Summer’s Here, and The Time Is Right

Patrick Daly

Special to the Mirror

   Summer’s here, and the time is right.

   Right for what isn’t exactly clear. According to Martha & the Vandellas, the time is right for dancing in the streets. Springsteen, always the dutiful grease monkey, cites racing in the streets as the appropriate activity. The Rolling Stones, of course, advocate fighting in the streets.

   But for Rhino Records, the state-of-the-art oldies record label that got its start 21 years ago in Santa Monica, it’s time to set our sights on something even better: time travel.

   Rhino takes over the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium August 13th, 14th and 15th for their first ever Retrofest, a weekend-long orgy of bands, celebrities, collectibles, and food that promises to put the "cult" back in pop culture.

   The show lovingly assembles a wide array of touchstones from life in America during the past half century, in many cases releasing its subjects from imprisonment to the distant past. If you’ve come to find Mozart, Beamers and sushi oppressive in their excellence, Rhino’s antidote comes in the form of Iron Butterfly, the Munster Mobile, and Krispy Kreme Donuts.

   For fans of Rhino Records, this latest foray will come as no surprise. The label’s multi-faceted past is sprinkled with the seeds of next weekend’s obsessive pop culture bacchanal: rock and roll, television, novelty, and that rarest of cultural treasures, unironic, uncynical, unjaded fun.

   And what a glorious past it is. The Rhino story, though not devoid of odd twists and turns, is essentially a rags-to-riches labor-of-love saga that is so chock full of hard work, integrity, and social consciousness, culminating in the rousing triumph of the little guy, it would make Frank Capra blush.

   It goes like this: Some time in the early seventies, founder Richard Foos buys a stack of records from a thrift shop that he promptly sells at a tidy profit from the trunk of his car. Emboldened by his success, he moves into the back of an electronics store right here in Santa Monica, and Rhino Records is born. The venture succeeds and gets its very own retail space on Westwood Boulevard in 1973, where UCLA student/pop music fanatic/erstwhile garage-bander Harold Bronson insinuates himself into the action and eventually becomes Foos’ partner.

   That the story in its more recent chapters includes a Pottersville-esque sale to the Warners Music Group in 1998 hardly casts a shadow on things. The label still operates autonomously and continues to be a source of a wide array of essential and/or amusing pop culture stuff idiosyncratically and innovatively marketed to fans world-wide.

   While the rest of the industry has finally awakened to the opportunity in their vaults, Rhino remains the measuring stick against which all reissue campaigns are measured. Recent forays into movie and television-related arcana have left the flow of kudos to Rhino unabated.

   Rhino’s appetite for repackaging the past for nostalgic baby boomers takes a giant leap forward with next weekend’s Retrofest. The company reached drinking age this year, and there are signs that they are drunk on the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.

   Consider the evidence: Eddie Haskell (check); the Turtles (present and accounted for); Pac Man machines (of course); Missing Persons (ho yeah). And that’s just the tip of the ice bucket.

   James Austin, a Rhino veteran behind a hot-rod CD box set that embodies the Rhino ethic in all its late-Nineties glory - 88 hot-rod themed tracks, liner notes lifted from Tom Wolfe, stylized packaging featuring a set of real fuzzy dice - summarizes it this way: "Rhino is pulling out all the stops to get everything out there at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for people to have a great time celebrating the glorious decades of pop culture. We figured if any company was going to pull it off, it was going to be us."