Making Music in the Valley : Recordings: Small independent labels are coming in search of less crime and congestion, cheaper office space, and some ‘peace and quiet.’

Rapper Eazy-E of NWA was really just looking for something “quiet, peaceful and away from everything,” he said.

Not that he was talking of abandoning the sex and violence that characterize much of NWA’s new “Efil4zaggin” album, including the song “To Kill a Hooker.” After all, that album shot up to the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s pop album chart soon after its release.

But that dark inner-city setting just didn’t seem right for running a business, even a record company, explained Eazy-E (whose real name is Eric Wright). This much he understood when he founded his Ruthless Records label in the San Fernando Valley in 1986, far from his old Compton neighborhood.

“I want peace and quiet,” said Eazy-E, who now also owns a home in the Valley. “If I had it somewhere else, everybody would be running up there, in and out. I didn’t want all that.”

Like Ruthless, small independent labels specializing in rock, jazz and classical music have also come to the Valley in search of less crime and congestion, cheaper office space, lighter traffic and Eazy-E’s “peace and quiet.”

For Ken Mazur, a session guitarist and founder of Proxima Records, establishing his new label in isolated Topanga came after years of working in the urban studios of Los Angeles and Manhattan. “We fell in love with Topanga and decided that’s it,” Mazur said. “It’s out of the congestion, it’s clean and quiet, and it’s beautiful.”

When Metal Blade Records grew into a successful company, friends quickly suggested that label founder Brian Slagel move his offices from Sherman Oaks to a more hip Hollywood location. “But I said no, I like the Valley. And I didn’t want to get too caught up in the scene down in Hollywood. I get enough of that when we go out there practically every night.

“I like it a lot better out here,” added Slagel, who grew up in the Valley. “The atmosphere is a little more relaxed, a little less corporate. It kind of fits our needs as a small business a lot better.”

Metal Blade was launched in 1982 from a room behind his mother’s Woodland Hills house with “Metal Massacre,” a compilation of hard rock that included early tracks from Metallica and Ratt. The Hollywood metal scene was small then, but the independent record’s local success persuaded Slagel to take a semester off from college “to see how things would go.”

After a year, Metal Blade became Slagel’s full-time concern. Label releases have since included four albums from Slayer, which remain the company’s top-sellers, film soundtracks, and music from such non-metal rock acts as the Goo-Goo Dolls and the Junk Monkeys. About 75% of Metal Blade albums are released through a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Records.

“It really doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you have the will and the knowledge,” Slagel said.

Ruthless first arrived in the Valley after being offered free office space in Reseda. But the label’s general manager, Jerry Heller, said the company chose to remain in the area, even after its first successes, despite advice from others that Eazy-E move to a more urban Los Angeles location.

Heller said that keeping the Ruthless offices in Woodland Hills and out of the city hasn’t affected its ability to conduct business or hold meetings. Among the company’s releases, NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” debut album and Eazy-E’s “Eazy Duz It” solo record have gone double-platinum, indicating sales of at least 2 million.

“When you’re as hot as we are, people come to you,” said Heller, who commutes from Calabasas.

However, for the Compton-based members of NWA, the label’s location is an inconvenience that “they put up with,” Heller said.

As president and owner of Ruthless, Eazy-E is the band member who spends the most time in the record company offices. “Usually he comes in at night,” said Heller, also NWA’s personal manager. “He’ll miss the traffic coming out here, and he’ll sit and play every tape that comes in until 11 or 12 at night. He’s very active in the company. He loves it.”

Keith Dressel’s dreams of becoming a record company president began in the late 1960s, when he was shooting pool in his father’s Van Nuys rock club, Mr. Benjamin’s.

Important emerging acts, from Linda Ronstadt to Canned Heat, were playing the club in those days, and people in the music industry often dropped in for beer or billiards. It was between trips to the jukebox one afternoon that young Dressel met Bob Krasnow, then president of Blue Thumb Records (and now head of Elektra Records), who seemed impressed enough with the 12-year-old’s career goals to offer him a job at his Hollywood label emptying trash cans and the like.

It was the humble beginning of a music industry career in which, before establishing Core Records eight months ago, he did promotion, marketing and distribution.

He runs the company out of his Woodland Hills home. With a roster of acts focused almost exclusively on alternative rock, Core has already scored on college radio and new music charts with the bands Monday Mornings, Jet Black Factory and Vigilantes of Love, whose next album is scheduled to be produced by R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck.

“The fact is that our label works our acts really, really hard,” said Dressel, 35. “We’re four out of four so far, as far as being able to chart records, get them into stores and get strong national press on them.”

The early successes of the new label have been notable enough to prompt SBK Records, home of the chart-topping pop acts Wilson Philips and Vanilla Ice, to work with Core on a new release from Will and the Bushmen. And Dressel said he is close to signing modern rock veterans the Fleshtones to his label.

Core Records’ attraction, Dressel explained, comes from the label’s close and relentless communication with key modern rock outlets.

“He services every college radio station in the country,” said Jim Morocco, Core’s tour coordinator. “And no major label can do that.”

Although Core now has a publicist and artist development representatives in Georgia and Texas, most of the label’s operations take place in the two-story home that Dressel shares with his wife.

As Dressel spoke, the hum of one-sided conversations filled the living room, where employees worked Core’s four telephones. On a nearby television, MTV videos played silently.

“The purpose of this is not to develop bands and then sell them off to the big labels,” Dressel said. “It’s really to develop a company with a strong stable of artists.”

Similarly, Mazur founded Proxima and Proxima Classics Records to introduce largely unknown “new American contemporary” and classical music. In its first few months of existence, the Proxima label has released four albums, including solo piano music from Zig, and jazzy pop instrumentals and ballads from The Rise duo of guitarist Mazur and bassist Russ Landau.

“I’ve always been a sideman,” said Mazur, who has played guitar for Robert Palmer, Kid Creole and Ben E. King. “This is my first record ever as the artist. It’s a wonderful bonus for me emotionally. Everybody has that dream of doing it.”

Proxima was created on a parcel of Topanga land that already had two houses on it. Mazur has since built an adjacent studio on the property, which has a stream. “I walk 17 steps to work,” he said.

“It’s actually a positive thing for us to be up in the canyon,” Mazur said. “People do find it enjoyable to come out here. For my artists, it’s a wonderful place to work.”

Such industry giants as MCA and Warner Bros. Records have been in the Valley for decades. But Frontier Records owner Lisa Fancher is a rare veteran of the local independent record industry. A former free-lance music critic for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Fancher was a booster of the developing punk and New Wave scene in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Beginning in 1980, Frontier would ultimately release the first records of such local cult acts as the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies and the Long Ryders. While still working a regular job at a record store, Fancher ran the label out of her Sun Valley home, never much concerned about being physically detached from the Hollywood club scene.

Actually, the label’s Sun Valley address is merely a post office box now. For the last five years, Frontier has rented offices in North Hollywood. “You can’t beat the rent in the Valley, that’s for sure. Dirt cheap.”

But, she added, bands from out of town are often confused and strangely concerned about Frontier’s Valley location. Fancher said that requiring a trip anywhere beyond the Hollywood Bowl can annoy some musicians.

Slagel agreed. “If people aren’t familiar with the Los Angeles area and you mention Sherman Oaks, they ask if that is between Los Angeles and San Francisco,” he said, laughing. “You have to kind of explain things to them.”