Back to the future labels

By Larry Schwartz

AZTECS singer Billy Thorpe was angry. A record company wanted to release a no-frills budget compilation of music by the celebrated Australian hard-rock band and he was not impressed.

So he rang a former bandmate and friend he’d once nicknamed Rats. “I’ve told them to go and get f—-d,” drummer Gil Matthews remembers him saying.

Matthews had for some years been running a music import business that took its name from the band with which he’d played gigs including  the inaugural Sunbury Pop Festival in January 1972. “It was our own little mini Woodstock, if you like,” he recalls. “Everyone stayed in tents and stuff. We just drove to the site and did our gig and went back to the Travelodge.”

He’s been playing drums since he was five. At eight he “did a drum battle” with the great Buddy Rich at Melbourne Town Hall. He was still a boy when he toured the US with Rich and Gene Krupa, performing on the Mickey Mouse Club TV show. He prides himself on being Australia’s “honorary Mouseketeer”.

Matthews was 14 when he met the Beatles in 1964. “My father owned a limousine service and actually drove the Beatles to Festival Hall,” he says. “My mother ran the restaurant at the Southern Cross Hotel. I was taken to the hotel the day that the Beatles met the staff. I went to Festival Hall the night that the guy jumped up on stage and shook John Lennon’s hand, which is a really famous point in time.”

He remembers Thorpe telling him the company had wanted to release an Aztecs compilation for $7.89. “(He said), what are we going to do about it? And I said, what do you mean, what are we going to do about it? I thought I’m going to get in the middle of a shit fight with them. Do I really need that?”

The band owned rights to its own work. So at Thorpe’s instigation, Matthews, an audio engineer, set about remastering one their most coveted albums. Live! at Sunbury was one of the first two albums released in July 2005 by Aztec Music. (The other, a compilation by singer Billy Field, would prove to be the fledgling label’s biggest seller).

Thorpe, who died in March 2007 after a heart attack in March 2007, was among the stars who performed at the label’s launch launched at the Corner Hotel. Others included Rose Tattoo’s Angry Anderson, Spectrum’s Mike Rudd and Bill Putt and Warren ‘Pig’ Morgan, who recorded the album Downunda with Thorpe as Thump’n Pig and Puff’n Billy.

Aztec Music has so far reissued more than 60 handsomely packaged albums by the likes of Coloured Balls, Buffalo, Spectrum, Buster Brown, McKenzie Theory, Chain and Mondo Rock. It has launched a reissue labels for Australian jazz, blues and country; another for “hardcore and punk”.

“Record companies…are not thinking of the historic document,” Matthews says. “They don’t want to do it properly. They just want to sell units and then three months later they will delete it and go on their way to something else. That is not our philosophy.”

And Thorpe? “He loved the idea…Billy usually wanted to take control of everything but in this case he was happy for us to just go ahead and do it.”

The label follows the lead of a pioneering Melbourne enterprise which has endured over several decades and earned a strong reputation overseas by catering mostly to the tastes of Baby Boomer enthusiasts, and seems likely to endure despite a significant increase in digital downloads and decline in CD sales.

Peter Shillito, co-founder of Raven Records, is confident. “I think there will always be a place for quality niche record labels,” he says. “We will always find interesting things to reissue. It’s a big world out there.”

Raven shifted its focus from exclusively Australian music by the likes of Masters Apprentices, Max Merritt and the Meteors, the Church and the Divinyls after it was founded in 1979 to include American and British “roots-based” artists from Steve Young to Levon Helm or Charlie Rich. Shillito says the venture set up with partners Peter Mueller and Glen A. Baker has “ridden that post-war … generation and their musical tastes all the way through”.

 Shillito looks back to formative music experiences. “When I look back to my teen years I had all my, or most of my, key developmental involved music,” Shillito says. “You know, my parents taking me as a 10-year-old to see the Beatles at Festival Hall. That was life changing. Seeing the Rolling Stones at the Palais a year or two later and on and on. We were very lucky growing up during that time when music was changing and we were changing with it.”

Shillito says Raven’s customers are mostly from “a generation that appreciated music and placed it above most other forms of entertainment”. “I don’t think the generation that followed saw music that seriously,” he says.

 “You’ve got to remember that as young kids music meant a lot more to us,” he says. “I think than it does to most of the kids today. Most of Gen X and gen Y and those after were brought up in an era where there were multiple opportunities to spend your relaxation dollar. There are so many things that you can do that are cool and interesting but don’t involve listening to music.

“Playing computer games, PlayStation, Xbox and buying movies. When we grew up listening to music there wasn’t much else that you could do. I can vividly remember waiting with real teenage anticipation for the latest Bob Dylan or Neil Young record to actually be released and getting it on the first day that it came out and taking it home and playing it with my mates. It was a real experience. I don’t think that happens these days.

“It was a big thing. Other than the sport, it was, as Ian Dury wrote in the song, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Nowadays there is so much more for young kids to take up their time and be involved in. The statistics show. They just don’t buy anywhere near the amount of music that they used to and that is even before the age of digital downloads which of course has changed everything.”

Gil Matthews thought of the generational change when he saw his 14 year-old daughter in the back of his car, listening to music with a friend. Each had one of the earphones. “So one is listening to the right, the other is listening to the left and no one is hearing the stereo,” says the former drummer with the Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs,  “and I am thinking, you idiots. It’s an MP3 as well, no bottom end. You wouldn’t know what the hell …the bass player was doing.”

Despite the convenience of iPods and other innovations, Matthews is confident music enthusiasts “will eventually all come back to wanting to hear things properly”.

 Matthews set up Aztec Music with the help of label manager Ted Lethborg, who worked at the Gaslight Music record store that was located at the top end of Bourke Street for many years. At 46, Lethborg was a big fan of later Australian music by the likes of Birthday Party, The Go Betweens and the Triffids.

He discovered a big interest overseas in some of the music overlooked here. “The reason you can’t find Buffalo or Coloured Balls vinyl is because it’s all in Europe or America or Japan,” Lethborg says. “They are rabid collectors.”

He took on the challenge of approaching the major labels for permission to release artists’ work. “I had to explain if you let us do this, the artists will be really happy. They will think you are looking after them. You should be happy getting currency from nothing. The public are happy. They will stop buying the bootlegs. It’s like a win-win and we will deliver you at the end of a beautifully remastered digital copy for you to sell online on iTunes.

It’s harder than it should be. We shouldn’t have to be constantly hounding these people to let us do something with something that they don’t really care about.”

 Aztec Music’s biggest seller so far has been the Billy Field compilation (4500 to 5000). “I think if we do 1000 copies of something generally we have covered our costs,” Lethborg says.

Raven’s biggest sellers among Australian artists have included Masters Aprentices, Max Merritt and the Meteors and Dragon. The Animals, Nancy Sinatra and GramParsons have been its biggest-selling overseas artists.

Ian McFarlane, who has written for publications including Juke, From the Vault and Hot Metal and is author of books including The Encyclopaedia of Australian Rock and Pop, works from his home in the Macedon ranges for both Raven and Aztec. He’s a consultant for the latter and with a friend Glenn Terry, of Vicious Sloth Collectables, which sells rare vinyl, came up with a “wish list” of about 250 ‘60s and ‘70s Australian they didn’t think had been reissued on CD.

“Gil and Ted ran with that,” McFarlane says. “They have been very successful in getting a lot of these albums out.”

 “When I left college in 1981 and had a bit of money I was buying all of those vinyl albums that no one else wanted,” says McFarlane, 51, who once attended a school dance at which the band was AC/DC. “People used to laugh at me when I’d go to record fairs and say have you got Buffalo albums or whatever? What do you want that for? But I just loved them you know. Nobody cared about that ‘70s Australian stuff.”

 He’s been writing liner notes, selecting tracks and working on licensing for Raven Records for more than a decade.

Sydney-based music journalist, broadcaster and commentator, Glenn A. Baker, is still a partner and director in Raven but no longer involved in the running of the company.

Baker remembers the Melbourne label’s repute overseas. “We did things like the world’s first Gram Parsons anthology that was held in enormous regard. Jello Biafra would arrive in Australia and say, I want to meet Glenn A. Baker because of Raven records. I was once in New York many years ago and I walked into a record shop in the lower east side or the Village or somewhere and just mentioned to the guy behind the counter that I was from Australia and I operated Raven records and he yelled out, Ugly Things, which was considered to be the great punk garage punk compilation in the world.

“That was when American labels just hadn’t woken up at all. I can remember being in the Havana Cuba 10 years ago for a songwriting workshop. I’m standing at the baggage carousel at Havana airport and this guy with red hair walks over to me and he must have seen my name on a list, he said, You are Glenn Baker, the writer? I said, Yeah. He said, You write all those liner notes for Raven Records. I said, Yeah. He said, Hi, my name is Peter Buck. I am the lead guitarist for R.E.M.

“We spent nearly 10 days together and we have been friends ever since. When he was in Australia with R.E.M he came out to my archives.”

He remembers early releases including a great Masters Apprentices anthology and the Loved Ones’ Magic Box album. “It was noble to reissue all this Australian stuff but it never sold,” Baker says. “The cultural cringe was alive and well. To some extent still is. People would say, ah you put this out and everyone I know will buy it. And the joke was, yeah, everybody they did know bought it and that was it.”

Raven co-founder Peter Mueller, 62, was studying economics at Latrobe University when he came to know Shillito’s cousin, a part owner of the Readings stores. They started out importing LPs.

 “Companies here were slow in getting Neil Young and other’s records and we would bring them in on import cheaper and maybe a couple of months ahead of the local release. We had a bit of a market going with shops like Archie & Jughead’s and Euphoria Records we started selling albums to people on campus and people we knew around the place.”

The Age. Prime section.