I made a poster in 1999 that advertised four shows, including Train, Mother Hips (who play tonight in Felton) and featured a photograph of a robot I had ripped from an ad and gave to my designer to photo-shop for our usage. The poster was supposed to say “Five shows celebrating 5 years of Earthwise” but one of the bands backed out and I scrapped the promotion but kept the poster design.

This morning I noticed the same robot in an article in The New York Times about worlds fairs and futuramas. It turns out the robot is called Elektro, was built by Westinghouse in Mansfield, Ohio and was used in the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York.

Somewhere between the Worlds Fair, The New York Times, and the Earthwise Not Quite 5 Year Anniversary Series, his voice was also used in a Meat Beat Mannifesto song “Original  Control(Version 2)”. I would not have known to book Meat Beat into the “Cubberley Sessions” on this basis, although I do recall discussing their work (or his work, Jack Dangers, if that’s his real name) with his or their manager, Cathy Cohn, a longtime KUSF dj who also booked the I-Beam and I met when she preceded me as Stephen Yerkey’s manager (I was Stephen’s manager for a matter of weeks; our so-called contract stated “I will get you a record deal and you will pay me $500” which of course had a generous exit clause; the highlights or only lights of this tenure were a) putting Stephen on to open for Freedy Johnston at a packed CoHo show and b) rescuing a crate of “Confidence Man” from the Heyday warehouse, which, in a magnanimous gesture, if I must say so myself, I eventually delivered post-term to his next manager, the photographer Tom Erikson, who is sort of a Brown Fellini ).

Here is the link to the Times story and illustration. I will Swede in my poster as an edit. Not to be confused with Gort from “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951) with music by Bernard Herrmann.

bonus track: there is a 30-second sample of “What is Hip?” remix, which reminds me that Tower of Power is playing San Jose Civic Aud produced by Nederlander of L.A. this weekend, here, to be both current and retro.