Considering that Matador Records is home to some of indie rock’s foremost slackers, it makes sense that the primary reason the label is celebrating its 21st anniversary this weekend is because a bunch of dudes were running late.
“We’d talked for a while about trying to do some kind of 20th-anniversary event,” says Gerard Cosloy, pictured above with co-owner Chris Lombardi in the label’s early days. “But in all our talks with various people on the concert promotions side of the business, there was a real strong sentiment that—to pull this off properly and to have the sort of bill that would really attract crazy attention—we really needed both Pavement and Belle & Sebastian.
“And at this point a year ago, neither band was actually operating,” Cosloy admits. “So it was very much waiting for those bands to re-emerge. When it became clear they were going to, that’s when we began researching how we could put this weekend together.”
And put it together they did: Over the past weekend, the New York-based label presented Matador At 21, an all-star blow-out in Las Vegas featuring not just Pavement and Belle & Sebastian, but also Sonic Youth, Guided by Voices, Spoon and a slew more. The weekend celebrated the label’s eclectic roster and rich history, which inspired us to sit down with the various players who helped making Matador one of the defining indie labels of the past 20 years.
Up first: The early days, when Cosloy and Lombardi ended up rather haphazardly running a legitimate business together. Matador’s beginnings were lean, but within its first few years, the label would become home to Superchunk, Liz Phair and Pavement (seen above, during their very first photo shoot.)
And, together, they would end up putting Matador on the map.
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Cosloy: It started with a one-off record by an Austrian duo called H.P. Zinker. I’d introduced Chris to the band because I’d put on a show of theirs at the CBGB Record Canteen in lower Manhattan. Chris and I had been friends for a number of years, and we’d worked together at [independent distributor] Dutch East India Trading. Chris saw the show and liked the band a lot. They needed a place to stay; he let them crash at his place. The next day they were all at Wharton Tiers’s studio recording a record, and that’s the birth of Matador. I’m not even sure it was called Matador at that point.
Lombardi: We were going to press with the H.P. Zinker record and I hadn’t come up with a name yet. I had just seen this Pedro Almodóvar movie called Matador, and for some reason there was a bull-fighting soundtrack at the top of a stack of records that I had bought. Those two things came to mind, and I was like, “Matador—that’s a good name!” I haven’t seen the movie since.
Cosloy: I had no real capacity at the label at that point. It wasn’t until another three-and-a-half months that Chris asked me to join up officially.
Lombardi: Gerard had left [famed indie label] Homestead Records, and there was this Superchunk album that he gave me a copy of. I thought it was amazing and told [Superchunk frontman] Mac [McCaughan], “Hey, can I put your record out?” And all of a sudden I had all these records and felt like I had some responsibility to these people. So I asked Gerard if he wanted to do it together.
Jon Spencer, frontman for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: Once Gerard came onboard things changed in a big way. He’s a real force of nature, and he already had a lot of experience with other labels and with his fanzine, Conflict. He was kind of a legend.
Cosloy: It just seemed, at that moment in time, that there were a lot of things we both liked and thought we could do a good job with. And we also felt, having been eyewitnesses to a sort of music-hater environment at Dutch East India, that we wanted to foster a polar-opposite climate at Matador. We thought we could make some sort of difference.
Spencer: I always felt like these guys had my back. I knew these people and completely trusted them. They were like me—they were my peers.
Lombardi: We were working for the bands and for ourselves. And we knew it was our souls on the line when we said something; it wasn’t at the whim of somebody else’s decision-making. Things had been kind of shady [at Dutch East India Trading]. They weren’t fair to their bands or their employees.
Cosloy: Our first official hire was Rusty Clarke, to do sales, and Rusty is still with us to this day. We knew her because we’d seen her at shows all the time. Every good gig, you’d see Rusty down front. She had a great record collection. She was completely up on things. She was a good talker. She possesses an amazing work ethic. But, at least to my knowledge, Rusty had no prior experience in sales or the professional music industry. We just thought she was awesome.
Spencer: They definitely came from nothing. I remember going to see the first office—it was a really small start.
Cosloy: The office was a complete mess. It took us two years before we began to have a serious system in place. It was probably not until we moved out of the Cable Building at 611 Broadway and into the second office at 676 Broadway that Matador began to operate with any kind of serious professional structure.
Lombardi: [Early releases by] Teenage Fanclub and Superchunk certainly opened a lot of doors for us. Then right after we put those records out, we got a tape in the mail from Pavement.
Cosloy: Pavement made us look at the label as more of a competitive thing—something where we were gonna have to change how we worked every day and stay on top of things. Because the sheer demand for [Pavement's debut, Slanted And Enchanted] was so much bigger than anything we’d coped with before. I mean, we didn’t have a publicist for the first couple of years. I handled that shit myself.
Lombardi: There was a closely knit group of tastemakers in New York then, and maybe it helped us that we were in New York. We were here and things happen in New York. It’s the media capital of the world.
Cosloy: Fourth-generation cassettes were being traded all over the place, and SPIN ran a rave lead review of [Slanted And Enchanted] when we were still three months away from having manufactured copies.
Liz Phair: I associated Matador with the coolest people I knew. Wanting to be on Matador was like saying you wanna go to Harvard in the indie scene. I called them and Gerard told me he’d just read a review of [Phair's first cassette] Girlysounds, like, an hour before. He had that moment of, “Maybe this is something I need to go with.” There was some synchronicity to it. So he was like, “Yeah.” And he gave me $5,000 bucks [to record Exile In Guyville, her full-length debut]. I mean, it was nothing.
Cosloy: Much the way that coping with Pavement was a whole new ball of wax compared to Teenage Fanclub, the same could be said about the Liz Phair experience. It was an entirely new level of having to deal with the bigger business and what it’s like when you’re not just working with an artist, but you’re working with a celebrity.
Phair: I think I came in there with that celebrity attitude, though I’m not sure where I got the chutzpah. I look back at interviews I did during that period, and I thought I was the shit. I was sure I was destined to be this important voice. I literally said to Gerard, “Are you ready for me to make you a millionaire?” But they were outrageous in their own way, too. You look at the label and they acted the star the way I do as an artist. There were occasional conflicts, but mostly it was very complementary.
Cosloy: I think we tried to treat her as a pretty serious artist for the length of her tenure on the label. But I don’t think we always saw eye-to-eye on the celebrity stuff.
Phair: They’re like the blond starlet who kind of fucks you over sometimes, but you still wanna hang out with.
With the release of Pavement’s Slanted And Enchanted and Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville, Matador had established themselves as one of the most talked about indie labels in the world. (Phair even ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone, as seen above.) But, by the mid-’90s, Cosloy and Lombardi found themselves wondering what to do with such attention.
While many scene tastemakers rolled their eyes and moved onto the next “it” label, Matador attempted to enter the mainstream for real. They signed deals with major labels like Atlantic—and, later, Capitol—while expanding their roster to include everything from underground hip-hop to Japanese art-pop to pioneering post-punk.
And the result was, well, one of the most confusing periods in Matador’s history.
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Liz Phair: It’s probably safe to say that friends of Matador bands are a lot of the people who’ve been ripping me to shreds [ever since Exile in Guyville]. But the Matador guys were always supportive. They never made me feel bad and never made fun of what I was trying to make happen.
Bob Nastanovich, percussionist/hype man for Pavement: I can’t compare them to anyone but [beloved Chicago indie] Drag City [which released several early Pavement singles]. But where Drag City sort of stayed the same, Matador always had a bigger feel about it. We were fortunate to latch onto what we thought was the hip new thing. The right place to be.
Gerard Cosloy, co-founder of Matador: [Those timesl] were very much fueled by the post-Nirvana explosion, where for the first time bands that were considered graduates of the American indie-rock circuit were beginning to sell tremendous numbers of records. Labels were all looking for the next big whatever, and in the shape of Matador they had a sort of built-in repository for that stuff.
Nastanovich: At some point [after the success of us and Liz Phair], they were being courted by more majors than we were, to be honest.
Danny Goldberg, former president of Atlantic Records: Atlantic had a weak roster when I got there in terms of alternative rock—or whatever you wanna call it. I think The Lemonheads were the closest thing to get on college radio. And one of the main reasons I was hired was to expand the roster. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth are two of the smartest people I know in regards to their judgment of rock culture. They both told me that Matador was the best independently owned label.
So I called Gerard, and we had a few meetings. They were going through a period where they needed money. They didn’t want their artists to feel like there was a ceiling at Matador. You have to remember that this was at a time when there was a real difference in promotional ability between the majors and the indies.
Cosloy: The first two records we did through Atlantic were [English post-punk group] The Fall and [New York noise rockers] Unsane. I think that pretty much says it all right there. If you wanna look up “suicidal” in the dictionary, there’s a little photo of me and Chris next to the word. But we thought, “Hey, we love The Fall. Why shouldn’t the entire world be into it?”
Chris Lombardi, fellow co-founder of Matador: I couldn’t even believe that I was in London at this hotel lobby meeting with [Fall frontman] Mark E. Smith and offering him a record deal. This was one of my heroes.
Cosloy: Making the deal with Atlantic enabled us to build up our infrastructure, sign more people, extend bands contracts and give people more money to record. As far as selling records through Atlantic, that wasn’t nearly so easy. It was a big, big company that was just too unwieldy for us to sift our way through.
Lombardi: I think both our [major-label] experiences were a little rocky because the people we did the deals with moved onto other companies. And your relationship is only as long as the contract of the guy who’s there.
Cosloy: The Atlantic thing came to an end when that company, being a publicly held company, began making all sorts of changes at the top. Danny left for Warner Bros. Doug Morris, who helped make the deal, left Time Warner for Universal. And the new regime at Atlantic weren’t so enamored by Matador and pretty much said, “Look, there’s gotta be a way we can work this out.” And, weirdly enough, that’s when the Capitol deal happened.
Lombardi: With Capitol there was a little bit more pressure to make our year-end numbers. There was a big change in the music business at that moment. It was really urban-oriented, and Capitol had not invested any money in that. We went through a weird transitional period around 1999 where we put out some different music [and] we got into underground hip-hop for some reason. [We] decided to give it a go. That was kind of a failure for us on a business level.
Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham, frontman for Fucked Up: There’ve been some spotty signings, sometimes to the label’s detriment. I was thinking there needs to be a “Matador, Really?” festival in Reno featuring [the label's hip-hop artists] Non Phixion, MC Paul Barman and The Fall. Like—really, guys? You thought that was gonna work out?
Lombardi: Pizzicato Five? I don’t even know. [Former marketing director] Christina [Zafiris] worked at CMJ, then worked for us and brought in a VHS of their videos from Japan. I can’t even remember how we reached out to them. It was just one of those things where we were like, “Wow, this is kind of wacky and weirdly stylish and very Japanese.” And they were like, “Cool.” Then we also had Cornelius and Guitar Wolf—three bands from Japan.
By the time Matador Records entered the ’00s they found themselves, somewhat surprisingly, having an incredible amount of commercial success. Gone were the days of overlooked Japanese experimentalists. Instead, the label was inking deals with emerging acts like New York City gloom rockers Interpol, while also churning out hit records by indie chanteuse Chan Marshall (otherwise known as Cat Power).
And while, sure, that amounted to one of the most exciting periods in the label’s history—a genuine comeback, by most standards—what really made Matador special in the ’00s was their willingness to go out on a limb for artists who they truly believed in, like hardcore experimentalists Fucked Up or fuzzed out rocker Kurt Vile. And, truth be told, it is that dedication that is likely to keep them here for another 21 years.
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Gerard Cosloy, Matador co-owner: A lot of [Matador’s success in the ’00s was] the result of good timing, sweat on the artists’ part, genius-level marketing, great work from our distributors and great support from our friends at record stores. The extent to which I should be personally gratified? I don’t know. If I get too fucking gratified about it, I’m gonna be a big fucking jerk.
Liz Phair: Matador has always been a well-oiled machine, but at the same time it’s a strongly bonded network of individuals. When I was there—and from what I’ve seen since—there was none of the power-tripping bullshit and none of the corporate culture than blunts individuality. Everybody’s good at what they do and they turn their shit in on time.
Danny Goldberg, former president of Atlantic Records: Their two main virtues are their excellent taste and their focus on detail.
Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham, frontman for Fucked Up: We’d tumbled from one label situation to another, and when it came time to do our next record, our lawyer was like, “Have you guys thought about Matador?” We were shocked—like, “They’d know who we are?” It seemed so out of the realm of possibility.
Kurt Vile: I’m free to be myself at Matador, but they’re also a bigger label. They want you to succeed, and they’re definitely not afraid to push you if they feel like they have to. I think they wanna see how good you can be, you know?
Cosloy: I don’t feel any different about the progress of someone like Cat Power than I do about a band like Harlem, who the first time I saw them they played in front of maybe 30 people. On the surface, they don’t have anything in common with Chan Marshall. She’s a globally famous, iconic musician, and those guys aren’t. But it doesn’t feel that different for me.
Lombardi: [In regards to signing veteran acts such as Sonic Youth and Mission of Burma], I think it just makes sense because we know the story from, if not Day One, then Day Two. Gerard managed Sonic Youth for a second. I saw them in 1983. It’s like having family in another town: You know what’s going on, you keep in touch, and when they come in and you have a meeting, it’s a completely natural thing.
Abraham: When we first met with them, automatically your thoughts go to [the success they had with] Pavement and Cat Power and Interpol. But they also have this weird hardcore history. They did Unsane and those Chain Gang and La Peste reissues. And Gerard used to do Conflict zine and managed Deep Wound. We ended up geeking out about this stuff and realized these are just guys who love music.
Liz Phair: Maybe Chris and Gerard are like Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards]. There aren’t a lot of labels that are run by two guys, but their unique chemistry brings this lovely, quirky balance that has lasted through the years.
Abraham: I think a lot of what they’re doing is a reflection of where music’s at right now: Since there isn’t really a risk of putting out a breakout sensation that sells seven million records, why not just put out what you like and go from there?
Cosloy: To me the most gratifying thing is when we take something that might otherwise not exist, and we get it out there and we get someone excited about it. If that’s 1,000 someones or 100,000 someones, the number itself is not super-important to me.
Lombardi: We’ve just tried to be good to our bands. They know where to find us. They know they can call me at night. I would think that’s pretty comfortable.
