better late than never right? sorry for the delay, but the beets were speaking last week and healey, penny and i had to
get up to the mountains to pickle a couple of bushels with her aunt and uncle! so here i sit monday morning, red handed (literally)
pecking out the balance of last weeks update. being that it’s mid july, there aren’t a whole heck of a lot of
new releases, but there are a few new essentials (endless boogie/full house head being the stand out) and a ton of restocked
greats from summer’s past that are still relevant for summer’s NOW. there’s more expected this week, so
as always, to stay on top of all the recent arrivals (as well as other odds and ends of interest), follow tequila sunrise
records on facebook and/or twitter ! gotta run, hope to see you soon!
062508
TEQUILA SUNRISE RECORDS IN THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS
From East to West, Girard Avenue is the center of a flurry
of entrepreneurial moxie
By BECKY BATCHA Philadelphia Daily News
BIG DREAMS aren't exactly new
to Girard Avenue.
Way back in the 1820s, the street's namesake, Stephen Girard, had the grand vision to build a monumental
boarding school for fatherless boys.
To see just how monumental, mark your calendar for a Thursday between 9 a.m. and
2 p.m., when the gargantuan Founder's' Hall at Girard College (intersection of Girard and Corinthian) is open free to walk-in
visitors. How big is it? Let's just say that the rain gutters along the roof are six feet wide.
Since the 1860s, Girard
Avenue has also drawn religious pilgrims chasing the biggest dream imaginable: a miracle, via prayers to the late Philadelphia
Bishop John Neumann.
In 1977, the Vatican certified three miraculous cures and made Bishop Neumann a saint. And the
faithful say that the intercessions keep coming at the National Shrine of Saint John Neumann (5th and Girard, open 7 a.m.
to 6 p.m. daily.)
Yes, that's Saint John Neumann himself on view in the glass casket under the altar. As it turns out,
unusual interment is something of a Girard Avenue theme. Sixteen blocks west, the body of Stephen Girard is entombed in a
marble sarcophagus in the lobby of Founder's Hall.
Vision quest, '08
What's new in the big-dreams
department is a flurry of entrepreneurial moxie along the length of Girard Avenue.
After decades of blight, the whole
street seems to be abuzz with ambitious business plans - for outfits that run the gamut from shops and restaurants to a mom-and-pop
fish-ecology enterprise that aims to establish the Good Housekeeping seal of sustainable seafood.
"It's energizing
to be here," says Spanish-born Nicole Marcote, a budding retail mogul who co-owns a fancy-foods store called Quince (209
W. Girard) with her mother, who's a public-school Spanish teacher and has just opened the stylish vintage consignment shop
Reverie (205 W. Girard) with a different group of partners.
Among the scores of other eager-beaver entrepreneurs that
the Daily News found operating on the avenue between Frankford Avenue and the Schuylkill is Derick Warren, a muscular former
bartender, restaurant manager and casino worker - "I did it all," he says - who now owns a genteel coffeehouse called
the Coffee House (113 W. Girard), in the shadow of the Market-Frankford El tracks.
This summer's most genteel touch
is Warren's homemade simple syrup for sweetening customers' iced drinks.
Kensington rising
The
Coffee House is situated on the block where the Market-Frankford El meets SEPTA's Route 15 trolley, at the crossroads of the
cluster of gentrifying neighborhoods that some hip young things are now calling Port Fishington.
Two blocks west, enterprising
Fishtown native Amanda Bossard (Girls' High, class of '92) has just opened the seafood shop Otolith (143-47 W. Girard Ave.)
with her husband and former school chum, Murat Aritan. "We met at Meredith. I was 8. He was 10," she says.
More
recently, they've both fished commercially in Alaska. The two own a 65-foot boat, the F.V. Sunset, from which they're now
shipping restaurant-quality fish across the country for sale at the shop and by special order (otolithonline.com).
And
that's just the first frame of the young couple's feature-length dream.
Bossard and Aritan plan to add a casual-dining
restaurant to their Girard storefront. (Before that, look for them selling beer-battered halibut sandwiches on the Parkway
during 4th of July festivities). They also intend to become a national watchdog for sustainable seafood: Keep your eyes peeled
for the Otolith seal of approval, already on their own canned salmon.
A couple blocks west of Otolith, we come to Mr.
Moxie himself: Joe Matisoff, a buttoned-down banker with 35 years in the business. At age 59, instead of resting on his laurels
and his money bags, Matisoff decided to rehab a dilapidated Kensington landmark and - here's the moxie part - start a brand
new indie bank.
One homey little extra at Hyperion Bank (199 W. Girard Ave.) is the plate of free cookies at the counter,
baked on-site. A bigger attraction is the spectacular stained-glass window on the ceiling of the institution's 2nd floor offices
- the jewel in the crown of the building's award-winning historical renovation.
For a peek, take the lobby elevator
to 2, where you'll also find what Matisoff calls "the CEO pop-up button" - a silver bell to summon help if there's
no receptionist at the desk. Since his office is the nearest one to the bell, he says, "I'm the one who pops up."
Have trolley, will travel
The neighborhood around Quince, Otolith and the bank has recently
become a well-traveled annex to trendy Northern Liberties (traveled, especially, by arty young people on bicycles), with enough
restaurants, retailers and art galleries to be a destination in its own right. See our day tripper's map on Pages 4-5.
More
clandestinely, the rest of Girard Avenue is also starting to patch together a resurgence, with new policing, lighting, tree-planting
and other efforts falling into line along the route of the restored Route 15 trolley.
While a lot of the territory
is still "very much in the urban-pioneer category," according to Rojer Kern, a planner for the City Commerce Department,
the tea leaves look auspicious. "It's just starting to take off," he says.
On this front, the big dreamers
are the members of the Girard Coalition, a collective of neighborhood groups along the length of the avenue. Along with brass-tack
politicking, they've hung decorative banners on lampposts and issued design guidelines for sprucing up storefronts.
Cornerstone
Market & Produce (19 W. Girard Ave.), a high-end neighborhood grocery store, is a poster child for the new look that the
coalition's after, with a colorful cloth awning and an inviting chalkboard menu. Metal security gates and boarded up windows
are specified under the guidelines to be Girard Glamour Don'ts.
Outer boundaries
One worthwhile
destination in the avenue's edgier precincts is Tequila Sunrise Records (525 W. Girard), specializing in used and new vinyl
LPs - including some from the ambitious young owner's own Tequila Sunrise label.
If you're into obscurities like
reissued LPs by the '60s psychedelic rocker Erkin Koray, congratulations, you've reached heaven. When he came up with his
business concept a few years ago, owner Anthony Vogdes says, "my thing was to be a boutique-y specialty record store."
Like a boutique wine shop, Tequila Sunrise has a neatly typed précis attached to nearly every record in its
inventory, detailing its provenance and character. Vogdes, a former record store clerk, says that he cribbed the idea from
the hyper-organized record stores of Tokyo, where these helpful mini liner-notes are common. "I feel like it's full disclosure."
(emphasis added)
The men's clothing store EndustrE (2826 W. Girard), run by an entrepreneurial start-up team of
Muslim artists and designers, is another boutique retailer on an unlikely block.
EndustrE's chic store fixtures and
urbane clothing labels - including Z-Brand shirts (as seen on Usher and Will Ferrell) and Kentucky jeans (as sold by Southern
California's Fred Segal) - would be more at home on Walnut Street than out here at the frontiers of Urban Pioneerland.
A
lot of the inventory is exclusive to the store (and the affiliated Kamouflage at the Cheltenham Square Mall), since EndustrE's
keen-eyed buyers try to stock emerging brands that no one else is carrying locally. The look is hard to classify, bridging
urban and LA style. "I think the right word is contemporary-artsy with an edge to it," says store clerk Hamid Holloman,
one emerging designer to watch.
A milestone - and a deal
This summer the Althea Gibson Community
Education and Tennis Center (1000-1038 W. Girard Ave.), North Philly's little athletic center that could, celebrates its fifth
anniversary.
As big dreams go for giving kids hope, this one's right up there with Stephen Girard's colossal old school.
Founder and director Bronal Harris basically willed the modern five-court tennis gym into existence in June 2003. She and
it now serve hundreds of 8- to 17-year-olds, many from public housing nearby.
In addition to tennis drills, the center
teaches math, reading, science, chess, Scrabble, nutrition, gardening and graphics.
The downside to being a beacon
for the neighborhood? Harris says that some enthusiasts have taken to cutting holes in the fence to use Althea Gibson's three
outdoor tennis courts after hours.
To stem the tide and raise much-needed cash, she's inviting any adult who donates
$50 or more to use the center's pristine outdoor courts on evenings and weekends this summer - in good conscience and with
the lights on at night. Players must reserve court time a day in advance; call 215-360-7453 for more details.
041708 BREAKIN WITH THE WARRIORS BY PAUL PHILTHY
070308 SIMPSON SENT ME THIS ONE FROM THE L.A. WEEKLY CIRCA 2006
BACK TO THE GARDEN The music
and mythology of Laurel Canyon
By STEFFIE NELSON Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Money may not buy you love, but $2.4
million can buy you prime real estate on “Love Street” — as in the song Jim Morrison wrote about living
in Laurel Canyon in the ’60s. The Doors’ singer and his girlfriend rented a house near “the store where
the creatures meet” (the Canyon Country Store) but nobody remembers exactly where. “It’s like bars where
Hemingway drank,” says Laurel Canyon author Michael Walker as he opens the gates of 2401 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, marked
with a Sotheby’s “For Sale” sign. “Jim Morrison lived in every house.”
Morrison did not
live at this corner of Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain Avenue, where a huge log cabin built by Tom Mix stood until it burned
to the ground in 1981. Frank Zappa did though, with his wife, Gail, and daughter Moon Unit, their in-house nannies the GTOs,
and a host of rock royalty and freaks who streamed in at all hours of the night and day. (Alice Cooper auditioned for Zappa’s
record label at 7 a.m. and got signed.)
From what was once a bowling alley, the rambling, bucolic property rises up
unmortared stone steps dotted with colorful tile, to seating nooks built into the hillside, where visitors would get stoned
before entering Zappa’s strict no-drugs zone. Artesian waterfalls flow into ponds, and there are caves big enough to
sleep in if you don’t mind bats. “It was just magical,” recalls groupie goddess and former GTO Pamela des
Barres (who remembers exactly where Morrison lived). “It was like going into what I would imagine to be a forest where
Pan frolicked around. It was my playground, but I was still in awe of it.”
The golden years of the Laurel Canyon
scene, roughly 1967-’74, saw the birth of the singer-songwriter movement and the rise of huge stars, from folk-rock
bands like the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Jackson Browne,
Carole King, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, the Flying Burrito Brothers, America, and the Eagles — many of whom played
on each other’s records and slept in each other’s beds. This concentrated blitz of creativity and passionate entanglements
has been compared to Paris in the ’20s, and although that’s a stretch, it was certainly as influential as the
Greenwich Village folk scene and Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Although other musicians lived in the neighborhood,
including Love’s Arthur Lee, the signature canyon sound was folky and introspective, representing a deliberate retreat
from the darkness of the late ’60s and the chaos of the Sunset Strip.
Two new books, Walker’s Laurel Canyon
and British music journalist Barney Hoskyns’ Hotel California, delve into the myths and the music created during this
era. While taking different paths, both chart the scene’s idealistic, communal beginnings in the late ’60s through
its devolution into crass commercialism, drug binges and broken friendships by the mid-’70s.
“In a way
it’s a death-of-’60s-utopianism story,” says Hoskyns, who previously explored Los Angeles’ music history
in 1999’s Waiting for the Sun. “When you look back down the corridors of rock & roll time there aren’t
that many homogenous scenes that you can write about, that are like stories of dysfunctional families where there’s
a real coherence in what a group of artists is trying to do and say. It seemed to be crying out for an overview. Plus you
have this great setting, this rural oasis right in the midst of freeway hell.”
Always a bohemian enclave, Lookout
Mountain Avenue was settled before building codes existed, on an impossibly narrow, winding road with a couple of flimsy wooden
guard rails that “wouldn’t even stop a skateboard,” notes Walker as we drive past. Tiny, Hobbit-like cottages
are piled on top of modern boxes, and the views are some of the best in Los Angeles. Here, Joni Mitchell, herself “discovered”
by David Crosby, bought a cottage that her boyfriend Graham Nash would later immortalize in the song “Our House.”
According to lore, it was at this cottage with the two cats in the yard that Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonized together
for the first time, although some insist the historic moment took place at Cass Elliot’s, nearby. Mama Cass, true to
her nickname, hosted regular salons where musicians and freeloaders would come to swim in the pool, get high, eat and jam,
and she definitely did play musical matchmaker, asking the newly formed duo of Crosby and Stills if they might need a third
voice. As Nash recalls the moment in Laurel Canyon, it took them three tries to get Stills’ “You Don’t Have
to Cry” perfect, and then they all started laughing because it sounded so amazing.
These artists were tapping
into the public’s desire for a softer sound. “After 1968 I think there was a sense in the global music community
that we need to slow down and chill out,” says Hoskyns. “We’ve got to get ‘back to the garden,’
to use Joni’s phrase. And I think what Laurel Canyon represented was a place of refuge. And it happened to be right
in the middle of the city. The recording studios were there, the clubs, down on the Strip. I think it was a place to stop
and take stock. What did the seismic ’60s phenomenon mean? People had not looked inward up to that point; everyone was
looking outward, usually through the prism of drugs. And now it was like, ‘My god, we really need to look inside and
ask ourselves some questions.’ ”
And the answers happened to sound like hit records. In 1969, David Geffen,
then a 26-year-old talent agent who managed Laura Nyro, took on Crosby, Stills & Nash. Soon he partnered with Joni Mitchell’s
manager Elliot Roberts; Lookout Management became Geffen-Roberts and in 1971 the multitasking Geffen launched Asylum Records
with the backing of Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun. Says Hoskyns, “In essence what people like David Geffen did was
to market the very non-commercialism, turn that kind of laid-back, patched-denim dropout thing into a product.”
Joni
Mitchell in ''Our House,'' which she shared with Graham Nash Laurel Canyon scenesters found a regular hangout in The Troubadour,
which opened as a folk club in 1957. “It was like the clubhouse,” says the scene’s unofficial photographer,
Henry Diltz, who also played on its stage with his band the Modern Folk Quartet. “It was a place you would go and all
your friends would be there. You knew all the groups that were playing, you had affairs with the waitresses, and Harry Dean
Stanton would be sitting at the bar.” For ambitious singer-songwriters, this was also the only game in town; multi-night
runs bestowed instant stardom on both Joni Mitchell and Elton John. And for the period of time that the scene was small and
new enough to be contained inside the club’s doors, the Canyon’s idyllic feel was carried down into Hollywood.
But in 1973, the Roxy opened in direct competition with the Troubadour. Its owners were Geffen, Roberts and Lou Adler,
so naturally they had money on their minds. “The Roxy was very symbolic of a shift toward something that was more glitzy
and in-crowd and movie-star oriented,” says Hoskyns. “Maybe this was the dawn of the celebrity era. You think
of it in terms of Cher and people like that. It certainly isn’t about banjos anymore.” Geffen was changing —
dating Cher, for one thing — and with him the scene.
In Hotel California Hoskyns tells the story of a legendary
summit in Geffen’s sauna, during which he informed his guests — Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Ned
Doheny — that he was starting a small record label: “I’ll never have more artists than I can fit in this
sauna.” Yet just two years later Geffen sold Asylum to Warner Bros., and then in 1973 the label merged with Elektra.
Geffen immediately cut Elektra’s artist roster and soon he was racking up enemies almost as quickly as the zeros in
his paychecks. By the early ’80s the Bronx entrepreneur’s ruthless business practices had led to his falling out
with Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Henley.
In 2000 Geffen told his biographer that if he never spoke to Joni Mitchell
again he “wouldn’t miss her for a minute.” Yet he tells Hoskyns that his Laurel Canyon experience was “the
greatest ride that one could possibly imagine.” Hoskyns is touched by Geffen’s sentiment: “The era still
means way more to him than anything that happened subsequently. I’m convinced that he did care about these artists,
he did care about their music. At the same time he saw them as a stepping stone to far greater riches.”
Mitchell,
Crosby and Eric Clapton in Cass Elliot's backyard, 1968. Voices of a generation or not, by the mid-’70s some of the
leading lights of the scene — including Crosby, Stills, Henley, and Frey — began, says Walker, “to behave
very much like Nero on his way to the vomitorium.” Hoskyns doesn’t spare us the sordid details, and it gets a
little tedious. But then, for some, it was always tedious. A string of early ’70s feel-good hits like America’s
“Ventura Highway,” Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes,” and the Eagles’ “Take It Easy”
(co-written by Browne), made the Hollywood hippies easy targets. Frank Zappa came up with the derisive term “navel gazers”
to describe his former neighbors. Tom Waits, whose song “Ol’ 55” was covered by the Eagles, said the band
was “about as exciting as watching paint dry.” Taking those sentiments a few steps further, Lester Bangs wrote
the essay “James Taylor Marked For Death,” declaring, “I call it I-Rock . . . because most of it is so relentlessly,
involutedly egocentric that you finally actually stop hating the punk and just want to take the poor bastard out and get him
a drink, and then kick his ass.”
Although Walker says his most revelatory musical discovery during the writing
of Laurel Canyon was Arthur Lee’s dark, orchestral psych pop, he believes in the lasting influence of the navel-gazing
singer-songwriters. “Whether you like it or not a whole generation defined itself by the music that was made here during
the late ’60s and early ’70s. It was an ongoing history while they were living it, and that really helped people
shape their lives and understand their values.” And who can argue with the lasting testimony: Young’s “Ohio”
(written in Nash’s backyard), or King’s Tapestry or Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, Blue and Court and
Spark; or even the Eagles’ canonical (if overplayed) Hotel California, which chronicles the scene’s decline into
nihilism.
Laurel Canyon, born of personal curiosity about the neighborhood Walker has lived in for the past nine years,
doesn’t wallow too long in this dirt. “I was trying to write about the psychology of what it was like to be here,”
he says. “I deliberately stayed away from certain stories.” So we don’t meet Crosby or Stills clutching
their freebase pipes in the ’80s, but we do get a somewhat long-winded — and not especially relevant to Laurel
Canyon — social history of cocaine, from the Incas to Coca Cola and Cole Porter lyrics. One former Elektra employee
says that doing lines was so routine within the Hollywood music industry, the label handed out promotional coke mirrors to
announce the release of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”
These sorts of distinctions make the
two books interesting companion reads. Hoskyns the music historian clues us in to lesser-known talents like Judee Sill, a
folkie junkie whom he believes “should be rediscovered like a Nick Drake . . . I think she was really nothing short
of a musical genius.” Walker, meanwhile, introduces us to then-16-year-old Morgana Welch, a second-generation Sunset
Strip groupie and Laurel Canyon dweller who was a preferred consort of Led Zeppelin.
“I tried to interview as
many people that were on the periphery of these music stars as the music stars themselves,” says Walker, “because
Graham Nash and those guys had created this sort of popular-culture hurricane, and they were in the eye of it. And the eye
of a hurricane is a pretty good place to be — it’s calm and balmy. But right on the edges of it is where the maelstrom
is, and that’s where a lot of these people found themselves.”
Photo Courtesy Numero Group There was, however,
one peripheral figure who brought the edge, the maelstrom, right into the hurricane’s eye. Both Walker and Hoskyns retell
the saga of an aspiring singer-songwriter named Charlie Manson, a hippie hanger-on who was befriended by Dennis Wilson and
Byrds producer (and Doris Day’s son) Terry Melcher, and whose fractured lo-fi folk was championed by Neil Young. Young
even recommended Manson to Mo Ostin, who wasn’t impressed, but Melcher made the fatal mistake of backing down on a promise
to connect Manson with Columbia Records. This slight wasn’t the only source of Manson’s wrath, but it was one
of them, and as it happened the house in Benedict Canyon that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate rented during the summer of 1969
was owned by Terry Melcher. It’s unclear whether Manson had put a hit on the producer and his friends or whether he
was just sending him a message. Either way, a chill set in, and doors in the canyons were locked at night for the first time.
There are some who say “the sixties” didn’t end until mid-way through the ’70s, others who
believe Helter Skelter in August followed by Altamont in December slammed the book on the decade the minute the clock struck
1970. The hippie look and lexicon certainly lasted well into the ’70s, but purity in any movement is fragile and fleeting.
Born of isolation and insulation, the Laurel Canyon scene couldn’t survive the scrutiny or the influx of drugs and money.
By the end of 1969 the royalties from CSN’s massively successful debut album had already bought the musicians new homes
in other, more upscale neighborhoods.
Yet the magic of recorded albums is that they are, truly, a record — of
a mood, a time and a place. Gorgeous specimens like Crosby, Stills & Nash can exist separately from the flops and the
feuds, the rehabs and the reunion tours. Happening upon “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” on the car radio, you can still
feel the electric thrill of a moment that was less about dropping out than tuning in.
060908
IN THE NY TIMES…
For Some Music, It Has to Be Wal-Mart and Nowhere Else
By ROBERT LEVINE
One of the
biggest music events of the summer has already taken place in Fayetteville, Ark. From Tuesday through Thursday last week,
the Bud Walton Arena at the University of Arkansas presented shows by Journey, the country singer Keith Urban, the “American
Idol” personality Carrie Underwood and the alternative rock group All-American Rejects.
The occasion that brought
this all-star line-up together? Not a festival or cause but Wal-Mart Stores’ annual shareholders meeting. Wal-Mart was
the largest music retailer in the country last year, so musicians (and their labels) are eager to maintain good relationships,
appearing in the special concerts for the chain, which are also open to the public.
During her performance, Ms. Underwood
volunteered that a Wal-Mart had recently opened in her hometown, Checotah, Okla., and Keith Urban changed his lyrics from
“Goodbye, city, I’m country-bound” to “I’m Wal-Mart-bound.” And the retailer is using
its leverage to aggressively pursue new deals.
On Tuesday Wal-Mart started selling on an exclusive basis a three-disc
collection by the popular 1980s band Journey called “Revelation.” The difference, however, is that there is no
middleman: the album was bought directly from the band without the help of a record label. Journey went right to Wal-Mart
and kept most of the money a record company would normally take as profit for the group. Last year Wal-Mart made a similar
deal with the Eagles, who like Journey are represented by Front Line Management, the nation’s largest music management
company.
The deals highlight the changing dynamics of the music industry as once-powerful labels decline because of
the migration to digital downloads. To fill the gap, musicians are scrambling to connect with fans, and Wal-Mart is using
these exclusive deals to assume a new role: hit maker.
The Eagles’ double disc, “Long Road Out of Eden,”
sold 711,000 copies in its first week and three million since its release, according to Nielsen SoundScan, impressive numbers
at a time when CD sales are declining. Journey sold 45,000 albums in its first three days on sale, and Irving Azoff, founder
and chief executive of Front Line Management and a music industry veteran who ran MCA Records in the ’80s, predicted
that it would sell more than 80,000 copies in its first week. That is probably enough to debut in the top five, and significantly
more than its last album sold in total.
“With the downturn, the labels couldn’t match the marketing commitments
that Wal-Mart could make,” Mr. Azoff said. “It was well in excess of anything a label could do.”
Front
Line took on some of the traditional work of a record label, producing a video and promoting songs to radio. But most of the
marketing was done at Wal-Mart itself. The chain ran print, radio and television advertisements that promoted the exclusive
availability of the Eagles album. Stores display the Eagles and Journey albums in several locations, not just the music department,
and this week some stores had the Journey DVD playing on their big-screen televisions.
In some ways, the arrangements
that Wal-Mart has made with Journey and the Eagles represent the mainstream equivalent of the path that artists like Radiohead
and Nine Inch Nails have taken by releasing albums on the Internet without a traditional label.
“It just goes
to show you that fewer artists need to be associated with record companies,” said Larry Mestel, chief executive of Primary
Wave Music Publishing and former chief operating officer of Virgin Records. “They don’t need to give up a big
chunk of money to the record companies when they’re iconic. They can go direct to Wal-Mart and make four to five dollars
per CD.”
It’s hard to tell how much traditional labels are threatened by the prospect of artists’
selling directly to retailers. New albums from more established acts can be less profitable if they have negotiated a higher
royalty rate. And although the Eagles are reliable sellers, Journey is what industry executives delicately refer to as a “heritage
act,” a steady summer concert attraction that sells relatively few albums of new material.
One reason the Eagles
and Journey albums have sold so many copies is their price: $11.98. That’s an unusually low retail price, especially
for “Revelation,” which consists of one CD of new songs, one CD of new renditions of Journey classics and one
DVD of a recent concert performance. But one of Wal-Mart’s goals in promoting such releases is drawing customers into
stores with a bargain they can’t find anywhere else.
“The goal with almost everything we do is to figure
out how to make some kind of a profit,” said Gary Severson, Wal-Mart’s head of home entertainment. “But
this can also give us the opportunity to add to the brand, and I hope we’ve accomplished that as well.”
Exclusive
album deals have been happening for some time with that goal in mind. Wal-Mart and Best Buy, the two largest physical retailers
of music, often get special editions of albums, with exclusive songs or video footage. In 2005, Wal-Mart made a deal to become
the exclusive distributor of Garth Brooks albums, including a new collection of outtakes. But the Eagles and Journey are the
first two major acts that have released albums of new material that are available at only one retailer. And although record
labels tread carefully around such deals, for fear of upsetting rival stores, bands need not be so sensitive.
This
summer Wal-Mart will carry an exclusive release by the young country singer Taylor Swift in a promotion that also calls for
Ms. Swift to promote L.E.I. jeans. (In this case, Ms. Swift’s label was part of the deal.) And Mr. Azoff said that he
was already talking to Wal-Mart about an exclusive deal for Fleetwood Mac’s next release. “Classic rock really
works there,” Mr. Azoff said.
Front Line is only one of the major management companies that are trying to take
on roles that have traditionally been filled by labels. The Nettwerk Music Group, which manages Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan,
has set up custom labels for some small artists. And Q-Prime, which manages Metallica, recently hired an executive to start
an independent label of sorts.
The idea of treating the label as a middleman that can be cut out fits Wal-Mart’s
approach to cost-cutting. In the past the chain has pushed record labels to lower their wholesale prices, arguing that customers
would buy more CDs if they were less expensive.
“I think that with any product, when the price goes up, the demand
goes down,” said Mr. Severson. “Sometimes it’s about the right artist with the right product at the right
price.”
For Journey, some of the success of “Revelation” is also about the right timing. For a band
that hit its commercial peak in the early ’80s, Journey has enjoyed an unlikely revival in the last few years. The song
“Don’t Stop Believin’ ” has been licensed for “Family Guy,” “Scrubs,” “Laguna
Beach” and, most famously, the last episode of “The Sopranos,” and the exposure increased the song’s
sales on Apple’s iTunes store. Journey, which has gone through several vocalists, recently hired a new singer, Arnel
Pineda, whom Journey’s guitarist, Neal Schon, discovered singing the band’s covers on YouTube.
But Journey
would almost certainly not be selling as many albums without the support of Wal-Mart.
“Shelf space has shrunk
so much over the last five years that for anyone to give you shelf space and exposure is a big deal,” said Terry McBride,
chief executive of Nettwerk Music Group. “Should the labels be worried? There’s been a move away from the labels
for a number of years now. And it’s not necessarily their fault. The shelf space to have those records sell just isn’t
there. That’s the market reality.”
Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Rosenbloom contributed reporting.
050108
TEQUILA SUNRISE RECORDS IN THE FISHTOWN STAR
here’s the unedited version of the column we submitted to the fishtown
star…
MAY WHINE
Johhny Brenda’s is supposed to be the epicenter of NoLib/Fishtown Hip. We’ve
never checked it out, but we hear they get a lot of good bands! We’re gonna hafta go down there on Thursday, May 1st,
though, when Jack Rose returns to town. What can we say about Jack Rose that hasn’t already been said? That he’s
eight feet tall, that he hammered through that tunnel faster than a steam-drill, and that he founded Fishtown – all
in one day! Plus, he plays guitar, and he’ll be whipping that box at JB’s as he has from coast to coast and across
the pond. With him on the bill are D. Charles Speer & the Helix (NNCK-affiliated downer singer-songwriters) and Randall
of Nazareth (former Pearls and Brass guitarist and bassist for Pissed Jeans), so all in all it’ll be a pretty acoustic
evening, and no real need to bring your earplugs.
You might need ‘em Tuesday May 20 (at 8:30 sharp, and also
at Johnny Brenda’s), when KTL rolls into town. They take their name from Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder”
(songs on the death of children) but don’t expect classical romanticism. Expect “extreme computer music,”
“drone-doom,” and “dark ambient.” KTL features Stephen O’Malley of SunnO))) and Khanate on guitar,
with Peter Rehberg, the avant-click computer-noise whiz also known as PITA. Expect to be overwhelmed by sound.
Heroic
noise titan Hiroshi Hasegawa will unpack his synth at Big Jar Books, on Wednesday May 21st at 8 pm. He’s headlined at
Brooklyn’s NO FUN festival in the past, but this will mark his first appearance in Philadelphia. Prior outfits he’s
participated in include Astro and South Saturn Delta, as well as the legendary C.C.C.C. (Cosmic Coincidence Control Center).
As Wikipedia will tell you: “Astro's music is made using a Moog synthesizer and covers a wide range of styles in the
experimental psychedelic music field, from space music to psychedelically tinged harsh noise.” Noise? Noice! Along with
Astro on the bill, _____ will perform; another in a series of seemingly endless permutations of the infinitely elastic Bardo
Pond collective. BTW: Big Jar Books (on 2nd Street in Old City) has long been a whistle-stop on the American sub-underground
railroad, and if those philobiblists would bother to update their website’s calendar to something more recent than March,
there’s prolly a lot more interesting things coming up on the radar down there. Nice list of all the cool shows you’ve
already missed, though!
I guess we’re not going to be able to get out of this column without making a note of
one more show at Johnny Brenda’s: Kurt Vile and the Violator’s CD release party on Thursday, May 8. K.V.’s
crazed Dylanesque psychedelic folk-rock noise thing is worth checking out. Opening acts include geezers King of Siam (not
Bhumibol Rama IX of Thailand, the world's longest serving monarch, but Philadelphia’s longest-serving garage-prog band)
and Meg Baird (of Espers fame, and whose first solo release was on Tequila Sunrise, though we haven’t kept up with her
subsequent output).
Stanley Milgram, Tequila Sunrise Records
Tequila Sunrise Records is a record label
and shop located at 525 w. Girard Avenue. Their most recent release is a double cd by Jack Rose entitled Dr. Ragtime And His
Pals. For more info please go to www.tequilasunriserecords.com
043008 TEQUILA SUNRISE RECORDS
ON AMAZON
if you haven’t seen it already, check out the boogie witch and tequila sunrise records mention on wfmu.
thanks brian!
