Chris Ashford of What/Iloki/Wondercap Records Part 3

Here’s the third installment of my interview with Chris Ashford. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

This interview is running concurrently with my full interview with Chris Ashford at Horrorgarage.com which covers his history in the music business, from the creation of What Records to his present releases on Wondercap. You can read it here.

Do you see it as a good thing or a bad thing or just impartial, it is the way it is?

Chris Ashford: In some ways it’s a good thing because it lets artist do what they want to do. They’re not hustled into a studio by a major label with a producer that changes their sound and makes them different, so it’s good in that way. With the price of recording equipment and gear now, outside of needing really good microphones no matter what you have, a lot of bands can make good records for cheap and I think that’s a good thing. It’s bad in the sense that it makes the band, if they don’t have money, it makes them have to be business people, unless they have someone who wants to be their manager and barely get paid. That’s okay, but it takes away from the creative people to also be the business people. It’s bad in that sense.

Yeah. A lot of creative people just aren’t good with business.

Chris Ashford: No, absolutely not. They’re good at going out and playing, but they’re not good at selling their CDs. It’s nice, in some ways, to see the major labels, which were so high and godly about what they could do, come down to their knees a little bit. It’s kind of like watching corporate America crash. I’d rather see the mom & pop place do better, you know? I think its opening a door that way. When there really are fewer avenues for people to make a lot of money, it takes away a lot of the people that are not really in it for what they should be, too. You get more of a purer artist. How many bands that weren’t any good ran to LA to get signed? Who knows what happened? They probably did get signed, the labels are so screwy.

That was your ‘80s hair metal era, wasn’t it?

Chris Ashford: [Laughs.] It’s a balance, it has good points and it has bad points. The only sad thing, and this is more sentimental on my part, is I don’t get to go to the record stores as much and thumb through all the bins in different places and see all these wacky different things because there are no more stores. It’s Best Buy mentality.

That is something I definitely miss, but at the same time, I kind of get that through music blogs. One thing I can definitely say about the collector aspect, as somebody who’s been a collector, I’ve sort of come to realize that what I really liked collecting was the music itself, which is something intangible, so, in a sense to me, it doesn’t matter what format it’s in because it’s the music itself that concerns me.

Chris Ashford: I think that’s a good pure way to be because I think that, initially, we all got into music because it spoke to us in some way or we related to it or we fantasized to it. There was something about it that just vibrated with you. How’s that for a nice hippy way to say it? But harking back to that, I did like the packaging of the product, too. I can’t imagine The Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesty coming out today and not having that beautiful 3D cover on it. All those interesting covers, in the vinyl days, were big and you could see everything. Take away The Stones and put in The Stranglers’ Raven cover. That was a beautiful cover, you know?

Check back next week for part 4!