|
Sprinkler Systems
Uhaul move
Lawn care
Roses and trees
Ford Parts
Chrysler Parts
Lake Powell
New IPod Touch Apps
New IPhone Apps
IPhone Apps
IPad Information
IPad Apps
Android APPS
Android Games APPS
Android Systems
Android Tablets APPS and Beyond
Smartphone Apps
Smartphone Games Apps Repair and Tools
Tablet PC
Car Sharing Car Leasing
Tabler Pc
Fly Fishing
Toyota Cars
Vacation Rentals
Stock market
NYSE
SSE Stock
Freight & Shipping News
Gluten
Lactose
Gout
My Coupon Life
Campgrounds Check
Outdoor
Kitchen Design and Redoo
Bath Remodeling
Palm Springs
Las Vegas Vacation Tipps
Lake Powell Boating
Homes for lease
Electric and green Car Blog
Pearls and diamonds
Whatsapp and forget SMS Blog, What is Whatsapp App
Solar Panel Solar Energie Sun Power Blog
|
Music / Musik » alt.fan.frank-zappa » A declaration of independence
| A declaration of independence [message #240201] |
Fr, 17 März 2006 01:02 |
|
http://www2.townonline.com/beverly/artsLifestyle/view.bg?art icleid=451056&format=&page=1
Beverly's Rykodisc returns to its roots of producing great indie music
for very serious listeners.
It's an independent record label that has always attracted fiercely
independent artists.
All 56 CDs by iconoclastic rock legend Frank Zappa are mainstays of
its catalog. It was once home to the classic David Bowie and Elvis
Costello catalogs. The company is dead serious about its independence,
right down to its location: no shiny corporate buildings in Los Angeles
for this label. In fact, for most of its history it's been located
right here on the North Shore. For the past few years, Rykodisc, one of
the largest independent record labels in the United States, has had
offices on Cabot Street, right across the street from Beverly City
Hall.
During its 22-year history, Rykodisc has also released CDs by such
major-league artists as Jimi Hendrix and The Who's Pete Townshend.
Recently it has released brand-new CDs by pop luminaries Big Star and
punk pioneers The Misfits, and re-issued the out-of-print Nine Inch
Nails classic "Pretty Hate Machine." For true music fans, Rykodisc has
always been an indispensable resource for excellent music.
Rykodisc has gone from being independent, to being owned by a New
York-based media company, and now back to independence once again. But
it's always functioned best as its own company, unfettered by outside
authority - much like many of its artists.
High-tech pioneers
Rykodisc started life as the world's first CD-only record label in
1984. It got its name from the Japanese word for thunder, "ryko," which
literally translates as "sound from a flash of light." It was a fitting
description for the brand-new laser-optical media known as the compact
disc.
The company's founders, Don Rose, Rob Simonds, and Arthur Mann,
wanted to cater to the real audiophile, as they didn't expect CDs to go
mainstream for five or 10 years at least. There were only five CD
manufacturing facilities in the entire world at the time. Rykodisc's
founders planned to approach hugely popular artists that they loved,
such as the aforementioned Zappa, Bowie, and Costello, who owned the
rights to their own recordings, and pitch them the idea of Rykodisc
releasing their catalogs on CD. It was a brash idea for such a tiny
company, but it worked.
Rykodisc's Jeff Rougvie started working there early on, after a stint
at an independent record store called Capitol Records (no relation to
The Beatles' record label) in Hartford, Conn.
"This little store - it was probably 200 square feet, it was tiny -
was the first store in America to be selling CDs," Rougvie says. "We
brought a lot of imports in. We had a huge clientele of crazy rich
people, who had private planes, who flew into Connecticut to buy mono
operas from Germany."
The store was buying a lot of CDs from a distributor in Minneapolis
- Simonds, who would become one of the founders of Rykodisc - who asked
Rougvie to work for him. He jumped at the chance to work for a feisty
independent label, and, at the same time, get out of Connecticut.
"Let me tell you: the punk rock music scene in Hartford in 1982 was
not hot," he says.
Rougvie started working for Rykodisc the same month it released its
first CD, "Comin' and Goin'" by jazz musician Jim Pepper. Soon, with
the exploding popularity of CDs, the label grew, and Rougvie became
Rykodisc's head of A&R, or "artists and repertoire," the man
responsible for scouting and developing talent.
"And the first thing I did was write the Bowie proposal, and about
nine months later we got the Bowie catalog," he says. "It was a great
way to start."
By the end of the 1980s, Rykodisc branched out from re-issuing
catalogs and began releasing brand-new recordings from artists. One of
the first original bands they signed was the Australian group The
Screaming Tribesman, who had a top-10 alternative radio hit in 1988
with their song "I've Got a Feeling
By the mid-1990s Rykodisc had grown immensely, and released CDs by the
popular Boston-based band Morphine, whom Rougvie remembers fondly.
"They were such an amazing live band," he says. "They were just so
different from anything else. The studio records, as good as they are,
don't really do justice to how great the live thing was. It was just
such a vibe, you know?"
The film director David O. Russell (who would later direct critical
favorites "Three Kings" and "I Heart Huckabees") used songs from
Morphine's album "Cure for Pain," which would go onto sell more that
250,000 copies, for the soundtrack of his first film, "Spanking the
Monkey."
The New York years
By the late 1990s, Rykodisc's music was everywhere, and its
distribution arm was impressive. Palm Pictures, a media company owned
by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, came calling to buy
the label.
"I think that what Palm was really looking for was a mechanism to
distribute their own stuff, and that the Rykodisc label had some value
to them but wasn't really their primary target in the purchase," says
Rougvie of the deal. "And they put out a lot of stuff with varying
degrees of success."
The label did stay in Massachusetts; it had an office in
Gloucester. But it scaled way down out of necessity, as its re-issue
deals with Bowie and Costello had expired.
"It had become very top-heavy," says Rougvie, who left the label
during the Palm years. "When we had the Bowie catalog, the Costello
catalog and the Zappa catalog all at the same time, that was just sort
of like printing money. But when the Bowie catalog went away, a huge
chunk of revenue went away. Having that kind of safety net, that's why
major labels are still around: they own the Led Zeppelin catalog."
Palm was interested in keeping Rykodisc as a niche label that was
more about singer-songwriters. But the combination of major-label and
independent-label thinking didn't mesh.
"The label got pretty beat up during the Palm years," says Rougvie.
"The people who were running Palm and Ryko - it was kind of weird fit.
It was a very different sensibility. Most of those guys came from a big
major-label background, and were about spending money to make money."
So Palm sold Rykodisc to an investment group, which at the time
included one of Rykodisc's original founders, in 2002.
Independent again
Shortly thereafter, Rykodisc set up shop on the second floor of
Beverly's Oddfellows Building. (It also has offices in New York City,
Pennsylvania and London.) Lately Rykodisc has acquired several other
independent labels, including Restless.
"It's a very good fit. A lot of snotty punk rock stuff that's
great," says Rougvie. It also got the label Emperor Norton, home of
electroclash band Ladytron and the soundtrack of the film "Lost in
Translation." And they've branched out seriously into the realm of
DVDs, including new releases by musician/producer Brian Eno and the
late stand-up comedian Bill Hicks. They've also released the
self-titled album by up-and-coming Massachusetts-based band Waltham
(see related story).
"It's probably my favorite record we've ever done on Ryko," says
Rougvie, who actively pursued the band. "All the songs are about girls.
It's guitar driven - they get compared to Rick Springfield a lot.
They've been on MTV. They won a bunch of Boston Music Awards. They're
just serious, hard-working, amazingly talented guys. They really want
it more than anybody I've ever worked with."
With Rykodisc's return to independent roots, Rougvie feels that the
company is back doing what it does best.
"The label is really realigned to what it was about," he says. "And
I think in a lot of ways we've kind of broadened our horizons. Because
some of the things, frankly, that were mainstays of what the label used
to do are not as viable as they used to be."
Rycodisc, which has released rock, punk, folk, country, blues and dance
music in the past, has just begun to release heavy metal CDs.
"We have been repositioning Restless as a metal label," he says.
"It's pretty bulletproof. It kind of comes and goes in waves of
popularity, but it never goes away enough that there's not an audience.
Metal fans are metal fans for life."
One can say the same about Rykodisc's fans. Rykodisc, as it's gone
from independence to corporate ownership and back again, has not just
survived but thrived. Through it all, one thing has never changed -
it's always been about good music.
To use a musical analogy: It pays to follow your own drummer.
David Rapp has written for the magazines American Heritage and
Out. He worked at Rykodisc from 1998 to 1999.
|
|
|
| Re: A declaration of independence [message #240216 ] |
Fr, 17 März 2006 19:55 |
|
In article <1142553740.457680.258220 [at] i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
ZutboF <zutbof [at] hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> http://www2.townonline.com/beverly/artsLifestyle/view.bg?art icleid=451056&form
> at=&page=1
>
> Beverly's Rykodisc returns to its roots of producing great indie music
> for very serious listeners.
Thanks for the post, pretty interesting.
I'm glad it's come through, even if I'm not buying
anything on it these days.
And I'm glad it came through the various and sundry
legal rocks thrown its way by a certain large personality
a few years ago.
JH
|
|
|
| Re: A declaration of independence [message #240217 ] |
Fr, 17 März 2006 21:14 |
|
> Lately Rykodisc has acquired several other
>independent labels, including Restless.
Does that by any chance mean that they've acquired rights to the
Straight catalog stuff that came out on Enigma/Restless? I've seen one
dealer (Metro City Records, who advertise in Goldmine) taking preorders
on a reissue of _Lick My Decals Off Baby_, but I haven't been able to
find any more info on that.
Your pal,
Biffy the Elephant Shrew
|
|
|
| Re: A declaration of independence [message #240219 ] |
Fr, 17 März 2006 23:27 |
|
Biffy the Elephant Shrew wrote:
>>Lately Rykodisc has acquired several other
>>independent labels, including Restless.
>>
>>
>
>Does that by any chance mean that they've acquired rights to the
>Straight catalog stuff that came out on Enigma/Restless? I've seen one
>dealer (Metro City Records, who advertise in Goldmine) taking preorders
>on a reissue of _Lick My Decals Off Baby_, but I haven't been able to
>find any more info on that.
>
>Your pal,
>Biffy the Elephant Shrew
>
>
>
I dunno if this is related to your question at all, but, FWIW, _Farewell
Aldabaran_ has been released on CD a couple of months ago on
_radioactive records_ (www.radioactiverecords.com).
Hasi
|
|
|
| Re: A declaration of independence [message #240220 ] |
Sa, 18 März 2006 01:09 |
|
In article <1142626456.851049.74370 [at] u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
"Biffy the Elephant Shrew" <biffyshrew [at] aol.com> wrote:
> > Lately Rykodisc has acquired several other
> >independent labels, including Restless.
>
> Does that by any chance mean that they've acquired rights to the
> Straight catalog stuff that came out on Enigma/Restless? I've seen one
> dealer (Metro City Records, who advertise in Goldmine) taking preorders
> on a reissue of _Lick My Decals Off Baby_, but I haven't been able to
> find any more info on that.
>
> Your pal,
> Biffy the Elephant Shrew
I found this ... interesting
< http://www.cduniverse.com/sresult.asp?style=music&HT_Sea rch=xlabel&HT_Se
arch_Info=Enigma+Retro>
Notice that they've been back-ordered for a couple of months, which may
indicate they are being re-issued, or it may just indicate they are out
of print and there haven't been enough orders to justify the next batch
or .... whatever, but it's interesting to speculate.
|
|
|
Gehe zu:
aktuelle Zeit: Fr Mai 25 20:48:21 CEST 2012
Insgesamt benötigte Zeit, um die Seite zu erzeugen: 0,02292 Sekunden |
