This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 10, 2012 - During my junior year of college, I spent winter break in Los Angeles, visiting a friend, Stephen, who’d transferred from Webster University to Loyola Marymount. His apartment was shared by three other guys, though very few of them were ever home. This allowed me ample time to sit around the apartment during down times, playing-then-rewinding-then-playing-then-rewinding the first side of The Smiths’ still-new “Strangeways, Here We Come,” the cassette’s first five songs indelibly burned into my brain during that trip. Play, rewind, play, rewind.
Musically, the month-long visit was critical to widening my tastes. A few visits to the massive club Scream cemented all that. There Stephen, his friends and I watched bands like the Sea Hags, the Nymphs and Dramarama, who whipped the crowd into the first, true, circle-dancing slam pit I’d ever lay eyes on. All I wanted to do that trip was walk around Venice Beach and go to shows. Young minds get fixated; and I couldn’t imagine a better pair of activities, even repeated ad nauseam over four weeks.
At some point in the visit, I found a small, lasting totem, this one not necessarily having anything to do with music. (Though we’ll make the connection. Give us a minute.) We were eating at a Mexican restaurant one evening. Someone mentioned over dinner that it was the last place visited by Sharon Tate and her friends on the night she was killed by the Manson Family. Three times a week I lose my keys and I can’t tell you if I ate breakfast earlier today, but this conversation ... I’m right there. Vivid as heck.
So we walk outside that restaurant, and there’s a flyer on a telephone pole. It was simple and strange, featuring the image of a chihuahua, ears pointed back and a front leg raised. Under it this message: “Where is GOMEZ?” Nothing more, nothing less.
I carefully took the flyer off the pole. It came back to St. Louis with me. And for a couple jobs, it was selected for a place of honor, just above my computer monitor and in constant view. And then a job ended. And Gomez got packed up, not to be seen for a decade, or so. Thankfully, he’s back.
Flyers 4 Life
If my walk-around knowledge is correct, there’s a famous story about an isolated troop of monkeys. At some point, they learned how to wash potatoes, each picking up the skill from another monkey, and the practice eventually jumped from their colony across the sea to a nearby island. All of this might be made up, but I’m pretty sure there’s something real here. (If only, while sitting at this computer, I had a way to look up this information ....)
So, yeah. Earlier this year, after watching other human beings doing it for years, I learned how to scan. It was a small step for mankind, but quite the leap for a Luddite who’d put off the practice for years, due to some sorta crippling, from-birth-to-death techno fear.
Once able to scan, I scanned and scanned and scanned. I used a box of old rock’n’roll flyers for practice and I posted them to my Flickr stream. Within a day, or so, my friend Jaime Lees wrote up a blip for the Riverfront Times website. Remarkably, thousands of hits came to the scans, which made me think that I should keep them on a dedicated page.
So I killed all the images on my Flickr site and added them to an unused URL, silvertrayonline.com. In asking my mass comm students about this decision later that same week, they collectively came up with this wisdom: I should have kept the images on both sites, allowing that many more people a chance to find them. After all, I took the time to digitize all that mess. I thought they were important enough to share them with a worldwide audience.
They were right. I should’ve left them on Flickr. And once summer rolls around and I have some spare time, maybe they’ll go back up.
But since we’re on the topic of spare time, let’s go make that delayed connection, the one between Gomez and music and .... you. It’s this: I love flyers. I think they’re an important piece of rock’n’roll culture. A huge piece of it, really.
When I see a flyer on the wall of a record shop, I stop to look. When I get a FB invite to a show, I try to avoid that message as quickly as possible. So insincere, your message! Hang it on a wall, or don’t bother me. This philosophy qualifies me for some type of dinosaur card, I know, one that gives discounts at the local moviehouse.
If it’s old-school, this notion, that’s cool. I love flyers. And I’m so glad that they haven’t gone away. When you’re not a musician, though, and you’re not a graphic designer, either, what does that leave you? If you wanna be a part of flyer culture, you’ve gotta find an angle.
And now we’re at that point in the story.
Activation
I have a scan of the original Gomez flyer. I’d like to share it with the world. I want it to be like that garden gnome, you know the one: It’s gotten famous and gets photographed at ferris wheels and waterfalls and landmarks the world over. I want Gomez to get up outta that box of fired-from-a-job packaging and I want him to get out into the world and have some fun.
I’m a monkey with a potato and a scanner and a photocopy of a chihuahua and a dream. That’s a good start.