7/23/2023 0 Comments Yep roc records loginGaillard invented his own jive patois and, with his partner Slam Stewart, gave the world such eccentric gems as “The Flat Foot Floogie” and “Cement Mixer Putty Putty.” Jack Kerouac rhapsodized about him in On the Road. In a song called “Yep Roc Heresay,” Gaillard inimitably reads the menu at an Armenian restaurant. They called it Yep Roc, a term they’d heard the offbeat R&B singer Slim Gaillard use while they were working at Rounder. In 1997, Dicker joined him in North Carolina they started a label of their own. He started Redeye to distribute records by local acts. Hansen had moved to Chapel Hill, following a new music retail opportunity. In the early-’90s, while still living in Massachusetts and working at Rounder, Dicker started Upstart Records, an appropriately named little label that hewed to his interests. It’s just after that I would really focus on: Now that we have this, how are we gonna get this to the people?” I love the curation aspect of building a catalog, and that’s always been a mutual thing. “I really enjoy connecting the dots, from getting the order to seeing it on the shelves to seeing somebody pick it up and walk out the door with it. “I enjoy the social networking of record stores,” Hansen says. Meanwhile, Hansen learned how to market and sell the product. “The model for a lot of our experience was learning the business through the ground up at Rounder.”ĭicker began working with artists, understanding how to recruit them and, in turn, how to promote themthe stuff of forming and shaping a label. It was there that they both found their own professional niche. At Rounder, surrounded by masses of music, they could experience that sensation almost daily. But in the mid-’90s, discovering the sheer volume of stuff called music could still feel revelatory. In our world of doom folk and slowcore and chillwave and concomitant mp3 blogs, many take for granted a multitude of musical genres and easy access to them. That’s when they experienced what Hansen calls a “musical explosion”the realization of just how much, and how many types of, music existed. They moved to Boston and nabbed jobs working for the influential roots-music-oriented label Rounder Records. They played speedy songs that echoed the contents of their record collections of British punk outfits like the Buzzcocks. That’s when the music bug hit big-time: They formed a band. Long before Yep Roc existed, Glenn Dicker and Tor Hansen were just two junior high friends whose relationship reached critical mass in high school. “Some of those things,” admits Dicker, “they just kinda fall in your lap.” Two nights later, The Minus 5 will take the same stage. On Thursday night, Nick Lowe will be at the top of the bill. This weekend, Yep Roc will commemorate its 15-year anniversary with four nights of concerts showcasing some of its marquee artists. For the past decade-plus, he has released those records on Yep Roc, the little North Carolina label that started in 1997 with nothing but a few connections. No longer encumbered by the more emphatic commercial demands of a music career, he is in the rare position to make and issue the music he truly wants to hear. In his later years, he has become a countrypolitan éminence grise. Nick Lowe penned “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” and made a small fortune through that song’s inclusion on The Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992. Yep Roc, the label Dicker co-founded 15 years ago, has since released five albums by the Minus 5, along with two by McCaughey’s Young Fresh Fellowsand another 300 or so by a panoply of bands from around the world. So he’s like, ‘Would you be interested?’” “He called because he was a big Nick Lowe fan, and he thought it would be a cool thing to be on the label that Nick Lowe was on. The album was by The Minus 5, McCaughey’s sporadic side-project. “He basically was calling to say that he had a record he recorded with Wilco as a band that was gonna be called Down With Wilco,” remembers Dicker.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |