BREMERTON — A VIP lanyard is hanging in front of my face. I can’t tell who its for. I can’t tell who the band is. Or what year its from. I think its a tuesday afternoon. Could be wednesday. Wait. Holy shit. Is that a backstage pass for BB King?! We’re at a music store on wheaton way in east bremerton. Dan, the guy who runs the place—the guy who’s run the place for decades—has told me what feels like 1,300 stories in the space of about a half-an-hour. We’ve looked at some 100 artifacts at this point. ‘Dan is a certain kind of historian,’ the notes read. He has a museum in the corner of his shop. And another hidden on the work bench behind the counter. Probably another in the file cabinets. And another in storage. This whole place is a museum with a certain set of eyes. Memories of another time. Relics of another era. Something tells me I could’ve probably ordered any piece of musical equipment I could possibly need off the internet from my cell phone right now while sitting in traffic on wheaton way, waiting for the light to turn green at the bridge…
BUT THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE inside this music shop. It’s the kind of stuff you can’t find on the internet. There are decades of stories in here. An ecosystem of local music spanning generations. That’s why we came straight here when we heard Dan was thinking of closing up shop after 40 years. We brought the second-biggest local historian we could think of, in Gordon H. Rinke, to get the stories from Dan. We collected close to three hours of audio footage. An array of cohesive, connected and random music history. And about 64 photos. All of which could fill an entire book. Perhaps series of books. So, edited for length and clarity, here are the first 17 minutes of the two-hour-plus recording, where Dan is attempting to show us the cable television advertisements he used to run on local TV stations in the 90s… For the full story, you’ll have to go see Dan while you still can. The 40th anniversary proper is coming up in June. He says this store never would have existed since 1985 without “the help/energy/creativity of my friends: Beth, Les, Tom Pike, Sheila, Mike Stoican, Heather Madden, Mikey, Khayah and all our teachers and product/rep people. . . !”
[AT THE COUNTER AT KITSAP MUSIC, MID-AFTERNOON ON A WEEK DAY IN FEBRUARY W/ DAN AT KITSAP MUSIC & GORDON FROM BROTHER DON’S….]
“What, are you logging onto the internet, here?” I ask Dan, as he fiddles with an old Asus laptop at the music store counter. He says he got hacked a couple years ago, so he doesn’t ‘participate in that’ anymore… “But I wanted to show you a couple of advertisements,” he says. “Because we were one of the first music shops to do ads…” He’s fumbling around the old bulky laptop, the kind with a CD-Rom drive. He’s trying to get these old Kitsap Music ads from the 90s that he’s got on DVD to play…
“What do you mean, it doesn’t want to play?” Gordon says. “Do I gotta go get my Buick and bring it over? We could sit in the Buick and listen…”
“Yeah, but this is a video,” Dan says.
“I hear it,” Dan says, leaning his ear towards the machine. “It just kind of spins and it stops. I hear it click. But, you know, it’s technology, man. I don’t know anything about technology.”
“Alright,” I butt in. “So, go to that button in the far left corner with the four squares…”
“Ok, well, yeah, that’s my start button,” Dan responds indignantly.
“Perfect,” I say. “And then you have…”
“Ok, so what do I do?” Dan interrupts.
“DVD player?”
“Yeah, that one!” I say.
“Well, we were in that one already…” Dan’s kind of frustrated.
“Oh, ok, hmm…” let’s contemplate next steps.
“You’re further than I would be…” Gordon says, as a spectator to the whole thing.
“When I put the disc in, it should just do that!” Dan laments. “Oh! I hear something though… Hey, listen to you, Mr. Smart Kid!
“It just needed to be booted a little,” Gordon says. “We have got to be smarter than the computers!” I add.
“There it is… Look at this!” Gordon exclaims.
“Ah-ha!”
Success. The video screen pops up on the old computer, expanding into full screen mode. “Ok, so this is…” Dan says, back in action. “I was trying to figure this out… I think this is like 20-plus years ago. And, of course, there’s Darren and Sheila, and that guy, and the Les Man…” He’s naming the actors in the opening scene of the historic video. They are celebrated old timers from the Kitsap Music Scene. ‘Les Man,’ Leslie Shelton, was the first person to work with Dan full-time at the music shop.
“That’s Les with the stand-up bass?” Gordon asks. “I’ve never seen… he doesn’t do that very often does he?”
“Oh, he rarely does that,” Dan replies. “But this was all a crazy joke…Wait, what are you doing?” Dan turns to me. “Oh, sorry, I’m gonna film this,” I respond, leaning over the counter to get the best shot I can of the videos playing on Dan’s old Asus laptop. “Are you playing it?”
“Well, I guess I could…” Dan says.
He hits the play button…
[Awkward Pause.] “… Anyway, so, a little about this video is that, in an era when…” It seems like Dan is about to pontificate into a broader story about the days of yore when he stops abruptly. “Well, anyway… I billed 60 second spots, actually 58 second spots, but a whole minute on cable television. Which was rare,” he says.
“That seems like a lot,” I say.
“That is a lot,” Dan says. “But the theory behind this particular spot I’m gonna play, the first part, there is 80-plus images and stuff in 58 seconds. The reason for that is because then every time somebody watched that, if you blink, you missed it. But then every time somebody watched it again, they would see something different going on. So it became kind of a puzzle.”
“That’s something that they do,” Gordon weighs in on the marketing aspect.
“Ok, now we’re linked up,” I’m looking at the computer. “Do you want to play it?” I ask.
“…sorry, I’m a talker,” Dan says.
“And you’re good at it,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m full of shit…” Dan laughs. “But… uh… ok… here we go…”
[CUE THE GLORIOUSLY 90’s FOOTAGE OF KITSAP MUSIC’S CABLE TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENT.]
“SO WHEN DID YOU MAKE THIS?” Gordon asks as the first ad spot comes to a close.
“Oh, I don’t remember, it was in the…” Dan chases the timeline in his memory.
“80’s?” Gordon asks.
“No, it was in the 90s,” Dan says. “And I would farm it out. It was local insertion on cable systems. I’m trying to remember what the cable system was that eventually became Comcast. But it was something else before that. Then there was something else which became Wave. There was two systems, so you’d have to buy into each system and you could buy scattershot.”
“Oh yeah, they used to come around and say, ‘Do you want to be on this show, this show and this show?’” Gordon remembers.
“Well, that’s what I did,” Dan says. “I was very particular about where the insertion was. And after people caught on to it, it used to piss them off. Because if I knew it was an MTV awards ceremony or ‘Spring Break’ or ‘The Osbournes’ or whatever the thing was…”
“That was an $8 million ad,” Gordon laughs.
“Exactly,” Dan says. “Whatever the thing was, that I knew was gonna have eyeballs on it, I would buy those slots. And I would buy every available slot. And it used to piss people off because they’d get hip to it and say, “Hey, wait, that’s not fair!’ And I’d say, ‘Well… sorry.’”
“So you should’ve gone into marketing instead of the music business, it sounds like,” Gordon says.
“Oh, I’ve always had a mind for marketing,” Dan says. “In fact this joint here is 98% marketing and 5% substance.”
“Well, I wanna see Spot #2 here,” Gordon says as we turn our attention back to the clunky old laptop…
“That came a couple years later,” Dan says. “And again, it was a 58-second, but we were a little more sophisticated by then so…”
“I can already see the difference,” Gordon laughs.
The opening scene of the second spot, looks almost identical to the first.
“I had a whole other thing,” Dan explains. “But I got about half way through the thing, and because of budgetary constraints and then also just running out of the energy to do it, the second half of the commercial became like the third part of this commercial…
“By the way, that’s Jeff,” Dan adds, a nod to another celebrated Kitsap Music old-timer. “That soundtrack stuff, is Jeff Tassin. I have a few little things in there too, but…”
“Oh Tassin,” Gordon knows the guy. “So he was doing that from Day One then, too?”
“Oh yeah,” Dan says. “You know, he had his Songwriter Showcase that he did live but then got recorded. You know, it was a KITZ radio show. I sponsored that show. We made some stuff for these soundtracks that could never be played live, actually.”
“It wasn’t KBRO then?” Gordon asks.
“No, we didn’t do KBRO,” Dan says. “‘Yo! K-Bro!’ … No, we did the KITZ thing and that was a lot of fun. In fact, that’s how I met Darren, Mainline Music Darren, because before he went to KZOK, he worked for KITZ.”
“And who did Tassin work for?” Gordon asks. “He worked for one of the radio stations too.”
“KITZ,” Dan says…
“And then, there was the one with ‘Maynard & Whatever’ and Jeff used to call up where he was a fake mafia guy,” Gordon thinks back. “Have you ever heard those spots?”
“Oh yeah, I’ve got background on that,” Dan says wryly. “I’ve got intel on that.”
“That was very interesting because it was like they didn’t know who this guy was that was calling in, but it was all set up,” Gordon says.
“Well, they didn’t know at first…” Dan says.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Gordon replies. “Because he was fucking with them, but then they brought him on staff.”
“His name was Pat Cashman,” Dan remembers. “Pat Cashman and Lisa Foster”
“Ah-ha!” I butt in to their memories. “The fake mafia man now exposed!”
“He went by Marion Sicilini,” Dan says.
“What would happen is he would write a poem based off whatever topically was going on, or in the news, that very morning,” Dan thinks back. “I’ve always been a radio listener. I’ve been listening forever. I am a radio guy. So I’d be listening and I’d call Jeff and say, ‘This is what they’re talking about,’ and then he would write a poem, a Marion poem, riffing on whatever that was, that afternoon.”
“Genius,” I say.
“I don’t know if it was genius,” Dan corrects me. “It was just fun.”
“You’d be interested to hear those,” Gordon says to me. “I’ve got them on disc. They’re just hilarious. Because they’re live. It’s live radio. And they’d make this whole deal of ‘Oh, great, Marion’s on the phone…’”
“Anyway… Ok, Spot Number Two,” Dan brings our attention back to the laptop. “You know, I wish I had copies of this,” he goes on. “I have a copy of this… this one. And Jeff, I think his stuff is long gone by now. So what this is, is what this is. If I break this, or scuff it or do something, I’m screwed…
“Ok, here we go,” Dan says, “Spot 2!”
He sets the second spot to play on the old Asus and the computer makes a loud humming noise. “Is it gonna play?” Dan’s concerned. “Uh-oh, what happened here?”
“Is it the connection?” Gordon asks…
“It’s probably fine,” I interject.
“Oh… Ok, sorry, that was me,” Dan says.
“Operator error.”
“Ok, we’re moving,” Gordon says.
“Trumpets are firing!”
We all stare at the screen…
It’s still buffering.
“So this is all on DVD huh?” I attempt to break the awkward silence.
“Yeah,” Dan says with a sigh. “You’ve heard of DVDs, have you kid?”
“Well, I have heard tale…” we laugh. Almost magically, the computer clicks and whizzes a happy sound as the video starts to play… [CUE THE GLORIOUSLY 90’s SPOT NUMBER 2!] …The room is flooded with even more stories and memories from decades of the Kitsap Music Scene as the second spot comes to a close. “Why don’t we check out your museum,” I suggest… // BILL MAN
CHECK OUT KITSAP MUSIC on Wheaton Way in East Bremerton, Google currently reads ‘permanently closed’ but you can’t believe everything you read, you might be able to catch Dan if you’re lucky.
