Logo #178: Pop-o-pies

The Pop-o-pies, for the first two years of its existence, did nothing but play "Truckin'" by The Grateful Dead. Various members of Faith No More spent time in the Pop-o-pies ranks - but not Mike Patton! God forbid he do something "wacky" in his life. The smiley face was, it turns out, designed by marketing man David Stern in 1967 for a campaign for Washington Mutual Bank. Interviewed in 1988, Stern revealed that he was not best pleased by people tweaking it for their own nefarious uses. Hence the Pop-o-pies. The smiley was detourned by Joe Callahan in 1981 and appeared a few years later on the "Joe's Second Album" LP cover. Callahan: "It first appeared on a banner hung behind the band at the first Pop-o-pies show. It was a reaction to the lame pseudo-toughguy skull-and-crossbones logos that were (and still are) on everybody's clothes." Amen to that! Luke Helder, the Midwest Pipe Bomber, planned a series of explosives in 2002 to form the shape of a happy face across the United States. Conversely, Scott Fahlman invented the first computer world smiley faces in 1982. And yet, even after all those e-mails, somehow the world doesn't seem much happier.