Legendary recording engineer and Sigma Sound Studios founder Joe Tarsia sits down to talk about his decades-long career "behind the board" in the music industry - from his early days at Cameo Parkway Records, to his long-standing relationship with Gamble & Huff of Philadelphia International Records, and the creation of "The Sound of Philadelphia" featured on over 200 gold & platinum-selling records, including David Bowie's Young Americans.
Joe gives me a nice shout out around 23:00 in...
1. Started at 6 am +/- with Twitter and Facebook social media cross-posting of the day's new POCHO content. Found out photo I thought was taken in Vegas was indeed taken in Vegas. Cross-posted a meme I had prepared last night.
2. Moderated comments/replies on POCHO and TACO TRUCK PARTY Facebook as needed.
3. Emailed producers of new LA-based web series with URL of the story I ran with their video.
4. Checked our bank account. Has an ad agency direct deposit for money we've been owed for months that was promised for November 5 arrived? It has not.
5. Three phone calls with three different reps and maybe 50 minutes re photographer web client's hosting company that broke our new site. Eventually convinced them not to charge us $100 for a "URL re-set" using my elite social engineering skills.
6. Sent sample ghostwritten blogs to a potential copyrighting client. 1. Second careers for boomers 2. Smart $ choices for your millennial wedding.
7. Rewrote/copy edited FAQ for specialized travel agency. Excerpt: "Frequently Asked Questions for Parents: We know you’ve got questions! Here are the answers to the questions you ask the most:" 2.5 hours on timesheet.
8. With the previously broken photographer's website back online and my renewed miraculous ability to login as administrator restored, I uploaded photos and built two new photo galleries, "Silhouettes" and "NYC." Removed passworded Nudes gallery from the main menu.
9. Continued curating, sourcing and producing stories for tomorrow's POCHO. Sought and got republish permission for an opinion piece from an associated blog, found an inspiring video from a friend of a friend's FB page and stumbled upon a Vimeo gem perfect for our audience. Generated art for each (need at least two instances per story), wrote copy, heads, links, tags, etc. via WordPress, double checked, tweaked, re-edited, and scheduled the blog posts for tomorrow.
10. More follow-up on FB page, Twitter
11. Lalo Alcaraz drops surprise Trump/wall toon from Miami where he has a gig so I do a rush post for POCHO plus Twitter and IG and FB with new toon.
12. Take walk. Regain sanity.
13. One more POCHO story.
14. More photographer tweaks.
15. New POCHO content for IG, and FB.
16. To be continued ....
(PNS reporting from the ALT YORK CITY, ALT YORK) The Wednesday issue of the local “Alt-Right” newspaper — The Putin Press & Patriot — was prepared to report a Hillary Clinton’s election victory as an “attack” on America, PNS has learned (photo.)
[Editor’s Note: A “newspaper” is an pre-Millennial period analog instantiation of intellectual property — i.e. “content” — fixed on a physical medium comprised of a data-carrying chemical reagent and processed dead trees.]
POCHO ÑEWS SERVICE PNS IS A WHOLLY-FICTITIOUS SUBSIDIARY OF POCHISMO INC., A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION, WHO IS A PERSON ACCORDING TO THE SUPREME COURT. DON’T ASK US, WE JUST WORK HERE.
GOYSPLAINING (noun): The condescending or patronizing way a Gentile (a "goy") explains something to a Jew about Jewish religion, history, culture, and/or society.
Friends don't let friends goysplain. Oy!
(PNS reporting from PHILADELPHIA) Donald Trump, Wharton School Class of 1968, is the new cover boy of a University of Pennsylvania alumni magazine mailed today to Penn grads across the country.
“PENNDEJO magazine will only publish this single issue,” editor Arne Mather Marmon, Wharton School Class of 1969, told PNS in an email. “We want to to memorialize the most famous UPenn ‘Quaker’ in appropriate style.”
Oh beautiful for taco trucks
On every corner YES
Fresh salsa on tortilla chips
Our country God did bless
America America
Your mobile taqueri'
As crowned with guaca-
Mole sauce
Burritos!
Tamale!
From the PHILADELPHIA BROADCAST PIONEERS NEWSLETTER:
"....A 15 YEAR-OLD AT WASHINGTON PRESS CONFERENCES!
Dennis Wilen is the founder and editor of Pocho.com in Los Angeles, an online news and satirical publication. He is a reformed journalist and veteran radio and records executive, music producer, webmaster and web editor with credits that include Rolling Stone, LACMA, the L.A. Jewish Journal, the Milken Family Foundation, Brentwood Patch, Yahoo! Geocities, Harry Shearer and Spinal Tap. He is a native Philadelphian, and wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and served a stint as music director and concert director of WMMR. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His sister is member Amy Wilen-Buckman. We asked him to tell us about his experience of going to Washington to cover national press conferences as a high-school journalist.
He wrote:
How do I tell this story? I could start out by saying “I’ve always been a troublemaker,” or, perhaps, “It’s better to apologize later than ask permission first.”
Either way, my White House adventure began in the spring of 1963, when I was a 15-year-old junior at Haverford High and News Director at WHHS, our school’s 10-watt FM station. I did a quarter-hour “News of the Week in Review” show every Monday, in the optimistic belief that a 15-year-old could talk meaningfully about world events.
I was also what we would call now a “JFK fan boy.” I loved President John F. Kennedy and remember his campaign appearance in Upper Darby near 69th Street, how his hair seemed extra red in person and the way he smiled.
I followed the news diligently - “The Evening Bulletin” at home every day (my family disliked “The Inquirer,” aka the “Republican Bible of Pennsylvania”), CBS’ Walter Cronkite every night and the talk shows and “The New York Times” every Sunday.
One day I sat down at the WHHS typewriter and tapped out a letter to Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary, on the official WHHS letterhead. I asked if were possible for me to get on the press release mailing list, and, by the way, to attend one of Kennedy’s regularly-scheduled morning press conferences at the State Department and the afternoon briefing in the White House. I got my answer soon after.
I was in class when the PA system summoned me to the principal’s office. “You’ve got mail,” they said, and handed me an envelope with a return address that read “The White House.”
My new pal Pierre had said, “OK!” I found out when the next press conference was, and got permission from my parents and the school to make the trip. My budget allowed for the train down to D.C., a cab ride to the State Department from Union Station (I remember being informed that cabs in Washington stopped to pick up passengers), a ride to go get lunch (“Tell the driver to take you to the nearest Peoples’ Drug Store where they have a lunch counter,” my mom said), and a ride to and from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
On the train down I read the day’s “N.Y. Times” and wrote down some questions in case the president called on me when I raised my hand (as if). I got to D.C., took a cab to the State Department, presented my year-old Social Security Card as ID and was ushered into the State Department auditorium for the press conference.
It’s lucky JFK didn’t call on me! I can now reveal - for the first time - I totally botched the name of someone in the news - a guy named Huntington Richardson or Wentworth Harrington or some indeterminate WASP-y combination like that and wrote his name down backwards. Whew! Thank you, Fate!
After an uneventful cab ride (no extra passengers) and a cheeseburger at the lunch counter of People’s Drug, I hailed a cab and directed the driver to the White House. As skeptical as the cab driver was when I told him my destination, the gate guard at the White House, thankfully, was even more skeptical. He double checked my Social Security Card, phoned back inside, and, after what seemed like an eternity, opened the gate and told me how to get the the press room.
A Marine Guard let me in, and there I sat, a kid among the wire service and syndicate and newspaper and broadcast White House correspondents, waiting to be ushered into the press secretary’s office. I don’t remember which reporters were there, but I do remember recognizing some of them. Pierre Salinger, sadly, was on vacation, so we got the briefing from Andrew Hatcher, his assistant, who was the first African American to serve in the White House Press Office. Hatcher, unsurprisingly, didn’t call on me either.
Back in Ardmore I was a celebrity of sorts, enough to get “The Bulletin” interested in writing up the episode as a human interest story.The story reached WPEN radio talk show host Red Benson who asked me to do a guest spot on his show, which was broadcast live from a coffee shop on Walnut Street downtown.
I told my story, read a commercial, took phone calls, and had a blast. Back at the White House, things were not so copacetic. My BFF Pierre - or one of his minions - sent a second letter to me, care of HHS, and scolded me for not noting I was a student broadcaster in my initial inquiry.
It’s better to apologize later than ask permission first...."
RIP Gene Wilder.
I bumped into him years ago at the old bagel store (long gone) down the street in Bel Air. (His grandkids lived in the neighborhood.)
I'm glad I got to tell him I loved him as the rabbi in The Frisco Kid.
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, during the reign of King Herod...
Hillel the Elder’s friendly adversary was Shammai, a native of the Land of Israel about whom little is known except that he was a builder, known for the strictness of his views. He was reputed to be dour, quick-tempered and impatient....
A pagan came to Rabbi Shammai and made him a proposition: "I will become a Jew if you can teach me the Torah while standing on one foot." Shammai threw him out.
Then the pagan approached Rabbi Hillel with the same offer. Rabbi Hillel said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself. That is the whole of the Torah. Everything else is commentary." The "School of Hillel" has been the majority strain of Judaism ever since.
Hillel the Elder is best known for one aphorism: "If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
Shammai, on the other hand, is known for "You're fired!"
Koreatown, Los Angeles, 2007. Banner on side of supermarket for ASSWELLBEING.
#TBT July 1971.
I brought country rockers The Flying Burrito Brothers into Philly's famed Sigma Sound Studios for one of my WMMR radio concerts. With Jay Mark and Joseph Tarsia behind the board, it sounded something like this ...
#TBT July 2001.
There's a pretty good version of the site at Archive.org.
A random thought made me do a Google search and voila -- I found this reference (although not my name.) When I was an idealistic Penn Law student, I worked in the criminal court system representing defendants in their bail hearings. My old criminal law prof, David Kairys, put it in his book
The screencap is from Google books.
England says "no" to #BREXIT?
Congrats to my Led Zeppelin homies on winning the lawsuit!
I'll never forget my first week on the job at WMMR that ended with our flight on the private jet to Atlanta and Miami with party girls and Atlantic Records executives and a "party atmosphere" -- very similar to the opening episode of HBO's VINYL.
Robert and Jimmy: We played blackjack but I don't remember who won -- do you?
There's been a bustle in my hedgerow ever since.
Thank you Bad Company and Swansong records for this! I've been dragging it from place to place for 40-plus years.
