If you’re lucky, and you haunt your local dollar bins long enough, you’ll still find albums on the Alshire label. But the best ones are getting harder and harder to find. You’ll still come across the odd 101 Strings album, provided it doesn’t have hot models in skimpy sixties getups on the cover — most of those were snapped up and shipped overseas long ago. But you’ll almost never find records by the Animated Egg, Doctor Marigold’s Prescription or John Bunyan’s Progressive Pilgrims. You also won’t find too many albums by the subject of this week’s featured fetish, the California Poppy Pickers.
Continue reading ‘Blue-Eyed Soul By The California Poppy Pickers’
I had the recent pleasure of spending a cross-country plane ride with 
Tucson merchant Jack “The Color TV King” Fitzgerald carved out a name for himself back in the mid-70s with a series of distinctive late-night television commercials. Standing among a pile of teevee sets and packing crates, he would harangue the viewer with a pitch that always began with a simple, effective, “Hi folks…” You could easily pick up Tucson stations in Phoenix back then, so even my friends and I knew his spiel.
Our stamp series has been so wildly popular among Bostworld readers that I couldn’t resist doing one final episode. This time we bring you two empires, one on the wax and one on the wane, along with some of the smaller satellites pulled along in their wake. While the British Empire both celebrates and defends the trappings of their noble traditions, the 
Back in August 1978, convicted murderers Gary Tison and Randy Greenwalt broke out of the state prison in Florence, Arizona, assisted by Tison’s three teenage sons, Ricky, Donald and Raymond. Their inept plan to slip into Mexico began unraveling the minute they left the prison grounds. After a hectic week-long scramble, during which they killed six innocent human beings and one defenseless chihuahua, the fugitives were caught just thirty miles from where they started. Their desperate swath cut a ragged figure-eight through three states, starting in Florence, sneaking down to the Yuma area, then all the way up to Flagstaff, down through the White Mountains and over to Clovis, New Mexico, then up to the four corners area. From there, they returned to Tison’s home town of Casa Grande, where they ran into a police road-block. After a gun battle that killed one of his sons, Tison fled into the desert. He endured over a week of searing summer temperatures before suffering the same fate he consigned to the chihuahua: an agonizing death from exposure.