The Bob Lefsetz PodcastBill Hein started in retail, created Enigma Records, ran Rykodisc and is now pressing vinyl and so much more!
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Lefts That's podcast. My guest today is Bill High. Bill, tell me about your vinyl business.
We have a vinyl factory in Poland. Although you know we are a US company, we have a Polish subsidiary. We work with a Polish company that was already in the media business, primarily optical media, CD, DVD. When they expanded into vinyl some years ago, they invited US and a few other parties to buy vinyl presses and work with them, and that's how we got going. We're now up to fourteen vinyl presses. We can run up to about a million vinyl discs a month.
Okay, a little bit slower. This company in Poland before they call you they're making media. Were they making vinyl at the time?
They had just well, they had been doing it for a few years. They started in the mid twenty tens. I don't know what we call decades anymore.
I know, it's sort of amazing.
Yeah, the twenty teams, so that the decade before this one. And it's interesting how they got started. They started getting calls from their CD and DVD customers wanted to know if they could do vinyl. This was a time when vinyl was coming back, but most of the vinyl factories had closed down, machines had been scrapped. No one was making new vinyl presses, so you couldn't just you know, google vinyl press manufacturer by a few presses and go into business. There were none to be had. They found someone in Zimbabwe selling some Swedish Swedish made TOOLIXELFA presses, electroplating baths and annoyment cutting lathe all very valuable, highly regarded equipment on eBay. So one of the executives there, Andre, who is the first guy I met at this company, he went to Zimbabwe. He verified it was all for real. They negotiated a deal. They bought essentially an entire turnkey vinyl pressing plant that had been mothballed for a long time, put it in shipping container, sent it to Poland. The factory engineers got the equipment going and they were in the vinyl business. Now. These were old manual machines that have relatively low output. But nice thing about the vinyl presses is they're eternal. I know, vinyl plants using machines that were made in the fifties still working just fine. So that was probably ten years ago. We got in business with them about five years ago.
And okay, so tell the difference between a manual and an automatic machine.
Well, manual machine, someone has to stand there form the well what the Europeans call it cake and what North Americans call a puck, but just a glob of PBC. Take it out of the extruder. It's warm, it's melted, stick it in the press, manually hit a button. The vinyl record is pressed. After approximately twenty five to thirty seconds, the pressing is done, you manually remove the disc. You put it in a trimmer that trims the excess vinyl, and then you set it aside on a spindle to cool. That's a manual machine. And also the disc labels for the A and B side are manually put into the press. Automatic machine automates most of that. One operator can look after several automatic machines, just make sure they're up and running, and everything I just described is essentially automatic. You do have to have a human in the room though, because things go wrong you want to monitor the quality. But generally the output is oh at least double with an automatic machine.
Okay, they go to Zimbabwe, they buy one machine.
Now they bought I don't know, I think seven or eight, one of which I think ended up getting used for parts and so that.
How did they get to fourteen?
Well, we have fourteen, so we bought myself, my two partners, we bought fourteen presses. By this time you can buy new presses, although the waiting was eighteen months two years to actually get a machine, to get brand new machines, we ordered fourteen. We took delivery of them starting around three years ago. Slightly before that, we found some used automatic machines in Salina, Kansas and we went out and bought four of them. That was in the middle of COVID. It was an interesting road trip. We packed those up, ship those to Poland. We kept too, and our Polish partner took too. So those were the first presses we actually owned. Also two Alex Alpha machines originally from Sweden. Best we can tell, those machines originally were installed in the UK, then went to Brazil. From Brazil they went to Salina, Kansas. Now they're in Poland. Vinyl presses all have a history. They're very interesting machines.
So let's say I decide to go into the vinyl business today? Are there old machines available? Two? Can I get a new machine? Three? How long would I have to wait for? What would be the cost?
You can't get new presses now there's I think four companies making new presses. The cost you just say ballpark two hundred thousand dollars, but probably this same amount of money again to build the infrastructure. You don't just plug them into the wall. You need cold water, you need steam, you need a lot of electricity, and you need a very stable environment. You need the factory to be a stable temperature and at stable humidity.
Okay, the company in Poland, ghost is Zimbabwe buys machine. Did they contact you about up on their machines before you purchased dr own machines? How did you make the connection originally?
Well, that's kind of a funny story. I have a good friend who runs a record label called Moonjune Records. It's jazz, progressive world music. Label was in New York. He's now in Spain. He had been making his CDs at this plant in Poland. He contacted me one day he said, Bill, I have a friend in Poland. His name is Andre. You and him you both love King Crimson. You'll get along great. Maybe you can help him build his business. And I thought, okay, that sounds interesting. I was not doing a whole lot in music at the time. I'd stepped away from music business for a couple of years, and that just sounded like fun. And I had been following the growth of vinyl and thought, this will be interesting if nothing else. And originally we were just going to help I drafted my business partner Andy. It was a local you know, has a radio show here in Boulder, plays punk rock where Gems and he and I were working on a company called Amazing Radio. So I'm kind of going off on a tangent, but I invited him in. He said, help me put together a vinyl business. Originally we were just going to help them find customers in the US. But then when he said it, we need more presses. We have more demand than we know what to do with, we stepped up and said, well, we'll buy some presses. And that's how we got into the business.
Is this self funded or did you raise money? How did you pay for the presses?
Right now, it's entirely well, I would say it's ninety percent self funded. We've got a handful of investors, but most of the money has come from the principles and the business.
And how many principles are there?
Three of us Andy Zicklin, myself and Fred Goldring who joined us.
Okay, so in Poland now they still have their manual presses. They have your fourteen presses. Are there any other vinyl presses there? Or is that the totality of their footprint there?
I think there's forty three presses. There are three other companies that have similar arrangements to ours where they own a couple of presses there. Those companies tend to have three or four presses each. So we're the largest owner of presses there. But we've got some company. It's kind of like a dominium, I guess, or co op of sorts.
Okay, so at this point in time, what are you pressing?
Well, lots of vinyl records.
You have your own company. Are they for the majors? Are they for indie's? Are they domestic or are they international? Is it everything? If I call you and I say I want to produce twenty thousand of X, so you're going to say, yeah, here's what it costs.
Well, that's exactly what we would do. We've got a full sales team here in the US. You know, our focus right now is building up our US business. We have customers all over the world. We do work for major labels, we do work for independent labels, we do work for independent artists. We've run jobs as small as one hundred discs and we've done it. We had a one po last year for a million discs, half million in double albums.
Okay, we heard for years that there wasn't enough capacity. What's the status of capacity today in the vinyl production world.
There's plenty of capacity.
So let's just say I want to get the records in the store for Thanksgiving. When am I going to have to get you masters? When am I going to have to make the commitment? Not this Thanksgiving but a year from now?
Well it depends, you know. Are you selling through band camp yourself? Are you working with a distributor. What's the distributor's lead time? We like to work on a nineteen week lead which provides lots of contingencies, but generally four weeks to make a test pressing is a good role thumb. We can go fast uster and four weeks once the test pressing is approved to final goods being ready. Now the factory in Poland does print in house, can cut lacquers in house, can do all the electroplating in house, which is unusual. I think there's two hundred vinyl pressing plants in the world. The amount that can do everything vertically integrated as a single digit number. So that helps us with logistics. Everything's under one roof.
What are the toxes, etc. Financial advantages and disadvantages of it being in Poland.
Well, a couple answers to that. Poland is a very good place to run a business. In general, any kind of business. Workforce is motivated, hard working, very well educated. It is a very good business environment. I think Poland, since communism fell, I think is the second fastest growing economy in the world. You know, it's very impressive. I was there in the nineties visiting a friend who had started up a record label in the mid nineties, and then I didn't go there again until we started pressing business, and I was astonished at the difference in the country. But it really comes down to I think we're able to get a really excellent workforce from factory workers all the way through executive ranks, and the general cost of doing business is very attractive and a lot of things. Poland is very well located in Central Europe. If you're going to ship goods to the US by a sea freight, you've got a lot of options nearby. Almost everything in Europe is one day trucking. So there's a lot of positives about doing business in Poland, But the biggest one is Polish people.
Okay, you've been to Poland how often? You know. We live in a country in America, the United States where so many people don't even have passports. You talked about a little bit about Poland. But what do people not understand about Poland today?
Well, what I just said pretty much, it's a very modern, very European country. I think a lot of Americans have this notion that it's still kind of very bunch in Eastern European backwater. That's very much not true. And again, people are very well educated. They're very cosmopolitan. You know, they watch the same TV shows we do. The show Yellowstone is very popu you're there. A lot of my Polish friends would ask me, Bill, is is Montana really like it is in Yellowstone? Is it pretty much little less killing, but otherwise it's pretty accurate. You know, they're very aware of American pop culture, they're very aware of world events. Hy it's a nice place. I live there mostly the last two years. I came back in January.
Okay, let's talk about the economics of vinyl forgetting your you know, sun costs with presses and people, et cetera. How much does it cost to make a record? How much you charge people, because ultimately this point a vinyl record goes for retail thirty plus dollars.
Well, I don't I think that's changed much from you know, the sixties or seventies. Cost of goods for manufacturing has always been, from my experience, runs fifteen twenty percent, between ten and twenty percent of your retail price. So you're looking at three to six dollars to make a vinyl record. There's lots of variables. How fancy is it is an unsplatter vinyl? Is it a gatefold? Do you have embossing or debossing? You know, you can make a record, you know, you can press a record jacket for a little bit over two bucks, or you can do something that's very deluxe, that's you know, approaches ten dollars.
So, okay, is this a competitive market? Is someone going to call you for a quote and say, I spoke to your competitor it was cheaper, and you have to convince them your company is better or make a cheaper price. Because in the old days, just getting capacity it was difficult. What's it like now?
Yeah, I mean that used to be the sales pitch. Do you have any capacity? And if you said yes, you've got the po I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Quality matters. Customer service matters, especially with the independent labels. They want to work with someone who will be, you know, what's the best way to describe it, you know, culturally attuned to what they're doing. You know the fact that I've spent much my life at independent labels, I think doesn't hurt. I understand what an independent label needs as far as service, quality and so on. I think that helps. You know, everyone cares about. I would say quality tops pricing. Pricing matters. If we were a dollar more expensive than everyone else, that would not help us. But I don't really see people changing manufacturers to save a dime.
You know, a disk Okay, In the old days, when Vinyl was king sixties and seventies. The records were warped, the records had surface noise, sometimes skipped. Then, of course, in the seventies we started to have Japanese vinyl, we had half speed Master, We get all this stuff. It's one hundred percent virgin. As opposed to regrind, What is the status of manufacturing a record today? To what degree are there rejects or problems? To what degree is a higher quality component?
Well, I would say in general the quality of vinyl records is better today than it was let's say, forty fifty years ago. More discerning consumer. Consumer now has lots of choices about it listen to music. Vinyl is one of them. So, you know, when in the seventies, when I start, you know, in the late sixties, early seventies, I started buying records. When you buy records or eight tracks, and it wasn't really a much of a choice. If you cared about sound quality, you bought vinyl records. I think the quality across the board generally is very, very good. We do very you know, what I consider fairly extreme QC. You know, we probably reject between three to twelve percent of the pressings. They don't even go out the door. They're going to recycling. We're constantly pulling records randomly out of manufacturing runs and listening to them in a QC room. Yes, there are people whose jobs it is to sit around with headphones and listen to vinyl records all day. And there's also a visual check because we've manually assembled the discs. The disc going in our slave, the inner sleep goes in a jacket. That person putting the disc in the inner sleeve is flipping the record over and visually inspecting both sides before it goes into package. So yeah, I'm it's very unusual for us to get a complaint for quality, and you know it's I would say, sometimes weeks go by where I don't hear about a QC issue. When I was working in record stores in the seventies, that was not the case. People were returning records every day, So I would have to say quality today is very very good.
Okay, you have these two partners in this pressing business. Is that the only business of these three people, because you also have a record label. I don't know if it's the same people, but are these three people we got a business? We're pressing or are they are going to go into other or have gone into other areas well.
Yeah, Andy and Fred Andy Zeckl and Fred gold Ring are also business partners in our two record labels, which are run by the same people but two different label identities, And we started that about early last year, so we're about coming up on our second anniversary of the record labels. So same people, but separate company, okay, and nothing beyond the record pressing in the record labels envisioned at this point.
Music publishing, Okay, So why two labels as opposed to one.
I've always liked labels that seem to have kind of an identity musically, and the initial batch of artists we're looking to work with didn't seem to fit into one sort of and I don't want to say genre be could both labels span several genres. But the idea is whether the labels is called label fifty one. If you like one thing on label fifty one, we hope you notice what label is on and are curious about other things on label fifty one. I got into this business as a record collector, and I was always very conscious of labels. I remember the Charisma label. I would pick up anything on the Charisma label. The early years of Virgin, I would buy anything that was on Virgin, the Vertigo label, the stuff that was on Vertigo out of the UK I was very keenly interested in. So it's just we've just decided to sort the artists into two labels. And sometimes we'll ask a signees which label do you think is more suitable for you? Let them choose.
Okay, So you came up in the old days of physical distribution. So what do we have. We have the three major companies minting cash based on catalog. Okay, what are the economics of an independent label today? Are they as good or worse than they used to be in the old days when you started with Enigma, Is it something like, well, we love this, We're going to do this, or are there real financial opportunities here?
Well, it's just different. I don't know if it's better or worse. I think that's a matter of perspective, but it is different. On one hand, the cost to record music now is very low. I mean, you can build a very nice studio in your bedroom and make very high quality recordings. That's new access, you know, the way to connect with fans potential fans is very inexpensive now compared to what it used to be. You know that has been oh what's the word. You know, all the direct the fan tools, pretty much the internet, everything the Internet has brought. But the other side of that is there's so much music out there, just you know, separating yourself from the herd is a significant challenge these days. But I enjoy it now. I think there's great opportunities now. There were opportunities when Enigma started. There were opportunities in the nineties when I was had a label Restless, there were opportunities even in the whatever the first decade of this century was called the oughts, even though the business was shrinking ten percent a year. There's always opportunities if you have great music and you're willing to work card and you know, have a little luck.
We hear from the independent artists complaining about how much money they're not making on streaming services. You are the label selling independent artists. Is that where most of the money comes from streaming? Do you have a piece of other revenue streams from these acts and what is your viewpoint in terms of the share of streaming you're getting.
Well, I like streaming I'm listening to My favorite is Cobas. I'm listening to Koba's every day, listening to Apple Music every day. I check Spotify a lot. I really enjoy streaming. It's amazing to, you know, pick up a new Mojo magazine, see review something and instantly pull it up and listen to it. I do tend to follow up, and if I really like something, I'll buy the vinyl. But I think it's a phenomenal tool for our labels. The majority of our revenue is physical product, and I think that's probably the kind of artists we're working with, as artists who overweight in physical product. We work very hard to grow our digital revenue. We take it very seriously, but we also view it as a way almost like free advertising or advertising, where we get paid a few pennies here and there. And you know, our digital revenue is growing, but if that's all we had, we wouldn't have much of a business.
And are you happy with the way the revenue is split or do you think it needs to be reconstructed.
I'm going to let other people worry about that. I mean, the business is the way it is, and my attitude on whether we're getting fair payment from Spotify, whatever, just doesn't matter. So I just put my energy into getting the music out to as many people as possible. And you know, the royalties are what they are.
Okay, So you sign an act. The majority of revenue comes from physical product. Let's assume the act doesn't have any significant history. Where do you sell the product? How hard is it to get into retail stores. It's more sold at gigs.
Well, depends on the artist. We've just released an EP by ban sixpence None the Richard. They're out on first big tour. They've been on a long time. They were more or less inactive for almost two decades, had a big hit the end of the nineties. Their big hit still streams a million streams a day on Spotify alone, So there's an audience for that song, and the band doesn't have fans. We're selling good quantity of CDs and vinyl on the road. We're streaming pretty well with the new music, and we're out of retail and doing decently. I think, you know, I'm satisfied with where we are, and I see this as building momentum. We're reintroducing a band that had sort of been on hiatus for a long time, which is its own challenge. You don't know if the audience is still there even when you look and you see the streaming of the catalog is you know, in their case Gigantic, you don't know if the fans are going to turn out at the shows. I want to hear the new music. In this case, people do. So that's in that case we're reintroducing the band, you know, and working with the band and working with their management. Obviously, we don't do this alone to a fan that we hope is still there and finding new fans. What's interesting is I'm seeing the demographics of their Spotify.
Are we talking still about sixpences?
Yeah, what's really interesting there Their biggest demographic I think is like nineteen to twenty four, twenty five to twenty nine on Spotify, So it's a it's a younger audience. So that's that's really interesting. So that's on one side, taking a band that has almost no existing audience. That's really hard now and you know, honestly, it's kind of a criteria for us working with an artist is what is the current fan base? Do you tour? You know, and you know, where are we starting from? It's hard to start from zero.
Okay, let's go back for a second. You have two record labels A. Are you only signing active acts or are you putting out any catalog product.
We're putting out some catalog product and sort of reissues. We're doing a Wall of Voodoo archive project, a band I first worked with in like nineteen eighty one. They had, even though they're not an active band anymore, they had some really good vault material that we're putting out next year. We're working at the band rain Pread, another band I worked with in the eighties, so I've always just loved their music and jumped at the chance to work with them on new music. They reacquired the rights to some of their old albums. We're reissuing them with bonus tracks remastered, so that's kind of a catalog project, but in sync with the band out touring and releasing new music as well. We did a Dream Syndicate live record earlier this year that spanned their entire career, like forty years worth of music. So we are but not as we tend not to do it as a straight reissue. We want to add something to it, remaster, new material, something so that it's it's worthy of being in the marketplace.
Okay, stepping back for a second, you have an act. They're on the road. They're selling product on the road. Where else can you distribute it. In the old days, there was a plethora of retail. There's indie retail. Now there's retail that's not in the music business selling vinyl. So how hard is it to get records and stores? And where are those stores?
Well, independent retail is pretty good shape in the US right now, and you know overseas as well and growing. I live in Denver now and there's a couple of really great independent stores here, you know, and I I will. I stood in front of Twist and Shout earlier this year for Record Store Day and the snow for two hours before getting in, So you know, there's a good there's an avid audience for buying vinyl here in Denver, certainly. And we see new independent record stores popping up all the time. And what's different now is they're not competing with the chain stores. The music lands, warehouses, towers are gone. If you're pure music retail, you're an independent now.
And I like that.
Quite a bit. We find the independence will champion music. They love and you know that's really important. We work with a distributor in the US called AMPT and they're very good. They're very well connected, particular to the independent retail base. We use bandcamp for a direct to consumer sales, and we've got a Shopify store and we've just started linking our Shopify stores with Spotify. Spotify has a feature where you can connect your Shopify store to the artist page in Spotify and that's very promising. We've only been doing that for a couple of months. But again it goes to what you asked about DSPs digital distribution. What do I think of them? And I think I think of it a way of reaching hundreds of millions of people.
Okay, how much of the business is non traditional media retail, non music stores.
For the overall market, I don't know. You know, you've got some clothing stores and a lot of people carrying fairly limited selections, so I don't really have a good handle on that.
Okay. When Vinyl started to research, everything was sold one way, because all your products still only sold one way, mostly mostly so in order to return the product. What would that situation be?
I don't think we've had anyone try to return product. We're pretty careful on what we lay out and retailers are pretty careful what they bring in out because of the one way factor. CDs are returnable, and our CD business is decent. I mean, it's not like what it was thirty years ago, but CDs still sell they self returing bands. They're selling it retail. So I think if we tried to push out a lot of vinyl for one reason or another, we would probably have to allow for returns. We haven't had to do that yet. Maybe it's coming, maybe it's not.
What is the future of the overall vinyl market? We've had this resurgence, you know, we hear numbers wholesale, retail. What do you see coming down the pike? A forget the overall dollars relative to streaming. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Just the business in terms of units. Is it just a steady business? Is it going to go up? Is it spiking? What do you think?
At retail? It's still growing and everything I've read by credible authors and researchers believe it's going to be growing for several more years. So that's great. I think a lot of people during COVID over ordered at the label level. I think there was a lot of label overstocks that are getting sold down. You know, we all know there was a temptation when it took a year to get a vinyl po filled to order years worth of vinyl. And now with you know, you can get turned around in four weeks after test pressings. There's no need to have a year's supply. So there was a lot of overstock. I think that's going away. But if you look at retail, I haven't seen anything that say retail is going flat.
Okay, how many acts have you signed? How many acts do you plan on signing?
We have about fifteen artists on the two labels, and that feels pretty good. I don't We're not really chasing much new right now. We might have one or two more signings, but we're feeling like we've got really good rosters and we've got our work cut out for us for next year in the years to follow.
Okay, we decide to make a deal, what kind of deal you're going to offer me?
Fifty to fifty profits split based on real revenue and real costs.
Just that easy? Yeah? And will I get an advent?
We try not to pay advances, and we very seldom have paid advances. We sometimes helped cover recording costs, but most of the artists we work with are self sufficient already. We're not you know, we're not working with the latest TikTok sensation or K pop bands or really what you would consider pop music. We're dealing with bands that have been around in some cases for a while, that are touring that not how to make their records. We are definitely not getting involved on the recording and we have very light hand on an r generally, let the artists do what they want to do and then bring us the results when they're ready. So, yeah, we avoid is when you pay in advance, that's less money to put into marketing.
At the end of the day, since you're not paying an advance, am I going to own the record? Or you go own the record?
If we don't pay an advance, you own the record?
And how long do you have it? For?
Seven years? Ten years? Something? Negotiating?
Okay, So we live in a market where the big streamers are hip hop and pop, but statistically they're going down in marketshare. We hear rock is dead. You're in these other rock alternative markets what's the status of those markets.
Well, yeah, you know, I look at the hits chart every week, the top fifty hits chart, and I don't see much rock and roll in there. When I do, it tends to fall off the chart pretty quick. So if you have that perspective, rock is definitely not much of a forest anymore. But on the other hand, there's very dedicated audience out there, very loyal, and for what we're doing, it's more than enough. In the past few weeks, I've seen the Beat Show with Tony Levin, mader In Blue, Danny Carey and Steve I twice once in denav just a few days ago. In thousand notes, sell out house, people losing their minds. I think they've sold out fifty nine of the sixty five shows, and I believe they're going to keep the tour going into next year. So I don't know, a very happy audience. And you know, we've got Tony Levin's album out now. It's doing really well sales wise. It's streaming, you know, if you measure it against what you would expect for an album like Tony's to stream, it's doing very well. Physical sales are excellent on it. We've held back the vinyl for records store Day Black Friday, so the vinyl will be available a week from tomorrow. So we're very happy that audience exists, and that's enough to keep us going. You know, we're not but if you dial back to the seventies and eighties when rock and roll ruled the world, it's very different. Rock and roll does not rule the world anymore, but there's a big, loyal, super enthusiastic audience, and we're happy to keep releasing records for this world, for this market.
You have a long history with Striper. What's the status of Striper today.
Well, they just wrapping up their fortieth anniversary tour. I caught them when they came through Denver. It was a great show. They're playing better than ever. They have one of the most avid fan bases any band ever. We've released an unplugged acoustic album a few months ago of theirs that I'm very happy with. It's a pleasure to be working with them again again. A couple of the artists of my label I have relationships going back forty years. It's just delightful that they're still making great music and I still get to work with them. It's one of the things that just keeps me in this business. It's an absolute pleasure.
Let's go back to the beginning. Where'd you grow up?
Born in Nebraska, but moved to California when I was pretty young?
Pretty young, two, pretty young? Eight?
Moved to Bay Area when I was two, and San fernetto Valley when I was five?
And would your parents do for a living?
Father was a lawyer, longtime general counsel for La City Schools. My mother fifth grade giacher.
And how many kids in the family?
Three of us?
And where are you in the hierarchy?
I'm the old guy.
Okay, so you're going to school. What kind of kid are you? Good student? Bad student? Popular athlete? How do you describe yourself?
I think I was a pretty good student. I was on the track and cross country teams, so that means I was not a popular student or popular with my peers. Yeah, you know. I was an avid music fanatic from about age nine onwards. Yeah, I would say it was an normal kid.
Where did your music interest percolated.
From the radio and TV to a certain extent. I can remember still seeing Beatles on Ed Sullivan I was nine. My whole family, you know, watched it on TV. My parents, you know, relatively conservative midwesterners. We're curious about this phenomenon, the Beatles, and you know, I know you remember this. The whole world was curious about the Beatles. Our family even went to see A Hard Day's Night in the theater and I was electrified by that. But I was already curious about music before then. I loved Jan and Dean.
Oh Man, Do I love Jan and Dean?
Yes? Oh I do too. And that might have been my gateway drug into music fandom. And I discovered Top forty radio. Top forty radio in LA was fantastic in the sixties. You had a couple of choices KFWB, KHJ, Carola. I used to go between Carola and cage J and I pretty much listen for hours every day, and I took a real keen interest in charts. I would listen to the chart countdown shows and I was fascinated how records would go up the charts, down the charts. I used to collect the playlist that you could printed playlists you can get at the local record store, and now I wish I still had those. Actually, never should have thrown those out. So it was just a fascination with music, but also kind of the business of music and the personalities of the artists. It wasn't just the music, it was everything around the music.
And will you an avid collector?
Oh yeah, I got the record collecting bug bad.
And where did you buy your records in La.
Well? When I was like, you know, before I had a car, you know, it was the Wallocks music city that I could get to on my bicycle, and you know, later there was a warehouse store. I was in Woodland Hills at the time. I didn't discover independences until early seventies. And when I discovered import records.
When you were going to Wallacks, did they still have the listening booths?
Oh? Yeah, that was awesome.
And how about going to shows?
Yeah, started going to shows probably around seventy two, and a great time to be going to concerts.
Anything especially memorable. You remember what the first one.
Was, Yeah, Pink Floyd at Hollywood Bowl. Wow, very memorable. But I think you were talking in one of your podcast orsthing about Santa Monica Civic. Maybe it was a ten CC show there. Yeah, maybe? Remember how many great shows I sawt Santa Monica Civic.
Oh, Kinks used to play every year.
Yeah, well Debock Deluxe and Golden Earring on this same bill, you know, or craft worker David Bowie or I saw Emerson, Lake and Palmer there. I bet I saw twenty five shows there.
So what was your first job in music a.
Record store clerk at the warehouse.
And how old were you and how did you get that job?
I was twenty and I was in college at u C Irvine. There was someone in economics class of mine was always asking to copy my class notes because he would miss a lot of lectures. Finally, one day and I was I find doing that. Finally one day I said, you know, Mark, where are you? How come you missed so many classes? Well? Now he was a manager of Warehouse Records store in Coasta Mason, the back Bay Warehouse record store. And I said, okay, here's the deal. I want a job. If you're going to keep copying my class notes, I want a job. And I got a part time job working at the Warehouse Records and I was in heaven. You know, I would have worked for free.
So now you're on the other side of the counter. What did you learn being on the other side of the corner?
Most people didn't buy the records I liked, and I think that's a pretty normal experience for records store employees. Yeah, this is around the time you started having some really big records. You know, Frampton Comes Alive, it was around that time.
Yeah, just it was.
It was my school. It was my music business school. The store had subscriptions to Record World, cash Box and Billboard, and I read all of them cover to cover. Mark the store manager would let me take the trade magazines home and I would just read every work and I would study the charts and I was I would look at the advertisements. You know, what records are being advertised, Why what records are going up the track? What records are charting high? But we're not selling in our local store. I mean, there was just so much to absorb, you know, seeing the business side of the business. It was a great education.
What was their plan if any going to college?
I went to use Cervine because it was the only college to you know, express interest me being on the track team. So it was easy decision.
Okay, were you planning to study anything? You say, I'm putting in my four years. I'll graduate, I'll figure it out. Then.
Yeah, I started as an engineering student and thinking I would like engineering, and I really didn't. I switched to computer science for a quarter, didn't really like that, and I switched to economics, and I really liked that, so I stuck with economics. I found that fascinating.
And you graduate from college, what's your first step in the work world.
I didn't graduate from college.
How long did you go and why didn't you graduate?
Well? I went five years and didn't graduate well, partially because I kept changing my major. I would have to start over on my classes. I switched from Warehouse to Music Plus when story manager brought me in Mark and I should name him Mark Wesley, a very important person. Without Mark, I would not be in the music business, So thank you Mark. Mark went to Music Plus and brought me along. Music Plus was getting started then, and a lot of people from the Warehouse went to Music Plus. It was just a better music retailer and at the time fairly innovative. And what was really cool about Music Plus is they had a really good import section. And I loved import records. So by time nineteen seventy eight world around, I had this idea. I had to start an import record company, a distributor by vinyl from overseas sell it to record stores in the US. There was one company doing that in the US on any scale, company called Gem Records, and I thought there was a lot of stuff that they weren't importing that could be the basis for a business to kind of compliment what they were doing. So I wrote in my brother, who was still in high school at the time, and the guy Steve Bideaux, who is the import buyer at Music Plus, to join me in the venture. And I had finished all my economics class work, and I had had to do basically two electives like two art history classes would have got me my diploma, and I just figured i'd do it later. I still haven't done.
It, So, okay, you're ever going to do it? Then, what did your parents say?
My parents are very supportive, you know. My mother and father could not have been more supportive. I'm not sure they thought I was going to be successful, but I figure they thought either I had to get it out of my system and it would be a good experience, or maybe it would work. I don't really know.
Okay, you started independent. How much money does it take? Are you fumbling finding things out by accident? Is your business plan and instinct, right, how does it go?
It was like two steps forward, one step back, which I think is you know, pretty much typical of businesses. You would rather be that than two steps back and one forward. You know. We start with fifty thousand dollars capital.
Where did it come from?
Some from I sold a car, I borrowed a few dollars from my mother. My brother actually had adequate savings even though he's high school kid. And Steve Burdo kicked in some money. So we raised fifty grand then, which is actually a ridiculously small amount of money to start a business. We had two thousand square foot warehouse in Torrents and a telics machine and an essential tool then to be in the import business.
So how did you start?
Well, we already had some Steve was the import buyer music, plus he already had some connections overseas. I had basically just studied the business, learned everything I could, and we basically just jumped on the telics machine and started sending out requests like hey, can we import records from you? Will you sell to us? You know, what are your prices? And because Jim was really strong bringing in stuff from the UK, we concentrated on places like Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, you know, picking up stuff from those markets, and we did do some from the UK as well, and it grew from there.
Okay, so you have these records, they say, yes, was it tending to be from the companies? Was it from what we call in the US rap job? Or is where were you actually getting the product?
Some cases directly from the labels. In many cases in Japan you would deal with the exporter. None of the labels there would deal with you directly, but they would direct you to an exporter they would work with. In the UK, we ended up actually setting up our own office in the UK because around this time there was an explosion in very small but very interesting record labels in the UK like Rough Trade, Mute for a D just on and on and on, and to be viable you would need someone there locally, you know, getting the orders from ten different labels, consolidating them and then shipping the air freight to Los Angeles.
Let's say I'm selling to you, When am I going to get paid.
Well? Back in those days, yeah, NET thirty was typical.
Okay, so you'll get the product. Who did you sell to retailers one stops what.
Early days almost exclusively independent retail like in LA would be Rhino, Westwood, Moby Disc. There were a lot of really good independent stores, and then we built a network around the country stores. You know. The cool record stores in those days was the stores that had imports. That's how you knew it was a cool, cool store, you know, and not a mall store, but the cool store near a college campus. Quite frequently. Also, Music Plus had a good import selection. They were probably our best early customer. Eventually we started sellingelling more and more to larger chains, you know, people like Record Bar. Music Land was always hard to get into. Tarer was a good customer. Tower would order a lot, but Tara was challenging to do business with for many reasons.
What are a couple of reasons.
Well, they would pay you in net ninety if you were lucky, and they would make a lot of deductions and you had no leverage to argue with them. But on the other hand, they sold a lot of records, so people tended to go along with it.
Generally speaking, how hard was it to get paid?
I don't remember any serious traumas. I mean you know, we seldom have money in the bank. It would go back out as fast as it came in. I know GEM Records who had been selling to as kind of a subdistributor, they went bankrupt and we took a hit on that. Really, it was never that big a problem, and I might be just conveniently forgetting some bad debt we experienced, but generally we were okay, okay.
The biggest import record of that time was Cheap Tricks Budicon record. Originally it's over for a long time as an import before it's released domestically. Were you in on that.
Yeah, every importer was bringing that in. We did pretty well, but that was not our best selling import.
What was your best selling input?
The Australian ac DC records that were not out in the US. We killed with those. I don't think anyone else was bringing them in.
Do you have any idea how many of sold?
Oh, gosh, Bright, between High Voltage and TNT probably total one hundred thousand more for import record. That that's the important version of a platinum record.
And what's the markup on an import record?
Then we would work on about a fifteen to twenty percent margin, So it was tight, and the dollar was going all over the place. There. We got hammered a couple of times when you know, to hear the Japanese yen, you know, we would get an order in sell the goods, and by the time it came to pay the bill, the dollar had lost eight percent against the yen, and there goes half our margin.
So Jim went bankrupt, patted it in with Green World.
At some point, you know, and Ignoral Records came out of Green World. It was just sort of a natural progression. But there was something that happened before in the import business I think is notable, and the independent label businesses that existed in the eighties in the US came out of the import record distributors. Those were the distributors started handling people like Frontier and sst Epitaph. You know, the old traditional independent regional distributors that handled Chrysalis Island weren't really interested in sort of the new punk rock and heavy metal labels, so they gravitated to going to the importers because we were dealing with the stores that would stock a Frontier, sst or Metal Blade record. And gradually the import business, as a percentage of turnover for these distributors, including Green World, became less and less and the domestic independent labels became more and more and out of this, Green World decided to start its own in house label, which ended up being Enigma. At some point, Steve, the third partner with my brother and myself at Green World, decided he wanted to take full ownership of Green World and he bought us out, so he gave us Enigma. He bought out our shares in Green World, and Enigma then was independent company. Around that time, Jim Marton joined us, so it was three of us again.
Now Enigma. The first thing I remember is the re release of the early Alice Cooper records that were on Frank Zappa's label. Were those the first releases?
Or oh no, you're about seven years It's about seven years to fill.
In there, okay, So tell me what were the first ones?
Well, the first one came out before we had the name Enigma. It was Motley Crue Too Fast for Love, right right right, and that was a rocket ship. That was a nice start. Too bad they all didn't go that way, you know. And as the story on that is, they had pressed up a thousand copies of the album and sold them right away, and there was a buzz on the band. You know, they were playing the clubs around LA and they had a real following. So we were trying to chase down someone in the band to see if we could get some just a distribute. Finally got a hold of someone. They said, we'd love to sell you some, but we're sold out. I said, well, can you make some more? I said, well we could, but we haven't paid the pressing plant yet. So we said, we'll pay the pressing plant, will you give us an exclusive? And that led to us basically being a label, and we later sold our rights Motley Crue to Elector Records. Tom Zutet was the A and R guy then and decided, Hey, this label thing is kind of cool, let's do more of this. We soon signed. We did a deal for the Wall of Voodoo EP, which came out on Index Records, distributed through Enigma. Band called the Fibonacci's, a great local band. And then the next big record for us was the first Berlin record just later that same year, which again did really well out of the box. We got a lot of k rock play early on the first record to get any kind of real Radio and then Geffen bought on our rights, so we it's kind of this pattern. We find something, sell, some have some heat, and major label comes in and writes us a check and we move on to the next thing. At that point we were determined not to do that so much to actually start building a roster, and yeah we did. We actually had a joint venture around that time with EMI America because there were some things we wanted to do that we couldn't afford to do on our own, So through that we had Red Hot Chili Peppers was on Enigma EMI America SSQ, which it's where Stacey Q came from, was there, and then that deal expired, was not renewed. Garry Gersh had been our big supporter edd EEMI American. He had left and I kind of discovered what happens when your big supporter at a major label goes away. But soon after that we connected with Capital and we created a new joint venture for just certain artists with Capital and that worked very well for several years. We did the Smither Rains with them, we did Poison with them. Both were very successful.
Okay, let's go back to the Motley Crue. The first record you make the deal. Yeah, it was upstream to Elektra. What did you actually have the rights to? Did you have a few albums? You only have rights to that album? Did you just have rights to distribution?
We had two record deals, so we got the rights long term. I have to remember. I think it was a long term licensed for Too Fast for Love and then an option for a second album. I don't think our contract was written that well, but it was written well enough that Electra was motivated to bias out and then they remixed the album. My opinion, I liked the original mix still.
Okay, a lot of independence at this point that people were writing their own contracts. Did you have a lawyer or did you do the contracts hush?
I think we might have used Don Pieterman at that point we had met through the wall of Voodo deal when we started. We later our longtime lawyer was Peter Paterno, and I don't remember exactly when we started using Peter, but our contracts in the Peter era were very good, fair I think. But Peter was a great lawyer.
Okay, in your history, have you ever had to sue anybody?
I don't know if we've ever sued anyone, we've gone into arbitration and maybe once I don't know, nothing comes to mind.
Okay, so you had all these acts that were hot locally that the majors wouldn't pick up. As you say, you had Motley Crue, had Berlin, you had Poison. What do you think was going on there? Because as soon as you made him successful, everybody else came looking. Why did they not see what you saw or what did you see?
I'm not sure. I mean I think they eventually saw what we saw, or they saw the numbers. I know when we did the Capitol deal, the Capital salespeople, the local salespeople were very aware we had one of the best selling records in Los Angeles, and you know that didn't hurt us doing the deal at Capitol. But you know, smither Rings came out of New Jersey. We signed bands from all over. I don't know. I mean, we kind of business people like Berlin because we just like we liked the music. This is a great record, let's put it out. Same with Poison.
There was the impression that no one else was authoring him a deal. Was that true?
I don't know. I'm sure there were people sniffing around, because there's always A and R guys sniffing around, certainly in those days, and we're the first ones to step up and say let's go, let's make a record.
Okay, And as I say, you do start putting out some reissue records. I mentioned the Alice Cooper Records. How much of a business was that and was that financially successful?
Yeah, we did a licensing deal with Herb Cohen, who I'm sure you know was Frank Zappa's business partner, to re issue some catalog records that when he separated his business from Frank, some of the titles went to him and some of the Zappa's stuff went to Frank. Yeah, it was notfensive. The Tim Buckley Liven London record, which had not been released before, did really well. I wouldn't say we still tens of thousands of it, which for a title like that, we were very happy with. The Cooper Records did okay. The Ted Nugent records did pretty well. People forget that Ted Nugent was signed to a Frank Zappa label once upon a time.
So you have some serious hits, are you making any money or you just plowing it back into the business.
Plowing it back into the business.
So how does it end in Enigma and turn into Restless?
At some point I think we're in nineteen eighty six. You know, we wanted to keep a We wanted to keep in business, the independent distributors, and we didn't think everything we were doing was suitable to go through Capital's distribution arm, which then was called SEMA, right, So we created a separate imprint just to be distributed independently and had some pretty good success there. Flaming Lips were assigned to Restless. There was some really good stuff on Wrestless and Restless grew shared a lot of the same staff, and we were basically one company distributing one label through Independence, another label through Capital's major label system. And I should point out that we did have two artists joint ventured with Capital, Poison and Smitherings. Everything else we did through them was one hundred percent hours bands like Hurricane and many many more. So you know, I said what how? And at Emi America and Gary Gersh left and Jamie Cohen left, who had been our big supporters. There, we were just kind of adrift. No one really understood what the hell we were doing with Red Hot Chili peppers, and you know, what is this music? Or are these people at Capital? We had some great supporters, Tom Wally certainly, and you know, we got on really well there. But then Tom leaves. He goes to Interscope where he was very successful later to Warner, and some of the other people we knew there who were great supporters left and the world was changing. You know, by now it's nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety one, Charles Koppaman is in there, and you know, he's very influential, and he's bringing in some big, big records, and I think people were looking at us and going, you know, why are we business with these guys. Let's just double down on the speak and some of this other stuff we're doing. So we had an amicable divorce with Capital. We kind of split the baby. They got poisoned, they got Smithereens, they got a couple other things. They got the Enigma name, and I had something to do over. I would have thought to keep that name, because they immediately abandoned the trademark. We got Restless, We got a lot of the catalog, and we started a new business wholly independent again.
Okay, how did Restless and and what ended up happening to all the assets from Enigma and Restless that you'd built up.
Well, I mean, some of the Enigma assets are owned at by Capital now Universal. Restless went through some ownership changes at the end of the nineties, was acquired by New Regency Productions or Non Millshones company. He wanted to do more with soundtracks. He wanted to control the soundtracks to his films because he had had some very big soundtracks, like Pretty Woman was a huge album, and he was very keen on music. So he bought Wrestless and we did some really interesting soundtracks there. I have great memories of La Confidential. That was a great album. It was absolutely a pleasure working on that project. The director's name just jumped on my head. One of the nicest people I've met my life. He's since passed away, but what a brilliant man. Fight Club was a blast. You know, imagine sitting down and watching rough cut of Fight Club and being asked what you think? Right? So that was that was fun. We'd done some soundtracks in the eighties Terminator soundtrack, Return a Living Dead, a few others, but this was on a whole different scale. I mean, you know, new agency was the major Leagues. Eventually that relationship didn't really go anywhere, and again we had another amicable divorce. My business partner Wrestless to Regis, and I bought back the assets to Restless and we turned around did a deal with rykod Disc. This is around two thousand and two.
Okay, let's go back in these varying chapters up to your end up to it, including your deal with right Go. Did you have any big paydays?
Yeah, when we actually sold half of Enigma and then the second half to Capital Emi, and that was like about the first time I ever really had money in the bank of any sort. We'd never had big paychecks. We always paid ourselves very modestly.
Were those seven figure deals.
Yeah, I don't want to say they. If we'd sold a few years later, we would have got considerably more. The value of independent record labels in like It nineteen eighty nine versus Like nineteen ninety five, hugely different. So we missed the run up.
Okay, Reiko is started primarily because they have pressing capability in Japan when no one can get that, certainly on independent label. You know Don Rose is running it. How do you end up selling and running Reicho.
Well, Reiko had gone through some changes. I'd been friendly with the Reiko guys from the early days. I was a big fan of theirs. I bought every single Reiko release. Well, I'd buy it if I couldn't convince them to send me a promo copy. And I was just an avid fan. I love them, I love the likeicism, I love the curation. At some point, Reiko took on a lot of debt to acquire the Zappa catalog and to set up a distribution business, and eventually that debt repayment schedule they just couldn't handle. You know, things are happening, Napster was happening, and they were forced into you might call it a shotgun wedding with Palm Pictures, And I don't really know the inside story, so maybe it was a friendly engagement. Who knows, one way or another. Palm Pictures in Reicho were merged together and that didn't really work, and the people with the money behind it, a private equity group, decided that they would shake things up. Sam Holdsworth was put in as a head of Raycho Disc. He came from Billboard, so he knew the music business, but he had been working in private equity for a while, so he kind of bridged the gap between the private equity people and you know, the Rykodisc music people. And I think he should be credited with keeping Reicho alive. It could have easily have been sold for scrap right around that time. He wanted to beef it up, so one of the things he did was by restless and merch it in. You know, Joe and I were looking for a partner at that point, you know, either distributor or a partner or something a home for Reiko. So it was it was you know, it was very happy with that. We had good years at Rykodisc.
And how did it end at Reiko?
Well, because as private equity owned, private equity owned businesses are always sold, so we knew there was a fuse that had been lit. And the mission was let's make it as much great music as we can, take care of the artists here, and get a good deal when it is sold, and try to preserve you know, what made recod as special and I do think it was a very special company. Just have to remember those were weird times those early years, this decade, record business was shrinking ten percent a year. Retail stores were going bankrupt left and right. There were layoffs everywhere, So you were navigating turbulent waters running the record label then, and Reiko was not just a label. They had a music publishing company, they had a distribution company, they had an international operation based in London though, you know, for an independent, it was a big vertically integrated business.
Who is it ultimately sold to again, Warner? Okay, you're out of a job. Where does that leave you?
Well, I was offered a job to stay and I thought about it, and you know, Warner is a wonderful company, a legendary company. Warner actually had interest in buying Enigma in the eighties. We were locked into the capital deal and you know, we weren't able to go forward with that, but you know, that's not the worst thing in the world. But I was about that time offered a job to run Caroline for EMI, and that looked really interesting to me, and I took that offer. So just really moved across town. I was living in New York at the time, and so it was just shifting a few blocks from the Reicho office to the Caroline office.
And how was your experience of Caroline?
Both good and weird again. I have a great love for the em My Company, as you know, the whole worldwide organization, Capitol Records, Blue Note, Harlophone. I mean, you go through the history of that company and what they've done in places like France and Germany, and it's an amazing history. And so I was very you know, to be running a unity am I I took very seriously and I considered an honor. Caroline was on kind of the decline then companies like Adya, which I had been involved in setting up, and Sony's independent arm Red we're kind of eating their lunch. So the mission was to get it back on its feet, get it rolling again. We folded the Astroworks label into Caroline, and you know Astworks again, what a great label with chemical brothers, so many, so much good music on Asterworks, and we got the business going again. It was losing considerable amount of money every month when I came in. It was profitable within six months. And then the weirdness started. Right my hands came in. That didn't really work out, and you know, the chessboard was getting shook up again.
Did you get pushed to walk? No.
I had a very good fortune of being offered a job right around that time. We're good fortunate, so you.
Go to work with Cole. How did they just call you out of the blue? Do you know Cold? You know Ezrin?
Well, I know I know Bob. I first met Ezren when it brought him in to rescue album by Ben Hurricane in the eighties. The producer left to work in another project, and Bob came in and finished the album, did a great job, and I found him to be a very interesting person. You know, you're never bored with Bob Ezrin, and he's got such a keen mind. So we just have that connection. And years later, my brother and I and one other partner, we're starting a company that we ended up calling a Enigma Digital. This is when I took a couple of year break from Restless, and it was a streaming radio business, but with a community component. Today you would call it a social network. This was in ninety eight and you told Bob about it. He found it very interesting. He joined on as a founding partner. So we did a Enigma Digital for a couple of years. You might be interested to know the company that bought Nigma Joel's Clear Channel. That was in around two thousand and one. So you know, we went through that whole dot com thing. We did have a great business. We got the rights to k and A C went off the air. We all the DJs or many of the DJs had started a streaming radio business called Kanac dot Com. We acquired and folded that in and that was a blast. So that's you know, that was my second go round with ezrind. So Bob was running Live Nation Artists, which was just getting off the ground, and it was, you know, under Michael Cole within the Live Nation organization. Cole was based in Miami, so Live Nation Artist was in Miami. So Bob said, you know, come down work with me. You don't want to work with guy hands, And you know he was not wrong about that. So I left EMI, moved to Miami and went to work for Live Nation Artists.
Well, ultimately Repino shuts that down. Where does that leave you?
Well, without a job, And that wasn't very long and it's you know, regrets aren't really useful, and I don't tend to dwell on things, but Live Nation Artists could have been really great. One of the first things we did was sign Zach Brown. Zach Brown band. It is seven year old rights deal with Zach Brown band, and we had that first album and we knew it was a monster, and we knew he was a monster. And you know, Bob and I actually continued working with Zach but outside Live Nation artists. So it was a great idea. Maybe it was ahead of its time. I don't know, but I'm I have some sadness when I think about that. It could have been a really special company. I mean, Live Nations resources are immense then, they're even more immense now. So having, you know, the idea to use something like Live Nation for an artist development tool is was. Yeah. I wish we could have gone on with that. So the one that got away.
So where do you go from there?
Nashville. I met a couple of people through the Zach Brown deal. Keith Stegaal a great producer who produced Zach Brown and you know they were he was based in Nashville, his business partner Alan Kates. So Ezra moved to Nashville. I moved to Nashville, formed a business with Keista Gall and Alan Kates, and you know, we were doing the radio promotion for Zach Brown country radio. We had eight number one hits. We helped Zach do deal with Atlantic, which was very successful. We signed a couple other bands, none of which really hit all that big. We did an Alice Cooper project, which was fun, but eventually I got a little tired of it. It was probably too many cooks in the kitchen. We had other partners, so Ezern drifted away from it. I left. I moved back to Colorado. But it was fun. I really enjoyed being in Nashville. And you know, now, seeing what Nashville has become and the music business is not a surprise to me. I felt it.
Then, Okay, you said, went back to Colorado. When had you been in Colorado?
Well, when Enigma, when Restless split from Enigma and the capital of my deal ended, I moved to Durango area.
Why Durngo.
I just liked Durango. I visited there and I just loved it. I burnt out a little on California. I grew up in California, loved growing up in California, but I wanted to do something different. I had a fax machine, I had America Online email. I had a twelve hundred Botom modem. I could work remote. I would drive to La oh, about once a month, maybe stay a week. Rest time I was on the fax machine, the phone, or on America Online email, so I know, early remote working.
Okay. So, for that period of time between bigger picture and then getting into the pressing, you're involved in non music business. Did you basically say I don't want to work in the music business, or there's no opportunities in the music business, or I'd rather do something different. Uh.
Yeah, I felt like I should do something different. I'd also felt a little disenfranchised. You know, I've never stopped following Billboard magazine. You know, I look at the Hits website all the time and stay in touch with a lot of my music business friends. I just felt out of touch with what music people were interested in, and probably, looking back, I wasn't looking hard enough. So maybe I was just ready for a break. But I'd look at the music that was selling and just think I never would have picked that. I don't understand that, So I think I doing it over again. I would probably have stayed in the business. But you know, I had a nice little vacation for music business, and what had my appetite to get back in and.
Of the other enterprises you were involved in any of them successful.
Yeah, I was managing well the leading cannabis businesses in Colorado. That's respectable business here in the state, and that was interesting. I find a lot of the personalities in the cannabis business similar to people I worked with in the music business, and it was something I would just remark upon all the time, the same kind of personality. It's kind of a wildcat. If you think of an oil wildcatter. You have to be a little insane to go in the music business. Yet to be a little insane to go into the cannabis business.
How did you actually get in?
My brother was when he left the music business. He was at Hollywood Records after Enigma, working Peter Paterno, and then he left music business after Hollywood, and he is a leading executive in California cannabis business. And he made some introduction. He knew someone in Colorado looking for a senior executive to help turn around a business and recommended me.
I know a lot of people who lost a lot of money in the cannabis business. What was your experience, Well, I never had much personal capital in the business. Well, yeah, as I say, I'm more talking about your running a business. What they always found was there always a heavier player who came in. I know a couple of exceptions. What was the experience you had with the company.
You worked for? Well, I worked with two. One was actually a supplier of materials grow Materials, a wholesale supplier with some retail outlets that sold to private growers. It did really well and it was sold for a pretty good amount of money. And then the retailer I worked with, which also had its own grow operation, is the number one store in Boulder and maybe the first, first or second legal cannabis store in Colorado and locally a legend. So and David Crosby was a customer whenever he was in town.
Someone sitting at home they say they want to get into the cannabis business. Colorado I think literally the first to legalize it. What would you advise them? Opportunities or stay out?
Now I would say stay out. The opportunities are gone. Some things have changed. When Colorado was the first to have recreational in California was earlier with medical, there was such thing as cannabis tourism. People would come here for a weekend to buy a legal pot, you know, smoke a legal joint get high, and there were companies that would do cannabis tours. You'd visit a grow. Now that majority of states have at least medical cannabis tourism is not a thing you would. Also, you know, people don't drive from New Mexico to buy cannabis anymore. There's legal cannabis in New Mexico, there's legal cannabis in Arizona. So some of the business has gone away that came from out of state people visiting Colorado and the market there's too many dispensaries and the market is resetting itself. Some of the dispensaries are going out of business. You know, markets always find their level. They're equal every point, and Colorado's doing that. We don't have quite the problems that with enforcement that say California does, where California has more illegal dispensaries than legal, creating all sorts of problems there. That is relatively under control in Colorado.
So how does it end with the cannabis business getting into the business now of pressing and labeled.
Well, I just you know, serve my time and said I'd like to leave. I'm going to go start making final records and I kind of overlapped the business for a little while because they needed me to do some things at the retailer. But I wrapped up my business there and got going in Vinyl.
Okay, you talk about all these moves living in Poland. Do you have a significant other, have you been married, do you have children?
Well, yes to all those questions. I was married first time in the mid eighties. For about a year. I was working probably one hundred hour weeks, never taking a day off, never taking a vacation. Then, so you know, I never give that marriage a chance. Ended relatively amicably, no kids. Then I was in a relationship later marriage for thirty years till twenty eighteen. My wife passed away in a car crash. We have a twenty year old daughter to durn twenty one, who is delightfully a huge music fan. Love going to shows with her. She's got great musical tastes, so you know that's a delight.
Okay, we are at the age where spouses of dying of cancer. I have some very close friends, even when in the Denver area. This was an accident. You know, it's a touchy subject, but how does one cope with this and how does one March forward. A lot of people say, oh, so sad, but then they move on. Some people go to grief groups. Some people never get over it. What has been your experience and what would you give insight to people who unfortunately might be in this situation.
Well, yeah, it leaves the hall in your life, but life goes on. And that sounds tripe, but it's true. You can never bring that person back. The fact that I have a daughter with my wife is you know, a reminder of the life I had with her, and I think I remember the good things. Probably harder on my daughter than on me. She was thirteen when her mother passed, so you know, that's a rough time for a teenager with a normal you know, with two parents, right, losing one that was rough, and then she had to go through the whole COVID thing where she was in high school. So she's a great kid. She's turning twenty one. I shouldn't call her kid, but it was hard on her, but she's come through. I think what helped us is we have a wonderful, supporting family. Supportive family, family's very close, you know, we're spread out all over the country, and very supportive friends. That makes the difference.
A while back, you talked about being partners with somebody in Boulder and a radio business. Can you tell me about that?
Oh? Yeah, that was Andy Zicklund, who is now my partner in the manufacturing company, pressing business and the two labels, along with Fred Goldring. Amazing Radio is an English streaming radio business with DJs that plays primarily unsigned music. And I was first approached to set up Amazing Radio America. I eventually passed. Andy took the job, and Andy ran it for a while I think did a real good job, and eventually he decided he would rather do the manufacturing business pressing business with me, and he signed his position Amazing Radio. It's still going. It's a really interesting business. It's a great way to discover new music. A lot of really interesting artists have come through that, like du A Loupa. Anymore.
So, you live in Denver, that's a very active music market. For those people not Denver savvy, what are they missing?
It's a great life here. I live downtown. I can walk to several music venues. I can walk to Union train station, take a twenty minute ride to the airport. Great restaurants in the neighborhood, most touring bands, but a Denver stop on the tour. There's some great venues. Everyone knows Red Rocks, of course, but there's lots of other great venues here. You know, it helps the You know, Denver was early in booking bands like The Doors and the Jefferson Airplane, very early days. So I think it gave the town a taste for live rock and roll and new and exciting music very early on. That's never gone away. And part of that was there was a legendary tour promoter here. His name just jumped out as my head, but Live Nation acquired his business.
Well, I don't think you're referencing Chuck Oh yeah, Chuck Morris.
Yes, yes, Chuck Morris. People like Chuck Morris leave a legacy, and the legacy is a lot of music fans here, a lot of people that live music's part of their life.
When you were with a Nigmahnu in La, it was a free flowing let's call it, not a free flowing party, but a free flowing high school. Everybody was in La. There was also a business in New York. You're living in Denver now, a are you basically saying you can live anywhere or b are you the type of person who's in your business but tends not to integrate with X terminal businesses.
I'm not sure how to answer that. Certainly, in nineteen eighty one, I couldn't have run Enigma from Denver. I mean, there have been really good independent labels from places like Denver forever, but you know, having so many of the bands based in LA and if they weren't from LA, they were like poison moving from Pennsylvania to LA. But yeah, look at Minneapolis labels like Twin Tone helped grow that scene. So I don't know. It's hard to say. I do have to travel a lot, but you know, I have no issue working from Denver. It's a worldwide business now. And one of the most fascinating things for me is to look at the Spotify data and Apple Music data where you know, I love seeing how many countries listened to someone like Tony eleven. Tony eleven album is about two months old. People in one hundred and ninety six countries have listened to it. Wow, That's that's mind blowing me. And that's not unusual. I think you can get up to two hundred and five. So we've got a couple to go. You know, music business didn't used to be that way. I saw thirty seconds from Mars just played like the former Republic of Georgia Kazakhstan. Who's Bekistan on a tour? That's just that's just mind blowing to me because for the longest time, the music business was North America, Japan, Australia, UK, a couple of European countries, and it is truly a global business. Now there are music fans everywhere, so I think it's less important where you are because the business is everywhere and the bands are everywhere. We've signed a band from Belarus who are fantastic, you know, you know, who would have thought you'd find great music in Belarus. It's there and I'm, you know, very curious to see what else pops on. I was at a music festival in Spain recently and I saw a band from Tehran who were tremendous instrumental band. They sound like something that could be on the ECM label, except for they also covered a King Crimson song. Again, who would have thought that you would hear music like that coming out of Iran. So if there's anything that keeps me interested in music, it's you don't know what's coming next. All you know is something really interesting is going to come next. You have no idea where it's going to come from, and it's going to be exciting.
Okay, we're of the similar vintage. So in the pre internet era, we would look at the chart. We literally knew every record. We might not have heard it, but we knew it. We knew the story. Today you can look at the Spotify top fifty and only know a couple of records. Do you feel, as I say, you're in your lane because you come from an era where you're working a record stores that had everything, they have three trades? Do you try to be comprehensive? Do you think it's impossible and do your best? Or and you say that's just not what I do?
Well, yeah, you can't keep up on everything. You know, every Friday, you know, part of my routine on Friday is to check the new music on Spotify and Apple. You know, see what the algorithms think I should be interested in. You know, I do come across some stuff. Then I come across some stuff. I go, why is this being recommended to me? This is horror? But I come across some amazing stuff that I've never heard of. I discover more new music. However're just friends, you know, pinging me saying hey, check this out. That's probably my number one music discovery source. But I do love the Internet, and you know the tool gives you to discover music, you know, discocks. I'm constantly checking discogs, you know, on some of the re issues we do. It's like, let's go check discogs. How many people have this in the collection, how many people are looking at it? What's the resale value this? You know, what a great tool. I think back when my record collecting days. I used to have a list fold, a piece of paper that I would keep with me when I would go to record stores, when i'd go to Errand's or Tower, you know, or movie disc or Rano Westwood, and I've had written down records I was looking for, and there were records it took me two years to find. Oh yeah, and that was when you would find it. What a feeling, What an endorphin rush? Oh my god, I can't believe I'm holding this in my hand. Or I would trade. I used to look at the trouser press ads and trade records with people. I once got a stash of New Zealand pressings of Split Ends records when the New Zealand pressings were different and I bought ten of each just to trade. You know. Now you just sit down at your computer type away, you know, and like magic, it pops up. It's a different experience. I can't say it's as rewarding as finding something you look for for two years, but you know, there's something to be said for instant gratification.
So you've had a very successful career. Why do you think you were.
Successful right place, right time?
Okay, there are certain people. You meet them, they've been successful in the music business. They could have been successful doing anything that was their personality. So you've worked in other verticals and you've worked through different eras in the music business. You must have some special sauce that you bring to it. Because there are people who get lucky. They get lucky ones, whether they're financially rewarded or not. They don't continue to go decade after decade.
Well, I don't know. Look first of our right team, right place, you know, starting an independent record label, just when independent music is exploding in LA and there's great bands and who are not immediately getting signed by major labels that you can sign and that's good timing. Yeah. I would say having good business partners is if I have a sick, that's it. I have good business partners. I've never had a business that I didn't have great business partners. At Enigma was my brother Wes Jim Martone who went on to Trauma Records where he was very successful at Restless Joe Regis. I worked with really great people at Raiko disc and at Caroline of course Live Nation Artists, working with Bob Ezrin and now with Fred Goldring and Andy Zicklin. So I've never done anything by myself. I've always had a great business partner.
Okay, it's hard to tell just talking to you. Are you more of an introvert, extrovert loaner. Are you the type of person who's out with friends, calling friends, or you know every day? Are you pretty much just doing what you're doing and whoever you run into, you'll interact with them.
I'm not not social, but I don't mind staying in and reading a book. In fact, I've got quite a backlog of like music biographies and music histories to read, and so if I have a night when I don't have to do something. Hey, you know, grab a beer, open a book. It's a golden age of rock and roll books and music history books. Every week something's coming out and it's like, Oh, I have to have that. Just bought the Red Cross book. Can't wait to see that. I've seen the forward which makes it tells a funny story about Poison, Striper and Enigma records.
What is the funny story?
Apparently the Red Cross Boys the McDonald's, when they were teenagers, were making prank calls to Enigma, pretending to be Poison, complaining that they couldn't find the records anywhere, but they're finding Striper records were They also claimed they were apologizing to Brett Michaels for pretending to be him and calling his vocal coach. So I don't know if it's a true story. Probably. It's also a golden era for music documentaries. That's another thing where I have a large backlock. There's so many great music documentaries that you can stream now, it's overwhelming. I just watched one on the cow Sills, which was fairly astonishing. I'm working on a project with John Cowtill and Vicki Peterson. That's you know, I think we're going to win a Grammy next year with it. It's so good. And so for homework I went and watched the cow Sils documentary. I kind of knew the story, but I didn't really know the story. So that you know, I occupy my off hours working in the music business, reading about music or watching documentaries about music.
So, okay, you mentioned the Council documentaries before we go, recommend one rock biography.
Steve Winn's book. I found very interesting Steve from the Dream Citcate, really good book. Gosh, you give me a second. No. Bill Brufford's book. I just finished that.
It's about the one that came out like fifteen years ten years ago.
Yeah, for some reason, I had never read it. But he was speaking at this music festival I went to in Spain in September and I met him there and so his book was for sale them. Oh I've been meaning to read that. I picked it up, couldn't put it down. And what was interesting, not only his music career is very interesting. He's a very good writer, and his insights on being in big bands like you Yes, King Crimson, and being in his little jazz band that he tours around the economics between him. He lays out a pretty interesting detail. I'm very familiar with the economics of record labels, economics of a band is still kind of a mystery to me, so that was fascinating. But ultimately he's such a good writer. I would recommend that book to people who aren't even Yes or Crimson fans.
Okay, Bill, I think we've come to the end of the feeling we've known. Certainly covered your career. There's a lot of roadway in the vinyl business we'll be watching. Thanks so much for taking this time to talk to my audience.
Well, thank you, Bob. Your podcast is a regular companion on bike rides and hikes in Colrad, so thank you for that.
Till next time, This is Bob Lefts sh
