Dave Alvin, August 5, 2023: My dear friend, ex-Blasters manager and my former solo career manager, Shelly Heber, passed away this afternoon.
    Smart, savvy, sensitive, stubborn, a bit wild and very passionate, Shelly loved rock and roll like few others I've known who weren't musicians. Whatever mainstream success The Blasters achieved, Shelly's drive, vision, patience and love was almost as big a part of making it happen as any notes the band played and sang. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Shelly's no illusions, world-weary optimism (not an oxymoron in her case) was a constant inspiration. She taught me a lot of the hard-earned music business survival skills that she learned running her own successful music marketing/promotion company for many years and her lessons helped to keep me going spiritually at the times when things looked very bleak. I could never thank her enough for that.
     Shelly and I had drifted apart over 20 years ago for whatever reasons, but during the last three years, due to both of us fighting cancer, we reconnected and restarted our long friendship. Shelly and I shared the exact same stage 4 cancer diagnosis but we chose different ways of dealing with it. I respect her decision to handle her situation in the way she felt was right for her and she respected my choices handling mine. It's difficult to express how much our later friendship means to me. It's hard to describe how inspired I was by the courage she showed facing her fight and how much courage she gave me as we fought our separate cancer battles together.
     Decades ago, in the rough and rowdy old days when she managed The Blasters, Shelly would often get swept up with emotion and abandon during our live shows. She would madly rush head-first in to the blood, guts and beer soaked mayhem at the front of the stage at The Whiskey or The Starwood, where she'd dance in unrestrained joy among all the out of control rockers, boppers and brawlers. That image of her is the one I will keep in my heart as the journey goes on.

"Would I like my job back?" I said: "Yes." That was 1970 until 1972.
    I learned something early on about women working in the music industry. I kept getting promotions, but not more money. The last straw was later when I had a job as the director of marketing at 20^th Century Fox and I found out my predecessor was getting $200 more a week than me. How did they validate that? They didn't have to. But in those days women didn't have positions in the record industry other than promotion and publicity. I would become one of the first women to have a marketing position. The abuse of women wasn't only swept under the carpet, but it was tolerated in a horrible way by the women because they desperately didn't want to lose their jobs. I remember being in a marketing meeting with a president of the company and I'd be trying to make a point and he'd say: "You're so cute when you're angry." They'd never say that to another man, but in their mind, somehow, they thought that was complimentary. I had one boss who would ask, "Did you get laid last night?" If I went to human resources with that, nothing would be done. So, I figured out that women couldn't make success with a man present - they could only do it on their own.
    I moved to San Francisco to work for a guy who was big in 20^th Century Fox. I was doing radio promotion for Ralph Cashen, who was the only person ever convicted in a payola scheme. The company went out of business because they put everything up their nose. I was then asked to be director of marketing for Dark Horse Records in 1976 (a label founded by George Harrison). But it was a time when Dark Horse was in turmoil leaving A&M distribution to go to Warner Bros. Dennis Morgan, head of Dark Horse, introduced me to Peter Rudge, who was Lynyrd Skynyrd's manager. They hired me to work on their One More For the Road album. Then Elton John's manager called to have me do marketing for Elton's Blue Moves album. I started to think maybe there's a company to be made for this.
    I got a call from a famous West Coast disc jockey named Humble Harve Miller. He had just got out of jail for killing his wife. A good friend of mine was writing a national song countdown show for him, but got another job, so she recommended me as a replacement. She said it pays $300 a week and "it's so easy and you can do it - just don't ask him if he killed his wife" [laughs]. So, he picked me up in his car. He had a great disc jockey voice. I realized I could do it at night after work hours. At that time, I approached a friend of mine that I worked with at Billboard, Leanne Meyers, and said, I think we should start a marketing company. I already had clients and was writing this show. The worst thing that can happen is we'll fail. The best thing that can happen is that we won't fail.
    We formed Image Marketing and Media. I had an enormous amount of contacts from the chart department at Billboard. I was the youngest and only woman in charge of the charts department. I carried those contacts over to my other companies. And at that time there was a lot of money in the music business. At first we got a lot of clients who were