Between a Heart and a Rock Place (25 page)

Of course, when it came to the label's reaction to my pregnancy, old habits die hard, even when the old habits are being perpetrated by
new people. This was partly because by the time we found out I was pregnant, the reasonable and rational team of Joe Kiener and Jim Fifield was gone and Chrysalis had been completely absorbed into EMI. Now we were EMI artists under the direction of Charles Koppleman, CEO, and Ron Fair, the head of A&R, part of a monstrous company with their fingers in every pie, from music publishing to electronics. With all that the folks at EMI had going on, you would have thought they'd have better things to worry about than my pregnancy. Apparently not. They shouldn't have cared but they did. While they didn't put us through the hell that we went through with Haley, they were clearly displeased and made no attempt to hide their dissatisfaction.

Gravity's Rainbow
came out, and though I was pregnant, we still went on tour. From the start, though, the performances were tough. I had terrible morning sickness that made it really difficult to focus. Eventually it got bad enough that we had to cut the tour short after three or four weeks. Our decision didn't go over well at the label, and there was no doubt that the premature ending hurt sales. While it was disappointing, we made no apologies about where our priorities were. We didn't forget how blessed we were to be in the situation we were in, and how careful we needed to be in order to preserve it.

Whether the record execs they liked it or not, Hana Juliana was coming, and she arrived in the world on March 12, 1994, screaming her head off. She was so loud that Spyder and I started laughing and her godparents, Moni and Myron, jumped up and peered through the delivery room windows to make sure everything was okay. She was a force of nature from the moment she arrived. She was beautiful, with twinkling eyes. As for Haley, all of her sisterly instincts came out, and she doted on Hana night and day. We worried about her having been an only child for so long and thought maybe she'd resent this new little creature, but if she felt any of that, she never showed it. She adored her baby sister. Our lives were officially on our terms, and we were going to do whatever we could to keep them that way.

A
FTER
G
RAVITY'S
R
AINBOW
,
WE
made the decision, once and for all, to leave Capitol/EMI. The decision was mutual and without any big fireworks. The timing just seemed right to go our separate ways. Though we'd grown up there, it was not the label it once was, and it hadn't been for years. The record business was made up of too many bean counters and not enough guitar players. Just watching what had happened to Chrysalis after the EMI merger was disheartening. Artists were considered roster “prizes” to be included in money deals, stock values, and corporate wheeling and dealing. While we were treated much better than we had been in the 1980s, it came at the expense of marketing and promotion. Simply put, they weren't supporting our records as they once had, and we were ready to move on to whatever the next phase of our career would be. EMI wasn't exactly crying to see us go.

Not long after our departure, they put together a hits package,
All Fired Up: The Very Best of Pat Benatar
. Now that we were gone, they didn't have to pay us advances or consult us on artwork, content, or release dates. In fact, when it came to our catalog, they could do pretty much
whatever they wanted. Since these were songs that already existed and they owned the masters, they could decide things unilaterally. They could package and repackage them as many times as they wanted with barely any overhead. For a while, they seemed to put out a compilation every year—with no input from us whatsoever. They'd pick some producer who'd go in and hack up our original recordings and make a record out of it. It was just put out there with no promotion. Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.

I knew it was “just business,” but I felt used anyway. While in the short term their efforts didn't hurt us financially, if they got greedy and saturated the market, it would make selling new product difficult. We had to make sure this didn't happen. They didn't care how this would impact our future, because they didn't have any claim to our future. It was shortsighted and mercenary, and of course, it was all about the bottom line.

But not for us. We weren't shortsighted. In the end, the EMI product was very profitable for us, but we knew we had to become better business people. We began to look at ourselves as a brand. We had worked long and hard to establish what we were. We were unique; no one else could do what we did. That had to be worth something. We still had a lot of music in us and we weren't about to let anyone screw that up. Figuring out our next step was crucial, and it was made more complicated by the fact that we also had to find new management. After
Gravity's Rainbow,
Danny Goldberg had decided to take a hiatus from his management company, going instead to Atlantic Records as president. We started looking and had a few short-lived relationships but finally decided on the team of Elliot Roberts and Frank Gironda, who went right to work getting us back out in the public eye.

Right away they approached us with an idea for a tour package: Fleetwood Mac, REO Speedwagon, and us. My initial response was “Absolutely not.” I had nothing against those other bands, but we'd never been part of a package before. I was used to headlining on our
own. However, I also knew we were in transition and without a record label. After much discussion, Spyder, Elliot, and Frank convinced me that it was a good idea, a way to see where we stood with audiences with minimal risk. We signed on.

And so we spent the summer of 1995 traveling the U.S. as part of the Can't Stop Rockin' tour. It ended up being a great experience, a little like being in the circus. It was a huge operation with three bands, three road crews, and an endless parade of buses and semis. We forged friendships with everyone on the tour and had a great time. We played baseball and had barbecues while our kids hung out together. All in all it was just a great group of people.

This was Hana's first tour, and she was fourteen months old when it began. Like her sister, she was a wonderful traveler who loved the road, the bus, and swimming every day. She learned to swim in the pool at the Arizona Biltmore, and she loved being onstage, something that Haley didn't care too much about. Haley was a little shy when she was small, but Hana wanted to go out onstage all the time. In general it had been our policy to keep the girls out of the public eye, but Hana would wait in the wings every night hoping one of us would scoop her up and bring her out. I remember taking her with me one night; I had her in my arms, and I introduced her to the audience:

“Hey, everyone, say hello to our youngest, Hana.” They all cheered, and Hana had a huge grin on her face. The crowd was yelling pretty loudly, and I asked her, “Are you scared?”

“Noooo, I like it,” she said happily. After that we had to find ways to distract her during the performance or she'd cry to go out. We'd station crew members in the wings, because she'd always try to escape from her babysitter and sneak onstage during the show to get bubblegum from Spyder's onstage stash. We'd be deep into the set and this baby would calmly walk out onstage and grab a handful of bubblegum off of Spyder's stool. The audience would go crazy, and of course that only encouraged her to do it again at the next show.

Overall the tour was a success for us. Throughout that summer the reception we got from the crowd was encouraging—strong enough to show us that there was plenty of support for us all around the country. There were still a lot of people who would show up to hear us, and that was an important confidence boost that would help dictate our next step.

Now that we knew there was still goodwill out there toward us, it was time to try putting out a record. Tours were good but they weren't enough to keep us relevant. To do that, we needed to record new music. We'd have been delusional to think that once we left a major label, we could just sit back and hope people remembered us. Without the exposure that new material generated, we could do ourselves long-term damage. We stood at a crossroads, knowing that if we didn't step up and make a new CD, we might never again be in the position to do so with any fanfare.

We could have easily signed with another major label, but why? Fifteen years of being big on a big record label had left us feeling exhausted and demoralized. The label had helped us to tremendous success but at a huge psychological cost. Our goal now was not to replicate that success, but to find ways to continue to do what we loved and make money in the process. And so instead of jumping right back in with another major, we set off on a different journey.

Around the time that we split with EMI, I read an interesting article about the singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco. At the time, I wasn't all that familiar with her music, but I was instantly fascinated by what she was doing. In 1990, she'd started her own record label called Righteous Records (later changed to Righteous Babe Records), and through this label, she had financed, produced, and distributed her own records. This was something that Spyder and I had been talking about for years—creating an independent label that would give us complete artistic freedom to do whatever we wanted at our own pace.

What seemed like far-fetched crazy talk started to make sense
after I read about what Ani DiFranco was doing. The recording industry has long had a rich history of independent labels. Let's face it: Jac Holzman founded Elektra Records in his dorm room in 1950. Sun Records in Memphis launched Elvis Presley. Motown. The list goes on. These were historic labels, and if Ani could do it, so could we. I always say, “God bless Ani DiFranco,” because she was my inspiration to stop thinking about being independent and actually start doing something about it.

As it turned out, this intense interest in going independent combined with another trend; by the midnineties, we could see that digital music would soon be forcing change on the recording industry. For a few years digital technology had been slowly seeping into the music business, and we'd been keeping an eye on how it was changing things.
Gravity's Rainbow
was the first recording we edited and mastered digitally. Spyder loved the technical aspect of recording, and he embraced digital advances with enthusiasm. As producer he was constantly looking for new ways to push the boundaries of what he could do in the studio, and the digital world held all kinds of possibilities, many of which he utilized on
Gravity's Rainbow
. Its value was undeniable, and in the years since
Gravity's Rainbow,
Spyder had been steadily incorporating digital methods into his recording process whenever he was playing around in his Soul Kitchen. At first it was simply digital editing and mastering, but then he moved on to digital recording and mixing.

While Spyder was fixated on the new studio experimentation that digital made possible, my goals were different. The way I saw it, digitally recorded music opened up a whole new way to get music to the masses. No more large manufacturing costs, no expensive album art—it might not even be necessary to make actual CDs if we didn't want to. All these ideas crystallized in 1994, when Spyder and I read an article about an innovative new concept called “file sharing.” Learning about this process helped me visualize how we could actually implement this new distribution to the consumer while cutting production and manu
facturing costs. Basically we'd be eliminating the middlemen, who of course were the record companies. It would no longer be necessary to have their money or muscle to get product made and sent out to the public. Distribution would be simple and cost-effective. The playing field would be level: artists and small labels would have the same access and clout as the majors.

Spyder and I each had our own vision for the future significance of digital music, differences that mirrored our original disagreement over the role of music videos. Spyder was fascinated by the impact on the actual music and the limitless creative possibilities that the digital age ushered into the studio. My interests were not so lofty. I was a businesswoman first and foremost, and though the artist inside me saw what technology could do for recording, I was more drawn to how it could prevent the financial turmoil that we'd experienced at the hands of the record label throughout our career. It was true digital was untested and uncertain, but if it worked, it would return the power to the artists, where it belonged. As with music videos, we recognized the game-changing promotional power that existed in digital music if we used it to meet our own needs.

What I was after was simple: the end of the record industry as we knew it. I wanted to see the collapse of the major labels' stronghold on music. Consolidation had both strengthened and weakened the majors. They had more money and clout, but they often lacked innovation. If the labels didn't get on board with the digital age, they would implode. And since we despised the way they did business, we figured we'd be only too happy to stand by and watch it happen. The digital age was going to shake them up and change everything, and I wanted us to be part of it. That said, we didn't want to be moguls and we were not looking to build an empire. This wasn't about creating a label that had dozens of bands on it and being able to control other people's careers; it was about controlling our own.

The environment seemed ripe for us to take advantage of the digi
tal advances and strike out on our own, but as prepared as we were mentally, we still had reservations. We could finance a record ourselves, take our time making it, put together a distribution deal, and retain control over everything. We could afford to do it. Each time we met with accountants, we were pleasantly surprised at how much money we had managed to keep over the years. It's frightening to see the money lost by musicians through personal lifestyle choices, bad management, and record company rip-offs. But our years of being basically frugal people and homebodies had paid off. Even so, financing a record ourselves would be taking a huge chance. We had the money, but we didn't have unlimited funds. We weren't set up like corporations that could leverage one loss against other wins. If we rolled the dice and lost, we could lose everything. We'd be putting not only our career but our children's futures on the line.

Spyder and I had never been impetuous people when it came to finances, so we decided to move ahead with caution. We wanted to test the waters without diving in completely. Rather than simply launch into our own indie venture, we made the calculated decision to sign with an indie label for one record, so that we could learn the business model and see if it was something that we could make work on our own.

With this specific goal of learning in mind, we started searching for an independent label that would meet our needs, and in the process we met a man named Tom Lipsky who ran an independent label called CMC International Records. A really dedicated guy, Tom loved rock and roll, and his only goal was to create an environment for artists to make the best music they could. And he was a character! A gregarious Southerner, he only wore shorts—no long pants ever. He said that he'd been denied entrance to some of the finest restaurants because he refused to change those shorts. You just had to love him.

Tom spelled out the deal, telling us exactly what he could do and what he could not do. And he hired the best people available (including people stolen right out from under moguls like Clive Davis) to do
those things he couldn't. He told us exactly what kind of money he'd put into the recording and promotion. He believed we needed to have a new record out there and he was willing to put his money where his heart was. What he asked was that we make the record we wanted to make, with no thought to what might play on radio or what might be written about it. He wanted our music as we saw it. Moreover, there was a level of artistic respect we'd never before felt. He didn't see us as product to simply be packaged or manipulated. His philosophy was that people who'd made great strides in the industry should have the opportunity to make the music they wanted, to keep producing, keep being creative—but on a different level.