I wanted to continue at that pace. Cees wanted to shoot for Jupiter. In his mind, he thought he was getting as big as some of the major labels and should pursue more bands that would be hugely profitable and go multi-platinum. He was more of a marketing man than a music man, and even though his label had been going for decades, he didn’t realize or accept that you can never count on finding the next Nickelback. Bands that strike a chord with the mainstream and become massive stars so quickly come along about once every five or ten years. It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge label with endless funds or an indie that happens to strike oil (as Sub Pop did with Nirvana). It’s a rare phenomenon, and I was lucky enough to have played a role in the careers of a few mega-platinum groups.
‘Derek, we need to sign more bands like Nickelback,’ Cees said, blinded by the green. ‘What they’re doing doesn’t seem so unusual. There must be a hundred that are just as good that haven’t been discovered yet.’
It was like he’d forgotten that Roadrunner was built on a foundation of underground music that strongly appealed to a certain demographic. By hiring the right people and signing good-quality bands, Roadrunner had become a tastemaker, and fans trusted that if a new band was on the label, they would probably like them—or at least should give them a chance.
I like to use this expression for Roadrunner: you have to build a cake first before you can eat it. The cake was built over time and finished when Slipknot broke. Nickelback were the icing on the cake. But to complete the analogy, if you put too much icing on a cake, it falls apart. Cees loved icing, and he didn’t want it to stop raining down. As impossible as that was to do, he sure tried. The mandate was to bring more super-melodic, alternative hard-rock bands to the label. So, Roadrunner signed bands like Theory Of A Deadman, Feeder, and Ether Seeds, which I felt was a bad move. It’s not that they were horrible bands. You just can’t force lightning to strike twice.
In a further quest for another multi-platinum winner, Cees insisted on selling twenty-five percent of Roadrunner to a European pop music company called Edel. The deal fell apart and put Cees in financial jeopardy. I was upset that he wouldn’t follow my advice, but in the end, he owned the company and I didn’t. I had a piece of it, and I was being paid well to run it.
I kept coming to work and following Cees’s direction, but I was also starting to plan my exit. Being at Roadrunner was no longer inspiring. I wanted to keep looking for quality rock artists and help them grow, just like I was hired to do. Now, however, we had less money to sign great bands, I was making fewer creative decisions, and regretfully, Roadrunner was turning into what I hated about the music business. The last thing I wanted was to see was Roadrunner adopting the capitalistic, hedonistic MO of Atlantic, Universal, Columbia, and the rest.
Cees could tell I was unhappy with the changes taking place at the label, and we scheduled a meeting to discuss the future.
‘First of all, I’m really glad you brought me in,’ I told him. ‘And I’m happy to have been a part of building Roadrunner into a hundred-million-dollar company. I wanted to be a part of something that was primarily about the bands and the music, and we made that happen. But now I’m afraid we’ve become more about business than music.’
Cees explained that he was hamstrung by the deal with Edel that went sour and now felt he had to sell Roadrunner to remain profitable. When Roadrunner went down further in value, he sold it to Warners, who made the label an Elektra imprint. If he had sold it when it was at its prime, he would have made four or five times more money than he got in the end. By then, Roadrunner was in bad shape and the cash flow was drying up. The label was still selling lots of records by Nickelback and Slipknot, but Cees had brought over too many of these Nickelback-style bands he thought would make him richer, and he was spending way too much money on marketing and promotion to try to break them. We parted ways after he sold the company, and today, Roadrunner, though still a label, is no longer the indie powerhouse that helped redefine the metal and hard rock genres; sadly, now it is just an imprint of the Warner Music Group repertoire, the history and the amazing success of this iconic rock and metal label just a sad asterisk.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
LEGEND
HAS IT
Looking back, one of my strangest and funniest moments at Roadrunner took place early on, when Cees still wanted to expand into the hip-hop world and the label was looking at signing a distribution deal with Psychopathic Records, which was owned by the loose-cannon rap-rockers Insane Clown Posse. The Posse were especially interested in pushing an album by the horror-themed rap group Twiztid, featuring ex-House Of Krazees members Jamie Madrox and Monoxide Child.
I scheduled a meeting with Monte and ICP to find out what we might be getting ourselves into. Soon after we sat down in the conference room, they slid a CD into the stereo, and on came their signature song, ‘Diemuthafuckadie.’ As soon as the riff kicked in, Madrox and Monoxide Child were banging their heads to the beat and grooving with the song, which was underpinned by a buoyant, whimsical, and all too familiar melody. I turned to them in complete and utter bewilderment.
‘Yo, yo. Listen to the chorus when we go, Die, fuckin’ die / diemuthafuckadiemuthackadie!’ Madrox said with a grin. He gesticulated with both arms, looking like a gangly puppet with tattoo sleeves.
‘Yeah, man. This is the bomb!’ Monoxide Child added.
I had to say something. I turned to look at the fellows in Twiztid. ‘Well, do you know who that song is? I mean, the sample.’
‘Well, it’s something you’ve probably never heard of, but I tracked that shit down,’ Monoxide said. ‘It’s this totally unknown band called Gentle Giant. They have this song called “Spooky Boogie,” but I’m sure you’ve never heard it, you know?’
I blinked hard and looked back at him. It wasn’t just a riff they were looping—it was the whole hook of the song. I smiled. I was sure Monte was playing a joke on me and had put the clowns up to this.
Am I being punked here? I thought. Is Ashton Kutcher going to walk in any second, laughing his ass off?
No, I wasn’t being punked. These guys were as serious as a spoonful of cooked meth. I turned to Monte, who was squirming in his seat. ‘Wow, I don’t know what to say. This could be interesting.’
I walked out smiling at the absurdity of the situation. A few minutes later, Monte came into my office. ‘We’re not working with these guys,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want anything to do with them or their inane posse.’
As it turned out, Twiztid had released ‘Diemuthafuckadie’ on their own, and the song was a minor hit and a fan favorite. I picked up the phone and called my attorney. In the end, we got a nice little settlement from Twiztid and Psychopathic Records for copyright infringement.
It wasn’t just that they’d ripped off our song. Kansas and Styx liberally borrowed ideas from Gentle Giant and admitted that we were a major influence. That was flattering. But Twiztid weren’t influenced by ‘Spooky Boogie.’ They stole it. They didn’t even ask for permission to use the song before they sampled the majority of it. And then they did absolutely no homework before entering a meeting with me and playing me my own music. That seemed unbelievably unprofessional at the time, but now, whenever I think about it, I can’t help but laugh. The incident was so ridiculous and surreal that if Nick Hornby incorporated this scene into a novel, his editor might tell him it’s too farfetched. Whatever, it kind of makes me wish we’d called our song ‘Diemuthafuckadie’ instead of ‘Spooky Boogie.’