One of the first times I sold something I had created myself was when I screenprinted T-shirts and sold them through the back pages of various magazines (the rock magazine Circus primarily although I also sold an anti-Reaganomics shirt in the New Republic) back in the early 1980’s. They surely weren’t works of art. I knew little about screenprinting and taught myself by reading a few basic manuals and by studying product catalogs, trying to discern what I needed to get the job done. The shirts were a little rough around the edges but I actually found myself liking that aspect.
. It was a different world then and if someone wanted your product they couldn’t simply go online to see and order it. They had to write a letter and send a check or money order then wait several weeks for the shirt to arrive. It was a pretty cumbersome process so as a result, of course, I never sold vast numbers of my shirts or even made a profit. I wrote it off as a lesson learned. The best part of the whole endeavor was hearing from those who did go to the trouble of ordering.
I had a guy from Manchester, England who wrote this great note in this mad scrawl who wanted to trade bootleg concerts tapes for shirts. Another fellow from Georgia reordered after getting his first and wrote how much he loved the shirt. And there’s my now longtime friend Tom from Northern Ireland who ordered a couple of the shirts. We have stayed in touch over these now more than 25 years, exchanging music and keeping up to date on the changes in each of lives. He sent me music from many British and Irish band that I knew little of. Many years ago he sent me a tape of traditional Celtic music from the Boys of the Lough that became one of my favorite driving tapes back then. It was fiddle and drum driven and at certain points I found myself flying along at 90 MPH due to the churning fast pace of the music.
Here’s a small sample of the fiddling from the band courtesy of their Aly Bain…
Redtree Times 