Back in April I was following a few of my peeps on twitter when someone posted a tweet about a group of three musicians who were putting together a west coast tour called The Vespa Experiment with sponsorship from Vespa USA. As an extension of the “Go Green” campaign Vespa was providing three musicians with scooters and they were planning a ride from LA to San Francisco with stops along the way to play small venues. Usually these marketing things don’ t really catch my eye, but I became more interested when I began to look into the back story and found out that Jason Reeves, one of the singer song writers, had started his career in Iowa City Iowa and had become one of Myspace’s most successful artists. To date his songs have gotten more than 6 million plays. Those are big numbers on or off the Internet.
I became even more curious, when I read Brian’s post over at 2strokebuzz, where he rightful railed about the miss-perception that scooters can make a significant impact on our environmental problems (bring on the hate mail).
I hope you will take a minute and listen to what Jason has to say about all this and make your own judgement about the Vespa marketing machine. I found Jason to be unpretentious and surprisingly reserved. It reminded me of what most of us were like when we first got into scooting. I say it’s all about enjoy the ride. It doesn’t need to really be any more complicated than that. With all the strong personalities in scooting, it’s nice to talk with someone who is low key and far from fanatic about things. Jason is new to scooting, but hopefully the scooter bug will stick with him long after he does 450 miles on a Vespa GTS.
I would like to thank Jason for taking time out of the tour to speak with me and also thank TJ at Warner Brother Records for helping put the interview together.
Show notes: It’s been another busy week, along with my regular job and all the meetings I go to, I have been spend most of my time at home setting up a myspace page. After a number of inquiries about “do you have a myspace page?” I caved and sat down to do some work on it. Look for it here. I guess I had this idea that myspace was about all these single (or maybe married acting single) people trying to hit on each other. But now I understand. In the few short days that my page has been up, I have gotten dozens of contacts from people asking about the show and maybe more important to me, I have had the biggest week of downloads ever. As a podcasters, I guess like a musician, you want others to hear what you produce, so like Orin said to me, this could really expand the audience who listens to SCTRCST
Marcel and I continue to plan her move from Cincinnati back to Richmond, Virginia. She is going to make this her home base for a new consulting company she will be working with. Since the company is based in Denver, it means her and hopefully I, will be getting back there more often.Having lived there for many years we still have many friends there and of course there is always Sportique Scooters, the place I were I would go when I got an itch for a new scooter in my early scooter days of scooting. It is also the home of some scooter legends like, Colin Shadduck who wrote Scooters: Red Eyes, Whitewalls & Blue Smoke Scooters Lawrence who I met at Amerivespa, emailed me to reminded me that the big Texas rally called Third Coast Rally in San Antonio is coming up October 5-7. Check out the rally site here. Also look at myspace page for the Scooter Club in Lawrence’s Brownsville Texas area. It is call the Scooter Club Golden Triangle and is here.
