Jon Monday

Jon Monday (born 1947 in San Jose, California) is an American producer and distributor of CDs and DVDs across an eclectic range of material such as Swami Prabhavananda, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Huston Smith, Chalmers Johnson, and Charles Bukowski.

Monday directed and co-produced with Jennifer Douglas the feature-length documentary Save KLSD: Media Consolidation and Local Radio.

He is also President of Benchmark Recordings, which owns and distributes the early catalog of The Fabulous Thunderbirds CDs and a live recording of Mike Bloomfield.

Monday got his start in multimedia through his own psychedelic light-show company in the Bay Area in 1967, providing visuals for concerts by Country Joe and the Fish, Janis Joplin's Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Steve Miller's Blues Band at local Berkeley, California venues and The Fillmore in San Francisco.

In 1970, Monday was hired by John Fahey at Takoma Records in Santa Monica, as their first full-time employee, becoming promotion director in 1972, and later general manager.

working with guitar artists such as Leo Kottke, John Fahey, Mike Bloomfield, and Peter Lang.

Eventually, he became Takoma's Vice President and General Manager, and also provided art direction, engineering, and/or produced albums by such artists as George Winston, Norman Blake, Peter Rowan, Jim Kweskin, Maria Muldaur, Loudon Wainwright III, and Joseph Byrd.

In 1979, Fahey sold Takoma Records to a new company formed by music business attorney Bill Coben, veteran producer/manager Denny Bruce, and Chrysalis Records.

Monday continued with the new company as General Manager.

During that time, Takoma signed and released albums by The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Canned Heat, and T-Bone Burnett.

In 1982, Monday was appointed sales manager for Chrysalis Visual Programming Division, headquartered in Los Angeles.

Eventually Monday was brought into Chrysalis Records as its Director of Marketing, working with Blondie, Jethro Tull, Huey Lewis, Pat Benatar, Billy Idol, and Toni Basil.

In 1984, Monday relocated to Silicon Valley and had a 2nd career as an executive in various software and high-tech companies.

He also held senior management positions or consulted with major 3rd party video game publishers, such as Epyx, Eidos Interactive, and Capcom.

He was also Vice President of PlayNet, working directly with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.

Monday's first role in the emerging video game business was with Romox, a company that has developed a kiosk-based video game distribution system.

Originally, Monday was hired as Sales Director of Special Markets to provide distribution through the "Rack Jobbers" who got records into Sears, ToysRUs, KMart and other major retailers.

Then he was promoted to VP Product Marketing, to help introduce their kiosk.

A gamer could buy a blank video game cartridge and download a game from a vast library into the cartridge (for Atari 2600, Atari Computers, TI-99, Commodore, etc.) and play the game for a few weeks.

IF they got tired of the game, they could bring the cartridge back to the kiosk, erase it, and program a new game into it.

The system answered the biggest problem plaguing the industry - the high cost of the cartridges.

One of the game publishers who licensed their titles to Romox was Epyx, headed by Michael Katz.

After the cartridge-based video game industry collapsed (due to the overproduction of the Atari game ET, which failed upon release) Monday was originally hired by Epyx as a consultant overseeing IT, manufacturing, and customer service and eventually was promoted to Vice President of IT and Operations.

In 1989.

Monday left Epyx to establish MusicWriter Inc., with music research pioneer Larry Heller.

During Monday's term as president, the Californian company developed the NoteStation, a point-of-sale kiosk for printing sheet music, in any key, for sale to customers in music stores.

In addition to printing sheet music, the NoteStation was able to produce MIDI disks containing selected music.

In 1994, NoteStation kiosks were in 175 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Monday was hired as Vice President of PlayNet, working directly with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, to develop an online jukebox, that was connected to a vast library of songs licensed from the major record companies.

In 1998, Monday was hired by Capcom, a leading video game publisher, to design and implement an entire IT overhaul, including replacing an aging mainframe with a Windows based hardware and enterprise reporting and accounting software.

After completing the project he was given the assignment to make their arcade division, Nickel City, profitable by shutting down the unprofitable stores, and beefing up the existing ones.

Eventually, Monday oversaw selling the division piece by piece.

He was then put in charge of all online business, including developing and implementing the company's first website.

Monday retired and moved to the San Diego area in 2004 and launched two labels: mondayMEDIA and GemsTone; producing, directing, and distributing original and archival material.

In 2006 Monday brought together many notable recording artists and produced The Revenge of Blind Joe Death: The John Fahey Tribute Album, which was released on the Takoma Records label, distributed by Fantasy Records.

Participating artists included, George Winston, Michael Gulezian, Alex De Grassi, Country Joe McDonald, Peter Lang, Stefan Grossman, Rick Ruskin, and Canned Fish (a one-time collaboration between Canned Heat members Adolfo de la Parra ("Fito") and Larry Taylor, and Country Joe and the Fish member Barry "The Fish" Melton).

His work with Huston Smith yielded 2 DVDs, The Roots of Fundamentalism, in 2006 with Phil Cousineau interviewing Huston about the genesis of modern Christian Fundamentalism, which came into existence around 1900 in reaction to modern scholarship into the origin of the biblical scriptures, a questions about who really wrote them.

In 2008 Monday was asked by Bill Coben and Denny Bruce, founders of Benchmark Recordings, to join as President and run the label.

The company has titles by The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Mike Bloomfield

In 2012 Monday released the feature-length documentary Save KLSD: Media Consolidation and Radio.