It’s one of Mother Nature’s most beautiful and inspiring mysteries: the migration of the monarch butterfly from North America to the Michoacán forest in central Mexico and back. It’s been happening for thousands of years, and it will, no doubt, continue for thousands more. But will we ever truly understand why?

Ten thousand feet up a slope in the Sierra Nevada mountains of central Mexico, the dusty trail of the El Rosario butterfly sanctuary abruptly changes to cement steps. Above our heads, bright orange flickers dart in and out of the trees. Each autumn, millions of Monarch butterflies migrate from North America to this dormant peak, swarming across highways, riding high-altitude currents, stopping only to rest in trees along the way.

After hibernating in the Michoacan forest, they awake in the spring, mate, and begin the journey back to the U.S. and Canada to lay their eggs. It’s an incredible feat of nature. Some will travel over 5,000 miles. And they’ve been doing this every year, for thousands of years.

But the spectacular journey is not without its pitfalls. “Ohh, no.” Our guide Alfredo stops, bends down and gently picks up a wounded Mariposa Monarca from the trail. It’s a male, almost dead, feebly moving its wings and legs. “See?” he indicates. “The stomach is missing.”

The Monarch is highly toxic to the tastebuds, Alfredo explains. Even a cow can die if it eats one. The only part not poisonous is the butterfly’s stomach. Unfortunately for the Monarch, its predators have learned this. Local birds, in particular orioles and grosbeaks, will attack the butterfly in mid-air, suck out the organs, and let it fall to the forest floor, where the insect wiggles helplessly for a few minutes before it dies. A horrendous fate for such a cute creature. But nature is not always pretty.

We humans might prefer the beaches of Puerto Vallarta or Ixtapa for our winter vacation. Monarch butterflies are much more discerning. They congregate in colonies only atop 12 specific volcanic peaks in central Mexico’s Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a 75-mile wide protected reserve.

While this region produces 80% of the world’s avocados, civic leaders also heartily embrace their other natural resource. The Morelia school soccer team is named the Monarchs. The mining town of Angangueo hosts an annual Monarch Festival each spring, and road signs throughout Ocampo boast cute butterfly icons. The footpath beginning at the El Rosario parking lot up is lined with butterfly trinket vendors, and women cooking over open flames.

We continue our hike up the trail, and Alfredo says out of the 12 sanctuaries, two are in this region. El Rosario is the most visitor-friendly, the other you have to enter on horseback. He’s been giving Monarch tours for six years, six to seven days a week. Approximately 200 million butterflies hibernate in Michoacan each winter, he says, with 20 million coming here to El Rosario.

In the U.S.and Canada, Monarchs only live 6 to 8 weeks, from egg to caterpillar to butterfly. Here in Michoacan, the migrating generations live up to 9 months, most of that in blissful slumber.

The colonies awaken and by February they’ve departed north to lay their eggs in warmer conditions. By March the first generation eggs are laid in the southern U.S. In April the Midwest will see a second generation of eggs, and a third generation is born in the Great Lakes and Northeast U.S. around July and August.

According to Alfredo, it takes three generations to reach the U.S., about five to get to Canada. The migration season roughly follows the annual growth cycle of the milkweed plant, a favorite food of the Monarchs.

As the weather gets colder in September, the newest butterflies start moving south towards Mexico, roosting overnight in trees along the way. Swarms can be spotted in the Midwest states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa around early October, and then they cross into Mexico a week or so later. This hardy final generation doesn’t breed or die along the way, they stay the course and arrive at the volcanic peaks of Michoacan each November to tuck in for the winter.

Monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains follow this North America-to-Mexico migration route. Butterflies west of the Rockies funnel down to southern California for their hibernation months.

The tiny insects are astonishing travelers. They can do 80 miles a day, at an average of 12 miles per hour, and if the winds are right, they cruise at an altitude of two miles. They travel during the day, living off their stored fat, and stop to eat only if there are flowers. If there is fog or clouds, they stay put, preferring to move only during bright sunny weather.

But why do they come to Michoacan? For centuries, locals believed the annual butterfly swarms were some sort of plague, and would kill as many as they could. The more superstitious still believe Monarchs come to this area to visit their dead ancestors.

Another popular rumor circulates that a magnetic field attracts the Monarchs to these mountains. Tantalizing, but not true. The real reason is more obvious, says Alfredo. “Butterflies look for protection, that’s why they come here. There’s high elevation, they are protected by the tall trees’ branches, there are flowers, and water. So they don’t waste energy.”

Local indigenous tribes have always known about the Mariposa Monarcas, but scientists in North America still had no idea where the butterflies wintered. Each year, the swarms just seemed to disappear south across the Rio Grande River. The mystery was finally solved in 1975, thanks to an underwear executive and a 12-year-old boy from Texas.

Volunteers had tagged thousands of butterflies under the direction of Canadian entomologist Fred Urquhart. Thirty years of research indicated that migrating Monarchs hibernated somewhere in Mexico, but Urquhart’s team was unsure of the location.

Ken Brugger, an American working in Mexico as chief engineer for Jockey underwear, had heard of Urquhart’s efforts. Being somewhat of an amateur naturalist, he offered to help, and began his own inquiries to the locals. On January 2, 1975, Brugger and his wife scaled the slopes of a Michoacan summit named Cerro Pelon, and discovered millions of hibernating butterflies clinging to the trees.

The Bruggers eagerly picked through the colony for Monarchs that might have been tagged in North America, thus establishing conclusively the exact migration route. They were having little luck, until they came upon one butterfly which stood out from the rest. It was significantly larger. And it had a tag. With a phone number.

For a few years, 12-year-old John McLusky had been tagging butterflies in Fredericksburg, in south-central Texas. He had read about the migrations, printed up his own tags, and did it all himself.

“I didn’t know there were any professionals doing it,” says McLusky, now a chemistry professor at Texas Lutheran University. “I was hoping that someone would find them. I didn’t really know I was contributing to science.

“Ken Brugger called my home from Mexico,” he recalls. “They were very excited. They found what they’d been looking for all these years.”

Alfredo and I pass through an open meadow ringed by forest, and Monarchs circle lazily above us, the sun casting their shadows on the ground. The trail turns back into forest, and he says we should be quiet. Monarchs are totally deaf, but they can apparently detect light and movement, and have a terrific sense of smell.

It’s true. Dozens of butterflies cling to bushes, then quickly flutter away just out of our reach. The treetop canopy up above bustles with tiny flashes of orange.

Alfredo opens a wooden fence and takes us off the trail. We walk a bit further, and then he stops and points. Giant pod-like clumps dangle from trees, pulsating slightly with movement. They look like grayish alien larvae from a horror film, but in fact it’s thousands and thousands of Monarchs all slumbering together, weighing down the branches, which look as though they are about to snap off. This is the Mother Lode, the starting point of nature’s most mysterious migration.

The grey color comes from the undersides of the wings, and blends in easily with the forest shade. Alfredo whispers that throughout the winter they will rotate sleeping positions, so that the ones on the outside don’t freeze to death.

Monarchs prefer pine and oyamel trees for their winter hotel, and for some reason extend their colonies out in a straight line through the forest. Each year, the location moves slightly, Alfredo says maybe 100 meters or so, because of the dust that humans kick up.

The sky comes alive as the butterflies respond to the late morning sun. Once they wake up, they fall to the ground and start flapping their wings to warm up. You have to watch where you step, because the ground is carpeted with groggy butterflies flopping around. Once they’re fully alert, they start mating furiously.

I step into a pocket of bright sunlight, and the sensation feels like wandering into the midst of a locust attack. Butterflies attach themselves to my head, pantleg, shoe, shoulder, back — at one point I count over 20 Monarchs perched somewhere on my body, curiously checking me out. I hear Alfredo say, “Look,” and turn around. One is affixed to his lips.

Perhaps it’s the 10,000 feet altitude that’s making me light-headed, but being covered in little butterflies seems like we’re all part of a spectacular Disney movie where everything is going to be okay. At any moment Miley Cyrus is going to step from behind a tree and start singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” There’s no noise at all except the woosh of tiny wings. It’s a soothing, dreamlike celebration of insect life – a combination hotel, breeding ground and cemetery.

I feel badly for John McLusky back in Texas. Of the three men responsible for discovering and verifying this amazing migration, he’s the only one still alive. And he’s never actually been here to see it himself.

Alfredo and I head back down the trail, and come upon a group of butterflies clustered on the ground, at a spring-fed rivulet. “They’re drinking water,” he whispers. Indeed, the Monarchs are guzzling like thirsty horses on a trail ride.

Alfredo describes a very moving moment in his life. One day while giving a tour, he saw a Monarch in a water puddle that appeared to be drowning. He gently picked it up and saw it was a female, she was weak and freezing. He held it in his hand to warm it up, and fed it by hand, squeezing nectar from a flower into its mouth.

“She could smell it,” he remembers. “They drink very fast.” The butterfly guzzled the contents of four flowers, then regained its strength and flitted away.

Alfredo smiles. “I never thought I was gonna be able to do that.”

Butterfly festivals occur in North America throughout the migration season, depending on location. Michoacan sightings are best during the spring season, when the region hosts a month-long Monarch Festival. Visitor info available at www.michoacan-travel.com (English) or www.michoacan.gob.mx (Spanish).

Jack Boulware contributes frequently to American Way. He was assisted for this story by an unknown butterfly who clung to his notepad for a good deal of the day.

# # #

————————————————————–

John McLusky

830-303-8937

jmcclusky@tlu.edu

Alfredo

c/o Mitzi Arreola

Michoacan tourism department

marreola@michoacan.gob.mx

011 52 (443) 317 80 52 Ext. 140

Michoacan.gob.mx – website of the region with info about Monarch Festival (in Spanish)

Biosphere reserve UNESCO site

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1290

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Masters+of+migration:+thanks+to+the+efforts+of+scientists+and+nature…-a0201801673

lots of facts:

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/indexCurrent.html

Brugger obituary

http://www.texasento.net/Brugger.htm

good first person account:

http://www.turkpipkin.com/mag/mexico/monarchs.htm

good history:

http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/butterflyhistory.html

Other articles

http://www.planeta.com/ecotravel/mexico/monarchs.html

http://www.budgettravel.com/bt-dyn/content/article/2007/02/07/AR2007020701357.html

http://www.globio.org/glossopedia/article.aspx?art_id=41

bird predators

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v291/n5810/abs/291067a0.html

http://bird-watching.suite101.com/article.cfm/birding_mexicos_el_rosario_butterfly_sanctuary

migration generations:

http://www.monarchbutterflyusa.com/Cycle.htm

migration maps

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/maps/monarch_spring2009.html

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/maps/monarch_egg_spring2009.html

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/maps/monarch_f08_roosts.html

A history of the world’s most famous acoustic guitar, including an interview with company president Chris Martin IV, and a visit to the factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

I pulled into Nazareth

was feelin’ ‘bout half-past dead

I just need some place

Where I can lay my head

- “The Weight,” The Band

In early 2008, an acoustic guitar belonging to the author of these lyrics actually pulled into Nazareth, Pennsylvania to the C.F. Martin guitar factory. Robbie Robertson had needed some work done on his 1927 Martin 000-45 nylon string model. Martin employees examined the ultra-rare instrument in amazement, which was built 80 years ago in Nazareth, and retained the original ivory pegs.

Workers were also reminded of the apocryphal story they’d learned only a few years before, about the creating of this song. As the tale goes, four decades ago, while working on music for The Band’s first album, Music From Big Pink, Robertson was stuck with writer’s block.

The first line of the song wasn’t coming to mind. He turned his guitar over and noticed the manufacturer’s label stamped inside the hole. It read, “C.F. Martin, Nazareth, PA.” He thought why not, and incorporated the town Nazareth into the opening lyric. Supposedly the rest of the song then fell into place, completing what is now a classic tune that we’ve all heard at some point in our lives. (Even if you don’t understand what the rest of the words mean, at least now you know the origin of “Nazareth.”)

Such stories circulate constantly through the history of the C.F. Martin company. The world’s most recognizable name in acoustic guitars, Martin this year celebrates its 175^th anniversary. For a musician, a Martin represents the ultimate in quality, the best that money can buy. Each model is still handmade at the factory in Pennsylvania. Vintage Martin guitars can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nearly every recording you’ve ever heard features a Martin, from country and folk, to rock, pop, classical, and Hawaiian music. You name the artist, they’ve played a Martin: Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, Beck, Neil Young, John Mayer, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, Elvis Presley, Sting, Kurt Cobain, Paul Simon, Jimmie Rodgers, Kingston Trio, Richie Sambora, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Dixie Chicks, Lucinda Williams, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. It’s almost scary how one guitar has so thoroughly saturated music’s landscape.

Besides making the world’s finest guitars, C.F. Martin is notable for several other reasons. Most importantly, its success and longevity come despite America’s rampant outsourcing of labor. In a business climate where CEOs eagerly move manufacturing overseas, virtually all Martin guitars are still made in the United States. With a lifetime guarantee for the original owner.

The 850 employees enjoy profit-sharing, and many have been there for decades. “Coffee Break” guitars hang from walls in the factory, so workers can play something on their downtime.

To lessen the drain on natural resources, Martin also offers guitars made from sustainable woods and non-wood materials. And here’s another anomaly in American business – the company has been run by a member of the same family for six generations.

But this wasn’t always a rosy success story. In the early 1980s, C.F. Martin nearly made its last guitar.

“We had peaked out in the 70s, somewhere in the range of about 22,000 units,” says Martin’s current CEO, Chris Martin IV, a friendly, sandy-haired man in his fifties.

“In 1983 we were making 3,000 units. We were on the brink of just barely being able to pay the rent. We talked to these people and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll buy your business. We’ll fire the board, we’ll fire upper management. And we’ll play you 30 cents on the dollar.’”

It would have been an ignoble end to a long legacy. Chris Martin’s great-great-great grandfather, Christian Martin Jr., had founded the company in 1833. He learned the craft of making guitars in Vienna, then moved to New York City and opened a music shop on Hudson Street. He sold instruments, and hand-crafted his own guitars in the back room.

By 1838 he moved his operation to Nazareth, a small German-speaking religious community in rural Pennsylvania. Using his original tools from Europe, Martin continued to produce more guitars. The earliest models were numbered with the style of guitar, followed by the price. A 3-17, for instance, was a Model 3, selling for 17 dollars.

More family members joined the company, and they introduced new models. Mandolins for the growing population of Italian immigrants. Ukuleles for the burgeoning craze of Hawaiian music. New sizes for orchestras and entertainers like the yodeling Jimmie Rodgers, country music’s first superstar.

During the Depression, Martin debuted a new oversized dreadnought model, the D-45, created specifically for “Singing Cowboy” Gene Autry. Rockabilly and rock and roll stars like Elvis and Ricky Nelson popularized the name further, and the 1960s boom in folk music took sales of Martin guitars through the roof. Sales peaked during the 1970s era of country rock, with artists like Jim Croce and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

At the time, this reputation and legacy was totally lost on Chris Martin IV, a young man working at a guitar shop in Hollywood. He had studied to be a marine biologist, had no talent for music, and little interest in the family business. He was also lousy at guitar sales.

“This was the 1970s. Westwood Music, on Westwood Boulevard,” Martin recalls. “The owner, Fred Walecki, was very astute in terms of getting Martins in the hands of professionals in the southern California music scene. I think Fred thought I knew a lot more about my family business than I did.”

“I was useless,” admits Martin. “They’d ask me the history, why they should buy this model. They expected me to know everything. I just felt like such an idiot. That’s when I was like, if I’m gonna do this, I kind of have to start back at the beginning.”

Martin quit college, came back to work at the factory in Nazareth, and ended up studying management at Boston University. As he observed the family business, he noticed things were on a downhill slide. His father Frank Martin had begun importing inferior guitars from Asia, and acquired several unsuccessful side projects, very un-Martin-like products such as banjos, drums, and electric guitars.

“I get the impression that all of my other ancestors but my father really got into guitar building,” Martin shrugs. “And the aspect of, how does it work? What makes it work? And my father, he wasn’t a bad businessman. But the thing that he was involved with, it could have been anything. Golf clubs. Had it been golf clubs, he might have been more excited about it.”

Martin’s father had also purchased expensive manufacturing machines, which didn’t work. They sat idle on the factory floor, as a monument of incompetence. Frank finally retired, leaving the company in a shambles.

“My father had his own personal demons,” Martin continues. “He was an alcoholic.”

It wasn’t just Frank’s unwise expansion projects. A drastic change in sound was sweeping through the music industry. Nobody was interested in acoustic guitars at the time. Upon rejoining the company, the young Martin felt the change ripple through the factory.

“After The Eagles, business tanked. Thanks to disco and the Yamaha DX-7, all the keyboards, you didn’t need a guitar player anymore. We were losing money. The banks called the loans.”

Astonishingly, the board of directors brought back Martin’s grandfather, C.F. Martin III, to run the company. Although in his nineties, the man did know something about the guitar business. He was able to stop the financial bleeding, but soon passed away, leaving C.F. Martin IV as chairman of a respected brand on the verge of collapse.

Martin never aspired to be in charge, but there was nobody else in the family who was interested. He knew the only way the company could survive was if he reached out to the employees. The people who actually built the best acoustic guitars in the world.

“I said to everybody, ‘Look, if it’s 3,000 guitars, let’s make 3,000 really, really  good guitars.” That resonated with the people that wanted to hear that, but weren’t hearing it.”

The company started profit-sharing, and set about focusing on just doing what they did best. And then in the mid-1980s, an extraordinary series of circumstances basically knocked on the door of C.F. Martin guitars.

Keyboards were becoming passe in popular music, replaced by acoustic acts like Lyle Lovett and Suzanne Vega. At the same time, a new generation of Boomers were coming into wealth, and could finally afford the Martin guitar they’d always coveted. Acoustic guitars were cool again.

In 1989, MTV debuted its new Unplugged series, and viewers watched artists like Eric Clapton and Nirvana playing stripped-down acoustic versions of well-known songs.

“Many, many of the artists were playing Martins,” says Martin. “The irony is, most of them were plugged in. But it was very discreet. Just don’t look at the cord coming out of the bottom of the guitar!”

Sales soared as a result, and demand was so high for Martin guitars, the company was forced to double the size of its factory. More models were introduced, including a popular “Backpacker” travel guitar, which even took a trip aboard the space shuttle. “Coffee Break” guitars were hung in the factory, so employees could play something on their downtime.

From 1990 to 2003, Martin sold 500,000 guitars, more than in the previous 150 years of the company. Artist series models were designed in partnership with well-known musicians, from Stephen Stills to Johnny Cash, Jimmy Buffet, and George Jones. Martin started offering public tours of the factory in Nazareth, and in 2006 the company opened a guitar museum, filled with rare guitars and historical artifacts.

Sitting in his office filled with guitars and memorabilia, Chris Martin IV enthusiastically describes one museum display in particular – the Martin D-45. Originally built for Gene Autry in 1933, the D-45 was larger than most, and adorned with the fanciest accoutrements then available. Only 91 D-45s were made before production stopped in 1942. The mythology surrounding this instrument boggles the mind. Collectors refer to it as the “Holy Grail.” An original pre-war D-45 sells on eBay for up to $1 million.

Martin desperately wanted a D-45 to showcase in the new museum. Two vintage dealers approached him with D-45s. A Martin employee was dispatched to inspect them. The first wouldn’t do, it had been repaired, and sounded inferior.

“Another dealer called up and said, “I have your guitar. A D-45, for your museum,’ Martin recalls. “I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘I know.’”

The dealer brought the guitar to Nazareth, and Martin called a meeting of employees in his office to see the D-45. The price was $270,000. It was a lot of money.

“One fellow I work with, he said, ‘Can I try that?’ He picked it up, and curled up in a fetal position, and played it. And he looked up at me and I knew, that is our guitar.”

Chris Martin smiles. “It’s possibly the best sounding guitar I’ve ever heard. It was the top of the line, and it’s been used, not abused, for 65 years. It came into its own.”

A bit later, on a tour of the museum, Martin’s manager of artist relations, Dick Boak, pulls out a key and unlocks a glass wall in front of the D-45. He grabs the guitar, fishes a pick from a pocket and hands them both to me. The wood is beautiful, old and strong. The Holy Grail. My god.

I drop to one knee, cradling the D-45, and am so nervous I can’t do more than play a few chords. The sound is amazingly loud, but with a soft and warm tone. It’s like playing a quarter-million-dollar stick of butter. People wandering through the museum stop and watch, as if to say, “Who’s this guy? Why does he get to play the D-45? He doesn’t seem to be very good.” I quickly hand it back, afraid I’m going to drop it.

Outside the museum, a tour of children swarms the main lobby, gawking at the displays. Guitars hang on the wall for anyone to play, and two guys sit on stools, jamming on an old Johnny Cash tune. I’ll bet they would love to play the D-45, too.

#  #  #

This article appeared in different form in American Way magazine

Standing in the room is a moment to be savored, imagining what these walls have heard over the years. From Elgar in his tuxedo and moustache, conducting that melody from everybody’s graduation ceremony, to a roomful of hippies in paisley singing about love. To more recently, Kanye West, Iron Maiden, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and soundtrack recordings for the Star Wars and Harry Potter films.

The world’s most famous recording studio sits tucked away in a nondescript mansion in north London’s posh St. John’s Wood neighborhood. Most of us recognize the name because of the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road, with the iconic cover photo of the band strolling across the striped crosswalk.

Beatles trivia runs deep. Geeks already know that the album was renamed Abbey Road at the last minute (the original title was “Everest”), and that the photo shoot took just ten minutes, and that Paul McCartney was supposed to be dead because he was depicted in bare feet, among other “clues.” If a fan makes the pilgrimage to the studio, it’s mandatory to scrawl some Beatles lyrics on the wall in front of the building.

But Beatles mythology is only a small portion of the Abbey Road timeline. It is in fact the industry’s oldest studio, with a long tradition of recording music, comedy and theater. The original name EMI Studios was officially changed to Abbey Road, only after the Beatles’ album became popular.

The facility remains open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. It never needs to advertise, and is never open to the public. Just a few months ago the studio celebrated 75 years in business. This June the Sundance Channel debuts a new music television show, Live from Abbey Road, taped on the premises.

Because of the upcoming show, Abbey Road managing director Dave Holley and Michael Gleason, producer of the show, have graciously agreed to give me a short tour.

Artists who’ve recorded here have included everyone from Glenn Miller and Noel Coward to Shirley Bassey, Peter Sellers, Beyond the Fringe, the Buzzcocks, the Spice Girls, and Radiohead. Like an old nightclub or theater stage, ghosts hang in the air, invisible to the eye but soaked into the structure itself.

I mention to Holley that I’ve heard U2 was recording here recently. “It’s policy of the studio going back 75 years that we never tell people who’s here,” he answers with a smile. “Because you end up with funny people standing outside trying to get in. We’re doing four films today, not a lot of rock and roll today.”

There is a rumor, however, that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin are in fact here, in another studio behind the red light. They could be just sipping tea and flipping through magazines, but it doesn’t matter. I’m in the same building with the band I used to play air guitar to in high school.

Holley opens a door and shows me Studio One’s futuristic glass-walled control room, bristling with knobs and switches and lights and the staple of every studio, a black leather sofa. This is where engineers mix sound for, say, The Lord of the Rings soundtrack.

Gleason points over to a beat-up Steinway upright piano and gestures for Holley to show it to me.

“Oh yes,” exclaims Holley. “This is the piano that ‘Lady Madonna’ was played on.”

I run my fingers over the keys, knowing full well that this moment would induce hardcore Beatles fans to wet their pants. The wear and tear from decades of studio recording is evident; the ivories look like an animal had scratched them off.

“It was used on the U2 sessions,” Holley concedes.

Holley breaks down the various elements of the complex. Because the industry makes fewer classical records these days, Studio One has been repurposed for recording and mixing film soundtracks. Studio Two, where Zeppelin is supposedly hiding today, is the most requested room by rock bands, and is where the Beatles made nearly all of their records. Studio Three is slightly smaller, the birthplace of most of Pink Floyd’s albums, and is also occupied at the moment. The Penthouse Studio was built in the mid-late 70s and used by punk/New Wave bands like the Buzzcocks and The Cure. It’s now primarily for digital mixing for films.

Another 17 rooms are used for mixing and mastering records, and digital remastering from analog sources. They’ve recently added a video department, and Holley notes with pride that the very first DVD outside of Japan was made here at Abbey Road.

Beatles folklore describes Abbey Road engineers leaving a marathon recording session and heading to a nearby pub to decompress. Holley says that’s no longer necessary, and walks me down a flight of stairs into the in-house restaurant.

“We’ve pulled the pub to us!” he exclaims. “This is where people tend to decompress. A bit too much for my liking at times! Artists will come and have a drink, orchestra players.”

“It’s one of my favorite rooms,” he adds. “You see all sorts of people in the same place that you don’t see together.”

Holley remembers one day at the studio, when the most unlikely group of clients were wandering in and out of the cafeteria. British rock band Starsailor, teenybopper boy band McFly, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, and operatic tenor Placido Domingo. “That was one of the most bizarre days,” he recalls.

Technology has advanced so much, it’s now common for musicians to never leave their house to create a high-quality recording. Why is a studio still necessary?

“There are different ways you can make things,” explains Holley. “If you want a performance-based record, then you need a space that sounds good, so we’ve got a few of those.

“I actually think, whatever business you’re in, it’s that walking-down-a-corridor moment, where you work with someone,” he emphasizes. “Something comes out of a cup of coffee around a machine. When you work together, two brains are more than twice the value of one brain. I think coming together to work in a community, and coming to a place where there are traditions of working together, with people who are used to doing that, I think you get far more than just working on your own.”

The tradition of collaboration at Abbey Road extends back to 1931, when EMI transformed a 16-room mansion into the world’s first recording studio. In addition to Sir Edward Elgar, prominent composers and musicians like Yehudi Menuhin, Noel Coward, Artur Schnabel, Fred Astaire, and Fats Waller made recordings in the early years.

During World War II, the studio remained open for BBC radio broadcasts, and hosted wartime entertainers like Gracie Fields and George Formby. In 1944 Glenn Miller made several recordings with Dinah Shore, which were to be his last-ever sessions. His airplane went down in the English channel a few weeks later.

Technical advances were absorbed by Abbey Road throughout the 1940s and 1950s, including the long-playing record, four-track equipment, new magnetic tape, and noise limiters. Pop music and comedy were replacing classical sessions. Comedians like The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were now scheduling studio time alongside pop stars like Eddie Calvert, Ruby Murray and Sir Cliff Richard, whose 1958 single “Move It” is considered England’s first-ever rock and roll record.

It’s worth noting that Richard’s first hit came from Abbey Road, because it was not exactly a rock and roll environment. Because of a strong musicians’ union, normal recording hours were rigid –10 am to 1, lunch break, 2:30 to 5:30, and 7 pm to 10pm. Musicians would enter the studio on time, engineers quickly set up the equipment, and within ten minutes the session had started.

Abbey Road was among the most strict and button-down of all the London studios, with a precise apprenticeship structure and rigid dress code. Balance engineers wore white shirts and neckies, and sat in the control room. The maintenance engineers wore white lab coats, and were the only ones allowed to set up microphones and other equipment. The “brown coats” were janitorial staff.

By the early 1960s, Abbey Road was regularly producing hit records, from Shirley Bassey to Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Manfred Mann, the Hollies, and Cilla Black’s version of “Alfie” with Burt Bacharach. The Beatles made their first record “Love Me Do” at the studio in 1962, and for the next seven years would make nearly all of their records at Abbey Road.

The studio changed forever in 1966, when the Beatles vowed to stop touring live because the screaming fans kept drowning out their instruments onstage. The band planned to make only records, with the idea they would tour an album, rather than tour live.

With no more pressure on creating music to be perfomed, the Beatles were increasingly excited about using the resources of Abbey Road. Technology was pushed to the limits. Band members and producer George Martin scrounged up all sorts of odd instruments, and challenged the Abbey Road staff to cut and splice pieces of music on top of and inside of each other. Often Beatles sessions would use all three studios simultaneously, with engineers dashing back and forth to synch up the primitive four-track recording machines.

According to the memoir of Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, one of the highlights was a recording session in Studio One for the Sgt. Pepper album song “A Day In the Life.” The basic song was finished, but it needed some strings to fill in a 24-bar portion, one long, loud ascending chord. The Beatles commissioned a 40-piece orchestra to come in, and as an afterthought decided to make the session into a “happening.”

As orchestra members arrived in their evening tuxedos, they were handed a clown wig, or rubber nose, or gorilla paws. Wine was flowing, as well as a few other substances. Celebrities like Donovan and the Rolling Stones were hanging about. Emerick recalled studio managers Bob Beckett and E.H. Fowler, two proper men in their sixties, standing at the rear of the room in pinstriped suits and starched white shirts, watching classically trained musicians attempt to play their parts, surrounded by balloons and drunken hippies, and sadly shaking their heads. Emerick thought to himself, “This really is a passing of the torch.”

Another milestone for Abbey Road was the 1973 Pink Floyd concept album Dark Side of the Moon. At the time, the band was at a crossroads. They were moderately successful, but their singular brand of hippie experimental psychedelia was old news. A new album needed to change course, or they were finished.

Taking a cue from the Beatles, Pink Floyd pushed the studio’s boundaries to the limit, raiding the EMI sound effects library and splicing tape loops around the control room. They programmed keyboard sequences, and experimented with ambient sounds of chiming clocks, clanging coins and cash registers. No rock record had ever sounded like this before.

The album took seven months to complete. In the final days, chief songwriter Roger Waters decided to layer some human speaking voices in and out of the record, to give it some texture. He gathered a handful of people hanging around the building to ask them questions about topics like death and insanity. Among the group were Pink Floyd roadies, Abbey Road staff members, and Paul McCartney, who happened to be recording with his band Wings.

An older “brown coat” Irish gentleman named Gerry O’Driscoll, Abbey Road doorman at the time, proved one of the session’s stars. His voice ended up immortalized on the record: “I’ve always been mad. I know I’ve been mad like most of us have. Very hard to explain why you were mad, even if you’re not mad.”

Since its release, Dark Side has been on the charts for over 28 years, spending an incredible 741 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200, a feat unequaled by any record in history. It’s estimated that one in every 14 Americans under the age of 50 has owned a copy of this album.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Abbey Road branched out into recording of film scores, while keeping a hand in the emerging Britpop scene. Bands such as Radiohead, Gomez, Blur, and Manic Street Preachers all used the studio. The Spice Girls’ sessions in Studio Three attracted fans and media from all over the world, camping outside the entrance. The Beatles legacy came full circle in late 2006, when Sir George Martin and his son Giles raided the Abbey Road archives to create the revolutionary mashup album Love.

“Seventy five years ago, you literally came to the one microphone, and you stood exactly where you were told,” says Dave Holley. “The artist was very much secondary to the technical engineers. You performed when we told you to. And now, it’s all twisted the other way, and anybody can make anything.”

The very nature of the music industry has changed the way Abbey Record does business. More people are creating music, and more people are consuming it in a variety of ways, from iPods to ringtones and interactive websites.

“The process is speeding up,” Holley continues. “People are like magpies, they take what they need — digital, analog, locations, working at home, using different people for different tracks, and then using different people to mix different tracks. I think the palatte is wider. What we’re trying to be is to offer a place where people can come come together to try things.”

————————————-

Outside Dave Holley’s office window, tourists are taking photos of each other on the famous crosswalk. Holley and Michael Gleason sip cups of tea as they explain the origins of their new TV show Live From Abbey Road. With the cancellation of the U.K.’s long-running Top of the Pops, and MTV rarely airing any music videos, there’s not much actual music television anymore. This show is designed to fill the void.

Other than the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” broadcast, and a few other programs over the years, Abbey Road has rarely opened its doors to a television or film crew. This upcoming series will be revolutionary for a few reasons.

Each segment features two to three artists, performing live in Abbey Road. There is no live audience, and no host or presenter. Focus is solely on the music. Performers range from Dr. John and Wynton Marsalis, to Norah Jones, Snow Patrol, Gnarls Barkley, Muse, The Kooks, and Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice.

“You get an actual raw performance,” says show producer Gleason, a Texas-born investor and former director of MGM Studios. “You feel like they’re performing for you. The building is the host of the show. Dave Matthews came in, he loved being in that room. Jay Kay from Jamiroquai, he just went on and on about how he loved the vibe of the room. Because it’s a cool place. There are other recording studios around, but the magic is here. It’s just got that special sense.”

“In the studio you see the masks slip a little bit,” adds Holley. “You get to see them relaxed, you get to see them playing rather than performing. You get to see a little closer. Simplicity really works. Because you’ve got time to really let it breathe and enjoy it.”

The show’s segments are beautifully shot in high-definition video with several cameras, and some pieces are reminiscent of photo essays, with closeups on a drum highhat, or fingers on a keyboard. It’s almost as if the show is set up to prove a point, that songs don’t have to be created to climb the charts, or sell sneakers. Music should be appreciated for what it is. This is for the purists, an MTV Unplugged that’s grown up.

“Each of the artists performs in different ways,” says Holley. “It’s lit differently, shot differently. Massive Attack looks iconic, almost like something from the Newport Jazz Festival in the 60s. Then you’ve got The Killers, which is much more intimate. You’ve got Corinne Bailey Rae, she’s like a 40s movie star. It’s so interesting. It doesn’t feel like the same show each month.”

The first season of Live from Abbey Road filmed 38 artists in 12 shows, and is already licensed to 89 countries. Channel 4 in the UK has already aired the show, and the Sundance Channel begins running the series this summer in the U.S. If reaction is as expected, another season will begin shooting this October.

There’s an unmistakable feeling of family in Abbey Road. Most of the staff from the old days continue to drop by and say hello. Even engineers from the once-rival Olympic Studios, who worked on records by Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, will keep in touch.

A 75th anniversary party last November attracted pop and rock music’s best recording engineers from throughout the decades. Did anybody put on the old lab coats?

“No, I was expecting one or two, but to be honest I don’t think they would have fitted many of them,” says Holley. “There’s one or two girths that have obviously grown since then!”

# # #

(A version of this story first appeared in American Way magazine)

TSF features no announcers, and very few commercials. The formula is simple: more music, less words. Cafes and tobacco shops throughout Paris tune into the station. Listen to it for an hour through iTunes or the www.tsfjazz.com website, and you’ll hear a palpable excitement, a passion that can only reflect a city boasting 40 live jazz clubs. France may not have invented jazz, but they gleefully take on responsibility to present it to the world 24 hours a day, broadcasting from TSF’s studio on rue du Faubourg St Antoine, a few blocks from the Bastille.

Launched in 1981 as a mouthpiece for the Communist party, TSF originally provided cultural coverage of music, theater and film. But when the tiny station ran out of money in 1989, two Parisian media moguls stepped in to purchase the station. Jean Francois Bizot was a wealthy eccentric who had founded the avant-garde Actuel magazine in the 60s. Frank Tenot was CEO of the publishing conglomerate Hachette Filapacchi. Both agreed to unveil France’s first 24-hour jazz radio station, under the umbrella of Bizot’s Nova Press music company.

“They said, ‘We will save the employees, and we propose another format and it’s going to work.’ Nobody at the time was thinking it was going to work,” says TSF program director Sebastien Vidal. “Jazz at that time was not that popular on radio.”

TSF began broadcasting in 1999, and within a few years was reaching over 200,000 listeners in Paris and Nice. Today it claims an audience of over TKTK, sponsors festivals throughout France, and has even launched a line of jazz CD collections. International Herald Tribune jazz critic Mike Zwerin has called TSF “the only unsubsidized radio station in the known world playing smart jazz 24 hours a day seven days a week.”

When Tenot passed away in 2004, Bizot was left with majority ownership, as well as a firm idea of TSF’s sound and direction. “It’s very funny, it’s the only station that when the owner calls and asks to listen to something, sometime we do it, sometime we don’t,” chuckles Sebastien Vidal. “Most of the time he’s right, because he has a very good feeling for radio and what we should play on the air. But sometimes when he calls I say, ‘No, I don’t agree, can we talk?’”

In addition to a hands-on station owner, TSF’s programming is also determined from spirited staff discussions and audience surveys.

“It’s my main concern when I’m programming the radio to bring pleasure,” says Vidal. “We are not jazz specialists, sitting and smoking a pipe. Jazz is a very joyful, acoustic form of expression. We need to broadcast a lot of things people recognize and know. People want something new, something authentic, acoustic, pure, with no marketing. Jazz is one of the few fields in music where the artist has nothing to sell.”

Since TSF began broadcasting, Vidal says he’s seen a big leap in jazz record sales and club attendance. France now claims over 500 festivals which feature jazz. But then, the country has always embraced this music.

According to Luke Miner, author of the new guidebook Paris Jazz, France’s unique appreciation for jazz began just after World War I.

“It was new and exotic, entirely unlike anything that they had heard before,” Miner emails from Europe. “Having just come out a war costing millions of life, Parisians were especially predisposed to leave the past behind and throw themselves into this new art form.”

“In France this music is still deeply attached to the French soul,” adds Vidal. “The States was the birthplace of jazz, but France was the place where we put that artist in concert. We have always treated American jazz artists exactly the way we treat classical artists. When Miles Davis played in New York, he got beaten by a policeman. When he came to France, he played Salle Pleyel [Paris’ premier concert hall].”

American jazz musicians continue to make the pilgrimage to play Paris. On a recent Saturday night at the Latin Quarter’s le Caveau des Oubliettes, literally around the corner from Shakespeare & Company bookstore, a hard bop group is tearing it up.

Inside the 300-year-old stone cavern lined with medieval torture equipment, Jean-Jacques Elangué and the Tom McClung Quartet play to a packed crowd of primarily young French, smoking and nodding to the beat like they’re part of a 1950s photo essay. Saxophonist Elangué is from Cameroon, the remainder of the group is from the U.S. It’s fantastic, classic frenetic bop jazz — physical, mental, spiritual, and just when you think the tune is completely shattered they bring it back and it miraculously all fits together.

During a break, drummer John Betsch (originally from Florida, now living in Paris) tells me American musicians started to once again flow over to France after Reagan took office. Health benefits and social services are better for artists, the government devotes much more money towards promoting arts and culture, and there’s simply more gigs. “There’s two airports and five train stations.” Betsch shrugs. What else is there to say?

The musicians take the stage again to cheers. Betsch launches into a long drum solo, pounding all around the groove, then suddenly picks up his snare drum and screams right into it. All this, for five Euros. That is, if you’re in Paris.

On a steamy morning in downtown Kuala Lumpur, the distinct smell of fresh dough and pepperoni permeates the usual smog. For the past 14 hours, a crew of 40 has been preparing to create an epic pizza. It’s going to be really long. The current Malaysian record is 272 feet, but today the staff of the Westin hotel is hoping to reach 492 feet – 150 meters – in five hours. Nobody is quite sure why they have only five hours; that just seems to be the rule of making unnecessarily long pizzas in Malaysia.

Banquet tables pushed end to end snake from the hotel’s front doors, around the corner, and down the block to a parking lot. Westin chef Rajesh Kanna ticks off the ingredients: 330 pounds of flour, 231 pounds of mozzarella, 18.5 gallons of tomato sauce. “Definitely we will do it!” he crows.

The madness begins at 9 am. Six assistant chefs dump ingredients onto 3- by 1-foot rectangles of dough and send them through a conveyor oven. After the cooked pizzas emerge, they’re positioned on the tables in a line. A second crew covers each seam with more toppings, using blowtorches to fuse the sections with a layer of melted cheese.

A sound system blasts party music by Cher, Bon Jovi, and C+C Music Factory. A spiky-haired emcee named DJ Naughty Puppy works the crowd: “Come on, let’s make some noise! You can do it!”

Finally, a clown sounds a bullhorn siren, signaling countdown time. When the crowd reaches zero, Naughty Puppy screams, “157 meters! We’ve got a record! We Malaysians have set the record, right here!”

The mob explodes into cheers and whistles. Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” pumps out over the PA. TV cameras descend for postgame interviews. Tearful chefs hug each other. And 515 feet of pizza is boxed up to be sold for charity.

From the dangerous (most days spent inside a box with 6,069 scorpions) to the inexplicable (most faces captured on a phonecam) and the outright banal (first independent tire-testing facility), not a week goes by without a record-setting event somewhere in Malaysia. The country might just be the world record holder in holding records.

The efforts are chronicled in the Malaysia Book of Records, a compendium of 2,005 of the country’s bests, firsts, biggests, and longests. Many attempts are so outlandish – most time spent cooped up in a vehicle – that they’re regularly slotted into the “wacky news” segments on newscasts around the world. To Western eyes, the country seems like a nation of attention-hungry circus freaks. But in Malaysia, the desire to build the largest tea bag or gather the most twins at a single location is a form of national pride.

The record frenzy began under the leadership of Mahathir bin Mohamad, the country’s prime minister from 1981 to 2003. He was obsessed with making his country one of the great nations of the world, especially in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when neighbors Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan – other so-called Asian Tigers – grew to become more significant economic powers, giving Malaysia a serious inferiority complex.

Mahathir championed the motto Malaysia boleh! (Malaysia can do it!) as a way to motivate citizens to embrace modernity. It was a key pillar of his Vision 2020 campaign: If everyone strived for excellence, he promised, Malaysia would be a fully developed first world country by 2020.

Determined to raise Malaysia’s global profile, Mahathir drove the country into debt in the 1990s with a series of ambitious public works projects. In 1998, the 1,483-foot-tall twin Petronas towers opened in Kuala Lumpur, becoming the tallest buildings in the world (they’ve since been eclipsed by Taipei 101 in Taiwan). Kuala Lumpur unveiled a new public transit system, international airport, administrative capital, and technology corridor. An excellent nationwide highway system was constructed and is now filled with Protons, Malaysian-made cars driven by people who can’t afford Japanese or German vehicles.

Mega-projects are good for his country’s ego, Mahathir told the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1998. “Small people always like to appear tall,” he explained. “If you can’t get tall enough, you put a box under you.”

The Malaysia boleh! slogan took off. Advertising agencies used it to promote products; fans chanted the phrase at the Commonwealth Games and other sporting events. And along the way to courting national pride, the call to excellence somehow got translated into setting the record for creating the highest stack of cans in 15 minutes.

The Malaysia Book of Records is published every other year by Danny Ooi. At the product launch of the country’s first theft-resistant handbag, Ooi, 51, is wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt with the MBR logo stitched on one side, and danny on the other. He looks like a gas station attendant circa 1975.

Ooi published the first MBR in 1998; it combined a childhood fondness for the Guinness Book of Records, a formidable instinct for promotion, and an unabashed enthusiasm for boleh. He has since started a weekly TV show and is now raising funds to build an MBR museum and hall of records. Ooi also organizes beauty pageants throughout Asia. One night he might crown Miss Tourism International, the next day he is handing out an award to 8,000 people, all wearing clogs.

“Our book is a selling point for the country. If I go to your country, you don’t even have a book to show. Which is your tallest building, who is your tallest man?” Ooi says, spreading his arms wide. “It’s something to shout about!”

It’s also a manifesto for global peace. “If the whole world was trying for excellence, it would be the perfect world to stay in,” he says, “because we would no longer be talking about fighting. We’d be talking about breaking records.” Perhaps instead of disarming Iraqis, the US should be encouraging them to play checkers underwater.

The day-to-day operations at MBR’s publisher are handled by Sujatha Nair. When she signed on four years ago, Nair was skeptical about her job. But when she witnessed the attempt for the longest grill of satay (a Malay kebab), she saw how seriously her fellow Malaysians take records. “I saw the work put into it: 5,000 students in the hot sun, all sweaty,” she says. “Some of them were in tears.”

Nair’s daughter has since set the Malaysia children’s record for hula-hooping (two hours and 12 minutes). The accomplishment has made the

10-year-old a regular performer at fundraisers for AIDS research and other causes.

Nair manages a staff of 10, who scan newspapers for award ideas, attend and monitor record attempts, and review submissions from the public. During one week in January, they considered bids for the highest-altitude radio broadcast, the first technology that would let students take college entrance exams via SMS, and the first Malaysian to win a German embroidery competition. All were accepted.

The book sells for 88 ringgets (about $24). Publication of the updated edition every two years is heralded by a red carpet gala broadcast across the country. Record holders come from all over: Subang Jaya has the longest pencil. Kuala Lumpur has the largest pair of jeans. Sabah is home to the youngest sumo wrestler. Selangor has the largest leather shoe. Melaka boasts the oldest pharmacist. Sarawak offers up the first cat museum. And Penang has the largest pizza in the shape of Malaysia and the siblings with the most extra toes.

Jayabarathy Letchemanah drags cars with her hair. The 22-year-old set the women’s national record by pulling 5 tons of vehicles 73 feet.

Her father, Ramasamy Letchemanah, was the family’s first champion, setting multiple records for pulling heavy objects with his tresses. In 1990, he dragged a 32-ton Boeing 737 more than 50 feet, an achievement hailed by Hinduism Today as “an awesome demonstration of his yogic power.” But last October, the Malaysian “Mighty Man” died from heart failure at age 55. His obituary ran in newspapers around the world. Luckily he had already taught his daughter his secret technique.

Many record holders are like Jayabarathy – individuals who have found a way to show their boleh and enjoy a little fame. Some are participating in massive social events that serve as community fairs in the spirit of boleh. And some are business owners who either want to show their company’s nationalism or capitalize on the boleh phenomenon to increase sales.

Not all records are whimsical. Take former newscaster Ras Adiba Radzi, who was paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident. In 2003, she rolled her wheelchair 260 miles, from Johor Baharu to Putrajaya, to call attention to people with disabilities, setting the record for longest journey in a wheelchair.

The idea that Malaysia’s national image is burnished by, say, having its citizens parachute a car onto the North Pole doesn’t sit well with everyone. One woman in a Kuala Lumpur suburb put it this way: “It’s a waste of time. It doesn’t mean anything.” A letter in Malaysia’s New Straits Times lamented, “Here we are, a nation gearing itself for Vision 2020, proud of our largest Hari Raya greeting card or the longest performance of a lion dance.”

Sure, events like the largest gathering of people with teddy bears may trivialize the nation’s ambitions. But is it any less crazy when Americans wolf down worms for cash or sing off-key on television for a shot at a record deal?

In the southwestern city of Melaka, a man stands under a banner that reads MALAYSIA BOLEH! Four coconuts are set out in front of him. This is kung fu master Ho Eng Hui; he pierces coconuts with a finger faster than anyone else in Malaysia.

He addresses the crowd, describing boleh. His voice fills with emotion, and he frequently points to his heart. The spirit of doing the best you can, striving for achievement because you are Malaysian, he says, is the driving force behind his art.

He passes around a coconut for people to inspect. He shows his index finger, cruelly bent from previous coconut penetrations. And then he pauses to pitch a bottle of red-colored oil that supposedly eases pain, stimulates muscles, and saves marriages.

After an impassioned riff on his special elixir, the boleh spirit summons him. He emits several screams and jabs his finger into the shell over and over until it punches through, splattering coconut milk everywhere.

The crowd cheers. An assistant runs to help extricate the mangled digit, and then – in a masterful stroke of product placement – Ho dumps a bottle of his own miracle potion onto his hand and rubs it into the skin. He bends over and groans in a superior display of showbiz and promotional savvy.

Told about the coconut triumph later, Nair shrugs. “I know a guy who can do it faster,” she says. “He just hasn’t had time to set up the record.”

(A version of this story first appeared in Wired magazine)

1876
In January, New York thieves break into the new security system of the Northampton National Bank in Massachusetts, stealing cash and bonds worth over $26 million today. A month later, they write a ransom note to the bank, offering to sell the bonds for cash. The bank negotiates for nearly a year before detectives arrest and convict the gang. The money is never recovered.

1945
As Hitler’s empire collapses in April, the infamous Nazi gold collection, a $3.34 billion collection of gold bars, stolen foreign currency and jewels, suddenly disappears from Reichbank vaults. It is called the world’s largest bank robbery in history. Over the years, portions are found in Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. But much of it remains missing. Search teams still hunt for Nazi gold, from the coast of Greece, to bank vaults in Brazil, and the bottom of an alpine lake in Austria.

1950
In January, after two years of planning, armed robbers use copied keys to break into the “burglar-proof” Brinks Building in Boston. They nab $2.7 million in cash, checks, and money orders. The Great Brinks Robbery is labeled the “crime of the century.” It takes until 1956 to charge and sentence all eight thieves. Most of the money is rumored to be hidden in the hills outside Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

1963
In August, 15 men tamper with train signals and stop the Glasgow to London mail train, stealing £2.6 million without firing a shot. Thirteen suspects of the Great Train Robbery are arrested and imprisoned. Three escape jail and become folk heroes, one of whom gets his life made into a movie starring Phil Collins. The lost money is never recovered.

1978
On December 11, a gang of thugs slips into the Lufthansa Airlines cargo terminal at New York’s JFK airport, stealing $5.8 million in cash and jewelry. Unfortunately for police, the currency consists of dollars which had been exchanged overseas, and is impossible to trace. One suspect is sentenced, several are murdered. Only $20,000 is ever recovered. The heist is portrayed in the 1990 mobster film Goodfellas.

1983
In November, six thieves break into the Brinks Mat warehouse at Heathrow Airport, hoping to steal £3 million and instead discover a safe filled with ten tons of gold bullion worth £26 million. The haul is so large and heavy, gang members actually leave the airport to retrieve a larger vehicle. A handful are eventually jailed. Three tons of gold remain unaccounted for.

1990
In March, just after St. Patrick’s Day, two men overpower guards at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and steal 13 paintings by Rembrandt, Degas, Manet, and others. Some works are crudely cut out of their frames. Officials estimate the total loss at roughly $300 million. Despite a $5 million reward, no artwork has been found, and no arrests. The museum continues to display the empty frames.

1997
In September, crooks break into the Dunbar Armored car depot in Los Angeles, and within half an hour stuff $18.9 million in cash into a waiting U-Haul. After some years, all are caught and confess, including the ringleader, a Dunbar employee. The Dunbar Armored Robbery remains the largest cash robbery in U.S. history. $10 million remains missing.

2003
In February, during a tennis tournament, an Italian gang slip inside the Antwerp Diamond Center and empty 123 deposit boxes of gems, leaving 37 still untouched. Loss is eventually calculated to be an astonishing 100 million Euros (then worth $107 million). DNA from a half-eaten sandwich leads authorities to its first suspects. One now awaits trial in prison. No jewels have ever been found.

2004
In December, robbers plunder £26.5 million in cash from the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast, Ireland. Authorities blame the meticulously planned Northern Bank Robbery on the IRA, who categorically denies any involvement. Five suspects have been arrested. Only £2 million has been recovered..

(A version of this story first appeared in American Way magazine)

This is the original Batmobile, from the 60s TV show Batman. For over 40 years it’s traveled the globe to conventions and car shows. Three generations of fans have wiped their sticky fingers on its sleek velvet-black metalflake finish.

Everyone in the world knows the Batmobile. For many of us, it brings the image of a leotarded Adam West and Burt Ward cruising the streets of Gotham, thwarting crime at every turn. And respecting all parking laws:

Batman: Better put 5 cents in the meter.
Robin: No policeman’s going to give the Batmobile a ticket!
Batman: This money goes to building better roads. We all must do our part.

Batman was possibly the goofiest show on television at the time. For legendary Los Angeles car designer George Barris, Batman gave him his career.

Barris has created literally thousands of cars for celebrities, car companies, private clients, and TV and film productions — The Beverly Hillbillies, Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch, Mannix, Knight Rider, Flintstones, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, the list is endless. But for eternity, he will be known as the Father of the Batmobile.

Here at his Barris Kustom Productions showroom on L.A.’s Riverside Drive, jammed with cars, movie posters and other memorabilia, he gives me the rundown on how he pimped the ride of the Caped Crusader.

Batman’s producers had only three weeks and $15,000 to come up with a vehicle. Barris happened to have an experimental car sitting on his lot, a peculiar one-off Lincoln Mercury concept vehicle called the Futura, which had been used in a 50s film and then retired. Barris and his crew quickly re-sculpted the entire car, and shaped it to match the theme of the show.

“This…is the ears of a bat,” he gestures to the front end. “These are the lights, which are his eyes. This is his nose, which comes down…there’s a chain-slasher which comes outta there. And then outta the front, gas nozzles come out to shoot this way. As you carry down the side, you find out that all of a sudden — boom — there’s a set of 15-foot bat wings. Very aerodynamic.”

Barris is a master promoter, full of endless soundbites and anecdotes. He’s described this car to people for four decades, but the project still genuinely excites him.

“Everything had to operate, all the trinkets had to actually work. Because they had to do it on camera. Nowadays, they can blue-screen it, put it on a computer, give you whatever you want.”

The enduring popularity of the Batmobile isn’t surprising. America boasts an ongoing obsessive relationship with customizing our automobiles, from reality shows like Monster Garage and Pimp My Ride, to the popularity of souped-up imports. Car owners scour catalogs and websites, hunting for parts and accessories they cannot live without.

The car custom scene developed after World War II, when restless young servicemen raced hotrods on dry lake beds of the California desert. Car shows sprouted up to support the racing, and began featuring customized cars built by designers that were street-legal and still attracted attention. Robert E. Peterson launched Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines, which began covering the nascent world of car customizing. George Barris, a young Los Angeles hotrodder and car builder who had opened his shop in 1944, was in the right spot at the right time.

The rebellious life of hot rodders gave him credibility when he started working with Hollywood.

“We used to race up Sepulveda, where there was nothing coming up over the hill, and the cops would chase us,” he says. “Yeah, it was dangerous. That’s why the movie industry liked us. We were rebels. We enjoyed doing things to cars. We were all young engineers and designers.”

One of his first big jobs was creating cars for the teen exploitation film High School Confidential. Barris points to a poster for the movie, hanging on the wall of the main showroom. More films and TV productions needed cars, and Barris kept building. For the Dobie Gillis show, he adapted a Ford Model A coupe, which had been used for actual racing at Bonneville Salt Flats.

By the early 1960s, Barris was a go-to name for producers who needed a custom car for a project. People on the West Coast all knew him, he was the guy who insisted on spelling Kustom with a “K.” But the rest of the country discovered him after an article appeared in Esquire magazine in 1963, written by a journalist named Tom Wolfe.

In describing Southern California’s custom car culture, Wolfe focused primarily on Barris and car designer/Rat Fink cartoonist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, christening them the emerging icons of this strange new art form. With typical Wolfian art-brat flourish, he described Barris as wearing a white T-shirt and off-white pants, “in the manner of Picasso walking along in the wind on a bluff at Rapallo.”

Although he’s traded in the white t-shirt for a Baywatch Hawaii jacket, Barris remembers Wolfe and liked the story very much. “He loved my wife because he was a gourmet cook, and they loved cooking Lebanese food together.”

Wolfe’s article and subsequent book “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” exploded on the national consciousness, and made Barris a known entity. In the 1960s, pop culture was all about cars. TV shows had cars, music groups had cars. You were what you drove.

The work kept pouring in. Barris and his designers built matching beach carts for The Beach Boys. He devised a coffin-themed hotrod for the Munsters. He made an outrageous twin-engined coach for Paul Revere and the Raiders, and a guitar-shaped car for the Vox guitar company.

Celebrities began approaching Barris for often-ludicrious requests. Elvis Presley wanted a stereo turntable. Frank Sinatra demanded two gas pedals and two brakes, in case one might fail. Zsa Zsa Gabor insisted that her Rolls Royce limo drip with jewels, from the gold wine goblets and make-up kit, to upholstery encrusted with diamonds and rubies.

The spry 82-year-old Barris walks me through a room lined with framed photos of celebrities and their cars he built:

“There’s the Beatles, Clint Eastwood, there’s Travolta, Farrah Fawcett, Joe Namath, Sammy Davis, Redd Foxx, Frank Gorshin, the Riddler. Frank was great. Four packs a day. There’s Phyllis Diller, John Wayne’s son Pat Wayne. So you can see, we’ve been pretty fortunate.”

Many of the shots feature a younger Barris with flashy sunglasses and bell-bottoms. He was becoming just as famous as his clients.

Because of the saturation of television, Barris creations were now in every household. Jay Leno has said, “While other kids watched TV to see the stars, I watched TV to see the Barris cars.” In the 60s, Barris also seized the potential of licensing, and saw additional revenue from toys, model kits, bolt-on car kits, and Kustom Kandy car paint.

The 1970s gas crisis put a crimp in the car custom market, Barris remembers. “The government said, no more big engines, get rid of performance, downsize your car. Of course when you tell the American public you can’t have this, they’re going to do the opposite. So we were flooded with making big coach-built cars.”

Barris’ shop created many convertibles for Cadillac dealers, because convertibles were banned at the time. He modified a Ford Thunderbird into a Titan, for Sammy Davis, Jr. He did the Partridge Family’s mondrian-psychedelic bus, the muscle cars for Mannix and Starsky and Hutch, vehicles for RoboCop and Tucker. The Dukes of Hazzard show was so rough on cars, he built 21 identical Dodge Chargers to stand in for the “General Lee.”

In the 1980s and 90s, he created a talking car for Knight Rider, the driverless vehicles in Jurassic Park, and the Ghostbusters ambulance, among others. But the industry was changing. The Batman and James Bond films were using computer effects to depict their cars, rather than use custom shops. Car manufacturers were producing more custom-styled cars, like the Plymouth Prowler. And there was also the issue of product placement.

“We did Fast And Furious one. We did Fast And Furious two. Now, Fast And Furious three, it’s all business,” he admits. “Mazda comes in, here’s five cars and $10 million. Toyota comes in, here’s five cars, here’s $10 million. Before they even start production, they got $50 million from the product placement. And of course the cars are done either by prop department or by the manufacturer, rather than individuals like us.”

Perhaps Barris should have gone into the clothing business. The Von Dutch garment line, named for the cranky but talented artist who virtually invented pinstriping, is today a multi-million dollar enterprise. Von Dutch passed away in 1992, and never saw his renaissance. But every time Paris Hilton is photographed wearing a Von Dutch cap, it seems, a new retail store opens somewhere in the world.

“He’s in his grave right now saying, ‘What the fuck happened? Where did this come from?’” laughs Barris, who was friends with the madman and even hired him on occasion. “I see some gal with a Von Dutch shirt on, and say, ‘Gee you got a Von Dutch, that’s great looking. You know anything about it?’ ‘Oh yes, he’s a young 35-year-old artist that creates this.’ He was a car pinstriper that died 25 years ago! The money didn’t mean nothing to him. But today he’s the biggest marketing value there is.”

Not to say that Barris isn’t busy. He’s not just showing off the Batmobile to the eleven-thousandth journalist. In another corner of the shop, his newest concept creations are waiting to go to another car show. The Pontiac GTO appears, on the surface, a stock model from the factory. But the color is vintage Barris, a pearlish metallic tangerine color, with hydraulic vertical doors popularized by Lamborghini. Instead of rear-view mirrors he’s added tiny cameras connected to monitors on the cockpit panel. The wheels are larger, 22 inches, with low profile tires.

Next to the GTO sits a Toyota Prius hybrid, one of the ugliest cars on the road today. The Barris shop has accepted the challenge, and sculpted the front end, opened up the wheel wells, added 18-inch wheels, and sprayed the car with a beautiful two-tone pearl Kandy metallic and green scheme. Barris says when Toyota approached him to customize it, he thought the car looked like a turtle. But it would be fun to do, so he agreed.

“The thing today is it has to be quicker, and you do have budgets,” he says. “But you have more to work with. In the old days we had nothing.”

By the end of the year he’ll have finished another new project, an electric/gasoline hotrod combination of a Prius, ’32 Ford, Mustang, and Prowler. “I got four-wheel steering. I’ve got steering on the rear, with power, I’ve got steering on the front with power. It’s the new hot rod of this decade!”

And just to keep the eccentric ‘60s alive, Barris is also finishing up a green toilet on wheels, an electric street legal vehicle called the Flushmobile. He points to the toilet, sitting in a corner, and explains, “It’s for a cartoon that’s being filmed in New York.”

From a distance, the fact that George Barris is still creating any cars, whether it’s a Prius or a toilet, is astonishing. Most 82-year-olds would rather sit on a porch. But Barris keeps on going with the energy of a man 30 years younger.

He is among the last of his generation of Kustomizers. Von Dutch is gone. Ed “Big Daddy” Roth has passed away, along with Robert E. Peterson. Many younger designers who were inspired by him, like Darryl Starbird, Chip Foose and Boyd Coddington, are now in some ways his competition for commissioned work.

Barris has survived for such a a long time, in part because of clean living and a keen sense for business. Barris Kustom Productions still works out of the same building Tom Wolfe visited in the early 1960s. A crew of 25 employees create the cars in three facilities in San Diego, New York and New Jersey. Twenty or so cars are always in circulation at various car events. Many of his older creations are in a Star Cars Museum in Tennessee. A few are on permanent display at the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, a few other in the hands of collectors. The rest is anybody’s guess where they ended up.

I get the sense that he still gets the Hollywood meetings, and people constantly pitch him ideas. But his staff – including daughter, son and grandson — tells me he’s home only two days a week. The rest of the time he’s on the road, touring car shows with his cars and signing autographs. After our conversation he will leave for another show in Sweden.

Gearheads around the world consider him an elder statesman, the “King of Kustomizers.” At a car show, anyone can actually walk up to Barris and get their picture taken with him. His press kit bulges with photos of fans, from wealthy concourse auto collectors, to long-haired rock musicians, to young kids in Japan. Occasionally someone will come up to him at a show and stare uncomfortably, and say, “Don’t you remember me? I came into your shop in 1942, and I brought in this 1940 Ford, and you put a bullnose on there for me.”

Barris chuckles. “That car? Out of 17,000 cars? How can you remember the guy? That was 40 years ago. I don’t want to be rude. The people are people. Everybody changes in age and looks.”

He wants to show me something else. We walk over to a wall of children’s toys and he pulls out a series of design sketches. “This shows you what us, as a family, thinks about doing with a car project.”

Dodge has proposed a new idea to Barris, and it involves his family. Each member of his family will receive a Dodge Magnum, to redesign however they wish. The varieties of Barris DNA are amazing. Grandson Jared’s version of the Magnum is completely tricked out, like something from the Pimp My Ride show. He’s a musician, so there are giant audio speakers everywhere. Son Brett has envisioned the Magnum as a hearse, because “He likes the casket look – there’s a big group of guys just into hearses,” Barris says. Joji, the daughter, will chop up the Magnum into a pickup truck, because she’s a motorcycle nut and it will carry bikes in the back. George’s version is more dramatic than the others, somewhat conservative, but at the same time very Barris.

“We start compiling all the parts,” he continues. “We get together with the different manufacturers. The ram air scoops, the American racing wheels, the Goodrich tires. And we’ll photograph it and assemble it, showing which car each one of us is doing.”

He looks at the sketches proudly. This is the work of his bloodline, continuing the family tradition, ensuring that there will be Barris Kustom Kars being made for many years to come.

I say goodbye to Barris, and stumble out into the LA sunshine, my brain loaded with way too much information about cars. I look back at the showroom window, at the outlines of one-of-a-kind vehicles — James Dean’s Porsche, the Knight Rider car, William Shatner’s motorcycle — and think, George Barris is an American treasure. Even if, God forbid, you’ve never seen an episode of Batman.

(A version of this story first appeared in Southwest Spirit magazine)

Bob Marley tunes blast out from unseen speakers. I would be suspicious of any pirate who sang along with “No Woman No Cry.” And yet it’s the perfect theme for Mundaca, because it was here on this island that a local Mayan girl broke his heart.

Unlike most pirates, who gleefully pillaged their way across the oceans, collecting diseases and watching their teeth fall out from scurvy, Mundaca was a sensitive swashbuckler. In a very un-pirate-like moment of weakness, he allowed himself to fall in love. And she dumped him for a local guy.

It’s an incredible tale of passion and rejection, like one of those Mexican soap operas on Telemundo. I can imagine Mundaca standing there in his pirate gear, pleading for her love, his eyes watery and sad. She turns her back defiantly, her hair blowing up from an unseen wind. A door opens, it’s a handsome Mayan fisherman, she runs to his arms, and we see Mundaca trembling, a single tear trickling down his craggy pirate face. Has this been done already?

The Isla Mujeres coastline soon comes into view. The island is small and narrow, only about five miles long. Our ferry docks at a harbor on the west side, in front of the dolphin facility. Tourists can get their photos taken while swimming with Atlantic bottlenose dolphines, or for the more adventurous, bull sharks.

Isla Mujeres offers your basic tropical paradise experience with palm trees and white sand. Once you leave the beaches, the landscape turns into quintessential rural Mexico – a few expensive homes, but primarily sun-baked cinderblock housing, with laundry hanging from windows. There’s an unfinished patina to everything. About 16,000 people live here. Most of the industry is fishing, as it has been for centuries.

Tourism is relatively new to Isla Mujeres. People come for the excellent snorkling and diving among the coral reefs, and families gravitate to the eco-friendly Garrafon Reef Park, at the island’s southern tip. A small beachfront hotel advertises “Beer so cold it’ll make your teeth hurt.”

To attract more visitors, travel brochures have absorbed the local pirate history. Mundaca has unwittingly loaned his name to a Mundaca travel agency, a real estate firm, and a diving company, as well as one of the trained dolphins. From Cancun’s harbor, the “Captain Hook Pirate Cruise” takes tour groups out on a lobster dinner sail, complete with swordfighting actors dressed as rogues.

Down the coastline, La Posada del Capitán Lafitte beachfront resort carries on the tradition of Louisiana pirate Jean Lafitte, who supposedly roamed the area. The Cedam Museum in Puerto Aventuras features artifacts collected from nearby shipwrecks, some dating back to the 1600s.

But the real Mundaca history is much more interesting. With me on my visit are Carlos and Roger, two locals who work as historical guides. We climb into a vehicle and hit the few paved roads of Isla Mujeres to seek out the Mundaca legend firsthand.

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Movies and cartoons often depict a pirate as a gallant swashbuckler with a parrot on his shoulder, saying “Arrr!” and ordering people to “walk the plank.” In truth, most were ruthless thugs, licensed by various European governments to target Spanish galleons on the high seas.

The Golden Age of Piracy lasted roughly from 1690 to 1730, and during this time pirates, or “privateers” as they were called, kept busy attacking ships on the trade routes between South America and Europe.

Pirates favored the Caribbean for its central location, and lingered in 17th century haunts like Petit-Goave in Haiti, Port Royal, Jamaica, and the island of Tortuga. Along the coast of Mexico’s Quintana Roo, buccaneers would lay (lie?) in wait for galleons coming up from Colombia. By setting lanterns along the Chinchorro Reef, pirates would fool the ships’ captains into thinking the treacherous undersea shelf was easily navigable. When the vessel ran aground or sunk, the pirates pounced.

Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard, and Jean Lafitte are familiar to anyone interested in pirates. Fermin Mundaca de Marechaja is less known, especially to Americans.

Mundaca made a fortune shipping “black ivory” slaves from Africa to the New World. He also worked the opposite direction, selling kidnapped Mayan slaves to plantation owners in Cuba. The Spaniard was technically not really a pirate, but he insisted on referring to himself as such, because, some say, he thought it was more respectable than “slave trader.”

When the British Royal Navy started cracking down on slave trading in the mid-1860s, Mundaca thought it prudent to retire, and purchased nearly half of a tiny island off the coast of Mexico.

To the Mayans, this island was sacred to their moon goddess, Ix Chel, who watched over the fertile women of society. They created statues of pregnant women throughout the island, and built a temple to Ix Chel on its southern tip (some ruins are still here today). When the Spanish first arrived in the 16th century, and noticed all the goddess images, they named the patch of land Isla Mujeres, “The Island of Women.”

Roger, who is half Mayan, tells me the island’s name also came about because visiting Spanish noticed only women and children living here. The men were frequently off fishing or doing business. So it seemed like the residents were exclusively women. There’s still another story that it was named Isla Mujeres because pirates would stop by and stash their women on the island, to retrieve later, which adds to the folklore.

After moving to the island, Mundaca wasted no time in throwing his money around, and built a lavish hacienda named Vista Alegre, stocking the grounds with birds, livestock, and exotic gardens. A beautiful young local girl caught his eye. Her name was Martiniana Gomez Pantoja. Her dark hair prompted him to call her La Triguena, “The Brunette.”

You can’t blame him. The Mayan culture is filled with beauty. They were the first people in the Western hemisphere to keep written historical records. Their art, architecture, mathematics, agriculture, and astronomy developments were highly advanced. The Mayan sport of hip-ball, where players moved a rubber ball down a court using only their hips, predates many modern sports like soccer, rugby, and hockey (an excellent recreation can be seen nightly at the Xcaret eco-cultural theme park in Playa del Carmen south of Cancun).

Even today, the woven-grass palapas that shelter bars from the sun, are built by Mayan construction crews using ancient techniques. And don’t even get me started on Cochinita Pibil, an amazing local pork dish prepared with Mayan spices.

Maybe Mundaca also liked the Pibil, history doesn’t tell us. But he did fall madly in love with La Triguena, and in her honor, named the entrance arch to his hacienda El Paso de la Triguena, “The Step of the Brunette.”

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, money can’t buy love, especially between a young girl and a middle-aged guy trying to impress her with his money. La Triguena would have nothing to do with Mundaca, and instead married a local Mayan closer to her own age.

Dejection festered in his heart, and by all accounts he went off the deep end. While La Triguena raised her family on the island, the jilted pirate puttered around his garden and walked the beaches, stuffing stones in his pockets. If metal detectors had been around, he probably would have had one.

In 1880 Mundaca left Isla Mujeres for the town of Mérida, approximately 200 miles to the west, and passed away that same year at the age of 55. Some guidebooks suggest he died alone in a brothel, others claim he succumbed to the plague. Roger tells me that Mundaca did eventually marry another woman, so who knows what really happened.

Mundaca’s hacienda ruins are located near Playa Lancheros, on the southern end of the island. A brochure describes some gardens and pathways, with a small zoo. Carlos tells me we’ll drive by, but there’s nothing really interesting to look at. A few stone foundations, some cannons propped up to give it that pirate feel. “It’s not that old,” he says.

We pull up to a crumbling brick wall, and realize the gate is locked. Closed for the day.

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The Mexican Navy established a base on the island in 1949. Underwater conduits brought fresh water and electricity from the mainland. An elderly taxi driver tells me that Isla Mujeres became modernized as Cancun underwent aggressive development in the mid-1970s.

We pull into Isla Town, the main village, and walk down the narrow streets of shops and restaurants. Unlike Cancun, there are no thundering discos, or chain restaurants with a giant frog perched on the roof. The pace is refreshingly laidback. Brightly colored crafts and curios, racks of Che Guevara T-shirts, and owners muttering “Cuban cigars, guys?” Locals sit languidly on steps, chatting in the shade. A teenager whizzes by on a Segway scooter, dialing a cell phone.

Italian food is very popular, and Carlos tells me that in general, Europeans prefer Isla Mujeres to Cancun because they want a more authentic Mexican experience. Except for the Italian food, I suppose. On the other hand, Americans gravitate to the more commercialized Cancun, where more English is spoken, especially in restaurants with a giant frog on top.

We walk through a sun-baked plaza filled with pigeons, cats, and squealing children. Some youths are playing basketball. Carlos says the local team is the best in all Yucatan. When I ask why, he smiles, “There’s nothing else to do.”

The town hits the ocean at Playa Norta, a well-known beach with palapas-covered bars looking out over crystalline waters. After Hurricane Wilma blasted the Yucatan in October 2005, the government spent $25 million to rebuild Cancun’s beaches with tons of sand dredged from the ocean. Carlos says that here on this beach, the storm actually brought them more sand.

We come upon a fishing contest in progress. Vendors are selling food and drinks, surrounded by large inflatable beer cans. Pescadores stand in a line on the pier, dead fish at their feet, waiting to have their catch weighed. First prize is a Ford F-150 pickup.

Behind a food booth, two women are drinking cans of Modelo and hacking off the head of a barracuda that looks about six feet long. They smile and wipe the sweat from their foreheads.

“Try some of this ice cream,” says Carlos, pointing to a woman behind a cart. “It’s homemade.” He’s right, it’s some of the best I’ve ever had. We watch the contest for a bit, then head off to find Mundaca’s tombstone.

A pock-marked stone wall rings the municipal cemetary at the north end of Isla Town. I sidestep a young couple from Chicago, squinting at their maps, and enter through a creaky metal gate.

It feels like the 1700s, except for the electricity cables snaking in between the crypts. Carlos motions me down a narrow pathway to one tomb which looks older than the rest. Two out of four pillars are broken off. Symbols of trees and a cross are chiseled into the top.

Mundaca carved this tombstone for himself, with his own hands. He added the date 1877, which would have been three years before he left for Mérida. On one side he etched the pirate skull and crossbones symbol, hoping to be remembered as something other than a slave-trader. He also inscribed a special message for La Triguena.

“On this side,” Carlos points, “It says ‘As you are, I was.’ On the other, ‘As I am, you will be.’”

We don’t talk. The graveyard is totally silent, and I think, my God, he really was crazy about her.

Unless you were looking for it, nobody would notice this strange monument to love of a Mayan girl. Mundaca did not engrave his name anywhere on the tomb. He didn’t need to. She lived her entire life on the island, knowing his final words were right here in the cemetary. A goodbye note for eternity from Fermin Mundaca, the lovelorn pirate of Isla Mujeres.

(A version of this story first appeared in American Way magazine)

It’s mid-morning and I’m smoking a strong, fat cigar on an empty stomach. Not the healthiest breakfast, but when you’re sitting in a cigar cafe in Ybor City, and everyone else around you is smoking cigars, it makes perfect sense to do so.

This historic Latin Quarter district of Tampa, Florida was once the Cigar Capital of the World. In the early 20th century, 20,000 workers were employed here, producing up to 700 million cigars a year, all handmade from Cuban tobacco.

Don Marco remembers the last heyday of Ybor City’s cigars. He grew up here, and owns the King Corona Café & Bar, where we’re sitting at the moment.

“Around 1957, 1958, there were still so many factories,” he remembers. “The smell of rough tobacco in the air. The coffee mills, the strong roast. The Spanish, Cuban, Italian workers all drank really strong coffee.”

Speaking of tobacco in the air, Don is halfway into a Puro Placer, a Lonsdale-sized cigar from Nicaragua. I’m working my way through a Cuesta-Rey sun-grown Robusto. Cuestas are now made in the Dominican Republic, but were once produced here, along with Arturo Fuentes, Romeo y Julietas, and dozens of other brands.

One of the cool things about Ybor is that if you already smoke cigars, it’s like making a pilgrimage back to the source. This is the Mother Lode. Ybor is still headquarters for many companies and distributors. Cigars cost up to 50 percent less than anywhere else. And it’s so acceptable. I live in California, where you have about five minutes to enjoy tobacco before an angry mob materializes and disembowels you right there on the sidewalk.

I make a vow. While in the Cigar Capital of the World, I will sample as many cigars as possible. Even if it makes me turn green, I will transform myself into the ultimate cigar tourist.

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It isn’t difficult to do. Evidence of the cigar ancestry is everwhere. The sidewalks are emblazoned with large tobacco leaves outlined in stone. Shops display rollers in their windows, usually an elderly Cuban man, puffing away as he works. A blues band guitarist wears a Fuente baseball cap. A local brewery posts a giant vintage “Hav-A-Tampa” sign. Everyone is smoking cigars — men and women, retirees and teenagers, tourists and locals. It’s like we’re all in a gangster movie.

Marco has always been around the cigar business. He lived across the street from a cigar factory. His wife’s great-grandfather came to Ybor from Cuba and worked as a cigar roller. For several years Marco ran the Tampa Rico cigar company, which included a factory and chain of retail stores. In 1998 he scaled back operations and opened the King Corona shop on Ybor’s main strip, 7th Avenue, or what locals still call Broadway. King Corona sells cigars, clothing, food, alcohol and coffee, and in the rear of the store, a barbershop does a good business.

So in other words, people can walk in, buy a cigar and a Cuban shirt, have a cocktail, and get a haircut? “It’s heaven, man.”

He no longer makes cigars because it’s too expensive to hire a roller, he says. That sort of thing is really just for the tourists. Also, most of the rollers working in the shop windows produce only mild strength cigars, because the darker, stronger wrapper leaves are more difficult to control. Tourists don’t care, but true cigar people notice the difference.

Few cigars are still made in Ybor. The small chinchales, and across town, the J.C. Newman family factory still cranks out machine-made Rigolettos. Most cigar manufacturing has left Florida, moved to Caribbean countries where the Cuban seeds have been successfully replanted. Cuba has lost the edge in agricultural techniques, Marco says. The best professional rollers have all emigrated to Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. These cigars are now, in Marco’s opinion, better than Cubans.

Will this industry ever come back to America? “It’s just too expensive,” he says. “If aliens landed tomorrow in the U.S. and wanted cigars, there wouldn’t be enough people to make them.”

Pondering this image, I stroll out of King Corona, and although it’s only noonish, I fire up one of the locally made “sticks,” called The Light of Ybor. It’s is a mild strength smoke, but certainly not necessary at this point. I just finished the Cuesta-Rey and my mouth is already chalky, I’m feeling a wee bit dizzy. But why not? Here in Ybor I can smoke until I pass out on the curb. People will step over my body, examine the cigar still in my hand, and mutter, “What a waste — he didn’t even finish it.”

After a quick lunch, followed by a Sancho Panza Caballero, a medium-bodied Honduran, Manny Leto meets me at the Ybor City Museum.

Manny acts as local historian of the Ybor cigar industry. He grew up in Tampa, and has taken it upon himself, at the ripe age of 29, to digest what has happened to Ybor in the last 100 years. We walk through the museum’s permanent exhibit, and he explains the origins of the former Cigar Capital of the World.

In the late 19th century, a Cuban cigarmaker named Vincente Martinez Ybor sensed an opportunity to make cigars in Florida. The timing was right. Cuban was in the midst of a civil war with Spain, and labor issues were difficult. Ybor scouted around Florida, and settled on a sparsely populated swamp outside Tampa. Buildings were erected and streets laid out. The first two tabaquerias opened in 1886 by Ybor and Ignacio Haya, and attracted a diverse labor pool of immigrants from Cuba, Spain, and Italy.

Ybor was structured as a company town, with the tabaqueros living in wooden casitas within a few blocks of the factories. Mutual aid societies were set up for each immigrant group, providing medical care, and promoting cultural entertainment. People were born, lived, worked and died within the same 40 acres. By 1919, workers were producing more Cuban tobacco cigars than Cuba itself.

“Cigars really were the identity here,” Manny says. “This was the onset of a consumer economy. There were standard sizes, taxes, the concept of window shopping. Cigars were first exported beyond the local area.”

Ybor cigars were known as the best in the country. Other cigar companies would brazenly print “Tampa” on their labels, even though they weren’t associated with Tampa at all. The name meant quality.

Manufacturers recognized the power of advertising early on. Because shops displayed cigars with open boxes, label artwork needed to attract the eye. Lithographers from Germany helped create the technique to print box labels and cigar bands, some so intricate it took 30 printing registers just to reproduce one label.

“The first celebrity endorsements were for cigar labels,” Manny says, and points to a wall display of labels boasting cigar brands like Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Ivanhoe, Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Riders, actors and vaudevillians of the time. All names used without permission, of course. “There were labels for generals, Spanish-American War-themed cigars. It was very patriotic.”

This information is all very exciting, and could really be enhanced by enjoying a nice cigar. I’ve got a Honduran Reo Robusto in my pocket, recommended by Don Marco. The five-year-old Sumatra seed wrapper leaf from Costa Rica, wrapped around a blend of Nicaraguan and Honduran filler. It’s been 20 minutes without tobacco in my mouth. But Manny doesn’t smoke. And also there’s no smoking in the museum.

Manny shows me a wall-sized photo of a factory rolling floor. In the image, hundreds of men and women are sitting at tables, talking, smiling, rolling cigars. It’s a very integrated group: young, old, black, white, Cuban, Spanish. Workers learned their craft through apprentice work, usually starting off rolling cigars in small “buckeye” shops, so nicknamed because, it’s thought, the inferior tobacco was from Ohio.

In a corner of the photo, a man stands on a raised platform, talking and gesticulating. This man is a lectore, or reader. A lectore was a human CNN of the era, delivering the day’s news and narrating classic novels by Cervantes, Zola, Victor Hugo and Jules Verne.

Originating in the Caribbean, lectores were brought to Ybor by cigar company owners, who wanted something to keep the workers occupied, rather than gossiping and complaining about the management. Workers loved the idea, and paid for lectores out of their own pockets, even holding auditions to choose the best quality performer.

The best lectores could translate between languages on the fly, and when reading a novel would even act out the various characters in the story. Their status ascended to become the factory’s highest paid worker. But hearing all that news educated the workers with an increased socialist and union awareness. Ybor factory owners removed the lectore stands in 1931, says Manny, and in retaliation, everyone went on strike.

Although eclipsed by the perpetual noise of mechanized factories, lectores still exist today to some extent. Cigar rollers often listen to a Spanish language radio station while they work. In 2003, Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz won a Pulitzer for “Anna in the Tropics,” about a lectore in a 1929 Ybor cigar factory, played by Jimmy Smits.

Ybor’s cigar industry declined gradually, through the Depression and World War Two. Mechanization eliminated many jobs. Cigarettes became more popular, and convenient. And at 25 to 40 cents apiece, many Americans could no longer afford handmade Ybor cigars.

Ybor also suffered from the federal government’s 1949 Housing Act, which leveled entire blocks. A new interstate highway literally cut the city in half, driving many out to the suburbs. By the 1970s, Ybor City was virtually a ghost town. Only a handful of cigar factories and shops remained, amid a growing population of artists and bohemians. Manny remembers seeing a newspaper article about one artist who lived alone in a giant cigar factory building.

Sensing an opportunity to revive the city, local officials relaxed zoning restrictions to promote entertainment. Bars and nightclubs eagerly moved in, and Ybor City was now the place to come and party. Sports bars and punk pits opened up alongside posh dance clubs with velvet ropes. The 1990s cigar boom added more tobacco retailers, with freelance entrepreneurs set up along 7th Avenue, selling cigars from shopping carts and hospital gurneys. In 2001 the city opened a $45 million Central Ybor retail and entertainment complex, on the site of an abandoned cigar factory. An annual Cigar Heritage Festival now draws over 10,000 people.

The museum’s gift shop sells its own brand of cigars, called Ybor City Society, rolled at the museum by master artisan Dagoberto. I light one and walk a few blocks to Ybor Square, a block-long complex of brick buildings which was once Vicente Martinez Ybor’s original cigar factory. It’s now rented out to offices and restaurants. I poke around the plazas, looking in the windows, imagining the rooms filled with workers, all smoking away, listening to Jules Verne and the local news.

As the day winds down, I light another no-name brand I bought on the street, and stop by the local songwriter night at the New World Brewery, where strangely, I am the only person with a cigar. I go to bed, dreaming of green tobacco fields, the leaves rustling in the gentle Caribbean wind.

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Morning in Ybor brings a bit of congestion in the chest. Well, more than a bit. But hey, it’s a cigar town. I shake it off, leave the hotel and spark up one of my own, a Dominican Romeo y Julieta. After a breakfast of café con leche and Cuban sandwich at Carmine’s, it’s time to investigate the Ybor cigar scene firsthand.

The El Sol shop opened in 1929, and is the oldest cigar shop still operating in Ybor. Owner Bob Saitta is the grandson of the founder. He sells mostly imported cigars, although he stocks a few sizes that are made in Tampa. He directs me to a Dominican robusto, wrapped in cellophane with the “El Sol” printed on the side. I light it up immediately. Not bad, strong and well constructed, nice after a Cuban sandwich.

Bob didn’t think he would be in cigars for a living, but ultimately family obligations drew him back. When asked about the Ybor cigar renaissance, he’s more inclined to talk about T-shirts imprinted with vintage cigar labels. It was his idea, based on his collection of labels, and now everybody is doing it. As far as the 7th Avenue business, he would like to see more retail stores move in. “How many tattoo parlors and pizza shops do we really need?”

I stroll down 7th and notice at least three chinchales (cigar makers), all with fresh cigars in the windows. All three have opened in the last six months. I enter one named Tampa Cigar, but nobody seems to be around. The cigar rolling station sits idle. Another, Havana Dreams, features cigars that just look too mild for my rapidly disintegrating palate.

The La Herencia De Cuba shop (“The Inheritance of Cuba”) looks the most promising. A clerk tells me the store has been open only a month. An elderly man sits in the window, patiently smoking and rolling cigars. This is cigar legend Roberto Ramirez.

“My father’s very famous,” the woman says. “He was quality control at the Cohiba factory in Cuba.”

According to the wall of news clippings, Ramirez was once in charge of over 500 workers at the Cohiba plant, and has rolled cigars for Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton. In terms of cigar street cred, it doesn’t get any better.

I pick out a nice rich dark torpedo. As with all the local chinchales, Herencia sells every cigar they make. It’s fresh, moist, but a nice draw. A good follow-up to the El Sol Robusto. Again, totally unnecessary. But It’s important to keep the process going.

Just down the street, the Metropolitan cigar store dates back to 1933, and is essentially a completely-enclosed walk-in humidor. Like El Sol, it also offers a few locally made cigars, but the majority of business is in major imported brands like Cohiba and Macanudo. Bill Cosby’s signed photo lingers on the wall. A few blocks away, Arturo Fuente Sr. and Jr. operate the Tampa Sweethearts cigar company, a wholesale and retail business specializing in Fuente family brands. Fuente started in 1912 and is the oldest cigar family still in Ybor. Customers can walk up to a glass window and order their cigars, much like a teller window at the bank.

My next stop is the Columbia Restaurant, which last year celebrated its 100th anniversary. Founded in 1805 as a lunch spot for Ybor cigar workers, the Columbia has been called “America’s oldest cigar bar.” Over the years it’s grown into a block-long Cuban/Spanish restaurant with 15 dining rooms, and weekend flamenco shows. Richard Gonzmart, great-grandson of the founder, now runs the day-to-day operation, along with his daughters Lauren and Andrea.

The original Columbia was fronted by an unpaved road, and bordered across the street by a swamp. There was no front door, it was open 24 hours, with staff making Cuban sandwiches in the window. Today the same café is still a dining room, beautifully accented with dark woods and antique light fixtures.

During the 1990s cigar craze, Gonzmart decided to revive the family cigar business. He hired Cuban rollers to create a Gonzalez-Martinez brand, and opened a small chinchale inside the Columbia gift shop. With a keen eye for publicity, he positioned his daughters to sit at the Columbia’s bar and smoke cigars.

“Sales spiked,” laughs Andrea. A photo of her even ended up, at age 16, in Cigar Aficionado magazine.

“My wife was great at it,” adds Richard. “She sold a lot of cigars.”

After an excellent lunch of Spanish bean soup and Cuban sandwiches, Gonzmart and his daughters walk me through the labyrinthine building, behind a secret panel and up a flight of stairs. During Prohibition the Columbia operated two clandestine rooms on this floor, for private parties. Gonzmart is renovating them into cigar-friendly VIP dining areas, and says he’s already planned out the ventilation.

Gonzmart doesn’t smoke many cigars anymore, but he does favor the occasional Diamond Crown Maximus, made by Tampa’s own J.C. Newman in the Dominican Republic. I make a note to find one of these.

At the King Corona café, salesman Josh Holland says, “Oh sure, we have the Maximus.” He leads me to the humidor, which takes up an entire wall of the store, and there it is. A gold-encrusted, beautifully ornate box, and inside, perfectly rolled cigars blended from seven individual tobacco leaves, each wrapped in a special El Bajo Sun Grown leaf, grown by the Oliva family, Ybor’s “First Family of Tobacco.” A limited edition available to only select suppliers around the country. Astonishingly, they’re only $10 each.

“They’re probably the best cigar on the market,” says Holland. “I think they’re much better than the Fuente Opus X.”

I have no sense of smell left, and my forehead is starting to throb. My palms are sweating. But boy, is it a smooth burning smoke. Rich, dark. Silky. I’m floating. How often can you enjoy something that’s the best in the world, for ten bucks? Josh goes back into the humidor and returns with another Diamond Crown, a tapered tip design, Cuban-style. “Don’t smoke it now,” he says, eyeing me up and down. “Your palate’s shot.”

—————————–

It’s not just my palate. A taxi deposits me at the Tampa airport, clothes reeking of tobacco smoke. My throat hurts. I’m dizzy, tingly, agitated. My fingers stink. My pockets are filled with cellophane wrappers and cigar bands. I want to get my blood and lungs flushed, and then curl up under a plastic chair and dream of peaceful Florida sunny afternoons, with a lectore orating the latest adventure novel.

But the gate is calling my name. I start running with my luggage, gasping for air, lungs pounding. I don’t know which terminal is which. How do those old Cuban guys smoke so many cigars, every day? Every roller works with a big stogie sticking out of their mouth. I think of the musicians in the film Buena Vista Social Club, all in their 70s and 80s, all still hitting the cigars. Is it in their DNA?

Maybe I’ll never make it out of Tampa. I’ll miss my flight, and end up staying here forever in the cigar womb. I’ll forward all my mail, sit at an outdoor table, and puff away life’s worries with the best cigars in the world.

(A version of this story first appeared in Southwest Spirit magazine)

It started with this:

Blue Note Presents The Foghat Summit
New Silver Platinum Anthology includes new essays, photographs, bonus tracks, alternate takes, and every single piece of unreleased material.

One of the most baffling things about the boogie-blues sub-genre, is that despite its essentially banal profile, beauty continues to exist within these parameters. Perhaps it’s as so many thinkers have said, that it is because of the banality, or call it adversity, that such beauty does exist. In the case of Foghat, the testosterone freight train of repetition also pulls an emotional caboose of raw vulnerability. The listener often is caught between tapping a toe or wiping an eye. Selected by scholars and historians, this definitive 10-CD anthology of recordings provides not only a vast cultural gift, but also a window to one of the world’s greatest musical partnerships.

I was 15 when I first heard Foghat, a formative moment that altered the way I thought and listened, destroying one attitude while inspiring another. I was a snob. I had been entertaining the notions of Head East, REO Speedwagon, Kansas, and other regional giants of the 1970s American musical experience. But like many of our generation, I hungered for a larger, more elusive truth. Something out there must matter. Where could I find it? “In Denver, next weekend,” advised an associate. “We can take my mom’s wagon.”

McNichols Arena wasn’t a nightclub. It was a sports stadium. That night, it might has well have been the Parthenon. Once inside, a universe opened up. The cathedral belonged to Foghat. By the power of their passion, I was led into the most exciting scene since the eponymous debut of Black Oak Arkansas. Like their kindred countrymen the Beatles and the Stones, this quartet of young men from England would transform an ordinary night into a magical evening.

“Lonesome” Dave Peverett was chief magician, his primary instrument of artistry the Gibson Les Paul. Still in his early twenties, clad in lambchop sideburns and white bell-bottoms, he played with the maturity of a seasoned pro, and sang with the patient wisdom of a master. Rod “The Bottle” Price’s slide guitar was full-bodied and robust, like a fine claret, yet also tasteful and beguiling. Roger Earl, the polished formalist of the group, alternately caressed and taunted his drums with lyrical pointillism. Bassist Craig MacGregor added constancy and strength, transforming his fretboard into a left-handed playpen of boogie.

I felt a satisfying boisterousness, an infinite certainty at the center of their souls, as their instruments bestowed an enthusiasm that has stayed with me for 20 years. That night, after treasuring and absorbing this music, I purchased a T-shirt with which to begin my Foghat memorabilia collection. The group’s willingness to readily pay homage to its mentors was apparent when you held the shirt up to a light. Clearly legible through the band’s logo were the words, “Stills-Young Band: Long May You Run.”

In this collection, a bonanza awaits the listener. If you have heard Charles Mingus piano solos, or Beethoven’s cello arrangements for the King of Prussia, then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that “Fool for the City” carries, both in a live context and in these ten unissued studio versions. All six alternate takes of “My Babe” crackle with the rapture of romantic bliss. An acoustic demo of “Rock and Roll Outlaws,” including an impromptu E-string replacement sequence, transports Don Quixote to an even greater spiritual orbit.

Chances are you’ve revisited Foghat before, and are wondering why you’re holding another re-issue. One reason is a recent discovery of archival tapes in a janitor’s closet at Bearsville Records. Aficionados may now enjoy the choicest of rarities, from radio appearances to reluctant groupie interviews and terse booking cancellation conversations. Another reason is the secret 1998 “Cruise Ship Rehearsals,” complete with an unanticipated grounding buzz. Yet another reason is the sublime a cappella version of James Brown’s “Lickin’ Stick,” from a birthday party for promoter Don Kirschner aboard the band’s Lear Jet. The entirety of Disc Seven, which treats fans to an 63-minute take of “Slow Ride” during a Michigan hailstorm, has remained unheard until now.

Earlier digitally remastered collections have sounded thin and brittle. This reissue was meticulously processed through a belt-driven BSR turntable, Audio-Technics cartridge/stylus, and Marantz flywheel-tuner/receiver powering 15 watts RMS per channel. Remixing was faithfully completed on an all-tube 4-track Sonic-Lux machine in the kitchen of legendary engineer Rudy Van Gelder, bumping the signal back down to monaural, and then resplitting the instruments into two separate stereo tracks, retaining original R.I.A.A. high frequency roll-off characteristics. Such reverse-engineering technique yields a full analog sound complete with needle skips, tone-arm wow and flutter, and resident amplifier hum. The drums now sound warm and thundrous through the right channel, guitars full and emotive on the left, with harp and vocals presiding center stage. Each song resonates with the true clarity in which it was originally heard, and exactly how Foghat had intended.

A professor once intoned that it would take two hundred years to figure out the complete message of Ellington. The same is surely true of Foghat. We may never decipher them, but the mystery is well worth the wait.
——————————————————-

Okay, pretty silly. Just something for fun. It sits on my website for over a year. I suddenly then receive this note:

Foghat Reply #1

Date:Fri, 04 Jan 2002 19:51:11 -0500
Subject: Foghat article
From:Michael McConnell
To:jackboulware@earthlink.net

Jack,
My name is Michael McConnell and I represent the estate of Dave Peverett. I’m writing you regarding your article at your site that references a pending Foghat release, I was wondering if you could please furnish me with information on this. I have contacted Rhino, and as they hold all the US licenses for any Bearsville era releases I thought they might be intending to release this, but they have’nt any knowlege of this either. I would like to know who the label is and any contact information you could provide. I can be reached via e-mail michael@bluerockent.com or I can be phoned at 212-XXX-XXXX. Any information you can provide would be much appreciated.

Thank you,
Michael McConnell

(Astonishing, I thought. How could he possibly believe it was real? I answered with an explanation that the liner notes were just a joke. No response. I post his letter to my website, along with the phony liner notes.)
————————————————————
Two years go by, and then I receive a note from the former bass player of Foghat:

Foghat Reply #2

From: ADDRESS DELETED
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 21:28:00 EDT
To: jackboulware@earthlink.net
Subject: Thanks for the write up

Dear Jack:

I came across your web site tonight and read your review. Thanks for the nice comments in appreciation for what we’ve done.

And always remember, gonna boogie for the doctor, gonna boogie for the nurse, gonna keep on boogin’ till they throw me in a hearse.

Best to you-
Craig MacGregor

(I couldn’t tell—did he believe it was real also? At least he seems to have a sense of humor.)
————————————————————
Two days later, an article I wrote about current rock bands appears in Southwest Airlines magazine. I mention the band Foghat in passing. The exact quote, “Foghat has petered out entirely, some would even say thankfully,” is based on the band’s website foghat.com, which says they’ve retired, and thanks the fans for all the years. It turns out that a reconstituted version of the band (with original drummer and logo) is flying Southwest that week, and sees the article. Which leads to an angry note from the band’s manager (also the drummer’s wife):

Foghat Reply #3

From: Linda Arcello-Earl
Reply-To: foghatbiz@foghat.net
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:00:55 -0400
To: jackboulware@earthlink.net
Subject: FOGHAT MISINFORMATION

Hi Jack,

Just wanted to respond to your quote in Spirit Magazine of March 2004….Foghat has petered out, some would even say thankfully….

I represent the band, and am also married to Roger Earl. We read it on the plane while on our CURRENT tour, while promoting our CURRENT CD ‘FAMILY JOULES‘.

Hmmm….

If you would like a copy of our Press kit, which includes our current CD and a sampler DVD, I would be happy to send it to you. Our current website is Foghat.net.

We did not ‘peter out’ after the death of Lonesome Dave in 2000, and still have quite a few fans out there that are enjoying our shows. FYI we did Sweden Rock this year to 25,000 people and it rocked, and we did a bunch of dates in Canada with Alice Cooper.

Just wanted to set the record straight, as misinformation can be damaging to a bunch of guys that have worked their asses off and enjoyed playing basic rock n roll music, AND brought enjoyment to millions of fans.

Thanks
Linda Arcello-Earl

Foghat
East Setauket, NY

(I answered, thanked her for the note, and mentioned hers was the second Foghat-related email I received that week. I also included the original phony liner notes and the first reply letter.)
————————————————————
Which led to:

Foghat Reply #4

From: Linda Arcello-Earl
Reply-To: foghatbiz@foghat.net
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 14:25:16 -0400
To: Jack Boulware
Subject: RE: FOGHAT MISINFORMATION

Your article was very funny and well-written. Roger and I just read it. Interesting that Michael McConnell thought the ‘release’ was serious. You write very well…why don’t you give me your address and I’ll send you a copy of ‘Family Joules’. I’d be curious to hear your comments.

Linda Arcello-Earl

(I send her my address. Who knows where this is going?)
————————————————————
A few days later, yet another email, accidentally cc’d to me:

Foghat Reply #5

From: Linda Arcello-Earl
Reply-To: foghatbiz@foghat.net
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:26:39 -0400
To: Jack Boulware
Subject: RE: FOGHAT MISINFORMATION

Also please send a Press Kit and CD to this guy. No DVD and please put the Goldmine article first on the left side for him….and all of the kits in the future.

Thanks honey.

(No CD or press kit arrives. To this day I have never received any Foghat-related material in the mail.)
—————————————————
Two weeks later, the former bass player checks in once more:

Foghat Reply #6

From: ADDRESS DELETED
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 20:32:47 EDT
To: jackboulware@earthlink.net
Subject: Re: Thanks for the write up

Jack:

Yes, I talk to Roger from time to time and I’m putting something together now to go and play and have some fun. If your ever in the Phili area, drop me a line.
Thanks and take care-
Craig MacGregor
—————————————————
Part of me thinks all this sudden camaderie is a golden opportunity. The door is wide open for me to become the first chronicler of the Foghat dynasty. I could write the official band biography, interview all the members, produce the documentary. Write the liner notes for real, man. Crack it wide open. Tell the full story, A to Z. Okay Foghat, it’s your move.