Fred Seibert's Blog

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.

Jerry Wexler recording with Aretha Franklin, circa early 1970s

It might seem odd to remember a great record producer on a cartoon blog, but it’s probably just as odd to take cartoon producing lessons from a great rhythm & blues producer (the producer who coined the term ‘rhythm and blues’, not so incidentally), like I sort of did. But when I was coming up there was no place to learn to be a producer (if it is indeed possible to learn such a thing) so I took my inspiration from the great record men I could read about. Like Jerry Wexler.

Ironically, I’d started re-reading Jerry’s autobiography just this week when I got word he’d passed away yesterday in Florida.

Jerry is my number one producer hero, which is saying something considering my dozen other favorites including the likes George Martin or Berry Gordy or Quincy Jones. The thing I most admired most about him was the finesse to allow musicians to play exactly how they wanted to play, but somehow coax mega hits out of them at the same time. A rare, sometimes, seemingly unique ability.

Sure, the music made my antennae go up (Aretha, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Bob Dylan, Dusty Springfield, the list is almost incalculable), his company too (he was a partner in the great Atlantic Records), and the fact he was a Manhattan-ite in love with Black music. I’ve heard he could be an irracible jerk (he who casts the first stone….). But, unlike a lot of the other great producers who were often highly trained arrangers or musicians or engineers themselves, Jerry seemed that he was just a fan first and foremost (I say “seemed” because he was a highly skilled writer and journalist before joining Atlantic in his 30’s).

Jerry just loved music. He married his fandom and knowledge to his impeccable instincts for talent. (He convinced Carole King and Gerry Goffin to write “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” after musing about John Henry’s term “natural man” and shouting out to them on a New York street to write a song with that title. He hummed a favorite country song to Patti Page and she sold millions on “The Tennesee Waltz”).

You can read more and better about Jerry Wexler in thousands of places. Do it, you’ll enjoy yourself. But, in the meantime, I realized that without thinking about it over at my music blog I’ve posted five tracks that Jerry produced or caused to be produced in the last few weeks alone. They’re the best way to hear what I’m talking about. Jerry Wexler made us all a lot richer.

Aretha Franklin > Rock Steady

King Curtis > Hold On, I’m Comin’

Carla Thomas > B-A-B-Y

Sam & Dave > I Thank You

Otis Redding > (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

Mailed out the week of July 7, 2008.
…..
Frederator Postcards Series 1, 1998
Frederator Postcards Series 2, 1999
Frederator Postcards Series 3, 2000
Frederator Postcards Series 4, 2003
Frederator Postcards Series 5, 2004-2005
Frederator Postcards Series 6, 2007-2008

(via i heart comics)

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.

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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.