Bruce Iglauer interview: 40 years of Alligator Records

    “I run this business with the knowledge that the grandchildren of Hound Dog Taylor are counting on me to make smart decisions,” he says, sitting next to a coffee table brimming with stuffed alligators (the label was named after Iglauer’s habit of clicking his teeth together in time to music) and a pyramid-shaped Blues Foundation trophy awarded to the imprint for “Keeping the Blues Alive.”

    In an interview, Iglauer reflected on his favorite subject: the blues, and how to ensure that future generations will hear it.     

Q: How’s business?
A: We took a really bad hit in 2009, but the last year turned out to be profitable. Our international business has actually grown. We have so many artists who are successfully touring in Europe right now and we’ve been aggressive about building those marketplaces. Our download market is growing.  For our more straight-up blues artists the digital market is fairly small, but newer artists like JJ Grey and Mofro and Anders Osborne can sell as much as 45 percent digital. 

Q: In 1991 on your 20th anniversary you estimated gross revenue of $4 million for Alligator. What’s your revenue like now?
A: Our cash flow is about half of what it was 20 years ago. The sales of all recordings in the world are about half of what they were in 1999. We’ve all taken a hit.

Q: Many in the industry blame file-sharing for the decline. I know you feel it’s hurt the business.
A: It didn’t hurt us as much directly because of our adult consumer base, which likes to buy physical product. But there are many fewer stores today carrying our records. The implosion of commercial recordings started in 1999, and Napster started in 1999. I don’t think that’s coincidental. There is some legal action against file-sharing in the U.S. It’s a good sign. But burning a CD and sending it to your friend is unstoppable. That’s here to stay. We can’t as publishers keep up with all our songs that are showing up on YouTube. We’ve given up. It’s an impossible fight. YouTube will take it down if you complain, but take no responsibility for what they put up.

Q: But is there any benefit to people exposing their friends to your music this way?
A: Certainly people hear about music from friends. I used to have friends come over and I’d play my new records for them, and some of them went out and bought them. But when you give away all the music, burn the entire album and give it to a friend, then no, your friend is not going to go out and purchase it later. I want people to hear my music, I solicit radio stations to play it. But I don’t solicit people to give it away. The effect of downloading is much more negative than positive.

Q: Are you trying to sign 360-deals with your artists to get a cut of their touring income now that record sales have dropped?
A: No. The only way that we benefit from touring is that these days most artists will buy CDs from us and sell them at shows. I won’t work with artists who won’t do that. It’s part of what a label has to do to survive. Most of my artists need all the money they can get from touring. A successful gig is the best sales tool we have. There is nothing more satisfying than a good live performance. If I could make all my records as good as a good live performance I’d be a happy guy. Most of my artists are still driving themselves up and down the highway, three to five nights a week, having no financial security, no health insurance. I only have a few artists who have the financial means to retire. There are only a tiny number in any kind of music that have that kind of financial security. In blues the number is smaller, once you get below the level of stars like Buddy Guy and B.B. King.

Q: What can a blues artist expect to make on the road?
A: A successful blues artist makes about the same as a factory worker, except the factory worker probably also has benefits. I know a few blues artists who own their own homes, a couple who have health insurance, a couple who have their bands on salaries. For the most part I know people who cannot afford to be sick, who cannot afford to be off the road, who will work if they can anywhere from 80 to 200 gigs a year. It’s a very hard life. Most don’t have other great job skills. Michael Burks did security for an aerospace company. Lil Ed’s brother drove a schoolbus. Coco Montoya was a bartender. We’re not talking about master’s degree jobs. 

Q: How have recording costs been affected?
A: The cost of making a record has actually gone down in the last 40 years. I was making deals for $100 to $120 an hour for studio time to record albums, now I pay half that. I used to spend $2,000 on tape alone. No more. I will cut songs on tape, then dump them into Pro Tools, than re-record over the tape. I’m not afraid of digital. I think those records sound as warm and live sounding as analog records. If the music is great, most of the public doesn’t care what it sounds like. The important thing is the song and the performance.

Q: You used to produce most of the albums you put out, but you seem to have cut back. Why?
A: Because I’m not the right producer for a lot of the artists I sign -- JJ Grey, Marcia Ball, Anders Osborne. I’m a good blues producer. If you want to make a good-sounding blues record, I’m your man. If you want to make something more complex than that, I’m not your man. I’m not a musician. I don’t read music. I’m no Arif Mardin, I’m no Glen Ballard. But I think I can make a better Lil’ Ed record than anyone in the world. I have other artists, they come with a vision of their own, their music is more complex, and they want to make their own personal statement. JJ Grey writes every song and will cut demos with almost everything done, and then he and his producer hire musicians to play parts very close to that. Anders Osborne’s sensibility is completely different from mine, and it’s cool. He’s way heavier than anything I’d normally like. But seeing him perform, I was shocked to find myself liking it a lot, I was drawn to the passion of it. Talk about throwing yourself into a performance, literally. But I don’t know how I could help him get that on a record.

Q: Blues is shrinking as a percentage of the national music market, right?
A: Yes, straight-up blues is less than 1 percent of the U.S. market. Blues hasn’t had a champion, a new artist in quite some time, since Stevie Ray Vaughan’s death (in 1990). There are a lot of younger listeners who don’t have a way into the music. 

Q: Eric Clapton says the blues has become like classical music – but is that a good thing for its future?
A: I think blues has a future as long as it doesn’t spend too much time repeating what already has been done. It’s in a double bind. A lot of established blues fans really want their blues to sound like what they grew up with. But it was never a static thing. When Muddy Waters started playing electric guitar at Chess he didn’t sound like Robert Johnson, and Robert Johnson inserting jazz chords into his songs didn’t sound like Son House. To survive, the blues has got to speak to a contemporary audience lyrically, it’s got to be something people can dance to, it’s got to feel like blues but not regurgitate what’s already been done so well. That box next to you is full of unsolicited demos. I guarantee that half of them will have a Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters or B.B. King song, and none of them will sound like those guys. You just can’t beat ‘em. So why are you trying? The future blues will have tension and release, and real-life story lyrics, usually in the first person, in a way that an audience can relate to. That feeling of hurt so good. If it has that, and a sense of the tradition, it will be contemporary music. If all it does is re-create it, it will be a museum piece.

Q: What will the next young blues champion have to bring to the music to break through?
A: I am always looking at younger artists, and it may be a guy or gal who is not an instrumentalist. As Tom Dowd used to say to me, “No one goes home singing the solo.” You do look for the songs. I’m not into style. My idea of style is just to be as exposed as you can possibly be. I’m not concerned about haircuts. I need to feel the honesty of what you’re singing.

Q: You do this label 24-7, but you are also married (to Jo Kolanda), right?
A: For 15 years. I am happily married to a woman who lives 100 miles away (in Wisconsin). We carve out time to see each other. I married into a family, with two adult children and seven grandchildren. My wife is incredibly tolerant of what I do. We got married on a Saturday, had a reception at (Buddy Guy’s) Legends on Sunday with 400 friends and on Monday we had our honeymoon. We went to the Art Institute and Cirque du Soleil, and in between I had a session I had to visit because an artist on the label was cutting a commercial. My wife assumed that was the norm. She is not a blues geek. She’s into folk. We managed to make it work, but it takes a very special woman to make it work. I met her professionally. Her old boyfriend was a booking agent. I first met her at Milwaukee Summerfest in 1975 at a Hound Dog Taylor performance. It took me three years to ask her out, and 18 years of off and on courtship before we got married.

Q: What does she do for a living?
A: She’s retired. She had a high stress job, running the victim witness services office for the Milwaukee County prosecutor. She has a degree in philosophy.

Q: Do you ever see yourself walking away from this?
A: Very few people have been able to create a label with a vision that has opened doors for musicians and created an audience for them. There were a half-dozen labels that started in Chicago around the time I did, and they’re not around anymore. As good as my people are here, I don’t know if any of them has the overall vision to find the artists, produce the artists and lead the music company forward for the next 15-20 years. As much as I’d like to work for the ACLU or political campaigns, I think the chances are I’ll be here the rest of my life.

Q: Would the 23-year-old Bruce Iglauer start a label in 2011?
A: I’d probably start as a webcaster and try to get the music out that way, or work as a booking agent. But I started the label because I love recordings, the idea of creating something that can live on in the future, maybe stand the test of time, and hit someone the same way it once hit me. The definition of a label is definitely changing. I like the old way of being exposed to music, but those ways are not coming back. I don’t want to miss an opportunity for our music to be heard. Figuring out a way to make it pay is constantly changing. A lot of our music is being licensed in TV and movies, even in a video game. These are things that musicians usually can’t do. We do a lot of social networking for them, too. I work with artists who have not finished high school, who are not computer literate. They need someone, if not us then a fan or friend, who can help them with this. Even if you’re a young band, you need a place to rehearse. You need dad’s garage, and you need a home to come back to. Somebody has to be a patron of the arts below a certain economic line. That is our role. Koko used to say, “Never curse the bridge that took you across.” We need to be that bridge for a lot of artists.

greg@gregkot.com