My Recording Career: LPs and Cassettes

From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990

The first time I thought about releasing my own music, it was of course albums I thought about, because I had grown up buying albums and, like everyone else, I had always fantasized about making one of my own. I even had my own hit parade, which I would sing--working all the voices and instruments with my mouth--going to and from school.

The first project to make it as far as a demo tape was a small group I was in called WMIC (Western Music Improvisation Company) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada back in 1974. At that time I was working as an entertainment writer for a big daily paper. Part of the function was to be lunched and wined by the reps from the big record companies. When Polydor took over the ECM account, I had lunch with the rep, an older man who was basically into his job in order to get free Deutsche Grammophon releases. I was excited about ECM, which at that point was still releasing interesting music. After a while I told the rep I was in a band. He was interested in WMIC and told me he knew Manfred Eicher of ECM personally. If I made a demo tape, he would be sure to get it to Manfred's attention.

We recorded a live show with the help of CKUA radio in Edmonton. A Calgary recording studio let us come in and the guy there spliced the various cuts in the sequence we wanted. This was my first time in a recording studio and I was mystified. About a month later I got a letter from Manfred Eicher's secretary. It said that the label was going into a more "melodic jazz direction" and they didn't need me. No kidding! Since that day, ECM has been a persistent flea in my hide, as I believe it really stands for Exclusively Chadbourne Music.

The rejection was too much for WMIC--the group fell apart. Eventually I started playing solo. Anthony Braxton heard a tape of me and on a visit to Calgary encouraged me to cut a record. "You'll have to put it out yourself," the CKUA DJ who had taped WMIC said. "Nobody else is going to!" At the time, the only people who regarded putting a record out yourself as anything other than a vanity project were jazz and avant-garde improvisation musicians. None of these kinds of records were available in Canada, but it was possible to order by mail from places like the now-defunct M. Webbe Disques in California. I had a lot of homemade records, such as Han Bennink-Willem Breuker New Acoustic Swing Duo , with a hand-painted cover, and Leo Smith's Solo Improvisations, which was brilliant but sounded like it had been pressed on a waffle iron.

The stigma of making a record yourself was nothing compared to the stigma of playing avant-garde music in this part of the world. Most Calgarians were very suspicious. They said, "You can't really play! That isn't real music!" and were really under the impression that I was only a few steps away from selling them the Brooklyn Bridge. I decided to press five hundred copies of my first album, and got the name of a pressing plant-- RCA Special Products--from Coda magazine in Toronto. Coda had started its own label, Sackville . These guys suggested that I start with five hundred records and not commit suicide if they were still in my living room ten years later.

The guy at RCA said I had to bring them a master tape and if I wanted to I could sit in on the mastering. I didn't know what they were talking about but I made plans to go out there and deliver the tape and sit in on the mastering. We recorded the music in two nights on a Dokorder 4-track, mixing down directly to 2-track. A friend put the entire cover together and another friend who was a printer printed them. Nobody in Calgary manufactured albums at that point so we did everything piece by piece. The jackets were folded and glued together by retarded kids in an institution. They also inserted the little flyer I had printed up about the music.

Meanwhile, I dashed out to Toronto with the tape. Luckily I found out that I didn't have to go to the pressing plant itself--located practically in Montreal--but to the RCA studio in downtown Toronto. It was the dead of winter and I still look back and laugh about how funny it would have been had we driven all night to wander into the pressing plant waving our tape around.

When the guy in the studio saw my tape, he laughed. "This is 1/4-track!" he said. "You need 1/2-track!" He made me feel like an idiot, but stopped me from going all the way back across Canada. It turned out he could transfer the tape to a 1/2-track machine. A few hours later I had watched him make a master from my tape. It was fun. I knew then that the next step would be to make a metal plate, then a stamper, then a test pressing, then the album.

I went back to Calgary and awaited the test pressing. It was thrilling to get it, but even better was word that the LPs themselves had arrived at a shipping depot. The album got some good reviews, mail orders started coming in, and I was on my way. By the time I started work on the second album, I only had about a hundred copies of the first one left. Now a vintage copy is worth $25-$50.

The bozo who ran the recording studio in Calgary knew a good thing when he heard one. He offered to do the next LP for me, and handle all aspects of production, for $1,000. This worked out OK. The second album was even better. I knew more about the process and recorded the music in six different sessions, then had an engineer splice it together.

When the master tape went off to Toronto, the guy from the recording studio enclosed a note that was condescending. He said, "The world may be ending and the first thing to go is music." Later on I realized that anytime you get any kind of reaction from a recording engineer, you're on to something. These people's ears are usually so burned out they don't change their expressions no matter what goes on in the studio. By the time the second album was out and bringing even more mail orders--in an edition of a thousand copies--I decided to leave Alberta and seek an environment more hospitable to experimentation in music. Carter's amnesty for draft offenders clinched my decision--I was headed for New York.

The first time I played in New York I got mention in The New York Times from bigshot critic Robert Palmer . He said I had released two albums independently in Canada and had something of a reputation. These were the last words he ever wrote about me. Most musicians like me were putting out their own albums around this time. But rock bands were still following the traditional big label contract like children chase after the ice cream cart. Hustling around New York might hook you up with a small label to do the investment for you and perhaps even pay you an advance, but despite the presence of many small labels, a lot of the best releases were still on artist-owned labels.

During a five-year stay in New York I took part in fourteen different albums, squandering my life savings in the process. The process of making an album was always the same and required a great deal of patience as one saw the project through from concept to getting some semblance of the idea down on tape, hopefully with good sound, to splicing it together on a master tape, to making covers, to getting a decent pressing, to yelling at pressing plants until they finally finish the album, to yelling at distributors. It was a pain in the ass but exciting.

The lack of funds always made it difficult to do anything but the most basic, rushed job on an album. Then you would put up with various pundits bad-mouthing the sound, the artwork, the labels, the fact that the catalog number was written in a weird place, whatever. Despite the experimental nature of the work, the process of dealing with printers, pressing plants, recording studios, and distributors always brought a healthy dose of conformity back to the picture.

I thought the cover of The English Channel was my most personal, expressive graphic work to date. "I can't sell this fucking thing, nobody can read it!" was the response from the salesman at New Music Distribution Service.

When I moved to Greensboro, NC, in 1981 my life had gone through many changes. I now had a child to support and no spare money to throw into recording projects. My most recent LP at that time, There'll Be No Tears Tonight, was expanding my audience and getting me a bit more work. It was still put out by myself, though, and I had no leads on who would finance the next one. My mother and father had paid for Tears because I told them it would be country and western. "You've put out more than a dozen albums," my parents told me during a Christmas visit. "We feel guilty we haven't helped you out."

They weren't up for helping me again. By this time the band that would evolve into Shockabilly was kicking around. We got an Atlanta-based label interested in a demo tape. I spent a few nights piecing it together with some buddies, one of whom promptly sent me a bill for $750 for editing. This was charged at $50 an hour, despite the fact that at least three of the hours had been spent rolling joints and listening to the playbacks. I screamed at him and he apologized and tore up the bill. I'd had it dealing with studios and the people in them at that point, and decided to teach myself to edit. Around the same time, one of the band members came to me with the idea of a cassette company. Cassettes had been kicking around awhile, but they still weren't seen as "real" releases. By this time rock bands were putting out their own LPs. A do-it-yourself record was fine, but a cassette was substandard. I soon realized this was part of a subtle, music industry brainwashing that everyone that gets into music is exposed to. It is part of a plot to keep you down if you are a lowly, unpopular sort with a cheap cassette deck. You are made to feel that success on any level is unattainable unless you buy it at a high price.

I didn't trust the idea of turning over a cassette release to someone else. But two years had gone by without a new release from me, and I was feeling frustrated. At the same time, financial pressures were so great that I couldn't sacrifice the time to create a new tape unless I was assured of some financial return from it, even if it was just $50.

When the Atlanta-based label passed on our demo, it caused a chain reaction within me. I wanted to release a new solo cassette and record it at what could be my major fall concert in Greensboro. I had some new pieces, "Guitar Freakout" and "The Rake II," the latter played on a homemade instrument that was too big to fit in our car.

I had to spend the day of the concert washing an entire house for a painting company. Thus I was already beat when I hit the stage. I liked some of the tape that was made that night, but decided to re-record the pieces at home. In the meantime I had assembled a ninety-minute anthology of guitar solos recorded over the prior ten years. I put together a flyer describing both projects, a ninety-minute tape and a sixty-minute tape, and offered it for sale. I placed an ad in Op magazine and mailed the flyer out to every address in my book.

About a week later, some old friends in Calgary sent a $50 check. I was on my way! I went to work editing the tapes together. First I did the solo anthology, which simply required splicing together various tracks in sequence the way I had seen many an editor work before. It came out fine, and I moved on to "Guitar Freakout," which required more than a thousand separate edits in a twenty-three-minute time frame. In the process I saw that the editor who had done The English Channel for me had misled me about what was "right" and "wrong" in editing. He had continually told me to change my ideas because they weren't "possible." I learned that as long as the blade is sharp, anything is possible.

For the next year I sold a small number of cassettes through the mail. Advertising was not much help, since publications at that time paid very little attention to cassettes. I made lots of music available that hadn't gotten onto record. When I decided to start making a stock of each cassette--ten or twenty copies at a time--and take them on the road to sell at shows, that's when the business really started rolling. At that time we had two cassette machines in the house, and made copies one at a time. Slowly we expanded until now it is possible to make eight at a time, all in real time from the same master signal. Experiments in packaging led to the design of the "envelopes," sticky paper folded directly over a recycled envelope. Although a bit expensive, this form of packaging has gotten a lot of compliments and I feel it is my contribution to recording technology (and more useful than any noise gate or dbx encoder will ever be).

At first I tried to keep only about a dozen cassettes in print. But about two years ago the cassette audience began to boom, and the new collectors wanted back editions they had heard about from friends. As a result, I have nearly forty cassettes in print at this time.

Publications have begun to pay more attention to cassettes. Part of this comes from the fact that the discerning listener has realized that in many cases something much more unique and innovative is going on through the cassette scene than is available on records.

Since I have both albums and cassettes available, it is useful to compare. The album Corpses of Foreign Wars, for example, was done with a big enough budget to permit 24-track recording and computerized mixing and editing. I like it very much. However, cassettes like Secret of the Cooler and F-ck Ch-ck are much more revolutionary because they include material nobody would put on an album--drunks jumping onstage and singing, children playing at a birthday party--as well as performances that have a unique edge to them but were recorded without the benefit of high-tech equipment. The cassette sound--whether heard at home on a stereo deck, in a car, or on a beach with a blaster--lends itself to so many levels of lo-fi or hi-fi that it is possible to do anything on them. The only thing they are not good for is instant prestige, which you can get with an album release. Part of the reason for this is that the music industry is groping for ways to deal with the cassettes that come from the underground. An album of your music will immediately be absorbed into the distribution business, even on a small level, whereas cassettes remain even harder to get than a bag of you-know-what. Sometimes the only way to get a person's music is writing to them directly--which when you think about it is the ultimate way of connecting with an artist.

At the same time the artist can continually update or change cassette releases. Some are into making each cassette different. None of this kind of innovation is possible with records for only one reason--financial! Nobody wants to go back and re-master an LP if it sells out its first pressing.

As more and more people got into my cassettes I was able to document on-going projects better than ever before. First there was the financial support of regular customers and collectors, always ready to spring for a new release. Plus there's scores of associates and fans who will tape shows or jam sessions just to help you put some cool stuff out.

Back in the days when I concentrated on making records, jam sessions would never go beyond the room they were held in. Yet now a recording like Third World Summit Meeting captures the full ninety-minute glory of a relaxed afternoon jam without any pressure to resort to music industry standards.

Lately I have been thinking about giving up making records, and just doing cassettes. I don't know if I will ever do this, because I love records too. However, they come with the stain of shit, the vibe of the music industry that still dominates what gets released and distributed. Even though the number of do-it-yourself LPs has increased tenfold since I started out in Canada, all one has to do is check out what cassettes are available and the conclusion is obvious--records are only telling a small part of the story, and the safest part in many cases. "This is for a record--let's make it sound really slick." "I like that but I don't want to put it on the record." "This is my first LP, I really have to impress people." "I'll do something like this later, but for now I have to do such-and-such to get a record..."

All of these are common attitudes amongst record producers, no matter what they are planning to transfer from 1/2-track to vinyl. But cassettes...the most common point of view is: "Who gives a shit? If you don't like it, dub over it." And after more than a decade documenting my music that's the most exciting thing I've heard.

Another useful comparison is the time needed to complete a cassette or LP, from start to finish. Even the most rushed album will take at least six weeks to be pressed, yet when I am done with this I will take my banjo, do a sixty-minute solo tape, run the master through my machines, and hopefully have a sale made while you're eating breakfast tomorrow.