The Intro

When Richard Foos and I kick-started the Rhino Records label from the back room of our record store, our ambition was limited to making enough money so that we wouldn’t have to get real jobs. Ignoring the constraints of commercial radio, we dreamed of having hits by producing novelty records like the ones we grew up listening to in the 1950s and 1960s. A bit later, when we started to make available the great records of the past, we went against the standard business practice of allocating as little as possible on these reissues by spending more money on the product as a reflection of how important the music was to us. We didn’t set out to create America’s best record company,* or one that made tens of millions of dollars. Our success was the result of our passion, inherent business sense, and the commitment of our employees.

In my own mind, I envisioned myself as a Rod Stewart or Marc Bolan type of mod, but without the drive or clothing budget. One morning in the early days of the label Richard announced, “It’s clothes buying time!” solely so he could persuade me to part with the out of fashion cardigan I had worn to work that day. Of course, he was right. I had worn it in high school. He gave me twenty-five dollars for it, and then deposited it in the wastebasket.

Richard was content to look like a hippie follower of the Grateful Dead, except that he wasn’t a fan of their music. Blow away the fantasy dust and Richard’s take isn’t that far off the mark: “We were a couple of record nerds who had a little more business savvy and slightly more social skills than the average record nerd who lived with their parents until they were forty. And if they ever got married, it could have easily been with a mail-order bride.”

Because we didn’t have hits, we weren’t respected by the music industry or happening new artists, and no models or starlets flocked to our sides. For a number of years our main social activity was crashing other people’s parties. We did, however, get to know many of the performers whose music we loved. We showed them interest and respect—compared to their era in which artists were routinely ripped-off by their original labels—and in a number of instances, helped to revive their careers.

For someone like me, engaged in the entertainment business, it might come as a surprise that I was initially inspired to write my memoirs after reading Iacocca: An Autobiography in 1985. Lee Iacocca, the veteran automotive executive, broke new ground in the way he revealed his personal life and professional career. Most autobiographies by celebrities and businessmen are not “written” by them. Mostly they talk into an audio recorder or to a ghostwriter. A transcript is written to which the “author” adds and edits the copy. I thought that, having been a writer in my twenties, I could manage to be more literate in telling my story by writing it directly.

I had intended to pounce on a history of Rhino not long after I left the company at the end of 2001, except it took me much longer to finish the film I was producing than I had anticipated. The subsequent head of Rhino changed the name of the company to Warner Strategic Marketing and stopped promoting the brand—although it was still used on the product. Primarily because of Rhino’s decreased visibility, combined with the music industry’s decline, I decided to put off the project.

But the more I thought about our story—how much music fans loved our product, how we inspired other companies to care for their archives, of all the good we brought to our employees and the community, of all the wacky things we did—the more I thought it was one that needed to be told.

It was a dream job, except nobody had given it to us. We had to develop and define it. We did it on our own, with no funding from a deep-pocketed relative, and with no mentor to show us the way. Because we had no boss telling us what we couldn’t do, the company was largely a reflection of who we were as people, the imagination as well as the humanity. We had a good relationship with each other, and realized the need to express ourselves. Neither of us had been to business school or had formal training in the record business but this lack of experience, more often than not, had us doing the right thing rather than what would have been expected of us in an ongoing business. The end result was a good product with a positive effect. Listening to music makes people feel good. It doesn’t add calories like a sweet dessert, and it can help to take them off, when providing a soundtrack for exercise.

At the end of our tenure, our profits and sales were good. Viewed from within the decline the industry experienced they were exceptional. To some degree, we were still propelled by our mission: to make the great music of the past available. Our successors, presumably, were ruled by more dominant and conventional motivators: keeping their jobs, pleasing their boss, hitting their financial targets, bolstering the company’s stock price. Those were not our concerns and we, as well as our customers and employees, were all the better for it.

The chapters are sequenced somewhat chronologically. Later entries will illuminate earlier ones, adding pieces to a puzzle with more revealed at the book’s end. Although what follows are my impressions, opinions, and recollections, there is a desire on my part to present an accurate account of what transpired in the world of Rhino.

*I would have preferred Record Label of the Year, but the National Association of Record Merchandisers (NARM) awarded Rhino the Entertainment Software Supplier of the Year award for 2001. It’s wordy but it meant that we were chosen over all the major record companies and the software manufacturers whose products also made their way into record stores.