Welcome to Retrofit

Hello, minimal ground rules, thrilling days of yesteryear...

People get their pasts on in different ways.  Not personal pasts so much as those innocent little jaunts into other times, where our favorite music played on the way to beloved movies in our hottest cars while our favorite teams went undefeated.

We Retrofit the good times to help get through the terrible.

Professor Mikey here, inviting you to push rewind with me anytime. Find peace, love, knowledge, and rock and roll.  Retrofit the old inbox. Back in the day. It’s just a click away

We are all a little guilty of taking breaks from the news while we weather the quarantine that has taken so much.

Retrofit is for anyone anywhere who might need a digital escape hatch. A memory that struck a cool note ahead of its time. Joining us who really were experienced, we make room for the cool kids decked out in their Marc Bolan T. Rex top hat t-shirts. Beyond banging a gong, they might be looking to fill some gaps in their old school pop culture, awaiting the return of Trivia Night.

Living in the Past - Jethro Tull

Living in the Past.

It’s a rocking little Jethro Tull classic, full of legend, wired flutes, and woodland creatures. It is also a term for a once shunned state of mind, when unrealistic detached souls found welcome escape by emotionally transporting themselves backwards in time to a younger orbit that promised an optimistic future. Escapist present tense deniers indulging in silly nostalgia.  Holing up with their first editions and vinyl.

Retrofit seems a natural for Baby Boomers as they begin their inevitable slide toward caducity, pecking at their bucket list doc on Microsoft Word. Their fondest embedded memories of Lucy, Ricky, and Prince, nurtured lovingly by the Greatest Generation, morphing from apple pies and Fred Astaire movies to Batman and quaaludes.

Wow, we pride ourselves on when we came along. We make sure you know that. A song less than three decades old has no chance of being used in a modern car ad. All James Bond actors were 006 up against the once and future 007, Sean Connery. No fighter could approach the forever cool forever stinging like a bee Muhammad Ali.  Every festival was great, but it wasn’t Woodstock.

If this younger generation upon which John B. Sebastian waxed in a Bethel acid sunset did not seem so cool at first listen, the Boomer and Karen promo machine will shout your asses down. You might come out of it with a shirt, “My parents were taken down to Strawberry Fields and all I got was living is easy with eyes closed.”

But as slowly as a mystery virus in Ultra 4K 5 gig times, multiple icons of the past faded in the presence of new blood (See Bette Davis meets Richard Pryor on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 1983). Events rolled out at hyper speeds as the preambles to us all faded like a tie-dyed t-shirt.  

New personalities famous for fame, history makers and the sexiest people alive appeared regularly to engage the Nintendo bunch who weren’t so clued into all this recent past. Their only concepts of time were based on when the next soccer practice might begin.

This precipitated the loading of an unexpected sidebar.  Individuals from newer generations Gen X, Millennials (Gen Y), and Gen Z disconnected from much of the cool that had come before, blatant chill that had energized their parents.  The bare mention of anything that preceded smartphones or drones resulted in vacant stares.  Forget any conversation that might include Emmet Kelly, The Ventures, the Salk vaccine, Myrna Loy, or Princess telephones.  Aging rockers turned to apology first tactics.  

“This is before your time, but…” 

Around then is when the past first became my side hustle.  Too many great stories and chill people had been lost to time.  Sensing a creative minimally lucrative opportunity, I fell back on my journalism minor and started cranking out nostalgia for local newspapers, then syndicates, then national magazines.  

Based in Denver, a lot of stories wound out west. Jack Kerouac among the desolation angels of Larimer Street.  Queen Marie of Rumania taking high tea at the Brown Palace, where Bob Dylan sang “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” into a Tascam recorder. (My own bootleg of that particular cassette sleeps in this great closet of vinyl, WWII Life magazines, and National Lampoons behind me.  I’ll play it for you.  As soon as I find it.)

My literary gateway drug seemed a natural.  There was always an anniversary coming up, or some other reason to look back on innocence.  We had crazes and fads that rocked. The times had been a-changing.

In the secure world of the freelance journalist, the secret to survival or even the next sandwich is to conjure a twist to some relevant narrative, then, before typing a word, convince an editor that this indeed will engage readers, increase sales, and not take up too much room.

The telephone conversation with the editor usually went something like this:

“Davy Crockett’s 30th anniversary is coming up.”

“What’s that? I haven’t seen anything on it.”

“That’s why it would kill in the Sunday entertainment section. Think of it. Production pics from 1955. I surround it. Real Davy, Fess Parker Davy, the kids are crying for coonskin caps.  Disney invents merchandising for the Leave It to Beaver farts overnight.  Ballad of Davy Crockett knocks Elvis out of number one”

“Not a comma over twelve hundred words. One hundred fifty bucks.”

(Singing:) “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee…”

When new fans get exposed to those thrilling days of yesteryear, they form their own mental documentaries of how things must have been.  Btw, “those thrilling days of yesteryear” is a line from the Lone Ranger TV show. Clayton Moore was a badass.  

In the 1980s, the aging Ranger was hauled into court because he wouldn’t stop making paid masked appearances. All he wanted was to be a role model for kids who might have fancied a walk on the dark side.  And contribute to his time share in the Old West with something other than silver bullets.

The past had become the Lone Ranger’s side hustle.

But wait! There is more to this than a trip back to the beach with Frankie and Annnette. At the root of all this is a modern culture that revels and celebrates the ubiquity of a past with little or any reference.

Adobe Photoshop, a tool for our time, advertises to a half century old song,“She’s a Rainbow,” from the psychedelic experimenting of the Rolling Stones. This would be the equivalent of Mick and the boys of 1967 being shoved side for 1917’s “Over There.”  A Star Is Born was embraced by many in 2018 by many who were unaware it was the fourth remake.  Millions of voters supported a platform of “America First” clueless of the slogan’s historical connotation.

Highlighting what once ruled is indeed just a part of this Retrofit.  Another thread is the connecting of cultural dots. Our timeframe/playground is roughly the mid to late 20th Century, sometimes earlier.  Somewhere in time where the dust has settled, the consequences suffered, the twigs bent, the crust cooled. 

In addition to reanimating people and events, I’ll be including lots of art, film clips, and a steady dig into forgotten record store closets. When I wasn’t writing I was on the radio. I have music stories out the wazoo. 

I also want to track the subject matter with modern tools. Maybe pinpoint Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with Google Earth, find auctions of Judy Garland memorabilia, or research for how much you can sell your original Etch-A-Sketch in a box onEBay.  There are big bucks in memorabilia; Trigger, the golden palomino ride of Hollywood cowboy Roy Rogers, died in 1965, became a work of taxidermy art, and sold at auction in 2010 for $266,000. 

In these recreations from other times and different spaces, my hope is you will fill the heat, relive the buzz, and understand why the subject matter did or didn’t resonate.  Why some things disappear and why others, like the Beach Boys, return and persist as sure as each Endless Summer. 

The iconic and the obscure, the forgotten and timeless.  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the High and the Mighty, they all put the top down and go reeling in the years on cruise control.  Everything old is new again.  The past was a blast.  

With Retrofit it gets an upgrade.

Happy trails to you!

Professor Mikey

December 2020