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toothbrush, compass/mirror/binocular, and cheap sunglasses. And a CD (picture and bio).
Guess I’ll be throwing out all of that Gucci luggage and most of my wardrobe. This
is everything a writer could ever want. And to think a local rock band, Screwtape, was
thoughtful enough to bestow this gift upon me.
No, really that’s sarcasm. This thing has no practical use. It
wouldn’t survive a single handling by even the most genteel of airlines. So, why on
earth does a rock band send a hack a little plastic suitcase?
Well, with approximately 29,000 albums released every year, for a band
like Screwtape, simply sending the requisite press kit — CD, bio, and press photo — to
print or radio in hopes of getting written about or played is a little like a recent
college graduate blindly faxing their resume to Big Corporation, Inc. in hopes of
scoring a job. It’ll get you nothing. In fact, it’ll get you less than nothing in the
music business, as rock critics and radio program directors don’t have the time or
the (dis)courtesy to send the obligatory rejection form letter with that,
“We’ll keep this on file for a year, just in case” lie. Typically, they simply
put the album onto the leaning tower of pisa-shit CDs and trash the bio.
Nevertheless, this maxim exists: If you want to be listened to, you’ve got
to be noticed. For good bands with name recognition, this usually isn’t a
problem. For everyone else, the common strategy is to send things that make you (or in the
case, us) go “Hmmm?” or more specifically, “Hmmm, this little
plastic suitcase looks interesting. I have no idea why someone sent it, but maybe I’ll play
the album.”
The practice of sending unsolicited junk to print and radio is fairly
widespread and is done by indie bands on homemade labels as well as major labels for
their projects. And a hefty amount of resources are being funneled into these trinkets. Seth
Orell, Screwtape’s drummer, estimates the band spent about $10 per suitcase, and
that they probably got off easy as they only sent them to folks locally. Costs can
range anywhere from pennies to upwards of $30-40, depending on the item, and for a label
doing promo mailouts of up to 5,000, even on the low end, costs can add up quickly.
Regardless of costs, labels can get elaborate on occasion and pull schemes
with a high degree of difficulty in an attempt to both out-clever past efforts and
synthesize some curiosity. In advance of Abra Moore’s Strangest Places, Arista
Austin ran a campaign where they sent out thousands of postcards from
“Abra,” who kept finding herself in the “strangest places.” That’s the
impression they gave anyway.
Actually, the label ordered heaps of postcards from a catalog, and in lieu
of having Moore spend inordinate and perhaps inhumane amounts of time traveling
and writing, had interns and temps fill them out as if they were Abra. The label
then addressed, stamped, and boxed the cards, sending them to post offices in
various weird locations where they were mailed with some exotic postmark thus
completing the illusion.
Usually, though, the ploy is pretty formulaic. KGSR’s Program Director
Jody Denberg sums up the general level of creativity with precision blandness: “If
there’s a song about plants, they’ll send us a plant.” To wit, Kim Wilson’s
Tigerman came with tiger-striped bandanas. The Butthole Surfers once sent out toilet
paper. Robert Earl Keen’s Picnic came in a bag with plastic ants (Picnic.
Ants. Get it?) Hollywood Records put fastballs in Fastball’s mailer. No, not drugs, but
little plastic Superballs. And the suitcase? It goes with an album called Tiny Me
Trip.
Other items include Buick MacKane guitar picks, combs, and style guides in
connection with the Derailers’ Jackpot — to achieve the perfect retro hair, of
course. Banana Blender Surprise would frequently deliver R.C. Colas and Moon Pies.
And Stephen Doster’s Rosebud came with a sled. Okay, that last one is a lie.
Of course there are gimmicks that make little or no sense. Elektra
recently included little plastic footballs with the mail out for Too Far To Care by the
Old 97’s. The current and tenuous theory around here is that they sent the
football, because like the Cowboys, the Old 97’s are from Dallas. Weak.
Mailing out trinkets and doo dads is actually one of the more innocuous
and low-key forms of Don King-isms. Getting noticed isn’t just the stuff of bad flicks
starring Brandon Fraser and Adam Sandler; bands go to lengths of great tastelessness
to attract attention. It’s well short of storming into a radio station and taking
hostages in an attempt to get its single added, but Boston rock band Little John did
storm up to the outside of its local modern rock outlet, WBCN, trying to get
added to its playlist..
Says drummer Brendan Taylor, “We basically decided to force ourselves
on them. We rented a flatbed trailer, and rigged up the trailer so that all the
gear would be attached to it, including the P.A…. All we had to do was pull up
outside the station, pull out the generator, start it up, make, like, one multi-pin
connection and start playing,” which they did. Too bad the band’s single never got
added by the station. It wasn’t a total loss, though, as the guys did get their
picture in the Boston Globe the next day.
Adopting a similar tactic, Austin’s former Schlitz Quarts (who later
became Banana Blender Surprise) once set up right outside the Chronicle offices and
played to a captive audience of two. (Note: This practice is now discouraged, if not
downright prohibited.)
In an attempt to get into South By Southwest last year, another Boston
band, Happy Bunny, paid Andy Maguire of locals Ursa Major $100 plus expenses to dress up
in a bunny suit and deliver Valentines to the SXSW staff. Happy Bunny did not make
it into the conference, although Maguire thinks the stunt helped her band
eventually get picked up for SXSW. Obviously, these things don’t always work out as
planned, yet sometimes even the most innocuous promotional schemes not only fail but
fail miserably.
A couple of years back, in conjunction with its big rollout of Frank
Zappa’s catalogue and also as an industry-wide Christmas present, Rykodisc sent out a sizable
number of sno-globes with an Eskimo, a husky, and yellow snow; for all non-Zappa
fans this is in reference to his lyric, “Watch out where the huskies go. Don’t you
eat that yellow snow.”
The key here is these are sno-globes with liquid inside them and that they
were sent out around Christmas time, which in many parts of the Northern
Hemisphere means an actual winter with cold weather. A memo from the Ryko shipping department
describes the fiasco as the little toys were sent to the offices in the Northeast:
“A bunch of the snow globes [sic] arrived here frozen. Since water has the
somewhat annoying tendency to expand when it freezes, the globes broke. Since water
also prefers to be in a liquid state at room temperature, the globes melted upon their
arrival.” Added Ryko publicist Darcy Mayers, “I wish I could describe the stench
of that water.”
Think that’s bad? Wait ’til the Baptists hear this: Thrash metal band
Sacred Reich once had bongs sent out with one if its releases. Sacred Reich is on
Hollywood Records, which is in turn owned by Disney. So, in effect, Mickey Mouse was handing out
bongs. Luckily, it was an independent publicist and not the label itself
distributing the “tobacco paraphernalia,” so Disney was able to wash its hands of
any responsibility. (Note: Occasionally there is this low-brow Jungian thematic synchronicity to
promotional gimmicks. Within a short time of the bong fiasco, American Records sent out
Black Crowes rolling papers and Dash Rip Rock did the same with little baggies of
oregano.)
Sometimes, though, the flaw in a plan exposes new levels of human
stupidity. Trying to gain favor with the folks who book the bands, another group of SXSW
wannabes had a keg of beer delivered to the conference staff. Unfortunately, they didn’t
deliver their name with it. Says Brent Grulke, Creative Director of SXSW, “We
still don’t know who sent that keg.” Someone else once gave SXSW a salmon sans
any band identity. “At times there are just these things that arrive and you
don’t even know who it’s associated with even though clearly it’s supposed to be
associated with some artist or another,” adds Grulke.
I may be going out on a limb here, but if there’s any one rule to getting
your band noticed through some shameless act of promotion, it’s probably to make
sure your band’s name is somehow connected to that act of promotion. Anonymous
gifts do you no good. They do you no harm, but that’s not the goal here now, is
it?
Grulke discourages sending anything of value as deliberate attempts to
gain favor are unacceptable; some people occasionally go beyond the questionable and
just plain offer up cash. “The most obnoxious thing always has been the offers of
direct bribes,” he says. Grulke declined to give numbers lest people think
there’s some sort of standard or, again, that the practice is even acceptable, but
added, “I was stunned, I’ll say that.”
So, outside of ethical, not-so-gray areas and poor execution, the question
is, does this stuff work? Well, the fact that this article is being written is
sufficient cause to say, “You’re writing about the crap you remember getting so,
yes, it works.” And whether a publicity stunt misfires or not, as long as it
generates publicity, then it works to some degree. Happy Bunny may not have gotten into
SXSW, but they got into print here (for whatever that’s worth).
But “noticed” and “listened to” are different things,
and whether a ploy or a toy is going to get you “listened to” is
totally dependent on the recipient’s attitude toward the blatant attempt to catch his or her
eye. Says Denberg, “If they’re going to spend that kind of money on something,
I’ll probably want to pop it in and see what it’s about.”
Michael Corcoran, pop music critic for the Austin-American
Statesman, is of the antipodal ilk. “I can’t think of any time that something came
across where I went, `Wow, this is pretty cool, I’ve got to listen to this
band,'” he says. “Usually, the band is not involved anyway. Just because they’ve
got smart marketing people doesn’t mean their music is any good.” Quite
often it means the music is bad, and the trinkets are just a way to get you to pick up
something you never would otherwise.
In fact, there’s often an inverse relationship between the cost of the
item and the quality of the music. High dollar items, while impressive and sometimes
useful, can also be a turn-off, as they reek of a desperate stab at generating hype
and sales for someone whose music deserves neither. Corcoran recalls getting a swanky
leather backpack (cost in the neighborhood of $40) in conjunction with some
now-unidentifiable country singer. Today, he recalls only the backpack. “The idea that a
year later I can’t even remember the guy’s name… they’re just trying a little too
hard,” he says.
So do these things work? Well, even the most cloyed can’t claim to be
completely immune to the voodoo of the marketing witch doctors. For Abra Moore’s
postcard charade, Arista Austin publicist Athena Fortenberry notes that one person, a friend of
Moore’s, understandably got his “feelings hurt” and felt “misled”
once he learned that the postcards were part of a promotion and not really from
Abra herself. Says Fortenberry, “The only backlash we had was from Michael Corcoran.
He was a little upset.”
This article appears in August 1 • 1997 and August 1 • 1997 (Cover).