“Own A Rumor!”

We never did too much actual advertising for Mosaic Records. They’d done quite a bit before Fred/Alan got involved with the company and it didn’t really pay off for them. Besides, our catalogs were growing their business pretty well organically. So, it was pretty hard to convince them to spend their hard earned money to experiment a little. 

Our strategy was pretty simple. The New York Times was the print medium that got them the most new orders in the world. And, NYT also got a lot of lift for other, quality direct response products. 

Marty Pekar was the only advertising copywriter Mosaic trusted other than Alan. And besides being a recorded music fanatic, he had a good knack with direct response ads. (There’s a real skill. Each word counts towards convincing someone to actually order, and if it doesn’t… get rid of it. Seriously.) 

The advertising worked really well. Though the exact number of orders generated has been lost to the sands of time, we can report that every placement was profitable for Mosaic Records, and added hundreds of regular customers to their catalog mailing lists. 

And, of course, thousands more people heard the clandestine, historical Dean Benedetti recordings of Charlie Parker, now a rumor come alive.

Mosaic Records, 1986-1992

Publish at Scribd: Mosaic Records Brochure No. 4

In the late 70s Fred was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history.

In the early 1980s Michael and former BlueNote/Columbia/Warner Records executive Charlie Lourie started the pioneering Mosaic Records as the first company specializing in boxed set reissues of classic performances, available only by mail order. Michael and Fred became reacquainted when he ordered their first set (The Complete BlueNote Recordings of Thelonious Monk) and he asked Fred/Alan to get involved with helping them out of the hole. It turned out their ‘sure thing’ idea wasn’t having many takers and they were worried about shutting down.

We turned them down two years in a row with a lot of unsolitcited advice about what they could do better —we were broke and our company was barely alive itself— even if we were talking through our hats. Everything we knew about direct mail cataloging was from being mail order catalog readers ourselves and from a direct mail how-to book Fred had read (at least the first chapter). We admired what Michael and Charlie were trying to accomplish at Mosaic, but our bandwidth was just too narrow.

Three years later Fred/Alan was doing a little better and Mosaic was doing a lot worse; Michael and Charlie successfully prevailed on us to finally help. We knew no more, but full of the arrogance of youth we took Alan’s first generation portable computer and invented the first Mosaic 12-page brochure on our summer rental’s picnic table. Alan wrote every word (Fred supervised “strategy” — what else is new?), our friends Tom Corey and Scott Nash designed the thing, Jessica Wolf supervised the production and we mailed out the first Mosaic catalog ever in the autumn of 1986.

We waited for the order phones to ring, and lo and behold, in the first three weeks Mosaic’s business had increased 10 fold. They were in business forever. Alan’s still writing the brochures, Fred’s still lobbing in ideas from the side. We’ve never been prouder of any project. So proud, in fact, that Alan continues writing all new release copy, and former Fred/Alan CFO Fred Pustay is now a Mosaic partner.

Do you like jazz? Order one of the Mosaic sets. They are still the standard by which all others are judged.

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Mosaic Records Stamford, CT. Brochure #4 1984 
Written by Alan Goodman
Designed by Tom Corey & Scott Nash, Corey McPherson Nash, Boston
Production: Jessica Wolf

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Mosaic Records Brochure Number 8


Mosaic Records Brochure Number 9

Mosaic Records Stamford, CT. Brochure #8 (1988) & #9 (1989) 
Written by Alan Goodman & Marty Pekar
Production: Jessica Wolf

“While you were busy looking for youth…”

Fred/Alan new business brochure.

…we were busy wondering what had happened to us.

By the late 1980s, Fred/Alan had morphed into a full service advertising agency, with writers, art directors, and account, production and media departments. Over 40 people.

We started trying to get some new accounts, the lifeblood of any agency. And not a skill we were particularly attuned to at the time. First step, a agency brochure!

It’s great fun doing good advertising, and we’d had a better run than many. Sure, we’d been critical to the building of MTV, VH-1, and Nickelodeon. And we did some awesome work for Swatch, Mosaic Records, Myers’s Rum, and Barq’s which had driven lots of business for them. It ought to be easy to wrap it all up and brag a little, yes?

Putting together a company hype is a drag, pure and simple. In person, we could speak passionately for hours telling you about what went into our work. But somehow, writing it down was somehow crass.

It began to dawn on us that maybe being an advertising agency wasn’t for us.