Indie blues

Rykodisc folds up its Salem tent

by Brett Milano

"Salem-based Rykodisc." Those words have rolled easily off the typewriter for more than a decade, usually in a context friendly to music nuts. Salem-based Rykodisc releases some critically praised acoustic or world-music album. Salem-based Rykodisc does an ambitious reissue project with Bowie, Costello, Zappa, or even Yoko Ono. Salem-based Rykodisc signs yet another integrity artist that the major labels won't touch.

As of this week, Rykodisc -- the label started in 1983 by local entrepreneur Don Rose -- is Salem-based no longer: the Salem offices are scheduled to be completely vacated by the end of the year. The change started last year when Rykodisc merged with Palm Pictures, the company owned by long-time Island Records president Chris Blackwell. At the time Rose and other label reps insisted it was a win-win situation: Rykodisc would get higher visibility and better distribution, and nothing else about the label, especially not its Salem headquarters, would be changing. Then the news hit last Friday that the label is moving to New York to integrate with its parent company. It remains to be seen how this will affect the label's 60-odd employees; most are being offered their jobs back if they're willing to relocate. Rose himself is staying in the Boston area, where he'll remain chairman of Rykodisc and an adviser to Palm Pictures.

"I can only say it will be the same but different," Rose maintains. "Rykodisc has always been something of an anomaly. We've been defying gravity from the beginning, and those forces have finally caught up with us."

Beyond that, label representatives insist there's no story. Rykodisc will keep its identity and its A&R focus, and it's got the cachet of being associated with Blackwell (who's garnered credit in Heaven for making Bob Marley a star). Still, things seldom work that way in the corporate world: when small labels get absorbed into larger entities, it never happens without some degree of compromise. Consider Rhino Records, the much-admired indie that is now effectively the reissue arm of Warner/Elektra/Atlantic: Rhino still does first-rate reissues but has lost some of its eccentricity -- and all of its interest in developing newer artists. Or Slash Records, the great LA indie that never recaptured its initial blaze of glory (with Los Lobos, X, and the Violent Femmes) after it went into Warner Bros. Or Blackwell's own Island Records: before it became absorbed into PolyGram, Island was the most progressive of labels, signing visionary artists like Marley, Brian Eno, Richard Thompson, and U2. Today, two of its flagship acts are Jimmy Buffett and the Insane Clown Posse. (Blackwell left Island in 1997, but both signings took place while he was still aboard.)

Maybe Rykodisc won't devolve quite so drastically, but changes are in the wind. "How can it remain such an eclectic label when the people who were steering won't be there anymore?" asks former marketing director Jamie Canfield, who parted with Rykodisc in the wake of the merger last winter. "It's always been Don's baby, and he won't be in New York. That [the Palm Pictures deal] is going to sap the soul out of what they've been doing for the past 15 years -- it's being presented as a merger, but it's really a buyout. I'm sure you'll see Ryko doing different things, like electronic music -- which is fine, but if Ryko was interested in that, it would have come in on the ground level.'

Even current Ryko employees admit that the future hinges on a few variables -- whether the A&R department will remain intact, and how strong a hand Blackwell's company will want to take. "We've been working [in recent years] to stay afloat, and it's been pretty hard -- we've made some artist choices in the past that weren't necessarily Rykodisc artists," admits promotions director David Greenberg. "There's a kind of music that Ryko is known for, and a lot will be determined by how much Palm wants to invest in that kind of music."

Closer to home, Ryko's departure creates a major void on the local circuit, an end to the era when the three big R's of indie-labeldom -- Rhino, Rykodisc, and Rounder -- would include two Boston labels. True, Ryko's importance to the local scene was largely symbolic. With the notable exception of Morphine (who were brought to the label by publicist Carrie Svingen), it was never in the trenches signing local bands. But it did reissue a vault of local music, giving after-the-fact props to Mission of Burma, Human Sexual Response, Throwing Muses, and Galaxie 500 -- the latter one of the most esoteric bands ever to be honored with a boxed set. More recently, it absorbed Slow River, the small rootsy label owned by Ryko employee George Howard, helping create an international audience for the likes of Willard Grant Conspiracy and Charlie Chesterman. (As of this writing, Slow River will remain a Palm-associated label.)

"The Boston music scene is going to suffer greatly by its absence," says Canfield, who now works at Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label. "I think it did more for the local scene than most people realize. Rykodisc's presence gave other local labels something to aspire to; some of the musicians in town knew they had somewhere to go. Taking the label away from Boston doesn't make sense -- it's like taking Aerosmith and saying, `You guys are moving to the Bronx.' "

Rykodisc was founded as the world's first CD-only label (though it wound up doing cassettes and a small amount of vinyl) -- but in the end, that may have been the least of its accomplishments. More significant was the way it weathered 15-plus years without losing its standing as a label run for and by diehard music fans. Beyond that, Ryko never got confined to one niche. Even among its initial batch of releases, it's unlikely that the same people were buying Richie Havens and the Residents. That diversity would serve Ryko well in years to come. The label never made a name as an alternative-rock stronghold, but it did have Sugar, whose Copper Blue brought it as close as it got to mainstream success.

Like any catalogue, Rykodisc has its turkeys. Unless you get off on the idea of an English hippie playing jam rock on the didgeridoo, you can steer clear of the two albums by Dr. Didg. Maybe it wasn't the sharpest of ideas to sign everybody in the Church to a solo contract when that moody Australian band were having their one hit single. And during the mid '80s, Rykodisc guessed right that neo-Deadhead rock was the next big thing but wrong on the band: at a time when Phish were gunning for a record deal, the label instead went with New Potato Caboose. Oops.

Still, those lapses pale next to the label's genuine accomplishments. From the start, Ryko proved willing to bet the farm on a good idea -- initially when it teamed with Frank Zappa for elaborate, remastered albums from his back catalogue (Ryko still has every Zappa album available, something that never happened during his lifetime). It also went the extra mile on the David Bowie reissue program, gracing his albums with beautiful packaging, much-improved sound, and bonus tracks. (The license has since expired and the Ryko Bowies are out of print, but they turn up in used and cutout bins -- if you see one, grab it.) Elvis Costello's catalogue got the same treatment during the early '90s, as Ryko issued better-sounding, better-packaged editions that put the original Sony/CBS versions to shame.

Those reissues may have heightened Rykodisc's profile, but the label's identity hinged as much on its less mainstream projects. Ryko invested in world music early on, releasing live albums by King Sunny Adé and Ebenezer Obey; later it won a Grammy for the Ry Cooder/Ali Farka Touré collaboration Talking Timbuktu. (Ryko also absorbed the eclectic world-music label Hannibal, which was run by industry veteran and former Fairport Convention manager Joe Boyd, and through the years it's been involved with other idiosyncratic labels like Gramavision and Bill Laswell's Black Arc.) And it's kept a few handfuls of cult classics in print, reissuing the catalogues of Big Star, Fairport Convention, the Undertones, and the Soft Boys. The latest band to get the Ryko reissue treatment were the Meat Puppets, whose seven SST albums were reissued this year with the usual spiffed-up sound, bonus tracks, and even CD-ROM videos -- the sort of treatment that's hardly ever given to bodies of work that didn't sell great the first time around.

More recently, Ryko was becoming an antidote of sorts to the merger fever that was sweeping the majors: as more and more older and untrendy artists got left in the lurch, Ryko swooped in and signed up Robert Cray, Taj Mahal, Loudon Wainwright III, and New England folkie Catie Curtis. "The bigger the majors get, the more it becomes about the bottom line -- and the more opportunities it gives people like us," A&R director Troy Hansbrough said last year. "Many career artists, the kind who sell 50,000 to 250,000 per album, are either being dropped or finding they're no longer a priority. These are people with strong albums under their belts, who can keep on making good music. But the majors feel they'd take attention away from whoever could be the next Alanis or the next Hanson."

The big question is whether Ryko can maintain that attitude as it moves a step closer to major-labeldom itself. Meanwhile, this is probably not the best time to think about selling your Galaxie 500 box to a used-record store.