Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records

by Bill Nowlin

Overview

Rounder Records was born in 1970, a "hobby that got out of control," a fledging record company more or less conceived while the Sixties were still in flower, which began on just over $1,000. Founded by three friends just out of college, the Boston-area company produced over 3,000 record albums, the most active company of the last half-century specializing in roots music and its contemporary offshoots. Rounder won 56 Grammy Awards and documented a swath of music that in many cases might otherwise never have been presented to a broader public. It's arguably a quintessentially American success story. This book focuses on the early years up to and just through when Rounder evolved to a second stage, with a generational change that has kept the label healthy and flourishing when so many other cultural enterprises from the era have folded or gone dark. It's the story of three people with no background in business who took an idea and, through hard work and passion, built up something of lasting cultural significance. Rounder Records: A Biography is less a standard history and more an idiosyncratic memoir written by one of the three Rounder founders. The book includes original photographs taken by the author or drawn from the Rounder archives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800500068
Publisher:	Equinox Publishing
Publication date:	03/20/2021
Series:	Popular Music History
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.17(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bill Nowlin, one of the three Rounder founders, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Rounder for most of its history. In addition to his work with Rounder, he has specialized in writing and editing books, most of them about another passion: baseball.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xi

The Record Business in the Late 1960s 1

1 The Backstory to Starting a Record Company 5

2 Rounder's First Two Records: October 1970 18

3 Building the Business: The Early 1970s 32

4 Helping Organize the Indie Side of the Record Business 63

5 The Concept of a Collective is Called into Question 79

6 The Second Half of the Seventies: George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and Wrestling with Change 88

7 Entering the 1980s: 50 States in 50 Dates - No Nights Off! 110

8 Starting Our Second Decade: A Maturing Company, and Some Real Growing Pains 125

9 The Middle 1980s 145

10 Alison Krauss: 1986 and for Decades to Come 156

11 1990: Rounder Turns Twenty 165

12 1995: A Quarter of a Century In, and Still Scuffling 197

13 John Virant: "The Fourth Rounder" 210

14 2000: Rounder Turns Thirty as We Enter a New Century 236

15 Selling the Company: The Next Iteration - The Concord Connection (2010) 255

16 Rounder's Sense of Mission 274

Afterword 280

Endnotes 298

Index of names 306

Index of albums 315

Editorial Reviews

"Nowlin . . . writes with warmth and candor. . . It's a lively history of a business, of roots and Americana music, and the changes over the last half-century of recording and releasing." —The Boston Globe "The book is impressive in its detailing of what it was like to build such a company and the many travails they experienced over the years. The index of albums alone is a fascinating trip into decades of roots music." —Halsey, Derek, Bluegrass Unlimited, August 2021 "Nowlin's enthusiasm for Rounder Records and what they built never falters, and provides the reader with endless streams of personal investigation and reflection." —Teplyske, Donald, countrystandardtime.com

From the Publisher