Making music a goal, reward for SquidHat Records

Running a record label is hard as hell.

I say this from experience, not empathy. Before I moved to Vegas, I ran my own record label — well, actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I ran it into the ground, if you want to know the truth. Even so, I know how hard it is to put out other people’s music. What’s more, since the memories of my misadventure are still painfully fresh, I have a prime perspective.

The quick back story, in case you’re interested: Two years ago, I finally found the courage to quit my day job back in Denver — a perfectly good gig, mind you, that I absolutely adored and probably could’ve done forever — to chase my dream. I made the purchase wholesale with some prodding on the part of my best friend, a corporate executive who left his job to become my partner, with funding from his father, who graciously staked our efforts and later became our other partner.

I was ignorant. I thought I had it all figured out. It was all about a few fundamental tenets: Follow your instincts, believe in yourself and your acts, put out music that you love and the fans will find you. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose, right, like Coach Taylor used to say. My heart was in the right place, but that still didn’t keep me from falling on my face. I made some major misjudgments, trusting people I shouldn’t have — some of whom I thought were my friends — and that fueled major missteps, from which there was just no recovering. And I say “I” here, because I failed. Miserably. The only mistake my partners made was putting their faith in me in the first place.

From the sounds of it, I did everything the opposite of Allan Carter, who’s been running SquidHat Records here for almost five years and has successfully released about two-dozen local records. Some may say he’s crazy. In an era in which nobody is buying music much, where buying habits have been eroded by ephemerality and an ever-present sense of entitlement, it’s ill-conceived to run a record label right now. It’s not a profitable endeavor. In fact, you might as well light your money on fire.

That said, you have to be motivated by something other than money to do it. If you polled the people who are putting out records these days, you’d find they’re passionate, pouring their souls into their work, powered by a pure love for what they’re doing. That’s why Carter’s still doing it. In fact, when SquidHat’s latest release, “PunkSexy: A Las Vegas PunkRock Tribute To Prince,” comes out this Saturday in honor of Record Store Day, it will represent yet another prized piece of his label’s growing catalog.

“I’ve been trying to put this particular thing together for three years,” says Carter, the proud owner of a tattoo dedicated to the Purple One. “On paper, it seems like an easy thing to do, but then you get into the logistics of wrangling thirteen bands, getting them to pick the song, getting them to learn a song — particularly if it’s not in their genre — getting recording time set up. It was pretty difficult. But for some reason we were able to get it to work.”

Carter credits Hoss from Franks and Deans, one of the Las Vegas bands on his local-centric roster, for helping pull the whole project together. Took more than a year, says Carter, from start to finish. “We were talking about it one day, and he goes, ‘Let me project coordinate that for you,” he recalls. “And he lined up all the planets.”

From the sounds of it, Carter has a host of people just like Hoss helping him run the label. In addition to his partners, Mike Bell, a former bandmate of Carter’s who helps with the finances, and Stephen Fahlsing, who runs a label some of SquidHat’s bands have recorded at, there are plenty of other people pitching in, including Carter’s wife, Ally, and several folks whose bands are signed to SquidHat.

Ally fills the online orders, makes calls and helps with the booking and works the merch booth at every show; Andy Harrison from the Damnit Jims and New Cold War handles the artwork; and Cody Leavitt of People’s Whiskey and New Cold War helps with all the promotion. More impressive, everybody helps with the heavy lifting because they believe in the label every bit as much as Carter does and they want to do their part to help keep it going and to elevate its profile.

Wisely, Carter still works a day job and doesn’t depend on SquidHat to be the sole source of his income. And that’s a good thing, considering that since launching in April 2012, the imprint has yet to turn a profit. It’s getting closer and closer every year, though, progressing from losing $30,000 the first year to losing less every year to finally coming close to breaking even this past year. And that’s largely because Carter has hung in there, against the odds, continuing to believe in himself and his bands, all the while learning as he goes along.

“That first year, it was all mistakes, because I’d never done this,” Carter concedes. “It was all mistakes, just making mistakes and trying to recover from it. You know there’s things I’d do differently, but there’s not one album we put out I wouldn’t put out again. There’s ups and downs. There’s days when it’s the greatest thing in the world, and there’s days when I sit in my office looking at paperwork and go, ‘What the hell am I doing? But then somebody hands me a master and goes listen to this, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s why I’m doing this.”

And he’s going to keep doing it as long as he possibly can. “I keep telling myself it’s like investing in anything, stocks, a 401k. There are no short-term gains. You’ve gotta ride the trends. We call it waiting for our ‘Nirvana.’” Turns out, that’s a perfectly fitting parallel to draw here. Like Sub Pop, which started off as a regional label, SquidHat is doing its best to help build the scene here and to get the rest of the country to continually look to Las Vegas for interesting new music.

With a growing list of laudable local releases, including this year’s entries, which kicked off with the Negative Nancys’ new album after the first of the year, followed by this splendid new platter “Punk Sexy,” a creative compilation stocked with 13 tracks featuring SquidHat acts turning Prince’s songs inside out (you can pick up one of the 500 limited copies of purple vinyl at 11th Street Records to hear it for yourself), Carter and company are certainly well on their way. Later this year, SquidHat is set to drop a new album from the Gashers, a reissue from the Quitters and a set of unreleased songs from Subterfuge.

So, yeah, sure, it’s been costly and hard. For Carter, though, the reward has been entirely worth the investment.

“To be able to look back on the catalog that we have, I’m psyched,” he says. “I look back at the body of work and I’m like, ‘Wow!’ That’s in the zeitgeist for all eternity. Like I said, I do it because I love it, and it makes people happy, at the end of the day, if you can say you did that, you’re in a pretty good place.”

Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com/music. Contact him directly at dherrera@reviewjournal.com, or follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.