FP: Almost out of boredom, you think?
Joey: Well, I guess they thought they could get more, and Biafra unfortunately should have negotiated, and you know, jury trials can go… basically you would be better off with a judge, with somebody who understands the law. Anyway, those guys were completely above board and always paid us and did a great job for us. They weren’t the least bit dishonest, so I am a total backer of Biafra, and I think that lawsuit was just a bunch of bullshit.
FP: So it is worth sticking with the independent labels, on principle and practically.
Joey: Well, yeah. But then now, if you get an opportunity… see, I never blame a musician who goes out and tries to make a living, because if you get a hit, you know what you should do? Take that money and buy a house. Because you think that you’ve got one hit, that means you can get another one, but it’s really hard to get that second one. But if you go buy that house, you will always have that house to live in, even if you can never make another substantial amount of money. So I never blame musicians that sign these deals with big companies, because it is really hard to make a living as a musician.
FP: So these bands who sign would say you are also reaching a wider audience…
Joey: You take that chance. Nine out of ten times, it won’t work. It’s like pulling a lottery ticket, like the guys from Green Day, or Nirvana, that’s the prime lottery ticket for you. David Grohl, they just got him in on that album, and then the guy’s a multi-multi-millionaire. He’s a real real nice guy, who helps all sorts of people, and being a millionaire doesn’t stop him from being that. He was there at the right time in the right place, with a really great songwriter. And with a lot of money from Geffen promoting the shit out of it.
FP: But do you think that had an effect on a lot of other labels, because when Nirvana broke out, majors weren’t all that interested in alternative or punk. Then suddenly it was a bit
of a feeding frenzy.
Joey: Well, what happened was, times change. So you had all the people that were signing record deals running record companies, formatting radio stations, running radio stations and TV, had grown up listening to the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones and stuff like that, and Journey. Their outlook on what was actually rock and roll was a lot different around the time Nirvana came out, you know, twelve, thirteen years after punk rock started. These people in the same positions at the head of magazines or record companies or radio stations, they had not grown up listening to the Stones, they had grown up listening to, say, the Ramones, Husker Du, maybe a little bit of Black Flag, maybe a bit of DOA, Dead Kennedys, the Clash.
So all of a sudden their outlook of what sounds good was different, and Nirvana had this different sound, their much harsher guitar sound, that was never really heard on the radio before—except maybe mid-80s glam metal, which had much more gloss on the production.
So when they got through with this sound, the people in a position to promote it were ready for it, and that’s why they broke through. And then the door opened and Offspring and Green Day broke through, and Rancid, and now, Sum 41 and Blink 182 and a million other copycat bands the labels are promoting now. They all have punk rock sounding guitars, but three quarters of them are just like pop bands, like twenty years ago they would have been wearing skinny ties and suits and holding their guitars up here. It’s just that now it’s cool to have a goatee and some tattoos. It’s all the same stuff, it’s just a business, trying to make money. Forget the genuine ones, you can’t expect kids to check out the genuine ones off the bat, it’s not that easy, right?
FP: Yeah, but after a few years they might start seeing the links to the older stuff and discover that.
Joey: Yeah, they’ll start separating the two, like my daughter. She’s fourteen, she’s into stuff like Simple Plan, Sum 41– and I happen to like Sum 41 and a lot of those bands –but some bands come along, and I’m like, OK, this here sounds exactly like, say, Husker Du, and this is a ripoff of the Clash, and she’ll go like, “Who? What?” You know? So it’s always the same with the younger generation, they’ll find out their own way.
FP: Did you ever imagine back in the 70s that punk would become a flavour of the major label offerings? I mean, aside from the day in the sun that punk had in the mainstream of the 70s…
Joey: Yeah, well, mostly with New Wave, at first, punk rock and New Wave were very closely associated, they kind of split by about ’82. But… yeah… we had a really smart manager, who said that all this stuff, this cultural or pop phenomena, goes in 10 or 15-year cycles. It goes up to a peak, then goes down, then it comes back dressed in a slightly different way. I mean, that’s why Disco’s come back a couple times…
FP: What do you think of small labels getting distribution deals with majors, instead of signing with majors?
Joey: Well, it can work, but I know some people who have little record stores, who, where it comes to a record that’s distributed by say Warner, they’ll say, “We just fucking hate dealing with those people.” And eventually, you know, these records will end up at a one-stop [distributor], where you’ll get like 10 000 titles listed and can order absolutely everything you need for your store there. That’s what most stores do.
But from the perspective of a label, getting distributors that are good and who’ll pay you is the most difficult part of this business. It’s so easy to get ripped off. You can tell sometimes when someone who’s previously been six months behind on payments is getting to be eight or nine months behind, and you realize, “Oh my god, it’s getting worse,” so if nothing else you just have to get your stock back and minimize your loss. We’ve got about 16 different distributors for Sudden Death records, and with each one we only have to worry about maybe ten different CDs.
FP: It seems like today, there are a fair amount of reputable distributors who deal with smaller labels, people like Mordam or Revolver who’ve been around long enough and have become pretty stable. So it seems to me like you don’t really need to sign for distribution with Warner or whatever.
Joey: Well some of the advantages you would get is if they guarantee that they would put some advertising money into it. But I’ve got a bunch of friends who’ve signed with what they call “designer” labels, where they’re called their own labels but they’re actually an arm of a bigger company, and everything’s all rosy until the bands aren’t really selling very well, then they have trouble getting money for promotion, then they have trouble getting paid, and it kicks all the way down to the end of the line where the band can’t get paid, they can’t get proper accounting of what’s being done for them. Now, if you’re a band that’s on a real upswing and you’ve got something that’s kind of poppy, then maybe it’s worth taking a chance on it, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, ‘cause you can easily get fucking burned.
FP: Is Sudden Death doing well these days?
Joey: Yeah, you know, we’re not going blockbuster in sales, but we’re doing fine. We realized that sometime in the next five years we’re going to have to switch the majority of our sales online. Maybe in ten years retail will be dead.
FP: You mean selling CDs online?
Joey: Yeah, or songs, or some combo of that. We’re trying to get into that now.
FP: What about vinyl, like limited edition or audiophile stuff, reissues?
Joey: That’s a thing that’s really helped us, the vinyl’s going great. Not so much in Canada, which I can’t figure out, but in the States we sell tons of vinyl.

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