Chris Ashford, Continued...
Chris Ashford: Yes. We even had a cover then. I had a mock-up cover for a while that I don’t have any more. Their train was rolling, and we had some stalls, and no bad blood, just, okay, things are going to be different.
HG: I guess it gave you some time to focus on the other bands that were playing, too.
Chris Ashford: I don’t think I ever took it that seriously. I was hanging out and if I wanted to approach somebody, I’d say, “Let’s record,” or “Let’s do something.” It wasn’t a well thought-out game plan, which is probably why I didn’t keep it going and doing what I probably could have done. If I had gotten more involved and did think about albums and did think about stuff like that and really got serious about it and figured things out, it could have been a whole different thing, but it is what it is.
HG: When hardcore was rising, when the bands from the South Bay were coming up -- Black Flag, etc. -- what was your reaction to all that?
Chris Ashford: Well, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting perspective because, I look back on it and I think, in a sense, I felt there was a competitiveness starting. First it was the Hollywood bands, then it became the South Bay bands, and, of course, a little bit later, the Orange County bands. I remember seeing Black Flag at The Starwood, like first time they played there, and there was hardly anybody there. And then, I remember after The Germs broke up, you’d see a Black Flag show there and, all of a sudden, it was a huge crowd. So, I think at first, people, at least from the Hollywood demographic, the people that would go to those areas, looked at them competitively, like, “What have you got?” Later, they got very, very accepted. It went from a very small thing to a much bigger thing very quickly, even within itself, before they came in. Everything was changing fast.
HG: Did you see any differences musically?
Chris Ashford: Absolutely. I think original L.A. punk rock, from ’77 until let’s say mid-’78, was all kind of rock’n’roll -- quirky, but still very melodic, whereas they got faster and harder quicker. The end of it is almost when the English oi thing came in, in the early ‘80s, where it was just more an attack than actual songs and melody. I think every little step along the way has been a progression to that. Outside of The Germs, Black Flag were much harder than anybody else. When the Orange County bands came in, it was more of an extension of that, though they brought different elements in, too -- more of a skateboarding element came in. The whole scene, within a three-year period, evolved immensely. Talking about the age, I think a lot of people that started it in the early ’77 stuff that were a little more arty and stuff like that, three years later, they were already almost 30. It changed the complexion and it changed the group of people that were involved. Nothing in a negative way, except for, it’s not really the bands’ faults, but the violence inside the clubs escalated because the people that came to the shows were a little more aggressive.
HG: The goon element?
Chris Ashford: Yeah.
HG: What was the end of What Records?
Chris Ashford: I did a few more releases into the early ‘80s when I started doing surf music. I actually did the first Halibuts record on What. Then, I got somebody who wanted to buy the name. This is a good story. It was a Christian label, Word Records, who wanted to buy the name What Records because they wanted to put out a rock’n’roll version of their label for their Christian artists who weren’t doing necessarily Christian music. At that point, I think I was poor enough where I decided to work out a deal and take the money. In my mind, at that point, What had kind of lost its identity anyway because I did various different things. It wasn’t just punk rock and people weren’t that interested in the old punk rock at that point. To me, the name change was kind of a hassle. You have to change your stationary and change the labels on your records, but it wasn’t that big a deal to me to lose it. I think if that had happened five years later, I don’t think I would have done the deal. I got okay money, but nothing to buy a house with. It was one of those situations where, when you’re involved with things, you don’t necessarily look into the future and think people are going to care about those things that you did before. I didn’t think that “What” would make that much of a difference. In my thinking now, I made a mistake, but at the time, it just is what it is.
HG: Did you go directly into Iloki, or did that come later?
Chris Ashford: Iloki was the immediate name that I went to, since I was doing surf music, hence “palm tree of hits.”
HG: Is that what the name means?
Chris Ashford: It basically means, “I’m low key.” It gives a Hawaiian kind of thing to it. Everybody puts all kinds of meanings to it, but that was the one that basically relates to the whole scheme of it all.
HG: How did you get into surf music?
Chris Ashford: I grew up with it! I’m in L.A.! I always liked Dick Dale. I always liked Jan and Dean.
HG: Was it happening on its own, in its own world, while everything else was happening, or was there a revival?
Chris Ashford: At that point, there really wasn’t much of a revival. I was a collector of surf music and I was bringing records up to KXLU and going on the “Surf Wave” show there regularly and playing stuff with the DJ there. There were inklings of things happening. Jon and the Nightriders’ first album had come out. I think The Surf Raiders had a single and an LP or something. I think even Rhino had put out their History of Surf reissues. But there really wasn’t any scene of bands at that point. Nobody could just go play anywhere and do a surf thing. Then, one day, a couple guys from The Halibuts came up to KXLU as well, and we started talking and they told me they have this band, it’s kind of a surf/ska band. I said, “Well, that’s kind of neat.” You know, ska was still going, Madness and Bad Manners and stuff like that. We just got to the point where I ended up recording them. I did a surf comp and I had been periodically doing little bits and pieces with Davie Allan and the Arrows for comps and stuff. He’s fuzzy, psychedelic surf, but he’s surf. I started putting together surf comps and I started working with The Halibuts. I actually took on as their manager in the beginning. They started out more surf and ska and later, as they progressed, they got more and more traditional sounding. Once again, I probably recorded them a little bit too early, too, at first, but all the energy and all the wackiness is there. They had a good little run. We did a couple of albums and then they started doing stuff on their own and I managed them and got them all kinds of stuff in the ’80s. I’d get them opening for Dick Dale or The Ventures. They played a show with Jon and the Nightriders. This is all a good seven, eight years before the ’93 surf revival.
HG: Or the ska revival for that matter.
Chris Ashford: Yeah. When they first started, they were still on the tail end of the first stuff. Bad Manners and some of those kinds of bands were still going strong, but you weren’t having the big hits like Madness and Selector were, at least in the early days.
HG: And The Specials, right?
Chris Ashford: Yeah. That took up a lot of the ‘80s where I was working on a lot of surf stuff. I reissued an album by a group called The Pyramids, who had a hit called “Penetration,” and did three What Surf compilations and recorded various different people. That’s when I hooked in with Agent Orange and produced two of their songs, covers, for my comps and then later worked with them and got that first EP on Enigma and got them signed to Enigma.
HG: They had moved on from the hardcore at that point, right?
Chris Ashford: They were still kind of in it, but they were definitely refining from it. The album, This Is the Voice, is still edgy, but it’s not that full on attack of the early band. Mike Palm went deep, deep, deep into surf music and later had his side project, The Diorras, which was an instrumental surf band. So that was kind of like the next chapter.
HG: And you also put out a Skull Control album?
Chris Ashford: Skull Control was ‘90s. That was like ’91. After that, stuff was dying off and I was morphing into figuring out what I was going to do. Kidd Spike and I had been talking about a lot of stuff and hanging out. They have now surfaced, but back in the day, none of us knew where The Controllers demos had gone. I was saying we’ve got to record “Hot Stumps” and record some of the other stuff that The Controllers had done. Stingray was living back east at the time. Originally, Spike had put together a band called Weird Skull Control, which was Nicky Beat, Billy Bones and himself, so it was a Weirdo, a Skull and a Controller. I put out a 45 by them. At this point, Nicky Beat was gone, but it was still Billy Bones, and then we started working on an album. In the midst of doing the album, Spike and Billy Bones didn’t see eye-to-eye about some stuff and, the next thing you know, it was just Spike. Between the single and the album, we found Maddog, so she got involved in it. Basically, it’s really just The Controllers without Stingray.
HG: After Skull Control, you did a Hawkwind live album…
Chris Ashford: A friend of mine was a huge Hawkwind fan, and he recorded them in Oakland on their Space Bandits tour. We made a deal with Dave Brock and I put that out and I did an album with Davie Allan. I was kind of ramping up, like, “Okay, let’s do nice packages, do this a little more seriously and do a little more promo and not be so localized.” I kind of got going up until ’93 and then I decided to open a shop, Ruckas Records, which changed the whole complexion of what I did with the label. I was getting kind of fed up with distribution. There’s all these little different distribution companies and your stuff would get put out there and sell okay for a while and then they’d put you on the back-burner, forget about you. Through everything that I’ve done, I’ve not necessarily done things to be in the norm, I’ve just done these things that I was into at the time. Sometimes it was too, shall we say, cult-y at the time. I was doing surf music in the ‘80s and it was the ‘90s when it got popular. People always had a hard time grasping some of the stuff that I was doing. Sales were not always what I wanted them to be and I went through some big ordeals with some distributors. I put out a Belairs collection, an early surf band, and had put together all these tapes with Paul Johnson and had a 40-page booklet in the CD and I would go down to a store and say, “How come you don’t have this Bel-Airs record? It’s available through this distributor.” I’d find out, “Oh, we order it all the time. I don’t know.” I’d give them a copy and then they’d finally get one and then they wouldn’t get back in there and I’d find that the sales person who was doing that account was not paying attention to what I was doing and we could have sold tons. Great. So I was getting kind of fed-up and, I don’t know, maybe starting a store was my idea that there’s always a place for my stuff. But the store was so involved, it was ’93 to ’97, that I just really couldn’t keep up and do a lot of label stuff at the time because I’d always try to do it myself. Smart idea. I did a couple more records. I did a honky tonk 10” with a girl named Dee Lannon and then I started putting together some stuff with Davie Allan and ended up working on licensing stuff more than really working on my label. So the label kind of spiraled down into nothingness, and the store, for what it’s worth, I burned out, more than anything else. It went through a tough music year where it didn’t do as well but a lot of it was really burn-out on my part. I just didn’t really get that motivated to do anything again until a few years ago. I did a few projects where I put together a couple Davie Allan records and got them licensed and had a few of my things licensed out on What? Stuff, a Bomp collection, but I never really put emphasis on my label. Finally, I took the first two Halibut vinyl albums and put them together on one CD and released that a few years back. And then, I decided, as usual, another change in direction, and I started another label.
HG: Which is Wondercap Records.
Chris Ashford: Which is Wondercap Records! It’s kind of this thing of people who are not really known for jazz stuff, but are doing jazzy kind of things, only it’s not straight jazz, necessarily. David Winogrond was the drummer for Davie Allan for 13 years, but he’s always liked Elvin Jones and he’s always liked psychedelic music and things like Hendrix, so he’s got his version of psychedelic jazz. I almost label it as prog rock at times, too. Then I made a deal with Sam Phipps, Sluggo from Oingo Boingo. He had an album that he did in the early ‘80s that was a straight hard bop jazz record, so I put that out and we added a few tracks to it. Recently, I hooked up with DJ Bonebrake again. He was the drummer on the second set of Germs songs that I recorded and he drummed on the Dee Lannon record. I called him one day and said, “Hey DJ, let’s do a record!” Between his schedule and playing with everybody else, we took two years trying to figure out what to do for a record. His is kind of a pseudo-jazzy, soundtrack-y, exotic-y, whatever you want to call it, kind of record. I’ve done a second record with David Winogrond and I’m looking to kind of set up a label that incorporates a lot of people playing with each other, ultimately, that are not necessarily from jazz background, but can be. Right now, I’m in the process of putting together a project with DJ Bonebrake and Elliott Caine, who’s a jazz trumpet player, and start creating this little community of people making records together.
HG: Kind of like the Blue Note thing.
Chris Ashford: Yeah, it has a lot of that going. One person’s the leader one time and one person can be the leader the other time. The way the music industry is now, I really want to make a label that is -- I hate using this word because it’s been used over and over -- but I’m trying to make it as artist-friendly as possible. I’m not looking at this as a big business label, but I want to make it a creative label and I want everybody to make something out of it, whether all the projects make money or not, because I think if we get a group of people that really want to be creative and can find the time to record and want to record and maybe do things with other people that are involved in this, we can actually make an interesting catalog of recordings that lets everybody be who they want to be. I want people to be a little more out there and a little different, not just get locked into the norms of bebop jazz or whatever. It can definitely have rock feeling because a lot of people are from that. I, ultimately, would like to see somebody like DJ Bonebrake scoring films and doing something different that way.
HG: How did you start Wondercap? I know I was pretty surprised to hear that you had suddenly started this jazz label.
Chris Ashford: Well, a couple things happened. A few years ago, somebody I know was starting a label and they wanted me to come in and be one of the A&R people. To make a long story short, the funding never came through on the label so it never really happened, but I had started talking to some really cool jazz people about doing a record, which included Dr. Art Davis, who is now passed away, but he’s one of the legendary bass players that played with Coltrane and played all through the late ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s. David Murray was going to be involved with the Art Davis project and a couple other people. I always listened to some jazz here and there, but I didn’t really move into some of the more interesting things that I found because I really wasn’t that familiar with David Murray at the time, so I really pushed into more saxophone-y stuff instead of just listening to Miles Davis and some of the other things I listened to. That kind of sparked me into more of a jazzy thing. David Winogrond and I have known each other for 255 years and we used to talk about stuff. He and I just started talking about jazz and maybe a project. He was getting excited about maybe doing something different than he had been doing, so that kind of morphed into what happened. I just always had a label in my blood so much. It seemed like it was ten years where I didn’t really do anything. I just started looking at it and going, “Okay, I’m crazy enough! The music business is in the worst shape it could possibly be. Everybody’s going down and here I am. Okay!” I started really looking at things and started saying, “Financially, we have to be able to record and make records happen where you can sell less than 1000 and still kind of be okay and everybody can make a little money.” Figure between people that I knew in the studios and engineers and stuff, but still make a quality record out there. Jazz is kind of another thing, too, where you can actually do a lot of live recording and still come up with stuff, so you’re not spending lots of money on recording. You’re not overdubbing a million vocals and guitar parts. It’s kind of a way, at least as the label is starting to get known a little bit, it’s a way to make some interesting records for low budgets and, hopefully, we’ll get a little more attention and people will look at it and say, “That’s a pretty cool label. I’d like to be on that label!” You know how it goes. Just kind of create this little recording community that is making good records. Hopefully, we can all keep surviving.
HG: One thing that especially interests me about it is that, for a long time, the established jazz community seemed to completely ignore and write-off Los Angeles. That was one thing that really irritated me when I lived there. One of my personal favorites, Peter Brötzmann, was doing a tour of the US and he didn’t come to L.A. I had to drive up to San Francisco to see him!
Chris Ashford: I’ve heard some really great stuff by him, too! L.A. is a funny place. We’ve pushed the industry to the point were if a band’s going to make money, they have to play live. You really don’t make money off of records anymore. Gone are the days were everybody sold 500,000 and they could make a living off it. No way. They go out and play live and they charge a big gate, and that’s how they make their money. Jazz has kind of morphed into that in this city. The Jazz Bakery goes on. A lot of big acts play there because, if they’re going to play L.A., they kind of have to in some ways, but it’s not a real comfortable place to go play because they have these fold-out chairs and it’s like a big auditorium with fold-out chairs kind of thing. One of the other clubs is Catalina’s, which is a really expensive dinner club and I think they’re a little snobby about who they bring in. You’ll go to the club and you’ll drop 30 bucks there on gate. Then there’s dinner and drinks. There’s another club off Mullholland on Beverly Glen that Herb Alpert partially owns, but once again, it’s a dinner club and these cutting-edge people don’t go there. I’ve been forced to see people like Ornette Coleman over at UCLA, which, it’s great to see him there, it’s a great sound system, but it’s still not the right atmosphere for that kind of thing in some ways. In the smaller clubs, there’s Jax and there’s Charlie O’s, but everybody kind of wants to be a dinner club and the jazz is just secondary. I don’t get a good feeling there’s a really good place for touring bands or artists to come in here and really be okay, which is probably why Brötzmann didn’t want to play L.A.
HG: I was part of a Sun Ra newsgroup at the time and I had made mention of it on there. A lot of people said that LA’s not taken seriously by the jazz community. I thought that was a shame because there’s some great jazz history there.
Chris Ashford: Oh, there’s all kinds of great jazz history and there’s a couple great artists who are not straight jazz at this point, but who should really be recognized, like Nels Cline. Sure, he’s playing with Wilco and sure, he gets a little out there for the jazz community and more into a noise thing at times, but he still does some records that are more jazz at times. I don’t think he really gets his due. It’s really hard in this city. I think the press, which I expected to be wholehearted anti what I was doing -- the jazz press -- has actually risen a little better than I thought they would. All About Jazz has been very supportive. It’s kind of a double-edged sword because, to run a magazine now, they want you to take out ads, too, so you do the trade-off thing. All About Jazz has been very supportive, Jazz Improv is working on being supportive, which is out in New York, but then things like Jazz Times are just a nightmare. I haven’t been able to get a peep out of them. Distribution’s been okay. I’ve been able to get it to all the Jazz Online sites. Cadence Magazine has been good, but it’s mixed. I think the people that are doing the avant-garde jazz know things are changing in jazz, too, whereas a lot of the old guard wouldn’t pay a hoot to me. I don’t think Downbeat pays much attention to anything I send them.
HG: Yeah, the jazz establishment can be very uptight.
Chris Ashford: Snooty. Oh, I’m gonna get killed for that one!
HG: But it’s true! I’ve experienced it and it’s annoying.
Chris Ashford: One of the DJs from KJZZ was at a book store doing a signing and they had a compilation CD they were selling. I brought a couple things to him and actually had a great talk with him and I know he likes more of the avant-garde type stuff anyway, so there is the group that’s out there, but there is the establishment that’s squeezing it, too. I can’t really count on radio play. Even if you get radio play you’re going to get played, what, once every week? That doesn’t sell records.
HG: Have you tried anything with National Public Radio?
Chris Ashford: Absolutely! It worked on a few. Maybe, until I get a little bigger, I have been concentrating more on west coast and US continent, not really stretching it overseas yet because it’s too thin. But as the catalog gets bigger, I’m starting to work out more and see if I can get something going there. It all depends on how good the catalog is. If I can keep it consistently into what I feel fits it, there will be an audience. It just takes time to find it.
HG: I think I told you before that I think your audience is more weirdos like me who own a ton of Sun Ra albums.
Chris Ashford: I can’t disagree with that!
HG: I’ve liked everything you’ve done, but I was really blown away by the latest Winogrond album, Into the Ether.
Chris Ashford: I think a lot of people will be. He’s kind of riding that line that I’m riding with my label. He’s not perfectly jazz, he’s not perfectly psychedelic rock, he’s not perfectly hard-edged punk rock. He’s kind of a tweener and it’s going to be interesting to see how people take him. His first album got a few good reviews and got a few scathing reviews and I expect the same on this one. It depends on where it’s coming from and who’s writing it.
HG: One thing I find really interesting about his albums is the production. It’s very different. It’s almost very slick and polished, but also dreamy. It definitely sounds different.
Chris Ashford: You have to hand that to David because I’ve let David do his own records and I just release them. Between him and his engineer and his sax player, Jack, they are the brainstem of how the production is. I let him ride and do his own sound.
HG: From what I understand, that’s kind of what you’ve been doing, right?
Chris Ashford: For the most part, though with DJ Bonebrake, he and I were very active in creating what he did. He’s kind of like me -- we’re very multi-faceted music lovers and we like many different things, so we had to knuckle down and figure out what kind of record it was going to be. DJ has never done a solo record before. He’s been involved in a million things but this one is really, shall we say, his brainstorm. As a producer, I had to say, “Let’s get focused. What are we going to do? Where are we headed?” I helped him a lot in bringing out what his first vision would be. We’ll probably do another Trio record and who knows if it will even sound close to the same? I don’t know. At least I helped him get over the hump of that first record, so I was very active in getting that one going. I’m looking to a trumpeter named Elliott Caine. We’re going to do some stuff with DJ and him together. DJ knows him because he’s played on Caine’s record on a track or two. I’m trying to take them out of their norm, once again, and do something really wacky and different between them. Elliott wouldn’t necessarily do it with his quartet or quintet. I’m trying to let people be themselves, but challenge them to so something a little different from what they normally do, too.
HG: You’ve got a lot on your plate. You’ve got Wondercap and some other things you’re working on…
Chris Ashford: I’ve been trying to coordinate some releases for Hepcat Records. We’ve done another Gears reissue that will probably be out in a couple months. We’re also doing a D.I.s reissue, which is Axxel and Dave Drive’s band after The Gears. In searching through the tapes for The D.I.s material, we found the original 1979 recordings of The Gears, so we’re adding five of those songs to yet another reissue of The Gears’ album, but it’s going to have something fresh and new on it, too. Of course, The D.I.s only did a five-song 12” in their day, and we found 17 more studio tracks to add to it.
HG: So this is not D.I. from Orange County.
Chris Ashford: This is not the Orange County D.I., this is The D.I.s. -- Drill Instructors. We’re probably a couple months away from getting those out and together. Not that I need extra work to drive me crazy, but I’ve been trying to coordinate some projects for Hepcat and we’re talking about a Shock one right now, too. The Gears had done some recordings in 2003, four songs for a label that has basically folded since then. I bought those tapes recently and I’m going to look to do a four-song 10” on Iloki/Wondercap for The Gears as well.
HG: So Iloki’s still going?
Chris Ashford: It’s never really stopped; it just hasn’t been very active.
HG: You mentioned The Spastics…
Chris Ashford: The Spastics! Well, that’s another one. I want to do another vinyl compilation of all the old What stuff and The Spastics have two songs. I’m going to add those to it. I just need to get a hold of one of them and make sure I got all the information right from the old days. I don’t know who’s going to be that excited, but they were the world’s most hated band! But it adds something new.
HG: It sounds exciting to me!
Chris Ashford: I’ll let the recordings speak for themselves when you hear it. I won’t explain it.
END
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