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Mike Flanagan, Professor Mikey, has been writing and broadcasting on and about popular culture for a long time. His love of the Old School has been expressed in hundreds of articles, thousands of hours of radio, five published books including Out West, The Old West Day by Day, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Old West, and It’s About Time. The audio book of It’s About Time is out now also, if you just want to hear him read.
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You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox, and most of them will include the podcast which can also be heard on Apple, Spotify, YouTube—almost anywhere that offers podcasts. Expect little known releases from fascinating people and the times in which they lived. Longer shows usually are theme based, but the new Old School Singles feature is great for a quick trip somewhere that only requires one great song to make your day.
There’s a lot of reasons to ditch the present and fly backwards via the rewind button. Some great tunes are lurking back there, along with the art and zeitgeist that propelled the before times. You can also suggest story ideas and send Professor Mikey on scavenger hunts.
The Past Is a Blast
Be part of a community of people who miss their 8-tracks, wonder what it felt like on the day a new Beatles album was released, or heard stories from relatives who were in the audience when Johnny Cash played Folsom Prison.
Boomers should enjoy the pulls at memory. Gen Xers, Millennials, Gen Zs, and Gen Alphas, all suspicious that “back in the day” is code for “it was so much cooler then,” will get to feel the buzz, get a little in the moment perspective, and be further amazed by their forbears. Inspiration never gets old.
Already in the second decade of the new millennium, we are subjected to so much input, it is hard to imagine a time when everyone had to have a color TV, a record collection that they never referred to as “vinyl,” when everyone acknowledged what was big and what was real.
Today we live in a time where originality as well as where and when everything that happened seems to have originated in a time of cigarettes and low gas prices. Why are so many 50-year-old songs used in commercials? Have we progressed into a derivative universe, where our best culture and creativity originated elsewhere, in a land before digital?
Maybe. Yeah. Probably. But we have better computers. HD. Access to the past like never before. So we can dial up the music of some poser if we can remember a shred of something that can be searched. Or we can go to pay per listen services and find albums we have never heard.
Professor Mikey hit the air at age 16 and remained there, in many incarnations and many radio stations, for over 50 years. Staying afloat meant listening to listeners as much as one listens to music. It required honing skills where stories could be told in few words, and the songs could be enjoyed as if they were being heard for the first times.
Everything old is destined to get old again.
One of the really weird things about diving into the past is how the likes of Lou Reed, Bessie Smith, Muhammad Ali, Jack Kerouac, Shirley Jackson, César Chavez, Joe Meek, Sonny Boy Williamson, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Harry Houdini, Salvador Dali, J. D. Salinger, Steve McQueen, Damon Runyon, Maya Angelou, and David Bowie not only fill our dreams of back in the day, they seem to be dictating the direction we are moving in. PMOS is not so much about nostalgia as it is filling in the blanks and perhaps experiencing things differently than they were at the times.
The settings are mostly 20th Century, but that’s not an unbreakable rule. Each piece is geared toward a certain mojo, an energy that was propelled by the times.
PMOS covers a lot of genres and is loaded with facts, up close and personal memories, rumors, jive and reality. There is much more to it than nostalgia. A big part of it all is the ability to look back, knowing what we know now, and either wish you were there, feel glad it’s over, or be part of what comes next.
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