Thank you so much for the overwhelming support and
encouragement so many of you sent in regards to the last newsletter I sent out.
I was blown away by the outpouring of shared stories, many similar to mine, and
the appreciation for the honesty that I shared when telling my story.
The response was so overwhelming I have not been able to
answer all the wonderful emails I’ve received. I am deeply grateful my words were an inspiration to others
and honestly, I cried when I read some of those emails. If you haven’t heard
back from me yet, know I will answer your email. I believe in saying thank you
and making a personal connection to the best of my ability.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about who I am, and what I
believe in. There’s an ad that runs on TV and radio for Kaiser Permanente, a
health care provider here in the US that states all the things they stand for
and encourage their patients to reach for: exercise, healthy relationships,
good food and plenty of sleep, play time and balance, and clear honest
communication.
It got me to thinking: what do I stand for? What are the
most important values in my life, and how do I share that with the world? A few
that come to mind are sincerity, honesty, patience, enthusiasm, great customer
service, speaking my truth (even if it seems counter productive), treating
others as I wish to be treated, connecting with my customers personally, and
transparency in all actions. As I look back on the twelve years I’ve spent
running and building my business, these are values I’ve tried to incorporate
into Gearhead on a daily basis.
When I first started the label I had another goal: I wanted
Gearhead to be the first label in the history of the music business that was
honest with the bands, and put out music I totally loved and believed in.
As I take a hard look at where I am today personally, and
where Gearhead is, I see it’s more important than ever to honor all these values.
There’s always been the myth of label vs. band, and that myth has created a lot
of false impressions and bad feelings between record labels and the bands
they’re supposedly helping even if they are being totally honest. It seems when
you mix financial gains with art, there’s bound to be misunderstandings
somewhere along the line. It’s enough to make me want to throw my hands up, and
ask, can anyone be honest in this day and age? Can a business truly be
transparent in their business practices and still be successful?
As I sort through the remnants of Gearhead Records, and get
honest with myself about what was and wasn’t working, I realize now that
despite my best intentions at transparency, there were a lot of times where my
actions seem to go against everything I stood for. Although I have never lied
to a band or anyone I’ve worked with, I see now that I was totally lying to
myself, and that’s just as bad, if not worse. I have made a whole lot of
mistakes because of ignorance and getting caught up in the ego of creating a
“successful” business.
I’ve been applying many of the Alcoholics Anonymous
principles to healing my life and bringing it into balance, and the one area
I’ve really been stuck on is Step 4: taking an honest and fearless inventory of
who I’ve harmed with my actions and making amends. In order to build on a solid
foundation, you have to find and fix all the cracks in it. It’s not a pretty
place to be, and honestly, I was able to justify my actions because my
intentions were always the same: treat people as I want to be treated, always
be honest and truthful even if it’s painful. But in my misguided effort to
“grow the business” I let a lot of these values get varnished over by thinking
I was making the best decisions for everyone. I forgot to be honest with myself.
There’s a quote from Ayn Rand that really reflects this:
“You came as a solemn army to bring new life to man [or in my case, to bands].
You tore that life you knew nothing about out of their guts–and you told them
what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every
thought in the farthest corners of their souls–and you told them what it had to
be. You came and you forbade life to the living.”
It started out so pure, so honest. I had no intention of creating
a “business”. I only wanted to share my passion with the world, to share all
this great music that I had access to. I was completely ignorant about what I
was doing; I have a degree in Cultural Anthropology, with an emphasis on
Ethnobotany. I never took a business class in my life. I just flew by the seat
of my pants, working full-time as a sales person for Mordam Records by day, and
at night, learning how to put out records by just doing it: DIY baby! And
gradually, it all shifted after the massive commercial success of The
Hives. That’s when I started
pushing the bands to be something they weren’t, to do something bigger and
better. That’s when the silent destruction began. I started lying to myself,
and following my ego instead of my heart.
I told the bands what they had to do to “make it” even if
they had no desire deep down to become successful. Certainly, almost all bands
I’ve worked with say they want to be
successful, but the truth is, it’s really hard work, and most bands just want
to have fun, play music, party and get laid. And I have always told bands just
starting out: “If it’s not fun, don’t do it. Don’t become a band because you
think you’re gonna be famous.” My pal Toothless George has just released a book
called Band Together about this
very topic in which I am quoted saying this very thing! I encourage everyone
one of you reading this newsletter to check out his book; it has a lot of sage
advice from some of the greatest talent in the world of independent music!
I took something pure, and as Ayn Rand so eloquently puts
it,“tore it out of their guts”. No
wonder most of the bands on the label ended up breaking up, and no wonder so
few of the records ended up breaking even. I owe every one of those bands,
every single customer and person I came in contact with over the years an
apology. I made some terrible mistakes thinking I was doing the right thing.
Even though I was completely transparent in all business practices, including
all the accounting, sales and money, I was lying to myself. I wanted the label
to grow, and to sell a lot of records. I wanted the bands to be splashed across
the covers of the big music magazines. I wanted to look cool because I
discovered a band and brought them to the world.
One of my favorite movies, Almost Famous, has some great lines in it that really highlight
reality of the music industry. If you don’t know this movie, go rent it!! It’s a semi-autobiography by the now
famous movie director Cameron Crowe (Singles, Fast Times at Ridgemont
High, Jerry Macquire among others) about a
geeky music fanatic high school kid who wrote for Creem Magazine and Rolling Stone. The
kid, William, finds himself on the road with a fictional rock band in order to
get an inside look at the band for Rolling Stone Magazine, and during the tour it becomes clear he is not part
of the “in-crowd”.
This movie
reflects my life in so many ways. I started out Djing for a college radio
station, KBVR in Corvallis OR, in 1986. Before that I went to the occasional
concert: The Moody Blues, The Kinks, Heart, and the occasional punk show that
came to town (Dead Kennedys and The Miracle Workers in 1982 stand out big
time). As a DJ, and then as a music critic for the Oregon State University
paper The Barometer, I began going to
shows almost every night. I found myself wanting to be one of the “cool kids”.
I was going to tons of shows, interviewing bands, writing about music and in
general surrounding myself with the “in crowd.” Being around those bands made
me feel cool, and I became friends with many of them. Or so I thought. There’s
a line in the movie where the Lester Bangs character, played by Phillip Seymour
Hoffman says to the kid, William “Oh God, you made friends with them! They make
you feel cool, and hey, I’ve met you, you are not cool.” That one line
perfectly describes my life in a nutshell: I’m not cool; I never was, despite
hanging around cool people.
I’ve been sorting through all the old posters I’ve collected
from my past twenty-five plus years in the music industry, and listing them for
sale in the Gearhead eBay store. I’ve decided to liquidate everything. I’ve dragged boxes of this stuff around all these
years, holding onto them as badges of “coolness”, looking for validation in
these colorful rolled pieces of paper. The truth is, I’ve seen and done a lot
of cool stuff, hung with amazing people and witnessed the emergence of some
unbelievable talent. I don’t need those posters to prove that I’m cool, because
I’m not.
I’m just a music geek girl who got sucked into a life that fed
my soul and my passion, because it made me feel. There’s another line in
that movie where William is interviewing Russell Hammond, lead guitar player
for the (fictional) band Stillwater, played by Billy Crudup. He asks him “What
do you like about music?” and Russell pauses, and then answers “EVERYTHING”.
The movie closes with a line, spoken by the groupie Sapphire (played by Fairuza
Balk): “They don’t know what it is to be a fan, to truly love some silly piece
of music or some band so much that it hurts”. And that’s what it’s all about: loving music and being so
moved by it that it hurts.
As I continue to reassess Gearhead and where I’m at
spiritually, emotionally, financially, and physically, that’s all that really
matters. I still love music deeply, passionately, and joyfully, and it doesn’t
matter that I totally get off on listening to Cat Stevens or John Denver when I
need to feel a little sad and introspective, or that I throw on The Go-Gos or
The Runaways when I need a pick-me-up, or Gram Parsons and Emmy Lou Harris when
I need to feel the ache of raw longing. It’s all about the music, and despite
my mistakes, that will never change.
I deeply love the music I helped release into the world: I
still sing along at the top of my lungs with That Dukes of Hamburg record every
time I listen to it. That White Barons record totally reminds me of what a fool
for love I’ve been when I listen to their anthem “Drank Myself Right Back to
You”. The Mansfields make me want to dance every time I crank it up, and Mensen
and Puffball get my blood flowing and I air-guitar along like a cool rocker
chick when I listen to them. I Walk The Line is still one of my favorite
records for it’s honest dark emotional lyrics, and I still think Red Planet is
still the greatest pop band that no one ever heard. Every single record in the
Gearhead catalog does something for me and I’m grateful that I got to share
that with the bands who created the music, and the fans who supported Gearhead
by buying the records and going to the shows and giving me the guts and
inspiration to keep putting out records by bands no one ever heard of, just
because I thought someone else might dig it as much as I did.
As I find redemption in the music, I know I’m going to be
ok. Gearhead will continue on. I know now I’ll put out another record when the
time is right, and this time, I’ll just let it be what it is; a captured moment
of self-expression, creativity, and passion, not just a cog in the financial
success of a business. In the words of the Flaming Sideburns “We gotta testify,
we gotta go to church, we gotta drink the wine, we got to testify!!” Rock n’
roll still feeds my soul!
Michelle Gearhead
