Free The Book of Drugs by Mike Doughty Page B

burnished-sterling Columbia logo on the wall.
    â€œCOLUMBIA RECORDS!—IS THE BIGGEST!—LABEL!—IN—THE—WORLD! Isn’t that right, Mickey?
    â€œThat’s right, Johnny!” Mickey said.
    â€œNow look at this!” Johnny said. “This is the new Sony minidisc player!”
    He slammed a minidisc into a desk-side console.
    â€œLook! The title is RIGHT THERE ON THE L.E.D. DISPLAY!”
    â€œThunder Road” scrolled across the console in digitized yellow letters. Bruce Springsteen blasted at enormous volume. In the din, Johnny beamed, shaking his head up and down like an overstimulated dog.
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    We played on Halloween. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion played the main room at CBGB; their show was packed. Ours was nearly empty. An A&R guy from a small label attached to a bigger label, tired and sweaty, wandered in, sat down, and fell in love with me. He was an obese, closeted-gay guy named Stanley Ray.

    The tale of the ’90s is sometimes told as the tale of underground bands thrown into the mainstream and showered with integrity-threatening lucre. This is partially true—certainly true in the case of the imperial grunge bands—but in general, artists’ advances were sucked up by recording costs, and the best they could seek was a reliable source of tour support—that is, somebody to pay for the van rental. Real money was made by people who worked at labels.
    Labels were selling shitty CDs at insane markups. It was cheaper to manufacture a CD than a vinyl record, but, on a pretense of technological sophistication, CDs cost more than twice as much.
    Many contained just one good song. There were CDs by bellicose hardcore bands with one lilting lounge-y sing-along tune, CDs whose song played on the radio was the lone song written and sung by the bass player, funk-metal bands with one incongruous acoustic ballad. The job of an A&R person—it stood for the antiquated description “artists and repertoire”—had transmogrified into mostly just trying to nab bands and sign them, abandoning the repertoire part entirely. Nobody’s job was to say, “Hey, guys, why don’t we take another six months so the bass player can write more tunes like that one.”
    The labels stopped selling singles, in the traditional radio-song-plus-a-B-side format; fans, assuming that the rest of the album would be in the same vein of the song they’d heard on the radio, had to shell out for the whole CD. Nobody saw this as a con.
    So the labels were drowning in cash.
    (The tanking of the labels, en masse, circa the 2000s, messed up my career a little. I might’ve been richer. Maybe substantially so. I still don’t feel sorry for them.)
    Alternative music’s popularity meant the labels were trafficking in a genre in which they were almost wholly nonconversant.
So they went on a hiring spree. People who worked at fanzines, people who ran “labels” out of apartments and sold only seven-inch vinyl oddities, people who booked bands at dive bars, friends of bands, people who just went out a lot were flying first class—not business class, first class —and being paid executive-magnitude salaries.
    Many of them embraced end-of-the-day-bring-to-the-table-ese; others fooled themselves into insouciant contempt for the bosses signing their enormous paychecks. They signed band upon band upon band.
    The story of Nirvana—the band that wrought the cultural sea change—was perceived like this: Nirvana was friends with Sonic Youth, asked them which label was best, and Sonic Youth said, “Our label!” Bands were signed because they might be friends with other bands, or they carried a whiff of prestige that might attract more profitable acts. Some bands were pursued as trophies by the labels, pelted with cash in bidding wars, and shrugged off nonchalantly when their CDs tanked.
    Nobody worried. They were tax write-offs for companies with