LUDIC LOG

Leonard Pierce:  Tell me how Bloodshot got started.

Rob Miller:  It was essentially three of us who were really bored and full of hubris and naivete and vodka, and just thought we were seeing this scene that was going on in Chicago that was kind of undocumented.  Everyone was paying attention to Liz Phair and Smashing Pumpkins and Urge Overkill, and there was this roots-inflected thing happening organically; and we just thought "Wouldn't it be a kick to put out a CD documenting it?".  We had no grand master plan beyond that.

LP:  Not too long after Bloodshot got started, the whole alt-country/Americana --

RM:  The great roots-rock scare?

LP:  Yeah.  It kicked into media hype mode around then.  Did you have any indication that was coming?  Was it good fortune or bad fortune that it happened?

RM:  It was both good and bad.  We've been around long enough now that I've seen this cycle happen a few times, that there'll be one or two artists that will break into the mainstream a little bit, and suddenly everyone will throw themselves into paroxysms of analysis about this 'roots-rock revival'.  And then a year later, when that person doesn't sell nine million records, they'll call us up and ask "What's it like with roots-rock dying?"  If we'd paid attention to the mainstream, we wouldn't have started in the first place.

LP:  What have been some of the high and low points of the Bloodshot saga?

RM:  Well, the fact that I can sit here and drink vodka in the middle of the afternoon is not a bad thing.  The highlights are when you see a band that you love connect with a new audience.  You put them in front of people that have never heard of them and never seen them and you feel the crowds building, and you finally feel like there's a group of people who get it.  That's always really exciting.  The hard part...where do I start?  This is a brutal racket.  It's really, really hard.  It's an accomplishment that I can't really fathom yet that we're still around after ten years.  Distribution and retail and press...the payola on the radio...the fact that you'll pour your guts into a record and thing "this is a really great record", and it will fall into a bottomless vortex of indifference, and you don't know why.  It's a grind.  I mean, I spend most of my day doing clerical work now, and five percent of my day deals with music.  And that's hard.  But I don't wanna sound like I'm complaining, because it's better than working at Home Depot.

The game is stacked against independent artists -- more so now that never.  We just don't have the money to buy our way into stores, to buy our way onto radio.  I guess to sum it up in a short, pithy way, it is continually maddening that the music industry is not in any way, shape or form a meritocracy.  It's more like a septic tank.  Only the really big chunks rise to the top.

LP:  What country legends would you like to have signed if you'd been around and had the chance?

RM:  I've always considered us a rock label or a punk label.  But if you look back at the history of country music, the people that I think all of our artists draw from as inspiration were, in their time, outsiders and genre-breakers.  People like Bob Wills and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn -- people who, now, from where we sit, are considered part of the standard canon of country greats.  But in their time, Bob Wills brought drums to the Grand Old Opry and was told he couldn't go on.  Everyone made fun of Johnny Cash's guitar player because he 'couldn't play', and now that sound is the signature country guitar sound.  Hank Williams got thrown off the Opry.  Any of those people, I think it would be amazing to have had on the label.  Also, people like X and the Meat Puppets and Jason & the Scorchers -- those are the people who got me into roots-inflected music.  Commander Cody was someone I came across in college, and who just floored me.  The first time I heard "Lost Highway" was hearing Jason & the Scorchers do it in '83.  The first time I saw the Meat Puppets was in '81; they were opening for Black Flag and played a bluegrass set.  They got booed off the stage.  And they were playing music faster than what Black Flag played! 

We sort of came at all this stuff from a different angle, and I think that's part of what makes us unique; we didn't have this reverence for the past.  Reverence for the past can be a straitjacket.  We didn't have that, because we didn't know what we were doing.  We were just acting on total id.  "Wow, this sounds really great...what is that, a Johnny Paycheck song?  Yeah?  Who's he?"  And then we'd go back throught the Johnny Paycheck catalog and think, oh my God, this is amazing stuff. 

LP:  Can anything prepare you for running a record label?

RM:  No.

LP:  Can anything help you recover from running a record label?

RM:  No.  It's really, really, really hard, and there's no reason to do it other than that you love the music and you love the people you're dealing with.  There are so many things that would make an intelligent person stop.

LP:  Is Chicago still a good place to be for doing the kind of music you like to do?

RM:  Absolutely.  I don't think we would have survived and thrived anywhere else.  It might be getting harder; with all of the neighborhoods changing and some of the clubs closing, it might not be the kind of wide-open free-for-all that it was a few years ago.  But it's still a very artist-friendly place to live and work, and the way the labels all co-exist in a very non-competitive environment makes it a very fertile venue for artists.  They can go and work with whoever they want, and there's not the kind of bitterness there is in a lot of other cities.  A lot of our artists moved here because they were amazed at the kind of opportunities there are here to create.  Maybe it's not the smartest business decision; if you want to be a careerist, you might want to be someplace else.  But as far as just being able to create stuff that keeps you involved and engaged as an artist, I don't think there's anyplace better to be.  And, as a label, why not be near the artists who are able to create like that?

LP:  Have the fans always been supportive of the label?

RM:  Oh, definitely.  We here in Chicago have it made.  I don't think music fans in Chicago appreciate that until they go elsewhere.  I get non-stop e-mails on our website from people who have lived here and moved away -- we have a great network of independent music stores and indepent labels that other cities don't have anymore.  We've got really good college radio, we've got really good clubs run by people who are doing it for the right reasons.  They believe in the music and they're doing it day in and day out because of that.  And we've got a ton of independent labels who are putting out all kinds of good stuff.  You can be a fan of all these different genres and go see the bands on any given weekend, or during the week.  Other towns, it's getting to where there is one good club, or one good record store, but in Chicago, the options are endless.  It's an amazing place for labels, for artists and for fans.

LP:  What's next?

RM:  We are working on our tenth-anniversary compilation DVD; we've been recording and filming a lot of great shows from the past year, so it'll be a great DVD package.  Other than that...I'll know when I don't want to do this anymore when I start to get bored by the music we put out.  I still hear stuff from the people we work with that makes me so happy.  We had 15 bands down at South By Southwest this year, and that's when you remember why you do this.  It gives you the energy to get through the bullshit you have to put up with day in and day out.