Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (51 page)

Not all other chieftains were as determined to salvage the indie spirit from the smoking ruins. “When everything collapsed,” recalled Ivo Watts-Russell, “quite apart from the trauma and tedium of having to attend endless meetings in rooms filled with far more people than I tend to feel comfortable being around, there was a feeling of everyone scrabbling around trying to save their own arses. Even before it was inevitable that Rough Trade would not pull through, I had a phone conversation with [Creation founder] Alan McGee trying to persuade him not to jump ship. To no avail.”

Sony swooped in and plucked Creation Records from the wreckage—the label behind Primal Scream and, later, Oasis. Then in 1992 another bombshell hit; Factory Records went bust. For the founder of 4AD, these years of upheaval were too much. “Back in 1979, I was given the opportunity, along with Peter Kent, to start a record
label
. By the early nineties, I was running a record
company
. I didn’t enjoy it and I was useless at it. More importantly, I felt in danger of losing my love of music.” Just two years after Rough Trade’s demise, Ivo Watts-Russell relocated to California and retired.

It was the same story for Sub Pop in America. Once grunge began exploding, Nirvana was lured to David Geffen’s new label, DGC Records. “Of course Jon Poneman and I were disappointed in the move,” admitted Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt, who nonetheless received a lucrative override of 2.5 percent for Nirvana’s first three albums. “Although in retrospect DGC was able to really get
Nevermind
out to a much larger audience—which it deserved. It’s an amazing record. I’m honored to have worked with Kurt and Nirvana.”

Despite the cash injection from Nirvana’s success, Sub Pop was forced to sell half the company to Warner. “As the label grew, the culture changed,” lamented Bruce Pavitt, “becoming more departmentalized and less spontaneous. Although we were technically
independent,
in reality, we were competing with majors and adopting their characteristics. My partner, Jon Poneman, seemed to be much more comfortable with this approach. I left, moving to Orcas Island in Washington State to raise a family. Jon continued to build the label, and it has done good business under his management. It’s just not as innovative, as fun, or as culturally significant as it once was.”

With the majors becoming hugely rich and powerful, for Mute founder Daniel Miller, the consensual, bland pop-rock of the nineties was a hostile environment for anyone with an adventurous imagination. In the early eighties, Miller regularly turned down lucrative offers from the likes of Richard Branson, “because why would I sell out? I was young, independent and doing really well.” Things turned sour soon after Rough Trade’s collapse. “There was a struggle, but not just financially,” confessed Miller. “There was a musical struggle, for me to be honest. There was a period in the midnineties—the Brit Pop era—which I hated. It was counterintuitive to me. I didn’t really sign very much because anything that wasn’t Brit Pop was very difficult to get exposed. Radio 1 and the media was completely taken over and obsessed with Brit Pop. And we were not doing brilliantly financially at that time. So I was a bit depressed about everything.”

In the midnineties, Daniel Miller convened a supper at Julie’s Wine Bar in Kensington. Joining him were twelve or so indie chieftains including Martin; Mills; Derek Birkett, owner of One Little Indian; Martin Goldschmidt, owner of Cooking Vinyl; and Derek Green, by now owner of his own indie, China Records. As the evening progressed, the veteran Derek Green surveyed the table: “All these characters sitting there with their eccentricities—it was quite a funny kind of gathering because as a community they’re not necessarily close to each other, they’re fiercely competitive, very private, not very easy to speak to. Their egos are very big. They need to be just to meet the everyday battle.

“Anyhow, in that wine bar, I’m sitting there and listening to the debate. All the frustrations are coming up. ‘We can’t get our records on Radio 1; we can’t get seen in HMV because all the marketing clout is with the majors.’ There was a moment in that dinner when a light flicked on in my head. ‘I know what everybody in this room has in common! Everybody around this table is losing money.’ And when I clocked that, I laughed to myself. Then I thought, that’s probably true, none of us are making money. So why then do we do it? Well, the only reason we do it is because on our balance sheets we have the value of our masters and the value of our contracts marked as zero. Therefore technically every year our accountants tell us we’re bankrupt. But what we really know and believe is that the majors will pay millions to buy us.”

Half the table did eventually throw in their napkins and ask for a check. In 1995, Go Discs!, then enjoying success with Portishead, sold out to PolyGram. In 1997, Green, enjoying success with Morcheeba, sold his label to Warner. The party host, Daniel Miller, held on for the best part of a decade “limping along financially and artistically.” The only way to raise enough cash to keep Mute afloat was a big worldwide license with a major. “But we weren’t really getting any interesting offers,” said Miller. “Then suddenly, we had this huge hit with Moby’s
Play
and of course now everybody wants to do a fucking deal with me!”

Thanks to Moby selling 10 million records, “I was in a really strong position, so I went to [French boss of EMI-Virgin] Emmanuel de Buretel and made up a list of things I wanted, and he said, ‘Okay, I think we can do most of that.’ So I thought, I’m going to take that opportunity to work with somebody else. Plus, you know, by then I’d been doing it for what, twenty-four years?” In 2002, Miller secured a deal for a tidy £23 million.

Of the dinner guests, one conspicuous holdout was the quiet Derek Birkett, founder of One Little Indian, whose success with Björk helped keep the wolves from the door. Then, of course, there was Martin Mills, who, during his legal wrangles with Nick Austin just a few years previously, almost did consider the unthinkable. “You only ever really think about these things because of money,” confessed Mills. “It was a time when things were difficult and I was kind of, hmm, I thought about it once, but it passed. It was a moment of madness. It passed. Ever since then, I’ve just resolutely always said no.”

For his resilience, Martin Mills was amply rewarded in the midnineties when his new sublabel, XL Recordings, directed by the capable Richard Russell, struck gold with the Prodigy. Their dance-rock smash hit
Music for the Jilted Generation
assured the Beggars Banquet Group, and in particular its rapidly expanding XL Recordings imprint, an inside lane into the computer age.

Another determined face walking against the traffic was Laurence Bell, founder of a new indie label, Domino. “I was there when Rough Trade distribution collapsed,” said Bell of his formative years holding down odd jobs as a young man. “I was working in that office, saw it all go down. And it was pretty depressing … Everyone was going; Creation, Factory, it was all around; you saw independent labels fail, go bankrupt, or be sold. The majors were taking over everything; they were starting up these bogus independent imprints—the whole culture was being bought up and chewed up. But I was still excited by music and finding things. I just wanted to do something genuinely independent, start again, find some bands, go against everything that was happening. And there was some great music around then—1991 was a great year for music. That’s when I started to realize that I wanted to do this; to work with bands, put out records. So I set up my own label in 1993.” Before Domino hit the big time in 2004, courtesy of Franz Ferdinand, it operated out of a basement. Its first release was a simple U.K. license for an indie-rock group, Sebadoh, originally signed to Sub Pop. The story was moving full circle.

Refugees, exiles, outcasts—the combined effect of corporate concentration and Rough Trade’s demise left a generation of England’s left-field record men wandering aimlessly along the roadside. Exposed to the elements in the naughty nineties, many a weary warrior was lured inside by a hefty check. Only a handful of die-hards had enough fire in their bellies to keep
believing.
Dust or pollen? The ruins of the proverbial temple blew away on the four winds—a sad memory for some, but for others, an ideal destined to come again.

30. BUBBLEGUM FOREST

First came the factories, then came the supermarkets. Enter the plastic jungle of artificial fruit whose sugary flavor can only be chewed for a while, then spat out. The new era oozed the musical equivalent of fast food—sold to children at adult prices. Quite literally, suits from food and drinks industries were taking over the conglomerates that owned the majors, and with them, along came their conception of a planned, supermarket industry.

“As the business got bigger, there was an arrogance,” said one of the era’s few genuine record men, Rick Rubin, who in 1988 left Def Jam for new adventures out west. In 1991, he produced
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and on his new label, American Recordings, he directed Johnny Cash’s last four albums. “From the nineties onwards,” said Rubin, “record labels were all being run by accountants and attorneys. It was becoming a less pleasant business.”

The compact disc had brought profound changes to the very artifact itself—the record. Since the forties at least, buying the latest pop song had been most people’s initiation into the record-buying habit. As Elektra founder Jac Holzman points out, however, “singles did not have a format after the demise of the 45 rpm record. At the beginning of the CD, prices ranged between $15 and $18. They fell over time, but the model ran counter to the business. Singles have historically been important to the record business because they helped point people—they were calling cards for albums.”

The cream of the nineties market was certainly capable of making interesting albums. Nirvana, the Fugees, Radiohead, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, the Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack, Portishead, Beck, Jeff Buckley, and many others managed to exploit the full capabilities of the compact disc in a way that justified the price tag. For record buyers, though, the CD age meant that to buy the latest
one-hit wonder
you had to pay at least $15. The price of bubblegum, a standard commodity in the record business, had soared to an all-time high.

“What went wrong,” continued Holzman, “is they all thought they were geniuses. When the CD took hold, it took hold very quickly. The retailers got rid of LPs as quickly as they could. They told the labels in effect; you take a twelve-inch bin designed for vinyl LPs, cut it in half with a board, and put in twice as many CDs at twice the price. Plus, the labels had clauses in their contracts that royalties would be reduced by twenty percent for any new technology. So suddenly the artist who was supposedly getting a dollar royalty on a CD was getting eighty cents. In some cases, they were getting another twenty-five percent taken off for packaging deductions, which meant the artist was getting only fifty-five cents. The result was that the labels became incredibly profitable. And everybody running a label thought they were a stone genius.”

With easy money, even the best companies became complacent. “The enormous growth was based largely on catalog sales,” pointed out Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman, who, while enjoying commercial success with De La Soul, became a Warner VP attending top-level meetings. “Anybody with a catalog was getting forty-five percent of their revenue from people rebuying their favorite records on CDs at sixty to eighty percent higher prices. And because it was such a cash cow, the majors didn’t have to be ambitious. Whatever they did, it did great.”

The joke was that not everybody was even sure the CD sounded better than vinyl. “It was all being heralded as a technological achievement that supposedly improved the way we listen to music,” ventured Craig Kallman, at the time an indie specializing in house music who joined Atlantic in 1991. “When the industry started happily announcing the death of vinyl, I used to have cold sweats and sleepless nights because I started comparing both formats. I’d sync the vinyl and the CD of the same recordings by artists like Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley, Van Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Neil Young, Frank Sinatra. Those early CDs were brittle, glassy, edgy, and two-dimensional, whereas the vinyl was liquid, open, smooth, inviting, and truly euphonic. Yes, the CD offered convenience, but back then, the trade-off in sound quality was too great. Not to mention the whole experience of the vinyl album jacket—the artwork, the liner notes, the tangible nature of it. For me, in the eighties, there was just no comparison between vinyl and CD.”

“In the early days, often a cassette master, which was already a substandard master compared to the vinyl master, was downgraded further to be cut to CD masters,” confirmed Rick Rubin. “So even though the CD had the potential for higher resolution, the source material tended to be really second-class. We all worked hard mastering our records to sound good on vinyl, but we hadn’t worked much on mastering records for CD yet. So they were further down the food chain … There were good and bad things about the CD. They didn’t sound good, but they were convenient, they were portable. But originally when they came out in a long box, it was really terrible. I missed the big sleeve artwork. And I missed the sound of analog.”

Realizing that the true sound of classic records was being downgraded while the originals were being phased out, “I went on a mission to preserve the history of recorded music on vinyl,” explained Craig Kallman. “I started making lists every night—notebooks upon notebooks: the complete discography of every artist who was important in virtually every genre. I had to study, do research, and then go find perfect copies.” Now the proud owner of one of the world’s largest, most pristine vinyl collections, measuring some 750,000 LPs, 10-inches and 45s, the Atlantic CEO, while acknowledging he is vinyl obsessed, believes it’s no accident the 12-inch LP has endured, even thrived, sixty-five years after it was introduced.