The legendary BBC DJ John Peel is rightly recalled for championing new, obscure and overlooked musical artists. He is less well known for his quixotic atte...
Miles Copeland III was already a veteran music promoter and manager when the punk scene exploded in London. With an office in the same building as Malcolm McLar...
Glaswegian Alan McGee was the embodiment of the D.I.Y. spirit of the 1980s and 1990s, bringing Oasis, Primal Scream, Jesus and Mary Chain and the Libertines to ...
Cleveland’s Scat Records, brainchild of Robert Griffin, set a high bar for indie labels in the Midwest, especially after he introduced Guided By Voices to the w...
Despite being regarded as one of her generation’s greatest singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell labored in relative obscurity for years before Reprise released her...
One way to gauge the quality of older rock & roll recordings is by the label that released them. Ork Records, Spy Records, Stiff, Radar, ZE, ESP-Disk and on...
Ten years in the making, a beautiful new book by Billy Miller and Michael Hurtt, Mind Over Matter: The Myths and Mysteries of Detroit’s Fortune Records, opens a...
After his first vinyl reissues label, Sing Sing Records, was laid to rest in 2014, Jeremy Thompson couldn't get the jones for lost rock rarities out of his syst...
Slash, the indispensable fanzine that charted the Los Angeles punk scene (1977-80), gave birth to a record label that pushed the punk boundaries well into the 1...
Bruce Licher’s rise to the top of post-punk graphic design began in 1980 as a means to package the music for his own bands, Project 197 and Savage Republic. Gra...
Faulty Products was a small record label and distribution company with an outsized influence at a crucial time for rock & roll, launching the Circle Jerks, ...
What do Richard Hell, Television, the dBs, Alex Chilton, the Feelies, Cheetah Chrome, Lester Bangs and Mick Farren all have in common? They released singles on ...
ESP-Disk’, a record label started in New York in 1963 by Bernard Stollman, unleashed a sonic blast of free-form rock ‘n’ roll, free jazz, ur-freak-folk, poetry,...
Not many record stores had their own label, and not many stores could have touched the lives of people like Peter Murphy, David J, Ian MacKaye and Trent Reznor ...
