Sansabelt
Ya know, I gave my old buddy Joe Sibilia the nickname “Sansabelt” because I could always picture the Italian Stallion wearing those pants in Springfield’s South End.
I started working with Joe probably 40 years ago, since the beginning of Gasoline Alley down on Albany Street in Springfield. Back in the 1940s, Albany Street was called Gasoline Alley because of all the big fuel tanks. We brought back the nickname and created a branded sticker that you still see slapped on car windows today.
In the early ’80s, Joe bought Marty’s Juice Creations from a coupla old buckeroos from Ludlow. We did a campaign in national beverage magazines looking for distributors and positioning the company for a possible sale. It worked. Pepsi bought it for millions. Joe took the dough and started another drink company. We branded it Al’s Beverages and trademarked Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” as the slogan.
Every time I’d walk in for a meeting down there, the guys who made the beverages would grab me and tell me that they hated the coffee Joe was serving. So I told Joe, “Let’s send ’em to a coffee roaster and let them come up with their own blend.” And they did. The strongest coffee in America at the time. We called it Al’s Daily Grind. We went mail order, and one of the first orders came from David Letterman. It became the official coffee of the show.
Later, we teamed up with Stomp, the English performers who were getting big in NYC making music with everyday objects. We supplied the 50-gallon drums with the Al’s logo on them.
We sponsored and helped rescue Board Aid, a snowboarding and skateboarding festival in Big Bear, California, which helped connect us to the whole snow/skate scene. We kept that buzz going through alliances with Thrasher, Transworld Skateboarding, Transworld Snowboarding and Dickies. We didn’t pay a dime for ad space. We traded coffee.
That’s how Joe and I worked. Bold creative, strong alliances and figuring out how to make things happen. Back home, the two of us even put together a hit squad of volunteers and twice beat the pro-casino campaign in Springfield. With zip for a budget.
Ya know, Joe's a smart aleck, but he's smart. And nobody had more laughs than the two of us over all those years. We proved that fun sells. Keep your dukes up.
If you know someone who’d like these ditties in their inbox every week, have ‘em shoot us an email at darbyo@darbyobrien.com and we’ll add ‘em to the list.