Dumped, but Still Dreaming : Twice Wounded in Big-Label Roulette, Alien Crime Syndicate’s Going Low-Budget--but Going

A year ago, regaining a sense of balance was the big issue in Joe Reineke’s life.

For two years, the veteran alterna-rocker and his band, Alien Crime Syndicate, had worked to perfect an album. Reineke, the singer-songwriter-guitarist, was sure they had something that radio stations would want to play and that lots of rock fans would want to hear.

No sooner had they finished the album than the band was in danger of being finished, period. Their label, Revolution Records, dissolved in a corporate shake-up. Their master tapes belonged to Revolution’s parent company, Giant, and would sit in a vault--two years of work, apparently rendered futile. What’s more, the band’s contract was kaput, its funding cut off, its future a blank.

Along with the other Crime Syndicate members, drummer Nabil Ayers and bassist Jeff Rouse, Reineke was playing the fall-guy’s role in a familiar script that is played out constantly in a business whose practices many musicians have come to see as morally bankrupt, if not actually criminal.

Emerging acts, lacking any leverage, sign contracts that will yield them nothing from record sales unless they score a major hit. Then they are dropped when no major hit ensues--or, as in the case of Alien Crime Syndicate, when corporate downsizing tosses them overboard, like cargo from a foundering ship.

This is nothing new, but the record business’ discard pile has grown uncommonly high over the past year. Labels have cut their rosters drastically or simply gone under to meet corporate goals for streamlining and cost-cutting. Hundreds of acts have been purged.

Getting dumped with Alien Crime Syndicate made Reineke a two-time loser in the rock ‘n’ roll game. His previous band, the Meices, had little luck with two mid-’90s albums for London Records. Reineke says he had an option to record a third but decided the label would never promote the Meices properly.

He broke up the band and started Alien Crime Syndicate in 1997, wanting to try different approaches with different bandmates. The Syndicate quickly won a new deal that only set him up for another bitter disappointment.

After ACS got stiffed, Reineke, 31, spent his days trying to keep his balance on a surfboard or a bicycle, and his nights trying to regain it emotionally as he mulled over what had happened, and what he should do next.

“For them not to put the record out was crushing,” he said over the phone last week from his rented duplex apartment in Seattle, where ACS, which plays Sunday in Costa Mesa and Tuesday in Anaheim, moved early this year because Rouse and Ayers had roots there and because gigs in Los Angeles, where the band had been based, paid too meagerly to keep the trio going.

Reineke balanced the disheartening setbacks of his musical career against its thrills and satisfaction.

“A lot of emotions run through you. ‘Am I doing the right thing? Is [the music] even worthy?’ All the answers were ‘yes.’ I don’t think I could have gotten this much enjoyment from anything else. All those reasons I enjoyed doing it outweighed the negatives, the things beyond my control.”

So Alien Crime Syndicate soldiers on, with a just-released EP that is beyond low-budget: Not only were the five songs recorded in a bedroom studio, but Collective Fruit, the tiny Seattle label that put it out, apparently couldn’t afford to print a CD booklet or even a cover insert. “Alien Crime Syndicate” is being sold in an unmarked plastic case, the only identification being the band name and song titles on the disc itself.

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“We’re cheap, and we’re doing things econo,” Reineke said, adding that Collective Fruit, which is co-owned by drummer Ayers, has done OK in the past with generic packaging.

Though twice-wounded in big-label roulette, Reineke wants another shot.

“I’m totally up for it again,” he said, detailing a game plan in which ACS buys back the rights to the Revolution album by guaranteeing Giant a cut of the record’s earnings, then placing it with another record label.

“If you heard it, you would go, ‘Oh my god, this should be on the radio right now,’ ” he said.

For all the trouble big labels have caused him, Reineke says, on balance those deals have given him more in fun, creativity, and a financial cushion than they cost him in dashed hopes.

For its seven-city tour down the California coastline, ACS will ride in a Dodge van that has accumulated 178,000 miles since London Records first bought it for the Meices.

Reineke has an ample stock of instruments, amplifiers and recording gear--again thanks to cash advanced under his two record deals.

London sent the Meices around the world, enabling Reineke to experience special thrills such as hearing avid European audiences sing choruses back to him.

“I remember in Italy a guy started crying ‘cause he liked it so much. It really stuck with me. In the States, people bob their heads, they get into it a little. Over there, it’s crazy. A thousand kids pogo-ing and chanting along to your songs. It’s just exhilarating.”

Along the way, the Meices sold a combined total of 33,000 copies of the two albums on London, Reineke said--dismally short of big-label expectations but more than enough to give his new band a grass-roots base of potential fans who know and enjoy his work.

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“People have stuck with me and followed my career,” Reineke said. “I know in Orange County there are people who come to see us every time.”

Reineke’s marches into the brick wall of music-biz reality don’t stop him from dreaming. Asked his ambition for ACS, he answered wryly, but not altogether facetiously: “Top of the charts . . . and we’ll settle for anything that’s on the charts.”

Ultimately, he said, “It’s never about the money, because there really isn’t any money in it. It’s all about the fun factor.”

Reineke knows plenty of other musicians in other bands that have been dumped, and they dispense mutual encouragement and compare notes on how to succeed without a big label’s backing.

“It’s this weird kind of support group,” he said. “You pat each other on the back and tell each other you did the right things and you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

* Alien Crime Syndicate, Pinwheel, the Relatives and Scrimmage Heroes play Sunday) at Club Mesa, 843 W. 19th St., Costa Mesa. $5. 9:30 p.m. (949) 642-8448. Alien Crime Syndicate, the Buckys and Evil Disciples play Tuesday at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. $3. 8 p.m. (714) 533-1286.