|
|
|
Words: Louis Pattison
|
Mike Simonetti is no musician, but as the label owner of Italians Do It Better, he’s a crucial figure in this story, the guy that makes all this happen. Born and raised in New Jersey, Simonetti has followed the New York music scene from the far bank of the Hudson river - and since 1993, has charted it with his label Troubleman Unlimited, ostensibly an emo/hardcore imprint, but more accurately, a deliberately borderless operation that’s been consistently ahead of the curve in bringing dance-punk, metal, and noise to a wider audience. Simonetti would be your archetypal hipster, except he’s a leader, not a follower. Plan B chases him down and grabs 45 minutes out of his preparations for Italians Do It Better’s forthcoming European tour.
So you grew up in New Jersey… how were you as a kid, and what was your earliest experience of New York?
“Back in grade school, in the early Eighties, I was really into Iron Maiden - Number Of The Beast, Piece Of Mind. And lots of rap - we had a lot of good radio stations in New York, and I used to record the shows and listen to them over and over. Before I had a driver’s license, you had to take a bus then a train - it would take like an hour, so I used to sneak out there all night. New York’s pretty safe now but back then it was pretty sketchy - walking from CBGBs to the train station was pretty dangerous.
How did you get into hardcore?
“When I hit high school age, the freshman year, I was still listening to metal, but I was getting into a lot of BMXing, skateboarding, and that kind of went hand and hand with hardcore. The first real hardcore records I got into was Suicidal Tendencies, DRI - and for some reason I got really into the Toy Dolls which was weird – they’re not hardcore at all, they’re kind of shitty. When I started going to shows in the late Eighties, hardcore was kinda crossing over into metal, but there was still a small straight edge scene, and as I never really drank or did drugs, I gravitated towards that. I got really into this band Seven Seconds - they weren’t really straight edge, kinda posi, positive hardcore. I went to see them at CBGBs, and that’s what got me into straight edge. I was always into Minor Threat so it was a natural progression.”
So when did you discover dance music?
“The guys who got me into skating, they also knew a load of guys who worked in nightclubs, so I would hang out with them, sorta criss-cross both worlds. I was always into rap. The club I used to work at, Mars, I started working there because I wanted to hang out and listen to hip hop! Funkmaster Flex was our inhouse DJ. But it had four floors, four different rooms, and there was a room playing house too. House pretty much immediately grabbed me. At that time house was kinda new in New York. All my friends lived in Jersey City, and at that time, New Jersey was all freestyle music, that was the big thing. Freestyle, it’s it’s like singing over electro beats – have you heard the song ‘When I Hear Music’ by Debbie Deb? That’s like the most obvious freestyle song. It was really minimal. Ninety percent of freestyle records came out from where I live in New Jersey, and the other stuff is from Miami. Actually, Glass Candy is really inspired by freestyle - on the surface it’s Italo but listen closer and you can hear the freestyle. Johnny grew up in Texas which is kinda close to Miami, and I think a lot of that Florida sound has crept into what he does. Anyway, back in the late Eighties a lot of the freestyle producers were getting into house – the club Zanzibar in Newark, that was really where house was born in Jersey.”
What did you do at the clubs?
“Well, I would go to other clubs and hand out flyers, and I would have my initials on the fliers. At the end of the night they would count up the fliers and I’d get paid by the flyer. So you’d have to hustle, you’d hit as many clubs as you could. Eight to ten clubs a night – if you worked the clubs, you’d know the doormen so you could skip the line. I guess now in hindsight these are all legendary clubs but for me it just a way to make a living. But you know, I wanted to meet the girls, and I wanted to hear the music. I think it wasn’t as much to do with the money as it was to get girls [laughs >. I was a teenager, you know? That’s all you care about. And if I made a couple of hundred dollars at the end of the week, I was really excited.”
When did you begin your first label, Troubleman Unlimited?
“Troubleman started as a fanzine. I was going to lots of shows and fanzines then were huge. I started a fanzine called Wanna Communicate? Terrible name, but it kinda took off – this is like ’89, ’90. This zine was based around these bands that used to play at a venue called ABC No Rio. CBGBs was becoming really violent, hardcore shows were becoming really macho, and gangs were coming in and hanging out. ABC No Rio formed in response to that. It was like, a community centre in the lower east side, a really bad bit, which is now million dollar condos, but then it was the worst part of New York. All these bands loved to play there because it had a different atmosphere to the other hardcore shows, so it really took off and I got really involved in the scene there. Towards the end of ’92 I did a zine that came with a tape compilation, and that was the first release on Troubleman – it was all over the map, a 90 minute cassette compilation that ranged from raging hardcore bands to indie rock. It just made sense to put everything together. That was the first release. Also, in the mid Nineties, I was into the whole riot grrl scene around Olympia, and I was heavily into this band Unwound. I was like, wow, this is like Black Flag meets… Black Flag [laughs >. So I wrote them a letter, like, do you wanna do a record? Now Unwound are one of my favourite bands of all time, later they were on Kill Rock Stars but at the time they’d only had one 7” out, or something They wrote back and they were like, we don’t really know you, but we’ll be in town soon, we’ll see you at the show. I gave them my phone number, but their van broke down in New Jersey on the way to the gig, so they called me from the highway, like, can you come get us? We became friends, and that was how it started. They became big and ended up opening for Fugazi on a few tours. You know, if it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t have a label.”
How did you get into putting out noise records?
“At the time I would be putting out bands like Unwound, really heavy hardcore records, and indie records. I think the first noise-related record I put out was Black Dice, and that was before they were the experimental Black Dice they are now. Before about 2001, Black Dice were a really violent hardcore band, they’d play five minute sets and the singer, Eric would jut kick people in the crowd, punch them, throw shit at them. They were really sloppy but they were great. I heard them because they were from Rhode Island, I’d heard their stuff on Gravity, so I wrote them a letter, and I ended up putting out a few records with them. Through Black Dice I got into Wolf Eyes - those guys used to be real tight. I remember seeing Wolf Eyes play a show at some Brooklyn warehouse. At the time Wolf Eyes were really crazy, they had beats and they were really fast. It was totally insane and really great. Wolf Eyes change their sound all the time. Dead Hills, I put that out, and that was the first Wolf Eyes record that had big distribution at all. At that time, I was putting out loads of weird shit – it was violent music, but it wasn’t hardcore, but hardcore kids were suddenly getting into it. It helps that Wolf Eyes is an amazing live band, they’re punishing, they don’t quit. They’re all ex-punk rockers, they grew up in Detroit listening to Negative Approach, hardcore.”
“I’m not going to claim I made noise mainstream, because I didn’t, but I was certainly one of the first labels to do that stuff – and if you look now, noise and indie-rock cross over - like, look at Animal Collective. Back then they were two guys just twiddling knobs. Now they’re a rock band.”
How do Italians Do It Better find playing in the UK?
“London is good, it’s crazy – you know, London seems to be our biggest fanbase. I’ve DJ'd in London a couple of times and every time I come it’s great. We’ve had such big offers to do shows. We don’t want to play any indie rock shows, we wanna push the dance thing. When we moved labels, from Italians to Troubleman, we decided we really didn’t want to do that stuff. We wanted to try something different, and it seems to be working. It’s weird, these bands have been together forever, and I’ve been putting ‘em out for years, and we’ve had some success but nothing like what we’re having right now. And it’s just because we’ve switched names!”
Are there plans for proper albums? Or are you planning to stick to these tour CDs?
“Let me give you the rundown on how this works – originally, when I decided to start a dance label, it was for me to release bootlegs and edits of my favourite dance songs. That was it really, I didn’t want to start up a proper record label, It was just a fun thing on the side. But one day Glass Candy were in town and Johnny was sitting in my kitchen drinking wine at 5 in the morning, listening to records. I was telling him how I wanna do this label, because I wanna try something new, I’m DJing a lot, and I wanna call it Italians Do It Better. It’s gonna be like, a fun thing – nothing serious. And we were talking about how Glass Candy were selling OK, but we could be doing better [laughs >. Then a couple of nights later, they’re playing a show, their first dance club show in Manhattan. They’ve just started playing more electronic stuff, this is like two years ago – they have a live drummer and also a drum machine. And it was crazy, people were flipping out - it was like a dance party. So we go back to my place and it’s like, hey, let’s start a new label, and Glass Candy and Chromatics can be on that label. That’s how it started. I had a bunch of groups I wanted to release - this guy Professor Genius, I’d been promising to release a record by him for like a year-and-a-half and I don’t think he thought it was going to happen. So he gave me some songs, and I said, well, let’s make a tour CD – Glass Candy make all these tour CDs, which they sell on the road. We’ll do 100, and we’ll sell them on tour. That became the After Dark CD, we made 100, and they sold out pretty much immediately. But one of the guys who bought it was a guy from Pitchfork, and he reviewed it, and the rest is history. It was up as Best New Music on Pitchfork over the Xmas holidays, and there’s no real competition as that time, so it was up there for two, three months. One of my distributors called me up and was like, are Troubleman releasing this comp? Because we could take a couple of thousand. We pressed it, and over the holidays we received numerous requests for promos. We don’t usually do that stuff, we’re pretty hard to get in touch with – you know, we have this thing where we’d rather remain sort of low key.
I’ve been doing Troubleman for years, you know, and my whole way of thinking is, if you become flavour of the month really fast, you’ll fade out really fast. Like, Franz Ferdinand over here in the US, they became really popular over here, everyone got their first record, then the second – nothing. It kinda bombed. Did the Arctic Monkeys release a second record? That never made it again over here. Americans are so… It’s always about the new thing, there’s no real loyalty. Glass Candy has so much loyalty, because they make exclusive material and sell it to the fans who come to the shows. They’re really true to their fans. They’re always touring, they don’t really have jobs, they’re home now for a while, but they’re doing Australia, New Zealand, Europe. Between that and licensing songs to fashion shows or commercials, or whatever, they get by. You know, you don’t really make money from selling records. Well, we do, but we got this weird hype thing going on. So what we’re doing now, we’re trying to keep the hype there, but not flood the market. Unless it’s the best record ever made, it’ll fade.”
So, keep it simmering…?
“Yeah. Keep it simmering forever. [laughs >”
Are you still keeping up to speed releasing stuff on Troubleman?
“I’m actually putting out about eleven releases in three weeks… eight Troubleman records and three Italians. All vinyl, no CD. CDs are dead, totally.”
Do you do digital releases?
“We do it. Italians does well digitally, but I don’t care about that stuff, I just buy vinyl. You know, when I DJ I’ll go to Beatport and download some songs and burn them onto CD cos some things are impossible to get out here. Or you’ll be paying 25 dollars for a single 12”. I’ll download dance stuff legally, but I don’t care about downloading major label rock stuff though – I’ll just take that. At this point, they really can’t afford it, but fuck it, I don’t care. I’m not a big fan of the music industry, I don’t care about it any more. I f the music industry died tomorrow I wouldn’t care. What’s happening with music nowadays is so silly. Ask a 16 year old what an album is, they don’t even know. They’ll just download one song, they’ve forgotten what it all means. We’re putting out a triple LP of After Dark, and the next three twelve-inches come out in a month. There’s Invisible Conga People from New York, then there’s two twelve-inches from Tie Dye in Sweden – the first is a Metallica cover, and the second is a really limited thing we haven’t really announced yet. It’s a remix of this band called Rubies, I don’t know who they are, some all girl band. But it’s got Feist on vocals – so we’re basically releasing a Feist remix record. It’s basically like a Balearic rock record, it’s great. We’re only pressing a couple of hundred. So it’s gonna say Rubies feat. Feist – Tie Dye remix.”
Are you DJing a lot?
“Well, it’s happening even more now as the label takes off. I try to DJ a lot. It’s fun and it’s a really good way to make money. You don’t make money selling records anymore, you make money gigging and that’s a gig for me.”
What are you playing out at the moment? There’s kinda a misconception that Italians Do It Better is an Italo label, but that’s not entirely the case…?
“I like Italo, but I don’t like playing it out – I have this weird aversion to playing shitty music when I DJ. When you go to most DJ nights, everyone’s playing bangers, like electro stuff. I think the reason I don’t like electro isn’t the music, it’s the crowd - you get the headbangers, the people who wanna stagedive and act stupid. People aren’t dancing anymore, it’s become an excuse to get rowdy. In America I see a DJ playing electro and it’s just rich white teenagers jumping around, doing a lot of drugs, stage-diving and crowd surfing. For them it’s just a reason to go out and get wasted. I remember, there was a Daft Punk afterparty at Studio B in Brooklyn. The Justice dudes were in town and DJing, it’s totally packed – and Justice like to play a lot of rock stuff. People start crowd surfing, diving off the DJ booth – it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I miss the days when people would dance like normal people. There’s nothing better than seeing a load of hands up in the air to a great song – like, European style. Not stage diving to a Rage Against The Machine remix. But hey, I like the first Justice single – it’s the people who like it I can’t stand.”
|
|
|
|
Current Issue |
To subscribe to Plan B, click here |
Order the July 2008 issue of Plan B - or buy back issues or a subscription. Click here for secure ordering and contents or more information. |
|
|
Advert |
 |
|
Mailing List |
|
...for exclusive competitions, special offers, up-to-date news, playlists, and information about Plan B-related events.
|
|
|
