Welcome to the Machine

The women behind "The Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records" take up a new battle to save the indies.

By Carlene Bauer

Feb 15, 2000 | In 1993, before Starbucks colonized the East Coast and alternative rock became a box to check off on the Columbia House order form, songwriter Lois Maffeo released a tune called "Indie" on Simple Machines, an independent record label in Arlington, Va. The song was a cheer for the do-it-yourself movement, the premise of which was that if you wanted to make a movie or put out a zine or record some music you should do it. "Do it on your own," she sings. "Be just who you want to be/Get it on in the land of the free."

The song could be the Simple Machines theme. Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson, the two women who founded the label in 1990, ran it with a freewheeling determination to put out records by bands they liked. Toomey and Thomson wanted to spread the good news: Anyone could do it, if they worked hard enough. Simple Machines released singles by underground bands like Superchunk, Bratmobile, Unrest and the Coctails in packaging that was often as complex and lovely as origami. They also managed to donate proceeds of some records to charities benefiting troubled kids, maintain a small media empire through mail order and nab a spot on Lollapalooza for their own band, Tsunami.

Simple Machines, along with label peers Merge, K, Kill Rock Stars, Teenbeat and Dischord, epitomized the can-do spirit that marked independent rock of the '90s. Toomey and Thomson built their record company -- and helped shape a music community -- on the ethics of playing fair and playing nice. Very nice. Their "Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records" -- which they wrote, self-published and sent out for free to 10,000 young bands -- encourages aspiring label heads to send cookies to album-mastering plants in order to humanize business transactions.

That advice seems more quaint than ever, given the current business climate and a seemingly biological imperative for media conglomerates to merge. After Universal swallowed Polygram in late 1998, the Big Six record companies dwindled to the Big Five, which had a lock on 85 percent of the market. Then, just after the recent AOL-Time Warner merger, Time Warner announced that it would acquire EMI, reducing the number of major record companies to four. That, in addition to even more radio consolidation, has turned the music industry into an even bigger threat to independent music than it was when Simple Machines began.

But there's a crucial difference between then and now. In the early '90s, there was no such thing as MP3, AVI or RealAudio. Digitally downloadable music, which allows anyone to deliver a song or a record directly to a consumer, has been heralded as the music industry's exterminating angel for its potential to cut the record industry out of music sales. In theory, the Net removes the distribution advantage that the majors have over indies and gives it to individuals in a way that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. But in practice, with multimillion-dollar Internet companies such as Emusic trying to sign bands to exclusive deals, majors joining with sites like Listen.com and a thicket of technology that grows knottier by the minute, the new music industry -- the online music industry -- is just as intimidating and dangerous to independents as the old.

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Although Merge and Matador each celebrated turning 10 in 1999, Toomey and Thomson didn't reach that milestone. They shut down Simple Machines in 1998. Keeping the catalog in print was prohibitively expensive, and the label required so much of their time that they couldn't tour with Tsunami to make money. And their part-time jobs had turned full-time. Thomson had also moved to Philadelphia, and the commute was wearing.

In the sixth and final edition of the "Mechanic's Guide," they wrote that they were "leaving labels up to the young and the idealistic." Their statement was a bit coy: Toomey helped lead a successful campaign to establish low-power radio and Thomson is a graduate student studying urban development at the University of Delaware.

Both are still dedicated to helping artists survive in the music industry. In December, Toomey and Thomson launched The Machine, an online forum dedicated to exploring the possibilities and pitfalls of digital music, on the indie rock Website Insound.com.

Toomey and Thomson got the idea after researching digital distribution as a way to keep the Simple Machines catalog in stock. After wading through piles of information on the topic, they decided to share what they'd learned and create a space for folks to puzzle out the incredibly confusing subject. So far, they've posted interviews with label heads and artists and hosted chats. They plan to dispense how-to advice on technical matters such as uploading tracks. In a sense, the ongoing project updates the original goal of the "Mechanic's Guide" -- to give power to consumers and the people making music.

So now the women who once sang that "punk means cuddle," who championed the cassette tape even as the CD reigned supreme, have given themselves to deconstructing a medium that's decidedly uncuddly. It's not exactly a vacation, either. "It's almost as much work as running the label," says Toomey. "But it's less of a psychic drain, because I don't owe anybody money."

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Toomey and Thomson's retirement from record-making may seem like one more coffin nail for indie rock. The once-thriving genre comes in only three flavors: noodly, wake-me when-it's-over-post-rock; fey jet-set retro bubble-gum; and, if it's got a pulse and smells a little like punk, emo.

Media attention once focused on the underground began dropping off about five years ago. After courting and wooing indie labels and their artists, the majors have figured out that pre-fab boy bands and pop tarts sell more in a day than Built to Spill will in a year. And alternative rock -- a dubious attempt to make independent bands into viable stars -- now means angsty posturing like that of Matchbox 20. These days, getting someone like Liz Phair on the cover of Rolling Stone seems pretty unlikely. She wouldn't even make the cover of CMJ New Music Monthly; the alternative music magazine that once saved that spot for bands like Velocity Girl now gives it up to slick, major label fare like Buckcherry.

"It's changed," says Slim Moon, the owner of the Kill Rock Stars label. "The market's smaller. There are fewer fans than there were at its peak in the early- and mid-'90s. But if you're talking about stuff that crosses over into electronica, there's a generation of teens and 20-year-olds that aren't just looking at indie rock but other kinds of music. Every few years there's going to be new music or a new idea or a new pose and teenagers are going to want it because it doesn't belong to anybody else."

What the kids want are MP3s. College campuses, thanks to high-speed Internet connections, are so rife with downloading and uploading that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) makes a habit of rapping the knuckles of schools that harbor student pirates. But it's not just kids: Last year, in two days, 150,000 fans downloaded a free Tom Petty single from MP3.com before Warner Bros. quietly moved the single to the label-run Website.

Although the industry is less hesitant than it was only six months ago, it still fears the MP3 format. While the big four struggle to come up with copyright standards and decide what to do about piracy, download marketplaces like EMusic.com and Musicmaker.com have been busy inking deals with indie labels and unsigned artists. "It's so fun to watch major labels get scared," Toomey says. "They were so arrogant about being the only game in town for so many years. Now they've got to compete with people who are actually smart."

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