In the Red Records: On Fire with Kid Congo, Strange Boys, Thee Oh Sees, Vivian Girls

In the Red’s recent output: Kid Congo, the Strange Boys and Thee Oh Sees

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More About

• Larry Hardy
• Dracula Boots
• Andre Williams
• Puerto Ricans Davila
• Jay Reatard

Los Angeles indie In the Red Records has a remarkably consistent output: Slip on any of its discs and the results are inevitably flabbergasting. Just a few seconds of any of them — whether Silky, the landmark 1998 comeback album by R&B veteran Andre Williams, or last year’s superfreaky psych-garage Puerto Ricans Davila 666 — deliver an immediate brain-pulping, intestine-clenching impact. The label trades in the genuine underworld rock & roll threat, pure rebel trash, a musical form far removed from the timid, tepid realm of what rates as “rock music.” As the company’s founder-ringleader, Larry Hardy, explains, “I always shoot for that ‘Holy Fuck!’ response.”

Hardy is a pleasant, self-assured little dude. Serene on the surface, yet beneath, a restlessness subtly discloses some indefinable, elemental other. In short, he’s a nut. Specializing exclusively in anticommercial, aberrant oddballs, In the Red would seem a catastrophically ill-advised venture. Even stranger, with more than 50 bands, six European distributors and a fistful of concurrent new albums, Hardy is meeting the New Depression head-on, and it’s working out quite nicely. “Normally, I’d stagger the release dates,” he says, “but I’ve got five out now, two others on the way, and I plan a total of 14 for this year. There are just so many good new bands, and it looks like this will be the busiest year so far. It’s surprising, but I’m doing fine. All my biggest sellers have been recent, the Dirtbombs are the top seller, but we’ve done really well with the Black Lips, the Vivian Girls and Jay Reatard.”

Hardy runs the entire show out of a small garage behind his Eagle Rock home, with a trove of crates stuffed with vinyl and compact discs that barely leaves room enough for his small office, crowded with pagan idols and monsters, shelves of books and albums, a huge Charlie Feathers poster, framed photos of the Cramps, the Damned — or, as he says, “all the junk that inspires me.”

In the Red, with its fat, greasy catalog of fast-rising (and faster self-destructing) young bands, is a glorious anomaly, the fruit of a drastically misspent youth. “The first show I ever went to was Iggy Pop at the Santa Monica Civic,” he says, referring to the former Stooge’s 1977 concert. “I was 13, but had a lot of older friends. A couple of years later, I got a fake ID that made me 18 so I could get into clubs, and I saw the Cramps open for the Runaways. It was their first West Coast show and I couldn’t believe it — I mean, I thought I knew about rock & roll, but this was, like, terrifyingly great. After they moved out here and got Kid Congo, they’d play all the time and that music, especially with punk going into hardcore, was the one thing that mattered.”

In the years that followed, he took matters in hand. “I started in ’92, doing singles as a hobby, first one was by the Gories. I kept at it, they all sold modestly until I started doing Jon Spencer Blues Explosion 45s. They proved popular, things got rolling and we really started to become a label. The first album was by the Cheater Slicks, Whiskey. I hadn’t planned on doing anything but singles, and I wasn’t crazy about the idea because half of the album was one 29-minute-long song, and I really didn’t think that would go over so well, but they talked me into it — twisted my arm.”

More than 100 full-length albums later, In the Red is thriving, but there’s been an interesting, perhaps inevitable shift: “Everyone wants vinyl now,” Hardy says. “CDs are increasingly considered to be disposable objects; I mostly use them to send to radio and writers. Vinyl is at least 50 percent or more of sales — they want a record, nobody cares about CDs, you can download ’em for free anyway. The Internet leveled the playing field, and now you can gain as much prominence on iTunes as you could with a big label. It’s not like I’ve been adversely affected by downloads or anything. But it’s all about music — if this were a business, I wouldn’t be putting these out. I sign a lot of bands that I know aren’t gonna sell a lot — I mean, I did a Tav Falco album! At least it was a good one.”

Perhaps his biggest gamble was signing 1950s-era rhythm & blues provocateur Williams. “I did two albums with Andre, and that was all I had in me to do,” Hardy says. “He was a terror to put up with, we brought him out here and he was always getting thrown out of the motels, for smoking in his room, bringing prostitutes in. I went through hell with Andre, but I’m glad I did it. He started making money on the road finally, but it also brought back a lot of bad old habits.” Hardy pauses. “I learned a lot about what not to do — in business and in my personal life.”