RS: I think the creative process does really connect [these artists] throughout the decades. Just the difficulty of getting a group together and getting ’em into a studio, and the complexity, with any level of technology, of actually getting something onto tape. Those are huge common threads that everyone we work with shares.
But I think there’s a major transition that happens when there’s an understanding that music could be part of a broader national and international community. When bands are touring DIY around the country, and they arrive in a new town and there’s an audience waiting for ’em—just to hear the idea, right? They don’t know the music necessarily. But there’s this idea—we can call it punk rock, we can call it DIY, there’s a lot of terms for it, over the years, but there’s an audience waiting for that. That’s the major paradigmatic shift, as I see it, between [‘90s independent music] and what was happening in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
Back then, you could be the most incredible band in the world. You go to a new town, they don’t wanna hear the songs you wrote. They want to hear the hits on the radio. That was what a live show was at a club in, in the seventies, right? So that changes, that goes away, and a new paradigm emerges. When Ken and I started going to shows, it’s a bunch of kids in a dirty basement, and they’re performing their own songs. And we just understood that that’s the way it was. If they were performing someone else’s songs, that’s a cover band, right?
But in the seventies, that’s just a night out. You go to hear a band and they’re playing “The Look of Love,” and then they go into “Celebration,” and they’re entertaining the crowd. That’s a huge difference.
It’s been interesting for me, as someone who actually lived through the ‘90s, to watch a historical narrative take shape around the music of that decade. Like, it’s all building up to Nirvana and it’s all downhill after Nirvana. By resurfacing all this underdiscussed and hard-to-find music from that time, do you feel like you’re creating a counternarrative or an alternate history, a different telling of the tale?
KS: Absolutely—but Numero has been telling the alternate history of popular music for two decades now, right? We’re just championing the unheard, the under-heard, the bands that just never really got there. And even a band like Unwound, who I would consider to be a pillar of that era— the last tour they were playing for hundreds of people, and now, I just saw them last night with 2,000 people. It’s really enjoyable to be presenting that to people, and showing them what they missed. While you were busy listening to these other things, here was this other world that existed.
History is written by the winners. But when you look at a band like Duster or Unwound, and you look at how many kids there were at this thing last night—that’s a whole new generation of people who are gonna decide what is worth saving from an era. Whether you go back to the blues collectors getting into Robert Johnson in the late ’40s and early ’50s or to psych-rock collectors in the early ‘80s, things get rediscovered and then people champion them and they become important because they were always great—it just took so much time to surface that stuff. And now with the power of the Internet, that distance is much shorter. You can hear everything, and you don’t have to mail-order it or wait for someone to put something on a tape. There’s an unlimited amount of ways for you to go and listen to Unwound or Duster if you want to. In a lot of ways we’ve arrived at a really fascinating crossroads in music history—distribution’s flat, and it’s not bound by genre, it’s not bound by year. It’s just bound by what you’re into.
Alex Pappademas
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