SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
In the early 1990s, there was a new sound in music.
(SOUNDBITE OF OLD 97'S SONG, "DOREEN")
SIMON: Not quite country, not quite rock, not quite punk.
(SOUNDBITE OF OLD 97'S SONG, "DOREEN")
SIMON: It was dubbed alt-country or even y'allternative, bubbling up alongside alternative rock and grunge. Rob Miller called it insurgent country. And in 1993, he co-founded Bloodshot Records, an independent label in Chicago. The label put out albums by the Old 97's, The Bottle Rockets and many more. He's now written a memoir - "The Hours Are Long, But The Pay Is Low." Rob Miller joins us from Chicago. Thanks so much for being with us.
ROB MILLER: Oh, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
SIMON: You grew up in Detroit in the '70s and say in this book you went to Chicago to escape music. Didn't quite work out, did it?
MILLER: No. No. I - in that, I failed spectacularly.
SIMON: Well, what happened?
MILLER: I had been working in Detroit as a middling fanzine writer, and I'd also been doing a lot of stage production and production managing. And I just found myself being at shows 14, 16 hours a day, first one in, last one out kind of thing, day after day. And I kind of got burned out on music, and I was no longer hearing music. I - it was just something that was in the way as I did my job. And I thought I just was kind of done with music, and let's move to Chicago, like so many other people from Detroit were doing at the time.
SIMON: What did you happen upon? What did you discover in Chicago at that time?
MILLER: It was a place where people in the creative fields - writers, theater people, woodworkers, musicians, people who wanted to start labels. It was a very wide-open town, and with a very low bar for entry. And you could screw things up. You could fail and just try again. There was no sense of, this is my shot, because Chicago was not in the spotlight that, say, New York or LA or Nashville were in terms of music. You could just kind of try things out.
SIMON: So Bloodshot Records was, if I might put it this way, conceived on a bar napkin?
MILLER: You may, yes. We - couple of friends of mine and I - we were sitting in one of our favorite bars. And we just made up a list of names of bands that were kind of playing around with roots music tropes, and that were being completely ignored by the music press that was happening at the time that were falling over themselves with Liz Phair and the Smashing Pumpkins and Urge Overkill. And Chicago was just kind of being portrayed as the next Seattle. But all these roots bands were kind of percolating beneath the surface of this underground scene, the underground of the underground. We just thought it was a shame and that we should just put together a compilation album and see what happens.
SIMON: Let me ask you about some artists and their releases. For example, 1997 - "Straight Outta Boone County."
MILLER: Well, that was one where we had modern artists, or artists in our circle, do covers of songs from a label called King Records and a radio show called Boone County out of Southern Ohio in the 1950s. Hugely influential, but also had - has kind of been forgotten.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG BIG CITY")
THE SHOWOFFS: (Singing) Well, there's an evening train coming and I'm going to be on it. I've been playing second fiddle to my girl, and I'm going to go home. Well, I'm really homesick and I'm tired of the big, big city. I'm going to hop that train and tell the engineer to get with it.
MILLER: And so we had these people cover songs from that catalog. And they did it in their - through their own lens in a way that was just vastly different from what was originally done, but still in the same spirit of innovation and kind of an outsider mentality to it. And, yeah, a lot of people loved it. But a lot of people, you know, who were arbiters of country authenticity hated it.
SIMON: And let me ask you about Justin Townes Earle.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HARLEM RIVER BLUES")
JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE: (Singing) Lord, I'm going uptown to the Harlem River to drown. Dirty water...
SIMON: The son of Steve Earle, the great country music artist, named after Townes Van Zandt. The kid didn't have a chance.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HARLEM RIVER BLUES")
EARLE: (Singing) Mama, I got to go, got to get there while I still can. Troubled days are behind me now, and I know they're going to let me in.
MILLER: Justin was somebody who stayed at my house once, and I didn't know who he was. I mean, I knew who he was, but I didn't know his music. I knew who his dad was. And he played at a house concert in the North Shore of Chicago, and I went to it. And within the second song, by the second song, I knew I had to work with him. He just commanded that little makeshift stage in this house and had an intensity to him that - it was a thunderclap moment for me.
SIMON: Friends said your work was glamorous. Was it?
MILLER: (Laughter) If you consider 3 a.m. tacos and not sleeping and long drives to watch somebody play for 30 people and make no money and be the first one in the building and last one out or - of the office as well. It...
SIMON: (Laughter).
MILLER: It's not glamorous, but it was never boring, and it was never the same. And it was - it did have those moments of exaltation when it all went right.
SIMON: Yeah. In your appendix, you have some tour manager's words of wisdom. May I ask you about a couple?
MILLER: Sure.
SIMON: Never give your duct tape to anyone.
MILLER: Well, that's pretty self-explanatory. I mean, everyone wants duct tape, and they take it, and then they never come back with it. And then the next day, you're looking for your duct tape, and it's gone.
SIMON: (Laughter) Yeah. I guess you're right. And you advise, never leave behind any food.
MILLER: You're not hungry now. But in that dead zone between Columbus, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, at 4:30 in the morning, whatever was left behind will seem like a steak to you.
SIMON: I got to ask you. You walked away from Bloodshot in October 2021, and there was a lot of controversy surrounding the label. There were allegations that some artists were owed thousands of dollars in royalties. How do you respond?
MILLER: That I put my full faith and trust in a business partner who did not deserve it. For better and for worse, our responsibilities were incredibly siloed. And I just thought that we shared a conviction to make sure we were doing things aboveboard, and apparently, we did not. I will say that I made sure, to the best of my abilities, that people were paid what they were owed. We spent a lot of time and accounting money to make sure - myself and the staff - to make sure that people were paid what they were owed.
SIMON: Is there still a need and a place for independent labels in a time when, you know, someone can sing a few lines into their iPhone and put it online and millions of people can hear it?
MILLER: I think absolutely there is because artists are, by nature - let's say that - let us just say that they do not have the logistical grace to carry off all the things that need to happen to make your music rise above the din of all these other people putting out music. So if label is maybe an antiquated term, then at least a team. You need a team behind you to help you help people find out what is so special about your music. We're all in it together, so no one can do this by themselves.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BOTTLE ROCKETS SONG, "THE LONG WAY")
SIMON: Rob Miller, co-founder of Bloodshot Records. His new book is "The Hours Are Long, But The Pay Is Low." Thanks so much for being with us.
MILLER: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BOTTLE ROCKETS SONG, "THE LONG WAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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