So how did you start making it actually happen?
My best friend and partner with all the non-surfing things growing up was Mike Piscitelli, and he was living in New York at the time, and I knew that everything I didn’t have, Mike had. Mike is so artisically on point, he’s always had this great vision — he’s weird, he’s eccentric, and he’s always incredibly connected with music.
So I call him, and I go ‘Mike, I think I want to start a label, and I want you to do it with me.’ And he goes, ‘Well I’m in New York and I’m having a really good time; I’m not really that interested in coming home, but if you can get a bunch of money to start a label, I’ll come back and I’ll do it with you.”
So at that point I called Paul Gomez, my team manager at Billabong, and he was close with people in the music industry. I told him what I wanted to do, and he goes, ‘Let’s do it together. We can figure out a way to get some money from somebody to get a label deal. Write a business plan, then we’ll take some meetings.’ In the ensuing 6–8 months, we got our stuff together and we were off an running… sort of.
Was the music industry then in the dire straits it is now?
The ‘record’ industry was beginning to be in real dire straits, but it wasn’t as bad as it is now. I think that’s why we got the deal in the first place. The chairman of Warner Bros., who we ended up doing the deal with, recognized that the industry was in such a major state of change, and it was happening because of young people like us. I think he thought, ‘well shit, who better to get into business with during this revolutionary period in the music business than the very people who are responsible for the revolution?’ So I think it worked out really nicely for both of us.
What was the first huge thing for you to have happen at RC?
When we moved into our first office, It became real. The deal took forever to do, or at least it felt like forever… Mike had moved back from New York with the understanding that we had money to operate, but the deal wasn’t done and he wasn’t happy. But Mike’s never happy so I wasn’t too worried. Anyway, for about two months we were just sitting around waiting for our lawyers to close the deal and I was beginning to freak out; I don’t like waiting around. Finally, the deal closed and within days the money got wired into our account. We found an little craftsman house on Abbot Kinney and we opened up shop. We ran the company for three years out of there.
What were you thinking when you moved into this place?
That it was expensive! It was $1200 a month, which is not much looking back on it, but we definitely didn’t want to spend a lot of money on rent, and at the time we were going ‘1200 dollars? Fuck man, this is for real.’
It was just the two of us. I took one office and Mike took another, and we were real excited about that. And I remember when I was signing the lease, my hand was getting sweaty. I started to perspire — I had never done anything like that before. It was so new, and I had no guidance on any of this stuff, it was all kinda fly by the seat of your pants. It was crazy.
What was the next phase of record collection?
Signing our first artist, Har Mar Superstar. We met Har Mar at a party in LA and he slipped us some demos for an album he’d just started working on. He was looking for something different, and we were looking to sign our first artist. The timing was perfect for both of us.
Did your partners go along with it?
It was an experimental signing for sure. There were a lot of expectations as to what we were going to do — I came from the surfing community, Mike came from the fashion kind of world, and Paul Gomez came from the surf community too, so we were kinda just like, ‘screw it — let’s just do something totally unexpected,’ and we did. Har Mar Superstar was anything but conventional — but he knew more about the music industry than we did, so in a weird way we all got to cut our teeth together. It was a lot of fun and that 1st record wound up being successful for us.
Running the label, were there ever freak-out points for you, or was it always taking things pretty day-to-day?
I don’t have that in my nature where everybody’s always freaking out and always nervous. I figure, we’re not doing surgery, I can figure this out one way or another. Nothing’s going be too complicated to figure out. And when you’re surfing, you’re constantly faced with mortality and you’re powerless to so many things that you realize that nothing’s that big of a deal. And It’s not that I don’t care, because I care immensely, it’s just that I’m not afraid of failure.
Jordan, Indonesia Airport.
For you, what has been the high point of doing RC?
The high point for me was getting to work with my sister everyday. We got to a point where I was able to bring her into the company and pay her a good salary and she was able to leave the job that she was at and come work full time at the label and that was the best. Two years, everyday, I got to hang out with her. Running a business becomes a stressful enterprise after a while and having your family there, especially someone as close to her as I was, it’s such a pressure alleviator.
Was there ever a point when running the label became too much?
There was a point toward kind of the end of my relationship with Warner Brothers where we were just seeing things from two completely different sides of the map and it became very difficult to continue. I would just come to work everyday stressed out, and it defeated the whole purpose of it. I was signing bands that they didn’t understand, and they wanted us to sign bands that I didn’t respond to at all. The problem was really just that our long term and short term goals were so different that we couldn’t co-exist.
At that point, was RC something you were looking forward to phasing out in your life?
Well, it was never phasing out; it was more that I was eager to breathe some new life into it. Mike and I stayed with RC, and Paul [Gomez] went off and started Science [Records]. It was all a challenging experience, but it felt really liberating at the same time. We had a deal with Warner Brothers that enabled us to keep working with some of our bands, so it ended up being fruitful for both of us. It was right after Spiderman [3, the soundtrack] came out, so I think everybody felt pretty good about things, and then it was kind of like a fresh start.
What were the proceeding events?
It took about 6 months to get out of my contract with Warner Brothers — it was a phase of limbo — most of our bands were off cycle, Simon Dawes had broken up, Walkmen were off cycle, and John Frusciante was off cycle. So, other than maintaining our catalogue, I had very little to do as far as RC was concerned. I couldn’t sign any new bands because we were technically still under contract so I spent a lot of time reading, surfing and developing some other projects.I couldn’t really do anything, so I went surfing for 6 months. I spent some time in Indonesia, in Mexico, at home…
Jordan Tappis, Indonesia
Did you need to get away?
No, that’s just what I do. I went from surfing to starting a label, and then I hit this patch with the label where I couldn’t do anything for a period of time, so I just went back to what I was doing before I started the label. I didn’t do any competing, but I wanted to travel.
A lot of people would be afraid to leave the foothold they’d created in their community. How did you feel about that?
I wasn’t gone for a full six months, but that never even occurred to me. I was just gonna go surfing. See some of my friends that I hadn’t seen for a while. So I traveled and I surfed, and I got to spend more time with my girl, my cats, and I listened to a lot of music and did a lot of writing, and just kind of realigned myself. And then the termination deal got done and then I went back to work. And John [Frusciante] delivered a record about two weeks after the agreement got zipped up. That was the first quarter of 2008.
Jordan Tappis 2
So how did you start making it actually happen?
My best friend and partner with all the non-surfing things growing up was Mike Piscitelli, and he was living in New York at the time, and I knew that everything I didn’t have, Mike had. Mike is so artisically on point, he’s always had this great vision — he’s weird, he’s eccentric, and he’s always incredibly connected with music.
So I call him, and I go ‘Mike, I think I want to start a label, and I want you to do it with me.’ And he goes, ‘Well I’m in New York and I’m having a really good time; I’m not really that interested in coming home, but if you can get a bunch of money to start a label, I’ll come back and I’ll do it with you.”
So at that point I called Paul Gomez, my team manager at Billabong, and he was close with people in the music industry. I told him what I wanted to do, and he goes, ‘Let’s do it together. We can figure out a way to get some money from somebody to get a label deal. Write a business plan, then we’ll take some meetings.’ In the ensuing 6–8 months, we got our stuff together and we were off an running… sort of.
The ‘record’ industry was beginning to be in real dire straits, but it wasn’t as bad as it is now. I think that’s why we got the deal in the first place. The chairman of Warner Bros., who we ended up doing the deal with, recognized that the industry was in such a major state of change, and it was happening because of young people like us. I think he thought, ‘well shit, who better to get into business with during this revolutionary period in the music business than the very people who are responsible for the revolution?’ So I think it worked out really nicely for both of us.
What was the first huge thing for you to have happen at RC?
When we moved into our first office, It became real. The deal took forever to do, or at least it felt like forever… Mike had moved back from New York with the understanding that we had money to operate, but the deal wasn’t done and he wasn’t happy. But Mike’s never happy so I wasn’t too worried. Anyway, for about two months we were just sitting around waiting for our lawyers to close the deal and I was beginning to freak out; I don’t like waiting around. Finally, the deal closed and within days the money got wired into our account. We found an little craftsman house on Abbot Kinney and we opened up shop. We ran the company for three years out of there.
What were you thinking when you moved into this place?
That it was expensive! It was $1200 a month, which is not much looking back on it, but we definitely didn’t want to spend a lot of money on rent, and at the time we were going ‘1200 dollars? Fuck man, this is for real.’
It was just the two of us. I took one office and Mike took another, and we were real excited about that. And I remember when I was signing the lease, my hand was getting sweaty. I started to perspire — I had never done anything like that before. It was so new, and I had no guidance on any of this stuff, it was all kinda fly by the seat of your pants. It was crazy.
What was the next phase of record collection?
Signing our first artist, Har Mar Superstar. We met Har Mar at a party in LA and he slipped us some demos for an album he’d just started working on. He was looking for something different, and we were looking to sign our first artist. The timing was perfect for both of us.
Did your partners go along with it?
It was an experimental signing for sure. There were a lot of expectations as to what we were going to do — I came from the surfing community, Mike came from the fashion kind of world, and Paul Gomez came from the surf community too, so we were kinda just like, ‘screw it — let’s just do something totally unexpected,’ and we did. Har Mar Superstar was anything but conventional — but he knew more about the music industry than we did, so in a weird way we all got to cut our teeth together. It was a lot of fun and that 1st record wound up being successful for us.
Running the label, were there ever freak-out points for you, or was it always taking things pretty day-to-day?
I don’t have that in my nature where everybody’s always freaking out and always nervous. I figure, we’re not doing surgery, I can figure this out one way or another. Nothing’s going be too complicated to figure out. And when you’re surfing, you’re constantly faced with mortality and you’re powerless to so many things that you realize that nothing’s that big of a deal. And It’s not that I don’t care, because I care immensely, it’s just that I’m not afraid of failure.
Jordan, Indonesia Airport.
For you, what has been the high point of doing RC?
The high point for me was getting to work with my sister everyday. We got to a point where I was able to bring her into the company and pay her a good salary and she was able to leave the job that she was at and come work full time at the label and that was the best. Two years, everyday, I got to hang out with her. Running a business becomes a stressful enterprise after a while and having your family there, especially someone as close to her as I was, it’s such a pressure alleviator.
Was there ever a point when running the label became too much?
There was a point toward kind of the end of my relationship with Warner Brothers where we were just seeing things from two completely different sides of the map and it became very difficult to continue. I would just come to work everyday stressed out, and it defeated the whole purpose of it. I was signing bands that they didn’t understand, and they wanted us to sign bands that I didn’t respond to at all. The problem was really just that our long term and short term goals were so different that we couldn’t co-exist.
At that point, was RC something you were looking forward to phasing out in your life?
Well, it was never phasing out; it was more that I was eager to breathe some new life into it. Mike and I stayed with RC, and Paul [Gomez] went off and started Science [Records]. It was all a challenging experience, but it felt really liberating at the same time. We had a deal with Warner Brothers that enabled us to keep working with some of our bands, so it ended up being fruitful for both of us. It was right after Spiderman [3, the soundtrack] came out, so I think everybody felt pretty good about things, and then it was kind of like a fresh start.
What were the proceeding events?
It took about 6 months to get out of my contract with Warner Brothers — it was a phase of limbo — most of our bands were off cycle, Simon Dawes had broken up, Walkmen were off cycle, and John Frusciante was off cycle. So, other than maintaining our catalogue, I had very little to do as far as RC was concerned. I couldn’t sign any new bands because we were technically still under contract so I spent a lot of time reading, surfing and developing some other projects.I couldn’t really do anything, so I went surfing for 6 months. I spent some time in Indonesia, in Mexico, at home…
Jordan Tappis, Indonesia
Did you need to get away?
No, that’s just what I do. I went from surfing to starting a label, and then I hit this patch with the label where I couldn’t do anything for a period of time, so I just went back to what I was doing before I started the label. I didn’t do any competing, but I wanted to travel.
A lot of people would be afraid to leave the foothold they’d created in their community. How did you feel about that?
I wasn’t gone for a full six months, but that never even occurred to me. I was just gonna go surfing. See some of my friends that I hadn’t seen for a while. So I traveled and I surfed, and I got to spend more time with my girl, my cats, and I listened to a lot of music and did a lot of writing, and just kind of realigned myself. And then the termination deal got done and then I went back to work. And John [Frusciante] delivered a record about two weeks after the agreement got zipped up. That was the first quarter of 2008.
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