April 27 - May 4, 2000
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Reeling at Rounder
Is Cambridge's pet indie label going corporate?
by Michelle Chihara
When Jennifer Truesdale Brogan started working at Rounder Records nine years ago, it was still the kind of office where you'd find employees standing on their desks while they talked on the phone, or rolling backward down the hallways in their chairs. It may never have been the ideal employer, but it was always the kind of place where people went out for AWBs -- After Work Beers -- to debate the finer points of the fiddling on the label's latest bluegrass release.Today, Rounder Records, the music lover's label, is the kind of place where employees suspect their bosses of snooping through their e-mail. The AWBs have turned into goodbye parties and bitch sessions. Employees say that morale has been sinking seriously for about a year and hit rock bottom on March 13, when the company fired Glenn Jones, one of its most senior employees and its chief union steward.
For a lot of people at Rounder, the firing is the most potent symbol of a cultural shift in the company -- a shift that leaves them wondering whether the label will be able to maintain the artistic integrity on which it built its reputation. "What you're in danger of having," says Truesdale Brogan, "is a group of business people, not music people. That's my main fear."
At stake is not only Rounder's funky corporate culture, but also the eclectic catalogue of music that has made the label's name. As Truesdale Brogan says, "You can't sell indigenous Chinese classical music the way you sell mainstream pop."
"I'd been there for nine years," says the 31-year-old singer and songwriter. But recently she opted out: in February, she resigned as national marketing coordinator. "To me," she says, "it just wasn't something I wanted to be a part of anymore."
It's a common complaint about the merger-hungry music industry: the lament that an indie music label is "selling out." In many cases, that lament seems naive -- after all, how can you criticize a company for acting like a company? And right now the changes aren't affecting Rounder's catalogue. You can still find noncommercial work such as Alan Lomax's field recordings of folk balladeers or prison songs. But staffers are worried about something less tangible: how many music-loving employees can you alienate before you jeopardize your ability to do the music justice?Rounder has always been different. It's still owned and operated by its three creators, Marian Leighton Levy, Bill Nowlin, and Ken Irwin -- the "Rounders." And by all accounts, despite the disagreements, the Rounders still love the music.
That love gives them invaluable credentials in their corner of the music business. When someone from Rounder calls, DJs and music critics -- the tastemakers in Rounder's world -- still listen. "They're the major independent in that area" of roots music (a category that includes primarily folk and bluegrass), says Brian Sinclair, DJ Sinc of the WGBH country show Hillbilly at Harvard. "A lot of artists who might never have gotten a chance managed to get there because of Rounder." It's with a touch of pride that Sinclair calls owner Ken Irwin an old friend. "Sometimes I'll get a call from Ken, and it's not even somebody on their label," he says. "I got a call from Ken, and he said, 'You gotta hear Patty Booker in California.' He had Patty send us the CD, and sure enough, it was something we ended up really loving. His ears are out, and not only just for Rounder."
That passion for music sets Rounder apart. At a multinational behemoth such as BMG, it doesn't matter if the marketing staff understands the latest 'N Sync record. It just has to move the units. Rounder's reputation, by contrast, is built on its staff's commitment to niche music. "We knew all the bluegrass DJs and all the folk DJs, and we got along with them," says Shay Quillen, a former employee and long-time bluegrass fan. "Just the name 'Rounder,' with people that knew our kind of music, meant they would take your call and be happy to talk to you, because they knew you wouldn't be pestering them with something that wasn't any good."
The passion, in other words, is the essence of Rounder's brand. And any marketing textbook will tell you that companies thrive by convincing the public that their brands embody certain values. The Body Shop sells animal rights with its cosmetics. Ben & Jerry's sold environmental activism and progressive labor policies with its ice cream. We've now lost Ben & Jerry's to a contract with Unilever that ends all guarantees of progressive behavior in two years.
Et tu, Rounder?
Rounder Records has even crunchier roots than Ben & Jerry's. Its beginnings are almost too hippie to be true: it was founded by three grad students as an "anti-profit collective." Working out of a shared apartment in Somerville, fueled by trail mix and a passion for folk and bluegrass, the three Rounders scoured the country for America's best obscure acts. Their first vinyl release was an album by a banjo picker from North Carolina named George Pegram. Their second release was a Cambridge bluegrass trio called the Spark Gap Wonder Boys. That was in 1970. Now, with more than 2000 records in its catalogue, Rounder is a $30-million-a-year company. That makes it one of the biggest indie labels around, though still minuscule in comparison to the billion-dollar music conglomerates that dominate the industry.
Rounder still records a lot of decidedly uncommercial music. One employee ticks off some of the more esoteric recordings: "Women's songs of India, various collections from around the world, some of the Appalachian stuff. Coal-mining songs," he says. "This is not something a major label would have any interest in."
But every once in a while, Rounder hits gold. Its first lucky break came with, of all people, George Thorogood. Thorogood's 1978 album of garage-band blues and country surprised everyone by selling more than 450,000 copies, and Rounder was suddenly vaulted into, if not the big time, at least the medium time.
In 1985, Rounder signed a 14-year-old fiddle prodigy named Alison Krauss, and lightning struck again. Since her 1987 album debut, Krauss has won accolades ranging from the Nashville Music Awards to the Grammys. Through it all, she has steadfastly stuck by Rounder, praising the label's integrity and its respect for artists in almost every interview. Her 1995 album Now That I've Found You: A Collection went double platinum, something almost unheard of for a record on an indie label.
Rounder has always had a huge stable of artists who sell only a few records each, but Thorogood and Krauss -- along with a handful of artists such as Juliana Hatfield, Susan Tedeschi, and Burning Spear -- have kept Rounder at the edge of the big league.
Big-time money, however, means keeping up with big-time demand. By 1980, the amount of revenue that Thorogood was bringing in had forced the "anti-profit collective" to behave like a bigger company. The awkward transition prompted Rounder's employees to sign up with Local 925 of the Service Employees International Union. Suddenly, the Rounders -- who used to say that all labor was exploitative -- had become members of the capitalist class. They even hired the venerable law firm Hale and Dorr to help them resist unionization. (It didn't work; today, all of Rounder's non-managerial employees -- about 70 percent of the 100-odd staff members -- are unionized.)
So the tension between big-business thinking and the old Rounder spirit is nothing new. But now it has a lightning rod: Rounder's new general manager.
When people at Rounder talk about the company's new, more corporate mentality, they usually mention Paul Foley. Foley is a Boston guy, well respected on the business side of the industry, who owned a record store for years. When he came to Rounder about a year and a half ago, it was from a job at New York-based music conglomerate UMG/Polygram, just before that company was acquired by the Seagram's liquor-and-entertainment empire.Foley started as vice-president of sales and moved up to a newly created position last February: general manager. In this capacity, he oversees a number of other managers, including those in the crucial areas of marketing and promotion. One long-time employee says, "I think Foley's calling all the shots now. We call it 'Foley Records.' "
Foley's big-label background doesn't sit well with a lot of staffers, most of whom spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal from the company. Says one: "I don't think he cares so much about the music. He's only interested in selling units. I guess, you know, there's no soul to him."
The biggest controversy surrounding Foley, however, has to do with the promotion of a woman named Sheri Sands. When Foley moved up the ladder, Sands took over his old job as VP of sales and marketing. Sands, by almost all accounts, is Foley's girlfriend.
Sands was first hired to a sales position in June of 1999. Like Foley, she's a former Polygram employee, and she does have substantial music-industry experience. But Glenn Jones and other Rounder employees considered her underqualified and saw her promotion as sheer favoritism. Management apparently thought otherwise.
Jones, with a number of his colleagues, began drafting a letter to the Rounder owners expressing their concern about Sands's promotion. The letter pulls no punches. "Do you have any interest any longer in how the company is run?" it asked the Rounders. "Is it your wish to alienate a loyal and dedicated workforce? What are you thinking?"
Before Jones could officially send the letter to the Rounders, however, it was leaked to Foley. Foley then fired Jones.
The timeline goes something like this: on his first full day in the office after getting wind of the letter, Foley served Jones with two "performance warnings" -- one about being late to work, one about typos on page 294 of a 300-page catalogue. It seems he had written the warnings before seeing the letter. Then, a few days later, Foley gave Jones another warning, this time about spending too much time on e-mail for purposes unrelated to work. Those purposes? Drafting the letter of protest.
Under the terms of Rounder's union contract, three performance warnings is grounds for dismissal. Jones disputes the grounds of the warnings: he says the lateness notices were not in keeping with the terms of the contract, and that the typos did not fall under his purview. He and the union also say that the letter, because it was about Rounder and was being drafted with other Rounder employees, was both company business and a protected bargaining activity.
Glenn Jones is the classic Rounder guy: he joined the company in 1977, and he remembers working shoulder to shoulder with the Rounders, when everyone pitched in to pack orders and send boxes. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from American fiddle music to psychedelic rock, and a healthy taste for world music. Like many Rounder employees, he's a musician himself, a guitarist for the band Cul de Sac.
He was also an office activist, fighting for flexible hours and a 10 a.m. start to the workday. He had his share of late-to-work warnings, but according to his personnel file, which Jones allowed the Phoenix to copy, his job performance was excellent. The Rounder employees interviewed for this article confirmed that Jones is an organized, almost obsessively detail-oriented person who has focused that attention on a series of positions at the company (his last was publications editor). His most recent performance review came in August 1999 and was exceedingly positive. It was administered by Paul Foley.
Jones's firing is complicated by the fact that he was one of Rounder's union stewards and had negotiated every union contract since Rounder unionized in 1979. He admits that, over the years, he has sometimes "butted heads" with management, but such is the nature of union negotiations. There are still three union stewards at Rounder, none of whom has ever negotiated a contract. The next union negotiations at Rounder are scheduled to take place this spring.
After two grievance hearings, Jones's dismissal has gone to arbitration with the union. The letter he helped write and the warnings issued him by Foley will be evaluated in light of the Rounder contract and national labor law. Jones's union is sure he will win (see "Union Woes at Rounder Records," This Just In, News and Features, April 14).
Jones has a lot of allies, both inside Rounder and in the music world at large. Scores of people have written outraged e-mail to the Rounders. Veteran rock critic Dave Marsh attacked Rounder in a recent syndicated column, and he's been stirring up support for Jones online.Paul Foley, the man at the center of the controversy, isn't talking specifics, which is standard in most management-employee disputes. He will neither confirm nor deny that Jones has been an outstanding employee for 23 years. "We won't discuss personnel matters," he says. "You certainly don't know the whole history that led up to this. You don't know whether he's presented all the facts."
For his part, Foley also says that he loves what Rounder does and that he "supports creative individualism."
"There's certainly change going on," he says. "We are trying to grow the company. And any time there's change, some people agree, and some people don't." As for the charges that Rounder is going more corporate, he says, "Anybody who wants to challenge us on that can look at our releases for next year."
The only personnel matter that Foley will discuss is that of Sheri Sands. He says that Sands was promoted by company president John Virant, not himself. "Sheri Sands was hired in June of 1999 as a Director of Independent Sales, a union position," he wrote in an e-mail. "After discussion with the owners of Rounder, John Virant, the President, promoted Sheri to the Vice-President of Sales and Marketing in February of 2000. I did not promote my girlfriend and Glenn and the Union know it."
Jones, however, recalls more than one union meeting with management where the issue of Sands and Foley's relationship was discussed. And with the decision to promote Sands, Rounder, in the view of many, stepped on a lot of toes. "They're saying 'screw you' to the employees," says one long-time worker. According to several sources, somewhere between seven and 10 long-time Rounder employees have resigned since Sheri Sands's promotion.
The broader issue at Rounder is whether one of American music's most interesting independent labels is jeopardizing its commitment to great music that goes ignored by other labels.Rounder signed a distribution deal with UMG/Polygram in 1998, creating a two-tier distribution system where some of Rounder's bigger artists get included in the major label's distribution system and catalogue. That deal sparked rumors that Rounder's owners, after all these years of standing strong, are gearing up to sell the company.
Is a buyout really in the cards? The Rounders themselves aren't talking. After all three owners had repeatedly agreed via e-mail to an interview with the Phoenix, their New York spokesperson canceled the interview, saying only that "as the matter in question is in arbitration, it isn't appropriate to comment at this time."
One e-mail from Bill Nowlin criticized the Phoenix for not getting the other side of the story in its April 14 report about the union dispute; another from Ken Irwin detailed a trip he took to Manchester and talked about his spending time with his wife. But none addressed the broader issues being raised by Rounder's employees.
For the love of everything from American fiddles to Guinean flutes, hip, overeducated musicians still take day jobs at Rounder simply to be near the music. Not everyone we spoke to loves the union: some people disagree with its priorities; some would like their dues to go elsewhere. Almost everyone agrees that the three Rounders still care about the music. But the Rounders are no longer young, and some people are guessing that after all this time, after watching their idealistic endeavor be transformed from a labor of love with a Volkswagen into a million-dollar business with a union dispute, the Rounders might simply want to retire.
In any case, a number of their most dedicated employees now think something is in danger of being lost. As Jones says wistfully, "A lot of people there still have a lot of passion for the music. But sometimes we feel we're holding Rounder to an ideal I don't think Rounder is holding itself to anymore."
Ironically, in a few years none of this may matter. Many music-industry observers think the Internet and file-distribution technologies such as MP3 and Napster will make traditional labels obsolete. And as rock critic Marsh points out, though society has done without record labels, it has never done without musicians.
"At this point," he says, "the system only really works for a very slender thread of artists, like Garth Brooks and the Backstreet Boys. And not that I begrudge Ken Irwin anything he's got, but why should he have so much more than his artists? At this point a record company represents an obstacle to the goal."
Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.
