Daily Iowan

Issue date: 6/21/07 Section: 80 Hours

Joining the hipster ranks of independent-music cities such as Lawrence, Kan., and Omaha, Neb., Iowa City stakes its claim to being a music town. Since the Do It Yourself scene boomed in the '80s and then flourished through the '90s, small labels have been prizes hidden in humble (i.e., not necessarily Coastal) towns across America. In smoky venues, cluttered garages, and crowded backyards, small labels and new bands have clustered in Iowa City for decades.

But in today's revolving door of both changing and failing bands, the independent-music industry that represents those groups struggles to stay afloat in the face of the corporate competition's blitzkrieg.

The music business isn't only full of white men in tony Italian shoes lounging with lattes in offices full of archeological treasures from cultures long ago, if not far away. Small labels across the country, much as the ones in Iowa City, subsist in the basements and living rooms of passionate individuals dedicated to keeping music personal.

The record industry remains a tough one to rip into, raising the question: "Why?" What happens behind the doors of skyscrapers in Chicago, New York City, Dallas, Nashville, or Los Angeles that makes it so difficult for talent to make it?



Slanted Records

Corey Gingerich doesn't have an office. He doesn't have his own recording studio. But he does occupy a regular seat at the back of Iowa City's Tobacco Bowl. It smells of stale cigarettes from the days and years before and is full of the people who kept returning after their first step inside.

Gingerich, a senior at the UI, is the owner of Iowa City-based label Slanted Records.

"[The label] is Plan A for me," he says, puffing on a Marlboro. "College is the Plan B in all of this."

Originally called Slanty Shanty Records at its inception in 2005, the label earned its name from the Dodge Street home Gingerich and his friends inhabited during Slanty's first years. Exposing his crooked teeth to shove in another cigarette, he describes the sky-blue house as a cake on the verge of toppling over. After deciding to record some of the songs he and his friends developed over the summer, Gingerich put fate in his own hands and began the label without any idea of how the industry worked.

Slanted Records now has a handful of local acts much like his own band, A Vague Sound. Holy Roman Empire and The Puritanicals, Texas-group Girls Rise with Heat, and Chicago rocker Simon Parks all produce under Gingerich's label.

"That's just my main roster," says Gingerich, sipping coffee. "We're Coast to Coast, and, surprisingly, most of the bands on my label are pretty good college bands."

But when he first entered the scene, friends would often approach - and expect - to be recorded.

"You'd be amazed at how some people all of a sudden like you," he says, as his friend smiles at him.

"Yes, I'm a groupie," she says joking.

While Gingerich revels in his small-town success, he knows his place in the grand scheme of the music industry. He says he would prefer the way indie music used to be, rather than what it is today. Referring to small bands on "small" labels - in actuality owned by large corporations, he shrugs. "That's just the business now."

But accepting big-box competition is only the beginning of the difficulties facing many independent-record labels.



Scenester Credentials

Among other individuals in the small-town, independent-music scene, partners Nick Bergus and Matt Show of Iowa City label Scenester Credentials can't deny that it all comes down to out-of-pocket, cold-hard-cash.

"Let's talk about [the group] 7,000 Dying Rats," says New Pioneer Co-op deli manager Show as he smiles wryly. The label lost almost $4,000 on one 7-inch record. Bergus, a UI graduate student, calls the failure a "learning experience." Now he and Show can laugh together about the story, but the bitterness of losing a load of startup cash still hurts.

"The whole process started off as this mystery," says Show, fiddling with a stack of CDs from his seat at the Tobacco Bowl. "We thought, well, we kind of know these guys [in 7,000 Dying Rats], and they kind of know what they're doing - you never know that it'll take you five years just to break even or take that loss."

Fortunately for Scenester Credentials, Show's and Bergus' "really fun, expensive, record-releasing hobby" finally can financially perpetuate itself.

With wives and children at home, the two don't give the label all of their time. But by the end of summer, Scenester, with a lineup of more than 20 bands, plans to release three records.

Specializing in punk music, the label's latest joint-releases come from bands as close as Muscatine and as far as the UK.

And it all started with simply "wanting to be a part of it." Independent labels don't want to have it all, Bergus says - they simply want a piece. Scenester Credentials has subsisted for nearly seven years since its start in late 2000, and both Bergus and Show have no desire to drop their side project anytime soon.



Fighting the big box

This isn't an uncommon tale: boy goes out into big world and realizes his small-fish status in the gargantuan ocean of the talent (and talentless) music industry. But the thing is, according to Scenester Credentials and Slanted Records, as well as other Iowa City independent labels, including Tortoise and Hare Records, Super Amigo Records, Trailer Recordings, and Hot Potato Records, that they aren't all in it for monetary success.

And while Gingerich's success can be conventionally measured by albums sold and new bands signed, making it big increases the chance that his label could be engulfed by a larger label.

Warner owns a large chunk of former Ma-and-Pa independent labels, acquiring them as they surface in their attempt to breach the gap between the big-time and the little league.

DIY labels view this as a travesty. The notion that large labels don't physically glue album covers together, or take records to the pressing plant, or have real relationships with their bands (as Scenester Credentials does for each band's 7-inch record) is a painful one.

And those aren't the only differences. Labels such as Seattle's SubPop records and Suicide Squeeze pushed themselves into an entirely separate financial ball game by joining Alternative Distribution Alliance - 95 percent owned by the Warner Music Group - which allows labels to sell records at national chains, such as Best Buy and Target.

"[Large] labels are extremely important because bands and just a few guys can't physically do [production] all on their own," says Bekah Zietz of Suicide Squeeze. She adds that, once labels get big, they can't to do it all.

But that's exactly what Iowa City's record labels are attempting.

While the '90s have come and gone, and independent music may not be what it once was, the smallest indie labels would rather turn back time.

"I got the idea [to start Slanted Records] because independent music got popular and the whole market changed," says Gingerich, saying music took a back seat to making money. "I just want it to go back to the way music was."

E-mail DI reporter Brigid Marshall at:
brigid-marshall@uiowa.edu

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