Items: Gail Davies, a celebrated Nashville singer-songwriter-producer who has made 10 albums for major record companies but says she has yet to receive her first royalty check, has refinanced her house and started her own Little Chickadee Records.
Cult-hero singer-songwriters Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch, also in Nashville, became weary of major-label red tape and artistic interference and joined with fellow musicians Tammy Rogers, Harry Stinson and Mike Henderson to form Dead Reckoning Records.
Harvard- and UCLA-trained businesswoman and banjoist Alison Brown has been running Small World and Compass Records labels for two years and says she expects to make her own records there, too, as soon as she’s free of other contractual obligations.
Previously unknown singer-songwriter Celeste Krenz of Denver has gained significant national recognition through the new “Americana” alternative-country hit chart after being launched on a shoestring on her partner’s new Emergency Records label.
What’s happening here? In the middle of the country music boom, a revolt seems to be taking place against Nashville’s major record companies.
“Country record production has been a very isolated thing,” says Kevin Welch. “Ninety-eight percent of it emanates not only from one town but from one set of studios, one set of players, one set of songwriters, one set of producers. There’s no way there’s a lot of vitality in a scenario like that. It’s not healthy.
“A hundred years ago there was just one guy picking and singing. Then another guy came along and said, `I believe I can help you, son,’ and that person started making a lot of money. Then he started having a staff and then a building, and the next thing you knew for every person picking and singing there were about 100 people around him, like a layer of fat.
“What has happened is, the whole thing flip-flopped. The one person picking and singing became the support apparatus providing income for these hundreds of people.”
Which is what Welch, his colleagues at Dead Reckoning and an impressively proliferating array of other mini-moguls want to correct–and, in fact, what many visionary performers have wished to change about the record business for a long time.
But, as Harry Stinson notes, it was far too expensive for individuals or small groups of people to try to make high-quality records until the recent advent of new digital recording technology. That, in Alison Brown’s words, has made it possible for artists to “make pretty much great-sounding records in their basements.”
Suddenly an artist didn’t have to count on selling hundreds of thousands of records in order to earn back the money the company had spent making his or her album. Instead of having to sell 350,000 records to break even, suddenly 350 would do.
Three hundred and fifty?
“To hire top musicians and go into a really fine studio, do the artwork and press up an initial 1,500 CDs and 1,000 tapes costs $15,000 to $18,000,” says Bob Tyler of Emergency Records, partner of Celeste Krenz and launcher of her wave-making second album, “Slow Burning Flame.”
“I did the engineering, and we cut it at a $10-an-hour studio. We’d save money for a month, then go in the studio and add stuff, then save more money. We released her first record, which was titled `Edge of the Storm,’ in November of ’93 and toured where Celeste grew up in North Dakota. It sold about 350 records in the first week, and that pretty much paid for everything.”
Similarly, when Kieran Kane and Harry Stinson began thinking about Dead Reckoning Records , the goal was to make a record only for a market in Norway, Stinson says. He adds that Tammy Rogers, a fiddler-singer with whom he and Kane had been working, came in to make an album she felt she could sell out of the trunk of her car at shows.
Selling records that way has tended to be regarded as “hillbilly,” Kevin Welch notes, but it’s also virtually all-profit.
“If somebody’s making a record for a dollar and selling it for $10 or $15, it doesn’t take long to do the math on that,” he says. “I know one guy whose name I won’t use who made a live record for $5,000 and at this point has sold close to 40,000. Think about the money that guy made–at $13 , let’s say–for every one of those. Then think about what he would’ve made if he had sold 40,000 records on a major label. He’d lose his deal.”
Instead of getting 75 cents–theoretically–for every CD she sells for a major label, Gail Davies says, she gets $15 for every copy of her current “Eclectic” album on Little Chickadee.
“For the first time in my life, when people write in–to P.O. Box 210151, Nashville TN 37221–and say they want to buy the new Gail Davies album and `Here’s my check for $14.99 plus $2 for postage and handling,’ that’s my money,” she says.
“I don’t have to give anybody any of it. I wrote 100 percent of the songs, I own the publishing on them, and I just say, `Thank you very much. We’ll buy food with this.’ “
But neither Davies nor any of the rest of these mini-moguls is going to tell you selling records is just a matter of cashing checks.
Small, independent record companies have to do for their artists many of the same expensive things the majors have to do for theirs. And whereas the majors have huge cash reserves and own their own distribution networks, independents must operate on tight budgets and go through the hassle of contracting with distributors if they want to get their music into stores. They also have to buy ads and hand out seemingly endless free promotional copies.
Noting that for every copy she gives away “I lose $15,” Davies says she sent out 55 copies to Americana-format radio stations, another 50 to stations in Great Britain, and her distributor just called saying he needed at least 30 for “promotional purposes.” In addition, she hired a radio promotion person and a publicity person and “it’s getting into a lot of money, which is one of the scary things about doing this.”
For Davies, a single mother of a 12-year-old boy, it is perhaps scarier than usual.
“I refinanced my house and got a fairly good amount of money and thought, `OK, I’m gonna have enough money to make the record and live for four or five years if I’m really careful,’ ” she says. “It’s going to turn out to be about a year, because there are so many things you don’t realize you’re going to have to do and pay for.”
Still, a lot of people are doing it. Led in the 1970s by Rounder Records in Boston and Sugar Hill Records in North Carolina and then John Prine’s Oh Boy Records a few years ago, a lot of small but impressive artist-input companies have come into the market in the late ’80s and ’90s. A random sampling includes the Acoustic Disc label of string genius David Grisman in California, Bohemia Beat Records in Denver and Austin, Texas, DejaDisc in Austin, Winter Harvest and Meridian Records in Nashville, and so on.
Harry Stinson observes that banding together as he and Kane, Welch, Rogers and Henderson have done lessens some of the scariness in a variety of ways. For one thing, they can offer a prospective distributor several albums and artists rather than just one, and they can put on shows together every time the firm needs a cash infusion.
As for how any of these new companies are doing financially, most say it’s still early but they’re encouraged and hope eventually to sign additional deserving acts.
“We’ve managed to keep it going for two years, and that says a lot,” says Alison Brown of Small World and Compass. “I’d say we’re doing well.”
The upshot of all this? Maybe something a lot bigger than it looks now. All these acts play music that’s edgier, meatier, more acoustic-oriented and traditionally less marketable to the masses than that associated with Nashville’s country mainstream, and they could be harbingers of a change in direction.
“Rap and grunge music both started out this way,” Welch points out. “They started out pressing up these little records and exchanging them between bands and then selling them mail-order through ads in the back of magazines. It was simply for the love of the music, totally groundswell, and it started catching on and selling and making a lot of money.
“Then all of a sudden they were selling a lot and making a lot of money. And then here came the major labels.”
