L.A.’S SHOUT FACTORY: AWASH IN POP CULTURE NOSTALGIA
FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
RICHARD FOOS never set out to become the arbiter of retro pop culture. He just wanted to see those classic JAMES BROWN records back in peoples’ hands.
As CEO of THE SHOUT FACTORY, he runs an emporium whose credo might be: Don’t bother with historical tomes or archeological digs. If you really want to understand the human race, figure out what they were watching on TV or playing on their iPods last year…or even 40 years ago.
(All right. If you’re going back that far, substitute eight track tape for iPod.)
THE SHOUT FACTORY finds and revives moments of pop culture nostalgia that people grew up on.
Dying to see that collection of JOHNNY CASH CHRISTMAS specials from the late 70s one more time? THE SHOUT FACTORY has it.
Or possibly you’ve read all of HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S books and seen this year’s JOHNNY DEPP doc on him? Now you can actually listen to recordings of HUNTER THOMPSON as he describes his lunatic adventures in real time before writing them into his books. They’re available on the CD collection THE GONZO TAPES.
“In a weird way, these guys are the ones who are preserving cultural history,” said PAUL FEIG, the actor/writer/director who created the TV show FREAKS & GEEKS.
“What’s more important than that?”
It all goes back, RICHARD FOOS claims, to his frustration as an R&B fanatic who, by the 80s, couldn’t find JAMES BROWN’S legendary songs in stores any more.
Although he grew up in BEVERLY HILLS, the son of a department store exec, he had adored that particular genre of music as a child. As a young man, he played bass in an inner city R&B band for $5 a night. “Which was more than I was getting paid, after taxes, working at my dad’s stores,” he recalls with a laugh.
Not so amusing, though, was his discovery that by the early 80s all of JAMES BROWN’S classic 60s recordings were out of print on their original labels.
“I couldn’t believe that they didn’t even think that JAMES BROWN was worthwhile!” he remarked, still clearly annoyed by the memory as he sat in his modest office at the back of a string of low profile two story industrial buildings tucked into a corner of an otherwise residential WEST LOS ANGELES neighbourhood.
Dressed completely in black, with a salt and pepper beard to match, RICHARD FOOS, 59, looks as though he could still be playing the godfather of soul’s songs at night after work.
In any case, he thought JAMES BROWN was so important that a fledging company he had co-founded – RHINO RECORDS – tracked down the publishing rights to those songs and issued JAMES BROWN’S GREATEST HITS. It was a critically acclaimed CD that would sell more than 200,000 copies and transform both RHINO and the music business.
The company started out in the mid 70s, getting its initial jolt when RICHARD FOOS began buying and selling old records out of the trunk of his car. By the beginning of the 80s it had grown to include a tiny record store and then a small record label that specialized in oddball stuff.
But after the JAMES BROWN breakthrough, it became known as the premiere reissue label – the outfit that would track down the most incredible old R&B, pop and rock and bring it around once more.
In 1998, RICHARD FOOS and co-founder HAROLD BRONSON sold RHINO to the WARNER MUSIC GROUP. But RICHARD FOOS soon discovered that collecting off the wall artifacts was something that he couldn’t set aside. Five years later, he and younger brother GARSON FOOS and former RHINO employee BOB EMMER launched THE SHOUT FACTORY.
Opting out of the game, RICHARD FOOS stated, would be intolerable for a dude who works in an office papered with posters from a by gone era (including BARBARA FELDON in her GET SMART role as AGENT 99) and with a coin operated kiddie car ride.
“It’s like telling STEVEN SPIELBERG to retire,” the soft spoken, normally shy man starts out, who then catches himself and apologizes for comparing himself to the OSCAR winning director.
“But what I’m saying is…”
“What he’s saying is: what would we have done?” interrupts BOB EMMER, SHOUT’S CEO. “Sat at home and watched TV and not seen the shows we wanted to see?”
So what they did was form THE SHOUT FACTORY and put out FREAKS & GEEKS, a television program that almost no one watched during its one season in 1999. But after the huge success of individuals involved with the show (JUD APATOW and SETH ROGEN) a lot of people got interested. BOB EMMER and the FOOS brothers noticed it had message boards all over the internet.
Their company was so small at the time that to pay for the rights to the scores of the songs the show featured, SHOUT initially had to distribute the reissue over the net so it could collect the money up front.
“It sold out in six or seven months,” recalls the company’s president, GARSON FOOS. Things grew quickly from that point. SHOUT now has a staff of 70. While its founders fall solidly into the baby boomer demographic, all seem to have a knack for tapping into what younger audiences want to see and hear.
They attribute their success to hiring people who are as obsessed with pop culture as they are, to constantly cruising the net in search of what’s coming back in style and to the belief that what you loved as a kid will always have appeal.
“And then there’s that fortune teller that we have down on Hollywood Boulevard,” laughed BOB EMMER.
