From the Sound Up

The offices of Vagrant Records are what you might call Upscale Warehouse. The converted paper manufacturing plant on a strip of wholesale industrial businesses in Hollywood resembles those spartan loft spaces that blossomed all over California during the dot-com boom. Raw concrete floors coexist with Pottery Barn furniture, oversized photographs of Vagrant’s artists hang on the walls, and two old-school video games idly hum in the back of the large main room.

The vibe here is convivial but industrious. Label founder Rich Egan’s office door is always open, and he can usually be heard bouncing tour revenue projections and idle chatter to director of artist relations Tricia McNulty, who works in the adjacent office.

Vagrant is so employee-friendly that it even has a modest child-care room, with kiddie toys strewn on a Fisher-Price area rug. “Rich actually uses that space for himself,” says Vagrant co-owner Jon Cohen, zipping by the space en route to Egan’s office. “It’s kinda like Brian Wilson and his sandbox.”

From this cozy sanctum, Egan, Cohen and their 12 employees are swimming against the music industry current. The independent rock label, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, is one of the past year’s most surprising success stories, a company that Spin magazine recently called “the Death Row of indie rock,” a reference to the landmark rap label.

Proffering a tuneful, reflective brand of pop-punk that has been labeled “emo”--short for emotion--Vagrant is selling a lot of records to an audience that has welcomed a viable alternative to the shock-rock tactics of nu-metal and the synthetic soul of teeny-bop pop.

Like L.A. indie labels that preceded it, Vagrant has become a rallying point for a musical movement.

In the early ‘80s, Greg Ginn’s South Bay label SST became known as a haven for hard-core pacesetters Black Flag as well as whip-smart punk bands such as Husker Du and the Minutemen. Slash, which started as a fanzine and eventually signed a distribution deal with Warner Bros., covered L.A.’s punk (the band X) and roots-rock (Los Lobos, the Blasters) flanks. In the ‘90s, Brett Gurewitz’s Epitaph helped launch the punk revival with the Offspring and Rancid.

The emo trend is virtually synonymous with Vagrant, something that pleases the label’s founder to no end.

“The fact that people think of Vagrant that way is just amazing,” says Egan, who as a kid would line up all of his SST records and stare at the cover art for hours. “You knew when you were buying an SST record that it was always gonna be good, and that’s how I want Vagrant to be. I want this label to be the Motown of punk.”

Among the artists on Vagrant’s 17-band roster (see story, Page 79) are New Jersey quartet Saves the Day, whose third album, “Stay What You Are,” is the label’s best-seller at close to 200,000 copies, and the Get Up Kids, a Lawrence, Kans., quintet whose second album, “Something to Write Home About,” has just passed the 150,000 mark. Those are huge numbers in the indie-rock world, where only a handful of artists ever break the six-figure sales barrier.

Vagrant’s most compelling artist is Dashboard Confessional, the pseudonym for Florida-based singer-songwriter Chris Carrabba, a 26-year-old punk with a sensitive streak a mile long and a growing cult of fans who hang on to every word of his sorrow-drenched ruminations on relationships. Carrabba’s Vagrant debut, “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most,” is the label’s fastest seller--135,000 gone in less than a year.

“It seems to me that [Egan and Cohen] are incredibly passionate about the music they put out, and how they get it across,” says Carrabba, who headlines the House of Blues in West Hollywood March 11-12. “They have carved a certain niche, but there’s a wide spectrum of music within that niche. And they’re great to work with. It’s been an amazing time for me.”

Vagrant’s success has come at a time when the music industry is mired in a major slump. Record sales are down at the major labels. Rosters have been slashed and costs have been cut. Label-sponsored Internet download services such as Pressplay.com and MusicNet.com have yet to catch on with consumers.

It’s not exactly a prime time for an indie label to make a major play for market share, but that’s just what Vagrant has done.

“Vagrant is really smart in who they sign and then executing the marketing plan,” says Tom Calderone, senior vice president of music and talent programming for the MTV networks. MTV2 frequently plays videos by Vagrant acts such as Saves the Day, Dashboard and the Get Up Kids. “They get the music out there in a grass-roots way. Nothing is too hyped and nothing is force-fed, which means their artists will have a longer shelf life down the road.”

On this busy Friday in the Vagrant offices, there have been a number of encouraging developments on the Dashboard Confessional front. “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and Carson Daly’s late-night talk show have extended offers for Carrabba to perform. In addition, MTV has called to inform Egan that the video for Carrabba’s single “Screaming Infidelities” will debut the following Tuesday.

Egan is also keeping a close watch on Dashboard’s radio play. “How many spins are we getting in Seattle?” he asks Bill Carroll, Vagrant’s radio promotion man, who’s on the receiving end of one in a series of daily phone calls. “CIMX is adding Dashboard in Detroit? That’s great!”

To watch the affable Egan work the phones is to observe a master schmoozer. The Santa Monica native is the kind of record executive artists dream of working with. A tireless cheerleader for his bands--his management company Hard 8 handles Dashboard Confessional, the Get Up Kids, Face to Face and Saves the Day--Egan keeps close tabs on every facet of his acts’ progress, from posters to in-store appearances. This morning, he will have talked to radio programmers, tour managers, retail rack-jobbers and a few of his artists--prodding, praising, browbeating.

“This label mirrors my taste in music,” Egan says during a rare lull . “I didn’t know I was signing emo bands. The unifying thread for me has been to sign artists who write serious songs. I was never attracted to meathead punk.”

Rave reviews for Dashboard notwithstanding, Vagrant has made its mark without the kind of critics’ consensus that congealed around earlier indie labels such as Matador and Sub Pop--not one Vagrant record made the list this year in the Village Voice’s annual critics’ poll. But there’s no doubt that the label has resonated with disaffected rock fans.

Egan chalks it up to “kids just getting sick of bands getting naked and smearing peanut butter on themselves. They’re looking for more depth in their bands.”

Egan and Cohen run Vagrant as fastidiously as any managers of a thriving mid-level company. Their costs are close to the bone, but they don’t skimp on expenses where it counts most--recording their bands’ albums. Egan recruits A-list producers such as Rob Schnapf (Beck, Foo Fighters, Moby, Elliott Smith) and Scott Litt (R.E.M., the Replacements, Patti Smith) to work with his green bands, ensuring that raw passion doesn’t trump polish.

Through 10 years of trial and error, the partners have developed an artist-friendly business approach, in which phrases such as “career development” and “tour support” aren’t just bait tossed out to lure bands to the label.

Egan and Cohen involve their artists in every facet of the decision-making process. Egan’s first meeting of this day, with Face to Face members Trever Keith and drummer Pete Parada, is a date-by-date breakdown of the trio’s upcoming spring tour.

The itinerary is grueling--48 dates in 51 nights--but Keith wants to see if the band can squeeze in even more shows. He consults a giant map of the U.S. behind Egan’s desk and traces a finger across the Northeast. “Can we go from Jersey to Buffalo and still make it to Cincinnati?” Keith asks Egan.

The band will also need to rent a tour bus, hire a tour manager and find someone to sell merchandise.

The atmosphere is collegial but strictly business. “The key is to keep the bands happy,” says Cohen, a graduate of Palisades High School and UC Davis who periodically pops into Egan’s office to confer. “Our whole motto is ‘Put the bands first and everything else will follow.’ If we put our interests ahead of the bands’, we’re gonna die.”

To that end, Vagrant offers healthy royalty rates that in some cases are higher than the industry average for emerging bands, as well as decent advances so Vagrant’s artists can live comfortably while recording their albums. Adds Egan, “We don’t hide the ball from our artists.”

Vagrant is hardly an overnight success, which has been to the label’s advantage.

Egan, who grew up in Santa Monica, attended Loyola High School and, after a few “false starts,” went to Loyola Marymount University. Egan was a huge fan of punk. “I grew up on Southern California punk rock,” he says. “The Descendents, Social Distortion, Black Flag. Luckily, I had two older sisters, and they prevented me from becoming a total dork.”

Egan held a number of short-term jobs before starting Vagrant, including a short stint in the mailroom at Creative Artists Agency, until he was fired for “hitting the main guy’s golf teacher in the eye with a paperclip.”

Egan conceived the Vagrant label in 1992 and brought in his buddy Cohen, who put up the initial seed money, in order to release a few singles from a couple of obscure Boston bands. Egan then put together a boxed set of singles called “West by North-South” in 1994 that featured such bands as Face to Face, Down by Law and Samiam, and marketed the compilation by placing small ads in a couple of fanzines. He sold all 1,000 copies in three weeks.

Egan, whose late father, Richard Egan Sr., was a popular TV actor in the ‘50s, continued to run Vagrant as a hobby while waiting tables at night and conducting business from his Hollywood apartment. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” Egan says. “Jon [Cohen] and I would drink good coffee and conduct imaginary magazine interviews with each other.”

The label’s breakthrough came in 1998 with a live album from Face to Face that sold more than 80,000 copies. Vagrant’s first studio album, Boxer’s “the Hurt Process,” was also released that year. “We didn’t want to sign anyone until we were absolutely ready to do so,” Egan says.

Every Vagrant band has a tailor-made marketing plan. For emerging acts such as Audio Learning Center and the Anniversary, the objective is to build word of mouth, then tour relentlessly and create an organic buzz.

For established acts such as the Get Up Kids, whose new album will be released in April, the label will opt for an aggressive approach with a large shipment of CDs to such chain stores as Best Buy and Target, and ads on Internet sites Punkband.com, Punknews.org and Insound.com as well as the band’s own Web site, www.thegetupkids.net.

“Alkaline Trio had never sold more than 15,000 copies of their two previous albums, but we knew they were primed to sell more,” Egan says of another Vagrant act. “We sold 40,000 of their Vagrant album [‘From Here to Infirmary’) the first week by getting their record into the chains. It was just a simple supply and demand issue. They were bigger than they even knew they were.”

Egan and Cohen have been careful to avoid the mistakes that have taken down indie labels in the past. They have no use for hubris, and the last thing they want to do is rest on their laurels. If the records are good, everything else will follow.

“People have this image of punk rock as holier-than-thou,” says Egan, now slumped on Cohen’s couch at the end of a business day. “But there are indies that are just as screwed up as majors because they don’t have the resources to take care of their bands, or they lock them into long-term deals. But working with bands is like raising children. You’ve got to nurture them and look after them.”

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Key Vagrant Bands

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Saves the Day

Zippy pop-punk with pointed, lovesick lyrics and a lot of endearing hooks. It’s as if this New Jersey quartet learned its moves from Jawbreaker and Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” and proceeded accordingly.

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The Get Up Kids

The Lawrence, Kan., quintet delivers astringent pop with a sardonic lyrical edge.

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Dashboard Confessional

Acoustic reflections on bruised souls and troubled relationships from a tattooed troubadour. Vagrant’s in-house heartthrob is winning over new fans by the week.

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Face to Face, Rocket From the Crypt

Vagrant’s Grand Old Men of Punk. Both Southern California bands are major-label dissidents who have fervent followings and steady record sales in the high five-figure range.

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Alkaline Trio

Along with Face to Face and Rocket, one of Vagrant’s dyed-in-the-wool punk bands. No sunny tunes to be found here--just lots of turbo-powered missives about betrayal and abandonment.

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The New Amsterdams

Smart love and mercy songs with a rootsy lilt from singer-songwriter Matthew Pryor; records for the Get Up Kids’ Vagrant imprint, Heroes and Villains.

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The Anniversary

Elaborately arranged baroque pop from Lawrence, Kan. This is the most un-Vagrant-like band on the Vagrant label.

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Audio Learning Center

Fractured, self-referential indie rock that’s a throwback to the genre’s salad days of the mid-’90s. The band most likely to win over older Pavement fans.

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Hot Rod Circuit

Melodic punk that bounces off the walls like a tween on a sourball sugar-rush.

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Hey Mercedes

The Wisconsin quartet’s wall-of-sound emo is firmly in the Saves the Day/Get Up Kids camp, but its lyrics are a touch more elliptical and abstruse.

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Marc Weingarten is a regular contributor to Calendar.