The Business Side

Vol. 1 no. 5

"...we were able to put out what I thought were good records, oversee the project from its inception through the manufacturing right down to seeing the copies get into stores..."

AW: What about Cornerstone Records? How did that happen?

BE: Well, again, a lot of these things happen by default. There was sort of a sequence of events. I joined up with Unity Records a number of years ago when it was time for Time Warp's next recording. The project was a live recording at George's, and the previous record had been put out by a Detroit-Windsor label, Parkwood. Hugh Leal who owns the label wasn't prepared to do another project, so we were label shopping. At that time there wasn't much happening, kind of like today; everybody's label shopping. Unity Records had been established and was already going, and I decided to get involved. My involvement led, over a period of a few years, to me becoming the administration. We created an executive board. I had a lot to do with trying to organize it into something a little more business-like. I don't really have any serious business chops, I just knew I didn't want someone taking my house away because we screwed up.

This went on and on; the fax machine got moved over here, and the mailing address became my home address. It was a cooperative of jazz players from all across the country, and there had to be an office somewhere, and it ended up being here. The problem was that it was a non-salaried position, and I was putting in six hours a day on this stuff. I was doing okay; it just got to the point where I started getting complaints from people in other parts of the country, and fair enough, they wouldn't understand or know what was happening here, and finally I thought I had outgrown it. Al Henderson was also on the executive board, and we decided to take the company to the point of being incorporated, so that no individual member could be liable for anything. After that, we wanted a break.

I learned a lot of stuff from doing all this, and Al Henderson and I decided that we should form our own company. We had both done a lot of the advertising for Unity, and a lot of the accounting, so we felt equipped to do that. We knew a lot of people now, and so we invited Mike Murley to be the third person. Mike was up for it, but we also knew that he would not be a big contributor in terms of the business side; he didn't want to do a lot of that. He was interested in being one of the three owners, and I thought it advantageous because he's a well-known player. I also didn't want to be part of a company owned by two people, especially two very close friends. Al and I are friends, but we think about things very differently sometimes, and I thought, there has to be a third person to break the tie.

At first we did all our own distribution, which was really remarkable. I went down to HMV in Toronto and argued and harassed them until they gave me a vendor's account. I told them, "We are a distribution company; we distribute ourselves." They were laughing, they were saying, " You know, we get guys like you all the time; you're musicians, you're not going to be equipped to deal with this. The first time we place an order and you don't show up, we're not going to be happy," and I said, "Listen, let's do it for a year, " and it worked great.

We were shipping stuff all over the place; it drove me crazy but now it was a labour of love. I wasn't answering to twenty-odd people. This went on and on, and we did well. That doesn't mean making huge profits; I mean that we were able to put out what I thought were good records, oversee the project from its inception through the manufacturing right down to seeing the copies get into stores, and coordinate tours for whoever's record it is. It's a small operation, but we have been effective, and we have been able to identify where the market is for our records, and make sure we have a mail-order service available to service fans of the music in smaller towns. Self-distribution did what it was supposed to do.

Unfortunately it got to the point where I just didn't have the time anymore to do that, and so now we have Festival distribution. They're out of Vancouver.