow, & Jack DeJohnette for the jazzbos, and Terje Rypdal all of them). Check out a track, and pick up some MP3s.Michael Mantler > The Sinking Spell

So, while it’s always fun saying hi to Steve*, I got an extra cultural dose of nostalgic inspiration the other day. Thanks bud.

* By the way, in addition to doing a hilarious job on Fanboy & Chum Chum,  I found out about another unsung showbiz story. Who knew that Steve Tompkins created Ari Gold on Entourage?

Hanna-Barbera Pic-a-Nic Box

Anyone who knows me is aware of my music habit, and close readers of this blog will pick up on my affection for cartoon music in particular.

So it was extremely gratifying when my friend, Rhino Records founder Richard Foos, agreed to indulge me in the 1990’s with a (now out-of-print) four CD boxed set of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons themes, underscores, sound effects, and other audio ephemera and artifacts of our historic studio. It was compiled and produced with passion and knowledge by cartoon writer/producer Earl Kress.

I’ve posted before about my worship and respect for the under appreciated HB music director and composer Hoyt Curtin but I’ve finally gotten around to scanning the great booklet Earl put together for the set. It not only includes a listing of all the sound in the box, but has great essays by Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, David Burd, Bill Burnett, and Barry Hansen (Dr. Demento). Plus Marty Pekar conducted an interview about the studio’s unique sound effects library with Joe, Bill, Greg Watson, and Pat Foley. (As we get around to it, you can look at separate transcripts of the essays here.)

For a quick preview, here’s a Quick Draw McGraw track from the box set, composed, arranged and conducted by Hoyt:

Hoyt Curtain & The Hanna-Barbera Studio Big Band >Quick Draw McGraw (Underscore & Syndicated End Titles)

As I was writing about my early experiences in the 1970s New York jazz scene yesterday, our friend Andy Schwartz was emailing me about his pieces about one of the great city music clubs, Tin Palace. Check them out in the online music mag Perfect Sound Forever.

It’s Ballads Week! over at Kathleen Loves Music!

I’ve been having such a ball since I moved my music blog over to tumblr (it’s so much easier) that I’ve actually started programming the thing. Whether it’s the Tribute to Isaac Hayes the week he passed away,  or the five versions I posted of James Brown’s funk innovation “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag,” I’m finding it a hoot to share the music I like with the tumblr community in addition to my friend Kathleen, whom I set the site up for in the beginning.

Coming up? So far I’m planning theme weeks about (of course) Cartoon Music, Modern Blues, the Nat “King” Cole Trio, One Hit Wonders of the 60s, and White Blues. Any thoughts, lemme know.

Some people get their cultural from comics, or movies, or the ponies. Me, it’s work, music, and books. And when my friend and NNN/tumblr investor Bijan Sabet posted about Goodreads, which he said was “sort of like last.fm for books” it reminded me what a reading junkie I am. Interestingly, my years in cartoons have once again proven to me that even the most interesting animators are the most curious, often well read, people. So, while I’m on vacation, aside from reading, I thought it might be useful to review my year’s reading list so far. Since I now read almost everything on my Kindle, my shelves aren’t quite as burdened as the picture above, but, it’s still a heavy load.

(By the way, for those who wonder, like I do, when I get the time, I read in the elevator, the subway, taxis, airplanes, and when I put my kids to bed.)

I’m not going to post about the billions of picture books I’m always getting (like the incredible “Wacky Packages”, a must have,

a five Frederator read

)

because this post would go on even longer.

Rhythm and the Blues by Jerry Wexler and David Ritts

(a four Frederator read)

I posted when I started this book last week. It follows the story of an atheist New York Jew who fell in love with the rhythm of Black America and found his love in bringing the story to the world. The great record producer of everyone from Aretha Franklin to Ray Charles to Bob Dylan to Wilson Pickett (and hundreds more) Jerry is one of my prime professional role models and I’m inspired to hear his stories as often as I can. He follows the credo of “Does it have heart? Make it!”

Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

(a four Frederator read)

Mystery fiction is the beginning and the end for me. In fact, I can’t remember when the last time I read anything else. I love Lawrence Block because he writes genre books as if they were “serious” fiction, and I read him always ending up feeling more of the human condition when I’m done. Block is an exceptional writer [Read more…]

If you love modern American popular music, you probably know it wouldn’t exist as we know it without New Orleans.

I’ve written quite a bit since 2005 about the tragedy that befell the United States while Hurricane Katrina hit and our government bungled the chance to save a great American region.

And I posted once about the graphic art that’s been created to help donate funds to help the rebuidling, but I’ve only glanced upon the personal part of me that resonates with New Orleans, and that’s the musical culture.

Briefly: Tipitina’s was set up by some music fans to provide a place for piano legend Professor Longhair to perform in his later years. Bad business met good intentions and the place almost went under until a good samartian resurrected the joint in the mid-90s. Katrina almost put it down for the count with the rest of the area but our samaritan instead set up Tipitina’s Foundation to help the city’s most important asset, it’s musicians. You can read more in detail about the foundation’s work here.

The point? Please donate to Tipitina’s Foundation. The tragedy is not over by a long shot –it won’t be for most of our lifetimes– and any help you can give will help. If you love music, this should be an easy check to write.

Most of the time I’m not a first mover. Early, sure (blogging, Channel Frederator, VOD Cars), rarely first. But with my music jones I’ve tried to be on top of most everything and often just wanted to kill myself. Over the years, I’ve been a musician, a record producer, a music television producer and most of all a stone music fan. Pop, rock, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, you name it, I’m there. So, the digital revolution has given me a wonder of hopes and frustrations.

I’ve used ‘em all –the original Napster, Winamp, MusicMatch, the HangGo, the Airport Express, heck I’ve even ran SonicNet Radio for a while– and eventually just chocked on the exasperation. The inventors have caught up with my needs –selection, convenience, and (relative) quality for a reasonable price– and though I’m a little behind the true hipsters, I’m finally at (almost) fan nirvana.

Sonos was the first level of enlightenment [Read more…]

This post has absolutely nothing to do with animation.

I’ve been cleaning out my drawers lately which caused me to scan some of my stuff and throw it on my Flickr page. Some of it’ll eventually get linked to on my old branding agency archive, but who knows about the rest.

The picture above is from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. It’s from a random collection of photographs I found in a box at a junk shop specializing in then-uncool mid-century furniture. I couldn’t resist the hundreds of vintage prints of these amazing deco buildlings I’d really only seen in amazing stylized illustrations from the fair. I had no idea what I was going to do with the snaps –hell, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them– but they were great just to have.

###

Mosaic Records Brochure No. 4

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Catalogs Consumer catalog 1984

In the late 70s I was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history. In the early 80s he and BlueNote executive Charlie Lourie started the pioneering Mosaic Records as the first company specializing in boxed set reissues of classic performances, available only by mail order. Michael and I became reacquainted when I ordered their first set (The Complete BlueNote Recordings of Thelonious Monk) and he asked me to get involved with helping them out of the hole. It turned out their ’sure thing’ idea wasn’t having many takers and they were worried about shutting down. My partner Alan Goodman and I turned them down two years in a row with a lot of unsolitcited advice about what they could do better –we were broke and our company was barely alive itself– even if we were talking through our hats. Everything we knew about direct mail cataloging was from being mail order customers ourselves and from a direct mail how-to book I’d read the first chapter of. We loved Michael and Charlie, and we admired what they were trying to accomplish at Mosaic, but we were just too low on bandwidth.

Three years in our company was doing a little better and Mosaic was doing a lot worse; Michael and Charlie successfully prevailed on us to finally help. We knew no more, but full of the arrogance of youth we lugged out Alan’s first generation portable computer and invented the first Mosaic 12-page brochure on our summer picnic table. Alan wrote every word (I supervised “strategy” — what else is new?), our friends Tom Corey and Scott Nash designed the thing, Jessica Wolf supervised the production and we mailed out the first Mosaic catalog ever in the summer of 1986.

We waited for the order phones to ring, and lo and behold, in the first three weeks Mosaic’s business had increased 10 fold. They were in business forever. Alan’s still writing the brochures, I’m still getting the free box sets and lobbing in ideas from the side. What a world we live in. I’ve never been prouder of any project I’ve worked on in my life.

Do you like jazz? Order one of the Mosaic sets. They are still the standard by which all others are judged.

Running into this old article on the origins of the MTV logo (designed by Manhattan Design: Pat Gorman, Frank Olinksky, Patti Rogoff) in my junk recently reminded me of the accidental process that “branding” is and how often the most successful stuff seems to have an innate intelligence that really isn’t there.

Sometimes I watch a great cartoon and marvel about how the creative team thought about something or other, or how smart they were to use the music a certain way, or how they must planned for the world domination they have.

And then I remember. It’s all an accident. Sure there’s talent, often there’s who knows whom, maybe the fix was in. But luck, never underestimate it.