Greetings From the Stars: A Mystery ... SOLVED

Last week I wrote about some strange audio oddities titled Greetings From the Stars that tend to surface in downtrodden Canadian neighborhoods. If you haven't yet had a chance to read that piece, please do so before proceeding.

As mentioned in the previous article, this series of cassettes featured old show business legends on their down curve, reduced to providing one-take birthday greetings and other such pablum. The who, what, where, and why of the project is not apparent by looking at them. A listen to the Greetings From the Stars series spawns more questions than answers. I've been struggling to piece it all together ever since I found a box of them, covered in soot, at a ghetto pharmacy. The packaging provides some minor clues to the story such as company names like Pezamerica Resources Corp and Pezzaz Productions, a nineteen eighty-four copyright and a Vancouver, British Columbia address. Finding the worn down building at the edge of that city's ghetto did not, as I might have hoped, lead me to an office filled with autographed Foster Brooks headshots or relatives of Don Adams trying to claim his residuals. My assumption that the series was a confectionary by-product of the Pez dispenser people also could not have been more wrong.

After several failed Google searches I came upon a very promising clue. A Vancouver based recording engineer's online resumé casually mentioned working for a Pezzaz Productions for one year... 1984. Of course, it could have been a coincidence, especially since the resumé mentioned all kinds of interesting gigs, but working with Milton Berle wasn't one of them. Lord knows if I even just delivered room service to Milton Berle it'd be at the top of my resumé - written in bold. A phone number and e-mail address were provided for the recording engineer, and before I knew it I was having coffee with one of the key men responsible for the gaudy looking piece of work you see pictured on the left.

Simon Garber found himself recruited by a wealthy stock market maven to produce the Greetings From the Stars series. Said Garber, "[Murray] Pezim had made a lot of money with a mine in Northern Ontario. So he was investing it in a bunch of things. One of them was ice cream. People would just approach him with ideas. A guy named Ivan Solomon who was a graphic artist ...  he came up with the idea and he approached Pezim with it. Pezim... he was one of the wealthiest ... he'd go to Vegas and rub shoulders with the other wealthy. He was buddies with Joey Bishop and that was one of his ins. So, Joey Bishop was a major player. It was easy enough to get those Hollywood has-beens to do that because, y'know, you hand them ten thousand dollars and they go into a studio or they sit in their living room." Certainly it seems that Zsa Zsa Gabor's Happy Anniversary greeting was recorded in just such a manner. Several selections from these tapes can still be heard on this podcast, including Zsa Zsa's clumsy recording that is interrupted by her dog barking. "They just paid them ten thousand bucks - cash. They said - here. Send us a tape," Simon recalled.

The low-budget aspect of the project seems apparent in both look and sound, so I was somewhat surprised when Simon revealed the following. "I was the production manager. I built the studio." I tried to clarify, "A whole recording studio was built just for [Greetings From the Stars]?" "Yeah," he said. "Were other things recorded...?" "No, it was built just for this concept. They paid me to go to trade shows and sort out the material. We had the best of everything. The best machines, the best quality tape, the best winders, the best shelves, it had all the potential to be a quality product... money wasn't an option ... just get it done."

Pezim and his moneyed cronies apparently had a hands-off approach to the project. If a problem arose they tended to give a huge pile of cash to somebody and tell him or her to fix it without any indication of how to go about doing so. Once the state-of-the-art studio's construction had got underway, Pezim and his minions flew off to England. Garber recalled, "These guys go away and I look at the drawings and the hallways aren't wide enough to be legal. But when Pezim and his boys would come in it was like... Tony Soprano and his boys. I'm sure they were all packing. They'd just take over. You'd step aside. They were totally flamboyant. It was the Vegas mafia or something. That's what it felt like. Pezim took Bishop out and bought him a seventeen thousand dollar watch. One of the few recordings we did [in Vancouver] was with Joey... which I never kept a copy of. I don't even recall doing a lot of editing either. Their business cards were gold. Everything was gold. They were creating this Hollywood image. They told me I didn't know how to spend money because I'd go to a conference in New York and I would come back with receipts for two thousand dollars. Anybody else was coming back with receipts for fifteen thousand, buying hundred dollar bottles of scotch."

Although no one knew it at the time, the jaunt to England would result in Pezzaz Productions' demise and the end of the limited run of Greetings From the Stars tapes. The meeting in England had Pezim negotiating with a group to buy out his company. The business found itself in a three million dollar hole after Pezim had been selling Pezamerica stock short for several years. On return to Canada he announced that he was resigning, selling the ice cream shares, doing away with Pezzaz Productions, and filing for bankruptcy. Consequently the price of Pezamerica stock fell, and the other company could now purchase Pezim's assets for a price they liked ... and quickly named Pezim as manager. "So Pezzaz was the sacrificial lamb," explained Garber, and thus ended the production of Greetings From the Stars. Garber speculates the series may have enjoyed a longer run if various medlers hadn't spent so much time on inconsequential details. "They spent maybe a month on the market ... a real short amount of time... by the time we got the plant up and running and got the graphics the way they wanted ... they had a blank check ... everything was done three or four times. The cabinetry in the studio was done three times because some guy didn't like the color of it!"

The aforementioned graphics, the amusing air brushed renditions of old celebrities in bow ties, were done by a designer named Ivan Solomon. Ivan was the same man who first came up with the has-been greetings idea and brought it to mister moneybags in the first place. Twenty years later Solomon was still at it, conceiving strange products for a market that still doesn't seem to exist. In 2004, Solomon had just released something called "The Grow-Op Game," a monopoly take-off that combined family fun with the ins and outs of running a marijuana farm. Underground comic book artists Gilbert Shelton and Paul Mavrides (best known for the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) may have beaten Solomon to the punch thirty-five years earlier with Dealer McDope's Dope Dealing Game, but Solomon, as before, didn't have satire or irony in mind. It was another serious product concept that seemed ridiculous to everyone but its creator. Said Solomon at the time of his board game's debut, "You get ratted on by neighbors, hydro cuts you off, you get floods, there are tons of stuff that is negative about it. Out of six players, one might get lucky. People would think that with grow-ops everyone would like to have one in their basement, that it's easy money. It's far from being easy." The game's planned showcase in the spring of 2005 ended up being banned from the New York Toy Fair.

Today the Greetings From the Stars series retains little value to anybody other than weirdos like myself, who love both failed audio projects and classic showbiz. According to Garber, when the company went under, a great deal of unsold product remained. "There was inventory that, when they pulled the plug on it, was all sold off at auction. I thought at the time that... I guess someone could re-use the cassettes 'cause... who's gonna want the product?"

Comments

[Bob]

in 1989 i ran a spotlight for an advertising awards dinner that Milton Berle was hosting. he was far from charming. we had a "discussion" about what kind of light i was running and he liked it at half intensity so he could see his public. everytime i answered him i was treated to witty stuff like "look kid, i have sox as old as you".

no wonder hes dead....

Bob

[K]

Hey Kliph,

So if I understand this sordid noir'ish little tale correctly; Murray Pezim and his mob buddies were running a fraudulent business scam. They created a public company, Pezamerica, ran up huge debts while short selling their own stock through some kind of cutout. I'm guessing that the money going into the company was being laundered, hence the profligrate spending patterns ( now there are legal receipts and assets for what was once dirty money ). You've got to wonder who would go long on such a company, but the market being what it is I suppose anything is possible. Did the engineer ever wise up? It sounds like he's still mystified by their behaviour.

Really, it sounds like you have the makings of a nice screenplay here. You might try to get the SEC filings from Pezamerica, that'd fill in a lot more blanks. I'm not sure who retains those documents, I know the EDGAR system only goes back into the '90s.

[David]

What Kliph didn't really mention - though it was implied - was that Murray Pezim was one of the most well-known businessmen/wheeler-dealers/stock-promoters in Vancouver's history. For a couple of decades - in the 80s and 90s - he regularly made the news for some new venture, or for angering the provincial SEC. What a character.

[Treasure News]

NEW READING OF MYSTERIOUS OAK ISLAND INSCRIPTIONS

Theory points to possible connection with nearby Birch Island

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia: Wednesday March 12th 2008 - -For the past two centuries, the tunnels of Nova Scotia’s Oak Island have piqued the imagination of historians and treasure hunters alike. Now, a new theory by First Nations researcher Keith Ranville may add fresh speculation to the mystery. Based on a unique reading of an inscription once found in the “Money Pit,” Mr. Ranville believes that the answer to the riddle may be found on nearby Birch Island.

Oak Island, located on the scenic Mahone Bay about an hour’s drive south of the provincial capital of Halifax, has been associated with buried treasure since the late 18th century. Local settlers reportedly found a ship’s tackle block hanging from a tree branch, overhanging a large depression in the ground. Early efforts to dig down failed when the diggers encountered layers of timber every 10 feet. In the ensuing generations, several organized excavation attempts have drilled down nearly 200 feet, en route encountering some artifacts within the staggered layers of logs, clay, putty, charcoal, flagstones and most perplexingly, coconut husks. Among the scores of enthusiastic treasure hunters was a young Franklin Roosevelt, one of the investors in a 1909 excavation attempt.

During the earlier diggings of 1800’s, the tunnel had become flooded by seawater – which many believed was the result booby trap being sprung – thus complicating further digging since then. A drilling effort in the mid 1800’s was said to have uncovered fragments of a gold chain. In 1971, a camera was lowered into the pit and reportedly captured images of wooden chests and human remains.

One of the most fascinating artifacts from the pit was said to be a flat stone recovered at the 90 foot depth, carrying a mysterious inscription. A fragment of stone with similar symbols was found nearby in Smith’s Cove in the 1930’s. The stone tablet itself has gone missing, but a record of its symbols remains. Until now, the consensus is that the symbols are a code translated as “forty feet below two million pounds are buried.” However, Keith Ranville’s theory offers a different interpretation as to the stone’s symbols, which could lead to a new explanation of the Oak Island mystery.

“I believe these symbols have been incorrectly assumed to stand for something else. In the First Nations tradition that I’m a part of, we believe symbols should simply be looked at in and of themselves, rather than thinking of them as codes that have to be cracked,” Mr. Ranville explained. “In the pictograms of Cree Salavics, for example, the images are meant to be descriptive, not abstract.” Using this approach, Mr. Ranville examined the Oak Island symbols and found what may be a set of instructions about a tunnel system involving both Oak Island and nearby Birch Island.

For example, the stone inscription begins with a triangle symbol, which is repeated throughout. Mr. Ranville believes that this represents nearby Birch Island, which has a distinctly triangular clearing on its north shore. Likewise, a symbol showing a circle divided into two hemispheres can be thought of as representing north/south directional markers. A series of dots in singles, pairs and triplets may be quantitative symbols.

Examining all the symbols in this way, Mr. Ranville believes that the symbols on the Money Pit’s stone tablet are actually technical instructions describing the location and layout of a possible underground network involving both Oak Island and Birch Island. “There was a fragment of another stone tablet that was found on Oak Island’s Smith Cove in the 1930’s,” Mr. Ranville explained. “It too has these types of symbols, but one in particular appears to be a Greek symbol designating ‘underwater door’. In conjunction with the other symbols, I believe this points to underwater doors and additional shafts on Birch Island itself.” Smith’s Cove is on the part of Oak Island that is closest to Birch Island, and is said to have yielded several artifacts itself over the years.

“Based on the inscribed symbols, I think we should be looking at Oak Island and Birch Island together in order to solve the mystery. If Birch Island proves to have underwater doors and tunnels around its triangular clearing, then it would be a huge step forward in our understanding of what Oak Island is all about.”

There have been many, occasionally bizarre, theories as to what the Oak Island tunnels may contain: a Masonic vault containing the Holy Grail, Viking or Pirate booty, Inca treasure, the French Royal Crown Jewels, payroll for colonial British soldiers or even the secret writings of Francis Bacon. Mr. Ranville prefers not to speculate. “Those are interesting and sometimes funny theories, but I’d rather just look at the evidence that we do have, and go from there.”

Mr. Ranville is a self-taught researcher born in Manitoba. While living in Vancouver, he became acquainted with the Oak Island mystery and began studying it. In October 2005, he relocated to Nova Scotia to further research and advance his theories on the subject.

Both Oak Island and Birch Island are private property, and access must be sought by permission of the landowners.
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