Those Bloodshot Eyes

The demise of long-running Chicago indie label BLOODSHOT RECORDS came to what appears to be an unceremonious conclusion Tuesday, with the label announcing its office is "permanently closed" and ROB MILLER, the last remaining co-founder, writing a farewell note saying he's out and it's "time for this phase of Bloodshot Records to come to an end." While the label said it's still filling orders "for the time being" and Miller's note left open the possibility there might actually be a next phase, two and a half years of stories about sexual harassment, mismanagement, artists jumping ship and co-founders at war with each other have left little reason to believe it would matter. Let the brand die. "F***" NAN WARSHAW," tweeted one former Bloodshot artist, SARAH SHOOK, referring to the other longtime co-founder and co-owner, while asking "what in the f*** is going on with our masters." Another ex-Bloodshot star, LYDIA LOVELESS, responded to Shook's tweet with 27 clapping-hands emojis.

Warshaw was cast as the central villain in a series of implosions that began in 2019 with a New York Times report accusing RYAN ADAMS—whose first solo album Bloodshot had released two decades earlier—of a long pattern of abusive relationships. Shortly afterward, Loveless accused Warshaw's domestic partner, MARK PANICK, of sexually harassing her for several years, and the label of "allowing" the harassment to happen. Both she and Rob Miller said they had warned Warshaw about Panick. That led to Warshaw exiting Bloodshot, followed by an audit of the label's finances that reportedly showed it had underpaid its artists by half a million dollars over the years. The falling out between the two co-founders (a third, ERIC BABCOCK, had left Bloodshot in its early years) was fast and severe. This deeply reported December 2020 piece by MARK GUARINO for Chicago Reader is probably the best account of how it all went down.

Bloodshot, which tagged its style early on as "insurgent country," was an essential player in the alt-country/Americana/country-rock world, putting out records by multiple generations of artists from the WACO BROTHERS and NEKO CASE to Shook (who now records for THIRTY TIGERS with her band, the Disarmers) and Loveless, whose last album came out on her own label. It was one of those labels that, at its best, you could almost blindly trust. If you lived somewhere on the alt side of country, you could go to almost any random Bloodshot showcase or buy almost any random Bloodshot record and there was a good chance you were going to like it. That kind of trust is hard to build and increasingly rare. But the problems that brought Bloodshot down aren't nearly rare enough, as the last few years of #MeToo reporting has made clear. It can happen at giant, multinational major labels and it can happen at cool, local indies. The lessons of the Bloodshot story are tragically simple and obvious. And not enough people have learned them.

Selling Out

Is this some kind of warning buried within Variety's interview with KOBALT founder WILLARD AHDRITZ and CEO LAURENT HUBERT about their $1.1 billion sale, to KKR, of their publishing investment portfolio featuring copyrights from the likes of the WEEKND, LORDE, MAX MARTIN and JAM & LEWIS: Asked why they're selling when everyone else seems to be buying, Ahdritz says: "I believe music is a good asset class to be in, but the decision was made by investors in the fund. They had invested over the years and they had their return targets and their timing and they wanted to sell now, given the proposals they saw and how they looked at returns." What, you might ask, do those investors know that everyone else might want to know? Kobalt, it should be noted, says it will continue buying publishing catalogs, but going forward it will do so as part of its main business rather than through a separate investment fund.

Etc Etc Etc

The 2022 GRAMMYS will be the first major awards show with an inclusion rider... TOM MORELLO launches a New York Times newsletter today... Singer/songwriter AMY SHARK and singer/rapper GENESIS OWUSU lead the slate of nominees for Australia's ARIA AWARDS.

Rest in Peace

“And you are aware, of course, that ‘rhinoceros’ does not rhyme with 'of courseros,'" said the well-known film musical star to the screenwriter, who also happened to be the composer/lyricist of all the film's songs. “It does,” retorted the latter, “if you pronounce it ‘of cos-eros.’" In addition to "Doctor Dolittle," the great LESLIE BRICUSSE was the composer and/or lyricist behind four decades of film and stage musicals including "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," "Victor/Victoria," "Jekyll & Hyde" and "Stop the World – I Want to Get Off." He also wrote the lyrics to the classic James Bond themes "Goldfinger" and "You Only Live Twice," and if you needed someone to score your film or write the book for your musical, he sometimes did that, too... Coloratura soprano EDITA GRUBEROVA, a longtime star of the Vienna State Opera... Italian jazz guitarist FRANCO CERRI.