At first, Cees, who didn’t like any of the metal bands on Roadrunner, tried to win me over with another approach.
‘Well, how about we focus on pop?’ he said. ‘I like pop, and it’s what radio stations and MTV are all playing.’
Cees didn’t know pop music any better than he knew metal. He was a marketing guy. He took two-week trips to Europe every month and wrote down the names of all the successful pop and electronic music he heard in the hope of signing them in the US. I told him it would require tens of millions of dollars to compete with pop divisions at Warners, Columbia, and Geffen, and that he’d have to bring in an entirely new staff. His current employees were pros with rock music, but they knew very little about pop.
‘Let’s focus on being the best rock label in the world,’ I said. ‘We can work with rock and metal and make Roadrunner a household name for that kind of music. You’ve already got the staff for it.’
It was a golden plan with a major problem. Cees hated rock music. His world revolved around classical, and he would go to eight Wagner Ring Cycles a year. He had hired people who loved the music he despised and were successful at promoting it, so he’d built a company rooted in metal. That’s what he was known for, and now I was asking him to double down. It was a good idea, but he didn’t understand what he had. He had only fallen into metal because he had limited funds and the bands he brought into the fold were relatively cheap to sign and produce. He had made good money doing this for years. Type O Negative, Sepultura, and Fear Factory were all successful bands who sold a lot of albums and toured the world. They were highly profitable, and I wanted to take them—and new bands from the same world—to the next level.
‘Derek, you know the record business world, and you know rock,’ Cees said. ‘I’ve done well, but I’d like to be bigger. If we put all our efforts into rock, can you oversee the company and do what you did at PolyGram and ATCO?’
It was a tempting offer. My only reservation was that he didn’t have the kind of backing those labels had, so there wasn’t a lot of money to throw around. We’d have to find great artists who hadn’t yet been discovered by major labels. I had experience with that, and Roadrunner had done well with bands that could have been on major labels. But if I was going to be involved, Cees had to view music as art and not just a commodity. I believed in the kind of artist development that had enabled artists like Gentle Giant, Bon Jovi, and Pantera to grow and evolve. Cees didn’t understand the musical references, but he grasped the marketing potential and he was all in.
I came on as president of Roadrunner in late 1997. The first thing I did was sit down with Monte and the marketing guys and talk about the bands who were already on the label and had the potential to become more popular. I wanted everyone who was there to be a part of the process and not feel like I was some big-label douchebag that had swooped in to ransack their cottage industry, take credit for their achievements, and threaten their jobs.
‘I very much want to work as a team,’ I said, which was probably the first thing some asshole from a corporate label would say before coming in and destroying a company. ‘You guys know and understand the music you work with. You’ve built it into this great thing. I’ve been elsewhere doing other things, so I don’t know everyone you’ve been involved with. Fill me in and let me know how you think we can grow these artists even more. Let’s see what we can do to help this thing get to where we want it to be and let’s focus on these bands.’
If nothing else, the meeting was meant to rally the team, to show them that we were on the same page and I didn’t want to wreck their playground. I wanted to make it bigger and stronger. The first band I saw with a glimmer of going a little further was Coal Chamber. Their song ‘Loco’ was a crazy metal song, but it had strong melodies, and in a nu-metal scene that supported bands like Korn and Deftones, they were promising.
‘I think we could take this to rock radio, not just college metal stations,’ I said. ‘Even though it’s hardcore, it’s got a bit of a chorus—even if it’s a shouty chorus.’
Everyone liked the idea, and as I got to know the members of Coal Chamber and talked to them about their goals, it reinforced my hopes that Roadrunner was the right fit for me. I loved being at an independent company where I could sit down with the musicians and say, ‘Look, here’s what we’ve got, and here’s what we can do for you.’ They understood, and they reacted positively. I think they liked getting feedback from the label president, as opposed to hearing something some marketing guy told their manager.
I listened to all the albums with scheduled releases and met with artists. Some bands didn’t want guidance and wanted to call their own shots. That was fine, and as long as they were good for the label, they kept their deals. Those who wanted to work with me usually received more of my attention and more of the company’s resources. I was clear about what the company could afford to spend on them to make them bigger, and what our plan of attack was. With a strong push to rock radio and a wildly surreal video that did well on MTV, ‘Loco’ ranked on numerous rock, metal, and radio charts, and Coal Chamber’s self-titled album went gold.
I was more hands-on working with Fear Factory, helping them to reach a larger audience. They were an extreme band influenced by thrash, industrial music, and a little death metal. But their vocalist, Burton C. Bell, had singing chops: he see-sawed between bloody-throated screaming and melodic crooning long before metalcore groups like Killswitch Engage and All That Remains came onto the scene. Burt was a star, and guitarist Dino Cazares had speedy riffs, searing solos, and great stage presence. I talked to them about writing a purely melodic song, but that didn’t feel authentic to them. So, I suggested they cover a catchy tune by someone they liked. We tossed around some ideas, and they decided it might be fun to do a loud, modern take on Gary Numan’s 1979 new-wave hit ‘Cars.’ It was the perfect choice. We got Gary to add vocals, and we included it as the bonus track on Fear Factory’s 1998 album Obsolete. The song became a hit on radio, and a video (which also featured Numan) received heavy airplay on MTV. In the end, ‘Cars’ helped springboard Obsolete to 750,000 sales and renewed public interest in Numan.
If Fear Factory had started writing songs that were still futuristic but slightly more commercial, they might have achieved the multi-platinum success that other unconventional metal bands such as Tool or System Of A Down enjoyed. But like many of the bands on Roadrunner, they wanted to remain uncommercial. It’s an aesthetic of the extreme metal genre. Commerciality is equated with selling out, even though groups like Pantera and Slayer remained successful without even coming close to selling out. So many of these bands shun mainstream exposure and, effectively, slit their own throats. They crave attention, but they’re afraid of becoming successful, as if accomplishing that is somehow a kiss of death. And then, if they’re not successful, they get frustrated and break up. It’s a self-defeating situation, and it caps these bands’ success at a certain level. They taste, see, and smell fame, but they want it on their own terms. If they’re happy with where that takes them, more power to them. But a lot of them commit commercial suicide after a hit and then can’t figure out why they didn’t make it. That was the case for both Coal Chamber and Fear Factory.