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Dan Clore · Guest

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Orinda man runs feisty record label
By Tanya Rose
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched: 07/06/2008 05:19:49 PM PDT

ORINDA -- He is the type of guy who will rush home in the middle of the
day to help a locked-out neighbor, who'd rather eat pizza at home with
his 5-year-old daughter than go out.

He is also co-founder of one of the most cutting-edge independent record
labels in the nation, one known for genre-busting music acts and a
feisty, do-it-yourself mentality.

He is 44-year-old Greg Werckman, and he runs Ipecac Recordings out of a
small cottage behind his house in Orinda.

It wasn't supposed to be a big deal, but it is.

"It kind of started by default," Werckman said. "We didn't start out
saying we wanted to run a record label, but we needed a home for some
weird projects. The success caught us off guard, but the more we thought
about it, it shouldn't have."

After all, he said, Ipecac fills a needed niche.

"In the music industry, there aren't a lot of places to go for different
stuff," Werckman said. "There's this need (for labels) to be huge and
we've never had that. There's a need to be on the cover of Rolling Stone
.... to watch the Billboard charts. I don't subscribe to Billboard and I
don't subscribe to Rolling Stone."

He founded the label in 1999 with business partner Mike Patton, the
former Faith No More frontman, after working for other labels for years.
Ipecac — named after the stuff fed to children to induce vomiting after
eating poison — has put out about 100 records, between 10 and 14 per year.

Artists include heavy rockers Queens of the Stone Age, pop singer/rapper
Imani Coppola, metal-punk-grunge giants The Melvins and all of Patton's
current projects, including Peeping Tom and Fantomas.

"Our lawyer thinks we're crazy," Werckman said. "But there's a reason a
lot of artists work with us. All of the deals are one-record deals, so
we don't own any bands — they're all licensing deals. The artists will
never lose control."

Under this arrangement, the label pays to make the record, but is paid
back once the album is released. The artist retains ownership of the
album, and after three years can take the album to another company if he
or she so chooses.

"I've always thought it's creepy that a record label owns a band. I
worked at a major label and I saw it happen and it's horrible. They can
bury you," he said.

Werckman answers the main phone line, along with every e-mail sent
through the company's Web site. With only three full-time employees, he
has to. Though Ipecac has a growing fan base and a long list of bands
sending in demos, Werckman said being busy is worth it if it means
maintaining a grass-roots flair.

"It's more important to put out stuff that is unique and that's real,
and if 1,000 people are into it, great. If 10,000 people are into it,
then that's really, really great, but at the end of the day, our
business isn't structured to sell a million records," he said.

Buzz Osborne of The Melvins, whose new album, "Nude with Boots," comes
out Tuesday, said his band signed on to work with Werckman because he is
a realist. So far, The Melvins have released a dozen albums on Ipecac.

"I could tell immediately that he didn't have some ... idea of us all
being rich superstars," Osborne said of Werckman.

"I liked that he wasn't blowing smoke and, believe me, the industry is
filled with that stuff. It's difficult to find people who don't have a
weird agenda. If we didn't like Greg, we wouldn't be there. Everyone
told him when this started that he was wrong, but look, not a single
band has left."

Werckman grew up in Indiana. On his 10th birthday, all he wanted was a
Casey Kasem Top 40s turntable. It came with dry-erase boards attached so
you could write up your own song lists. That's when he decided he wanted
to be a DJ.

In college at the University of Dayton in the 1980s, he worked at two
radio stations — one student-run and one an adult contemporary station
where he played Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler records. At home,
though, he was listening to such seminal punk rockers as Black Flag and
the Dead Kennedys. Werckman didn't know it then, but the Dead Kennedys'
lead singer, the iconic Jello Biafra, would come into his life a short
time later.

Right out of college, he landed a job at a talent agency in New York
City. They asked him to handle the "weird, fringe people," he said. His
clients included activist-turned-fugitive Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary
and "gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson. In fact, he was with Thompson
once in an airport when the writer pulled a gun out of his sock and
waved it around because a bartender hadn't moved with his drink fast enough.

Another client of his during that time was Biafra, who suggested
Werckman move to San Francisco to run Biafra's Alternative Tentacles, a
record label that launched some of the most original bands of the 1980s
punk scene.

"I was like, 'Nah, nah, I'm not a West Coast guy," Werckman said. "But I
was in the entertainment industry and I was burned out. I was like,
'This isn't the life I want.'"

He decided he would try it for six months. It was 1989, and he was 25.
He would run Alternative Tentacles for more than seven years. And,
eventually, he would work for Mercury Records, but only for a year.

Over time he began managing artists such as Patton, and became good
friends with The Melvins, with whom Biafra has performed for two years.
Then in the late '90s, The Melvins' Osborne, Werckman and Patton were
talking about projects — two Patton projects and a Melvins album — that
had no home.

Patton's two most well-known bands — Mr. Bungle and Faith No More — had
just broken up. His two new projects were experiments — one was
Fantomas, a noisy project featuring Patton and Osborne.

"He said, 'What should I do with these records?'" Werckman said. "I was
like, 'Well gee, Mike, we could just do this ourselves.' And he was
like, 'Really?' And I was like, 'Yeah, I know a bunch of local people.'
.... And then Buzz from the Melvins was like, 'Well if you're going to
put out Mike's records ... The Melvins don't really have a home.' And I
was like, 'God ... that's a real record label.'"

When the label started, Werckman was living in Alameda. He moved to
Orinda five years ago. A single father, he said he will never leave the
area. He wants his daughter to go to good schools, and he likes working
behind the scenes.

Werckman said he has been shocked by Ipecac's success. Ipecac acts tour
with such big names as The Who and Tool. Fans bombard the Web site with
orders, and well-known bands — including Pearl Jam — have expressed
interest in signing with the label.

A few years ago, a large record label expressed interest in buying Ipecac.

"I said, 'Well, look, you could buy us, but all you'd get is the name
'Ipecac' and I guess you'd get Mike and I as A&R (artist-scouting) guys.
And the owner of the label was like, 'Why, why is that? What about your
records?' And we were like, 'We don't own any of them, they're all
licensing deals,' and the guy was like, 'Well then you're not worth
anything,' and I was like, 'Well in your eyes, maybe, but to our bands,
it's the world.'"

Reach Tanya Rose at 925-943-8345 or trose@bayareanewsgroup.com.
# Biography
# NAME: Greg Werckman
# AGE: 44
# EDUCATION: University of Dayton, B.S. in communication arts
# occupation: Co-founder of Ipecac Recordings
# DETAILS: http://www.ipecac.com

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"