At their Factory, preserving pop culture is rewarding work

LOS ANGELES - Richard Foos never set out to become the arbiter of retro pop culture. He just wanted to see those classic James Brown records back in people's hands.

As chief executive officer of the Shout! Factory, Foos runs an emporium whose credo might be: Don't bother with historical tomes or archeological digs. If you really want to understand the human race, figure out what it was watching on TV or playing on its iPod last year - or 40 years ago. (OK, if you're going back that far, substitute eight-track tape deck for iPod).

Shout! Factory finds and revives moments of pop culture nostalgia that people grew up on.

Dying to see Johnny Cash Christmas specials from the late 1970s one more time? Shout! Factory has them.

Or maybe you've read all of Hunter S. Thompson's books and seen this year's Johnny Depp documentary on him. Now you can actually listen to recordings of Thompson as he describes his adventures in real time before writing them into his books. They're available on the CD collection "The Gonzo Tapes."

But to get a real bookend look at the evolution of television, you might want to catch the first season of that gentle, squeaky-clean 1950s classic "Father Knows Best," followed by a viewing of the raunchy Howard Stern-produced "Baywatch" spoof, "Son of the Beach," from 2000-2002.

"In a weird way, these guys are the ones who are preserving cultural history," says Paul Feig, the actor-director-writer who created the TV show "Freaks and Geeks."

It all traces back, Foos says, to his being a frustrated R&B fanatic who by the 1980s couldn't find songs like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" in stores anymore.

Foos, the son of a department store executive, grew up in Beverly Hills. As a child he became obsessed with rhythm and blues. When he was a young adult he played bass with an inner-city R&B band.

"I couldn't believe that [stores] didn't even think James Brown was worthwhile!" he says, still clearly annoyed by the memory as he sits in his modest office in West Los Angeles.

In any case, he thought Brown was so important that a fledgling company he had cofounded, Rhino Records, tracked down the publishing rights to those songs and issued "James Brown's Greatest Hits." It was a critically acclaimed album that would sell more than 200,000 copies and transform both Rhino and the music business.

In 1998, Foos and cofounder Harold Bronson sold Rhino to the Warner Music Group, but Foos soon found that collecting stuff that had been either kitschy or cool was still in his blood. Five years later, he, younger brother Garson, and their former Rhino cohort Bob Emmer founded Shout! Factory.