You're with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

Jessica Hopper & Charles L. Hughes, Editors

Margo Price, Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir

Francesca Royster, Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions

Lynn Melnick, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton

Lance Scott Walker, DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution

Eddie Huffman, John Prine: In Spite of Himself

David Cantwell, The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard

Stephen Deusner, Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers

Eric Harvey, Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality

Kristin Hersh, Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood

Hannah Ewens, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture

Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

Chris Stamey, A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories

Holly Gleason, editor, Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives

Adam Sobsey, Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography

Lloyd Sachs, T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit

Danny Alexander, Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige

Alina Simone, Madonnaland and Other Detours into Fame and Fandom

Kristin Hersh, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt

Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

John T. Davis, The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again

David Menconi, Ryan Adams: Losering, a Story of Whiskeytown

Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

PETER BLACKSTOCK & DAVID MENCONI, FOUNDING EDITORS

you’re with stupid

kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music

BRUCE ADAMS

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by Bruce Adams

All rights reserved

First edition, 2022

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adams, Bruce (Record label founder), author.

Title: You’re with Stupid : kranky, Chicago, and the reinvention of indie music / Bruce Adams.

Other titles: You are with Stupid | American music series (Austin, Tex.)

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: American music series | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021060196 (print) | LCCN 2021060197 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2120-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2616-9 (PDF ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2617-6 (ePub ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kranky (Record label)—History. | Adams, Bruce (Record label founder) | Record labels—Illinois—Chicago—History. | Alternative rock music—Illinois—Chicago—History and criticism. | Underground music—Illinois—Chicago—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3792.K73 A32 2022 (print) | LCC ML3792.K73 (ebook) | DDC 780.26/6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021060196

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021060197

doi:10.7560/321201

For Annie

contents

Introduction

1. Hey Chicago

2. Honk if You Hate People, Too

3. That That Is . . . Is (Not): 1991–1992

4. Accelerating on a Smoother Road: 1992–1993

5. Analog Technology Makes Space Travel Possible: 1994

6. Slow Thrills: 1995

7. The Taut and the Tame: 1996

8. London Was Ridiculous: 1997

9. An Audience Hungry to Hear What Would Happen Next: 1998

10. Both Ends Fixed: 1999

11. After This They Chose Silence: 2000–2002

Epilogue: Specifically Dissatisfied Since 1993

Acknowledgments

Author’s Notes

Index

The photographs appear following page 130.

introduction

I’m not sure which makes you more Post-Rock, having played on a Tortoise record, or having eaten at Jim’s Grill.

—Matt Lux

It must have been late in the fall of 1991 when I had my first meal at Jim’s Grill. I started working at Cargo Distribution in September that year, and sometime after that the domestic buyer Joel Leoschke and I stepped out for lunch. Joel took us on a short drive to Irving Park Road by Lincoln Park High School to a diner. The chef, Bill Choi, had introduced Korean dishes like Bi Bim Bop, cabbage soup, and vegetable pancakes into the grill’s standard greasy spoon menu. There was an autographed Smashing Pumpkins Gish poster on the wall. The Pumpkins were the up-and-coming Chicago band, clearly aiming for bigger things and gaining momentum. I came to discover that many musicians in town frequented Jim’s. After we placed our orders at the counter and sat down, Joel grabbed a section of the newspaper, opened it up, and started reading. Later, more than a few people told me they found that habit to be irritating. I took another section and did the same. I squirted some of the red chili paste onto my zucchini and kimchi pancakes and chowed down. It was the first of many lunches together, some of which would evolve into if I had a label conversations. Joel had a reputation as a curmudgeon and, to a certain extent, cultivated it. One of the jokers, and there were many, who worked in the Cargo warehouse had written Honk if You Hate People, Too on the dusty back of Joel’s car.

You could say that Joel and I had metaphysically met years before at the cutout bin. If you frequented record stores in the 1980s and ’90s, you know what I’m referring to: the place where you’d find discontinued and overstocked LPs and cassettes for half price or less. These bins were full of oddities and outliers that hinted of secret histories and hidden paths outside of the loud underground rock music that took up most of my listening time. I knew that the predecessors of the distorted guitar rock I loved, the Stooges, Velvet Underground, and Captain Beefheart, were relatively unknown in their time. What I discovered among the cutouts were even more obscure musical strains from the ’70s that not only ran counter to the Beatles-Stones-Zep-Floyd narrative of mainstream rock music but also pointed to wider parameters indie guitar bands were not touching. Money was often tight. I had developed the habit of visiting the record store weekly, and the cutouts offered an affordable and intriguing island to explore. The low prices there meant you could buy on impulse and take risks.

An early cutout-bin find for me was Evening Star by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. The cover art was appealing: a misty island on the horizon, glowing in the twilight. So was Fripp’s guitar, stretched out and cycling across each track. Some of Evening Star was soothing; some tracks were appealingly named An Index of Metal and struck me as discordant and unsettling. The mix intrigued me, and as an instrumental album it was well suited for late-night or early morning listening. I ventured further into a group of artists aligned with Brian Eno and the Editions EG label, picking up Jon Hassell’s Dream Theory in Malaya LP and the Brian Eno-Harold Budd LP The Plateaux of Mirrors for a couple of bucks apiece. I stumbled across Psalm, by the Paul Motian Band, again lured by the cover art, which featured a smeared photo of a fire cutting through a patch of meadow. The blurry jazz of the album presented the evocative, lonesome tones of Bill Frisell as a variant on the potential of the electric guitar. I was prompted to investigate the ECM label that released it. Over lunch, Joel and I would share impressions of particular albums and how we discovered them thumbing through a cutout bin. Every day it seemed to us that indie rock was getting more and more calcified, aiming for nonexistent brass rings in the wake of the grunge explosion. More formulaic and tight-assed. Those old EG and ECM records represented a set of less-constrained possibilities.

When people asked Joel how things were going at Cargo, he often replied, We’d be dangerous if we had a brain. Working there was a case study in what not to do. By 1992 the conversations Joel and I had about how we would run a record label had moved to how we could start a record label, impelled by hearing a duo from Richmond, Virginia, called Labradford. Joel told me that he had put some money aside, without mentioning a sum. Whatever it was, I knew it would be sufficient, providing our prospective label operated within its means. Joel wouldn’t have proposed it otherwise.

1

hey chicago

The story of kranky is a Chicago story. In the early eighties, as a global music underground was developing, a network of wholesale music distributors, independent record labels, clubs, recording studios, college radio stations, and DIY publications established themselves in Chicago. The city had been a center of the recorded music business since 1913, when the Brunswick Company started making phonograph machines and pressing vinyl. Chicago had been home to jazz pioneers Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong for a brief, impactful time. In the 1950s Chess Records was a force in the blues and R&B scenes. Alligator Records was an independent blues label started in 1971. But the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM) in 1965 is what created the precedent and working model for independent organization and avant-garde music in the city that eventually was reflected in house music and underground rock. AACM’s self-reliance and the border-crossing devotion of related musicians who incorporated ancient African music into the creation of future-facing music put Chicago on the map of innovative and independent music centers.

It was possible to get cheap apartments to live in or practice space for your band or even a storefront to open a distributor or store. The hollowing of the city’s industrial base had left empty warehouses and business spaces that were ideal for multiple activities, especially for anyone willing to live near a highway, train line, or in a low-income or overlooked neighborhood. One point of origin for house music was an underground club called The Warehouse.

The people behind the bars or record store counters, or piling the boxes up in warehouses, were often musicians, or artists, or both. Well-stocked record stores and distributors brought records into the city, giving people opportunities to listen to and process music. The radio provided access to multiple college stations playing a dizzying variety of music. Rent was cheap enough that people didn’t need full-time jobs and could pursue their enthusiasms. David Sims of The Jesus Lizard moved to Chicago in 1989 and recalled in the free weekly the Chicago Reader in 2017 that the band’s landlord raised the rent on the apartment five dollars a month every year. When we moved in it was $625 a month, and when I left 11 years later it was $675 a month. My experience was similar.

If you were a music lover but not a musician, you could work for a music-related business or start your own. Self-published fanzines popped up, and people had workspaces where they could screen print posters and T-shirts for bands. The major labels and national media were located on the coasts, lessening the temptation for bands to angle for the attention of the star-maker machinery. The circuitous impact of all the above was meaningful in shaping how and why Chicago would become the fertile center of the American indie rock scene, and why it produced so much music that broke the stylistic molds of that scene.

I moved to Chicago from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the summer of 1987. I shared a house with a roommate from Michigan in a northside neighborhood called Bowmanville and started work in a suburb called Des Plaines, right by O’Hare. It was at a distributor called Kaleidoscope, run by the unforgettable Nick Hadjis, whom everybody called Nick the Greek. His brother Dmitri had a store in Athens and promoted shows for American bands like LA’s industrial/tribal/psychedelic outfit Savage Republic. Kaleidoscope was a common starting point for enterprising young music folks seeking to enter the grassroots music business within Chicago. People came in from downstate Illinois or Louisville, Kentucky, or Austin, Texas, and worked there before they went off into the city to work at the growing Wax Trax! and Touch & Go operations. Bands were starting their own labels to record and release their music, following the pattern established by the SST and Dischord labels. In those pre-Internet times, scenes grew up around successful bands who distributed their singles via touring the country, getting fanzine coverage, and garnering college radio airplay. The seven-inch single, LP, and tape cassette were the preferred formats for these bands and labels.

Two guys named Dan (Koretzky and Osborn, respectively) who worked at Kaleidoscope had been impressed, and rightly so, by a self-released, self-titled album by the duo Royal Trux that Kaleidoscope stocked. A little later, I had a single called Slay Tracks 1933:1969 self-released by the band Pavement firmly pressed into my hands by one or another Dan and was informed that only a thousand were pressed. I bought it that day. Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn each worked at the distributor, had experience at Northwestern’s WNUR radio station, and were strategically placed to discover and make contact with new bands. They reached out to Royal Trux and Pavement, started a label called Drag City in 1988, and began releasing records in 1989. In a similar process, Joel Leoschke and I would start kranky after hearing the first single from an unknown ambient duo from Richmond called Labradford four years later.

In the economic sense and at the label level, independent or indie refers to a means of production and distribution. Independent labels operated outside the fiscal control of major labels and multinationals that owned them; the so-called Big Six of the Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music, BMG, PolyGram, and Universal that operated from 1988 to 1999. Indie labels arranged and paid for manufacturing themselves and were distributed at least in part by independent distributors like Chicago-based Cargo, or Mordam Records in San Francisco, who sourced records from hundreds of labels around the world and got them into record shops domestically.

The levels of economic independence labels exercised were on a spectrum. So, for example, hardcore punk records on the Washington, DC, Dischord label were manufactured by the British independent distributor Southern Records, which also provided European manufacturing and distribution for a consortium of mostly British labels. Although Chicago-based Touch & Go Records were also distributed by Southern in Europe, the label arranged and financed its own manufacturing. By necessity, most labels had to interact with multinationals, and those interactions also existed along a spectrum. The psych pop Creation label, home to My Bloody Valentine and Oasis, and grindcore pioneers Earache Records with Napalm Death and Godflesh started out as independents in England and were eventually manufactured and distributed in North America by Sony. RED, originally an independent distributor called Important, was eventually acquired by Sony. Virgin/EMI Records opened Caroline Records and Distribution in 1983 in New York. Touch & Go was distributed by both of these distributors.

Labels turned artists’ recordings and artwork into LPs, singles, cassettes, and compact discs. Parts were shepherded through the manufacturing process, and finished products were received and warehoused somewhere, be it someone’s closet, basement, or a wholesale distributor, and then scheduled for shipment to record stores and mail-order customers. Stores needed to know what was arriving when in order to predictably stock their shelves, and so release schedules had to be created, coordinated, and adhered to. Likewise, fanzines, the magazines created by dedicated fans/amateur writers, and radio stations had to be serviced with promotional or play copies of releases so that reviews were run and music was played on air when records arrived in stores or as close to that time as possible. If there was enough money available, advertising would accompany the release. Some labels had paid staff or volunteers who promoted records; others hired agencies. If bands were touring, stock had to be ready for them to sell on the road. And if a label wanted to export releases or had a European distributor, the schedule had to be aligned with the logistics of overseas shipping and sales. At any step in the process of releasing music—manufacturing, shipping, or distribution—a label could easily find itself doing business with a multinational. Complete self-sufficiency and independence for record labels was virtually impossible in practice. It’s fair to say that the greater the degree of economic independence a label possessed, the more aesthetic leeway it had to operate with.

As a musical genre, indie rock is much more difficult to define with precision. The use of it often tells you more about the person using it than about any band or piece of music. Indie rock could be used in 1992 to describe a band or dismiss it, or to do both at the same time. As a pejorative, it worked really well: indie rock meant watered-down and weak if you liked loud rock music, and it meant boring and predictable if you were inclined toward more open-ended musical structures or approaches. If you considered yourself to be with it, listening to someone use indie rock sincerely in conversation (as opposed to in an ironic or self-deprecating way) was a sure sign of hopeless squareness, topped only by alternative on the Open-Ended Scale of Uncoolness. If punk rock was used as praise for righteous motivation or self-reliance, indie rock was directed at a lack of wherewithal or poor organizational skills. In the widest aesthetic sense, and for the purposes of this book, indie rock means guitar bands who released music on independent labels, utilizing the song structures and dynamics encoded by ’60s garage bands and the Velvet Underground.

Many artists and records you will read about here are described as being experimental. The musicologist Joanna Demers defines the general understanding of experimental as any music that rejects tradition and takes risk through running counter to musical conventions. It’s close in the horseshoes and atomic bombs sense, which I think is as good as you can expect for the constantly evolving and moving location of convention in popular music. As with indie rock, experimental often reveals more about the person deploying it than it does about any particular piece of music.

Touch & Go Records was unquestionably the lodestone of the Chicago independent rock scene. Touch & Go began in 1979 as an acidic fanzine in East Lansing, Michigan, by Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson and eventually began releasing hardcore punk rock singles by bands from Michigan and Ohio. The bass player in one of those bands, the Necros, Corey Rusk, a distinctly less extroverted person than Mr. Vee, took on label tasks in 1983, began releasing LPs from Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers, and Killdozer, and moved with his wife, Lisa, to Chicago in 1987. By that time, you couldn’t really call most of the bands on the label hardcore punk, though many of the musicians involved had begun playing hardcore. They took the volume, aggression, and distortion of punk rock, played at mostly slower-than-punk tempos, often with a blues-inspired lurch, and used a wider set of guitar textures. There wasn’t really a genre name for this post-punk tendril until grunge came along, although the latter term became associated with Seattle bands. The term éminence grise describes Corey Rusk’s role in Chicago, and the role of Touch & Go in the city grew almost in proportion to his desire to avoid the spotlight.

The other magnetic pole in Chicago was Wax Trax! Records. Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher opened a record store in the northside Lincoln Park neighborhood in 1978 after selling a Denver store by the same name. The store was well stocked with domestic and imported vinyl, located close to train and bus lines, and quickly became a go-to spot for shoppers. In 1980 the Wax Trax! record label began with the release of a seven-inch single from the Chicago hardcore band Strike Under, followed by the drag artist and John Waters associate Divine’s Born to be Cheap single. The label’s third release was a reissue of the local Chicago band Ministry’s self-released Cold Life twelve-inch single. That got the label going seriously as Ministry’s sound hardened from synth-centric new wave into the blend of harsh electronics and assertive dance beats that became known as industrial in the United States. Another twelve-inch, from the Belgian group Front 242, was licensed, and the growth became exponential. Kids wanted to dance, and the heady mixture of clang and menace Wax Trax! dished out resonated with those already enamored with English goth and New Romantic bands. If you knew anyone who worked at the store or label, eventually you would meet Jim and Dannie. They had great parties with a welcoming aura for all kinds of freaks, outcasts, and the curious. The establishment of label offices at the corner of Damen and Wabansia was one of the key events in the development of the Wicker Park neighborhood as a locale for musicians and artists in Chicago.

There was no rivalry or friction between Touch & Go and Wax Trax!, just a healthy respect. Each label had its own lane and stuck to it, and the role of the Wax Trax! store in supporting all kinds of underground music engendered an affection and respect among those who worked at T&G and musicians on the label. This attitude would come to infuse the Chicago music scene in the years to come.

Meanwhile in Seattle, Bruce Pavitt took on Jonathan Poneman as a partner in his infant Sub Pop venture and released the initial twelve-inch EP recordings by Green River and Sound-garden in 1987. The word grunge was used in the Green River release sheet and a small snowball was pushed down a hill. In 1988, Sub Pop released the debut Mudhoney single in a limited, numbered edition of eight hundred. A genre was named, and a strategy to stoke demand was implemented. In November 1988 Sub Pop started a monthly Singles Club subscription series with a seven-inch from a trio called Nirvana. The singles flew out, it seemed, each on colored vinyl by a new band.

The trio Halo of Flies had debuted in 1986 with the influential Rubber Room seven-inch pressed in a limited, numbered edition, and singer/guitarist Tom Hazelmeyer had the Amphetamine Reptile label releasing more, including the Dope, Guns & Fucking in the Streets seven-inch compilation singles series. Hazelmeyer settled in Minneapolis and started releasing records from bands like Vertigo, Cows, God Bullies, and Tar that lived up to the Noise motto on the label logo. In Olympia, Washington, Calvin Johnson and Candace Pedersen’s K imprint ultimately released more than 130 editions of singles, cassettes, and compilations in the International Pop Underground series, with a highly visible level of participation by women.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Chicago had something that Seattle, Olympia, and Minneapolis couldn’t match—the combination of wholesale distribution and infrastructure to support and power the indie rock boom. The import bin was the first stop at the record store for many obsessives, and British records were at the top of the agenda for record store buyers.

Chicago had O’Hare Airport, where freight companies, customs brokers, and a large UPS facility made bringing import goods from London or sending orders to anyplace in the world possible. The Wax Trax! store took advantage of this, bringing in the newest records from England directly. This geographic placement is what powered Kaleidoscope’s success. Labels could take advantage of this too. Imports from the United Kingdom and Europe would arrive, and brokers would process them through customs. Consolidating freight shipments to overseas customers was a way several labels could batch relatively small orders together so that one big order could be sent affordably to Europe. Recordings from Chicago got to London or Berlin quickly, while records from Seattle or Olympia or Minneapolis often had to make the trip via Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York. Bands from all over the United States and Canada were coming through town, giving savvy distributors and labels the chance to build relationships and get access to the newest recordings and maybe keep a step ahead of the competition. The Wax Trax! and House music scenes each pumped vinyl into the distribution channels and garnered attention in the United Kingdom and Europe, ensuring that Chicago was not seen from the outside as a one-dimensional indie rock town.

When I arrived, Kaleidoscope was an out-of-the-box distributor. Records and CDs came in, and the sales staff endeavored to make calls to stores to sell them and ship them out. Most of the stores we contacted were independent operations, many of which had started in the sixties and seventies as head shops or small storefronts. A few did well enough to open multiple locations. Most were located in big cities or college towns. Kaleidoscope was a midlevel player at best, a rag-tag operation that didn’t have any associated or exclusive labels like RED, Dutch East India, and Caroline in New York. Those larger distributors could offer stores exclusive new releases and had in-house promotional people to get radio play, reviews, and book ads so that those albums or singles entered the stores with some level of consumer awareness. We had to hustle, work old connections and make new ones with DIY bands and established labels, and bring in unusual items from Europe and the United Kingdom. The bigger indie distributors could ship relatively large orders to national and regional chain stores like Musicland, Wherehouse, Camelot Music, Coconuts, Peaches, Strawberries, Rainbow Records, Sam Goody, the expanding Tower Records group, Barnes and Noble bookstores, and (to be noted later) the appliance chain Best Buy. The success of Kaleidoscope rested on the ability of the buyers to find sellable records and CDs, or magazines, fanzines, and even posters, and the sales skill of the staff. And pulling every order quickly, and packing it up, nice and tight, as the owner Nick put it, to ship to Madison or Houston.

Phillip Hertz was the super salesman at Kaleidoscope, and he bolstered business with connections to independent labels. He’d gone to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where he befriended Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt, Simpsons creator Matt Groenig, and K Records honcho/Beat Happening front man Calvin Johnson. Phillip spent some time working at one focal point of the international independent network, Rough Trade Distribution in London, drummed for Aussie proto-grunge heavyweights the Scientists, and hung out with the dub reggae producer Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound fame. In addition to possessing incredible sales skill, Phil had a talent for spotting interesting trends and record labels and talking people into sending records to Des Plaines for him to distribute. Reputation and trust were everything in a small, tight-knit network of individuals in every city who all knew each other.