Chicago label Drag City had been putting out records for six years when one of its artists, Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux, proposed a new project. Drag City had already collaborated with Hagerty on several offbeat ventures–What Is Royal Trux?, a tour film cum sci-fi epic released on videotape in 1992 (and slated for reissue on DVD next year), as well as scripts for The Drag City Hour, a radio program with music and comedy sketches. Hagerty’s latest, it turned out, was a science fiction novel, and though no one at Drag City had experience with books, they decided to publish and distribute it. The result was 1997’s Victory Chimp, the first release under the Drag City Books imprint. Six years later, books account for a surprising 12 percent of the label’s total sales.
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Founded in 1989 by Dan Osborn and Dan Koretzky, Drag City has a reputation for championing critically acclaimed yet slow-burning acts like Will Oldham, Smog, Royal Trux, and Jim O’Rourke–artists with little in common except perhaps an aversion to being categorized. Initially run out of Koretzky’s apartment, the label released a handful of records before getting lucky with the Pavement ten-inch Perfect Sound Forever in 1991. Pavement opened the door for collaboration with the more established Touch and Go Records, which took over Drag City’s manufacturing and distribution and quickly increased its market reach. By 1993 Koretzky had quit his job doing legal proofreading to devote himself to the label full-time, and in 1995 he and Drag City moved into a live-work loft space, complete with loading dock, on Peoria. Around this time the label released its first big album without the help of Touch and Go, Oldham’s Viva Last Blues. The core team of Koretzky, Osborn, and sales manager Rian Murphy gradually grew to a staff of seven full-time employees plus interns, and Drag City relocated to its current offices, near Grand and Damen, in 1998. The label’s catalog now includes around 260 albums, singles, videos, and books; it also manufactures and distributes for other labels including Oldham’s Palace Records, O’Rourke’s Blue Chopsticks, David Grubbs’s Moikai Records, and the European experimental label Streamline Records.
Hagerty’s convoluted tale–about a chemical-engineer chimpanzee who travels through time and space to fight the forces of evil only to resurface in the end as a pro wrestling star who gives erudite lectures on the rhetoric of wrestling–is likely one that only friends, family, and Royal Trux fans could love. “I think that keeping it straight might be a little antithetical to the intention of the writer,” says Murphy. He dutifully compares it to Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence and the novels of Philip K. Dick, but admits that “I have not fully penetrated the book in the six-plus years since we put it out.”
“Putting out the first book was much easier than putting out the first record,” Osborn says. “We’re able to bring all the knowledge of selling a product in the marketplace to bear on the books. All the structure within the label for packing stuff up, shipping it out–all that stuff pretty much transfers over.” The company still hasn’t hired any new staff to accommodate the publishing side of the business. Instead, book-related tasks have been integrated with staffers’ responsibilities on the record-making end–Seth Bohn, for example, who handles foreign licensing and production, works with Osborn and fills the managing editor role, negotiating with printers and vendors and ensuring that deadlines are met. Melissa Severin now does double duty on tour support and promotion and on book publicity.
John Fahey’s Vampire Vultures, a posthumous collection of the groundbreaking guitarist’s writings, also came out this fall. It’s the follow-up to 2000’s How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, by far the standout on the Drag City list with more than 10,000 copies sold–an enviable number for any full-fledged independent publisher. Carrot Top was very successful with Bluegrass and is seeing strong starting sales of Vultures, says Souris. “Of course, that’s John Fahey. I could sell his fingernail clippings.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
