Hey everyone..jeff suhy here to tell my post-KLSU life story and to engage some of my old friends I have not seen in many years.
What a great surprise to find this site (thanks Barry for finding me and Scott for creating it!) and seeing you all here. I was just telling a friend last weekend that KLSU was the first community of friends that I connected with on a deep level. My community of friends at KLSU changed my perceptions about life and I’m forever grateful for the guidance and friendship I had here. I have many of my great life memories associated with this group of people. KLSU also set me on a course professionally that I’m still connected to 17 years later. Music has been my rudder ever since. I often consider the passion and purity of the environment around the station as my reference point for everything I’ve done moving on in life.
When I left Baton Rouge in 1988 I traveled around Europe for a few months then moved to Los Angeles to find a way to get a job in music. Through a great deal of luck I found my way into A&M Records. In July 1989 I created the “college music marketing” department for A&M and started discovering enclaves of people like us out there working in college radio that were deeply passionate about music and turning on their communities. This was an intensely fun and creative time to be in the music business at a major label level. It seemed like “alternative” music was ready to explode when bands like The Cure, Love and Rockets, Red Hots, Nirvana and the like began to penetrate the consciousness of pop culture. I worked closely with Soundgarden, the Mekons and Robyn Hitchcock (among others) as this emergence took place. In 1993 I was hired by David Anderle (legendary producer/A&R guru.) I was incredibly lucky to have encountered this man who had thrived in the business for decades while remaining connected to creativity and innovation. I was given an remarkable amount of freedom under his tutelage to sign whatever I thought was “cool” without being asked to find something that sounded like Stone Temple Pilots, Candlebox or whatever was sucking at the time. I signed several bands including 16 Horsepower, Ass Ponys and Other Star People which all went on to achieve at least some level of success but alas my taste proved too esoteric for the masses (I guess all that legendary pink dots, Wire and Chameleons chugged along with gallons of hallucinogens distorted my ability to appreciate popular music for 12 year old suburban kids?)
11 years after I started at A&M we were bought by Universal. I was fortunate to be signed to a long term contract so when I was booted from the new Interscope/Geffen/A&M juggernaut I had the luxury of 2 years of paid vacation to figure out what to do next. I struggled with the idea of revisiting the major label world but the glory days were clearly over. The idea of mixing music (artist’s lives) with the kind of negative energy that was rapidly engulfing the business was too repulsive to imagine.
I brought a couple of my bands from A&M into an independent label a friend and I were launching on a shoestring budget. You can see what it has evolved into here:
http://www.checkeredpast.com This project has pretty much withered away as it was originally envisioned (an artist breeding ground) and as we’ve moved onto new projects…but my partner larry still sells tons of catalog and cool checkered past branded clothing from the website.
I jumped the fence into the technology world and helped create a content delivery company with a couple brilliant engineers. We currently provide streaming and download media delivery and statistical reporting to all of the labels at Universal and EMI:
http://www.ninesystems.com Pretty geeky stuff but it’s actually pretty interesting if you are curious how people behave. This was a great breeding ground for ideas that lead to my most recent venture…
About 2 years ago a couple partners and I bought the URL
http://www.music.com and have been building what I hope will become the largest music community online. We’ve collected over 2.5 million emails on our splash page as we prepare to finally launch on july 15(ish) We are going to host a place to discover people through your music and music through friends. This site is pretty massive (over 20 million pages in size) and enables you to find music through a clever bit of programming by comparing all your friend’s collections to yours and making recommendations through your “magic list.”
I equate this effort as my life opus when I’m feeling positive about it. I more often compare this time to the moment just before a salmon spawns. I feel like shortly after our glorious launch I’ll keel over and float downstream all red and bloated and dead. This sensation is probably amplified by persistent sleep deprivation from having a lovely 2 year old daughter (Ava) and a screaming little boy all of 6 weeks old (Truman) while trying to work on these 4 projects.
The 4th project will shortly be available for your critique at
http://www.robotandsons.com where my partner in Checkered Past Records along with a very talented graphic designer and a neo-modernist architect in Los Angeles are working to try to reverse the devolution of humanity through creating environmentally responsible, sustainable, non-toxic, low impact modern architectural sanctums in the Hollywood Hills. Something like that anyway. I’ll probably lose my ass when the real estate market collapses but it sure is fun.
My wife (leslie) and I married 4 years ago and I rarely see her even though we live in the same house. I usually work out of my office which happens to also be in this same house with my kids and my mother who moved into our Yurt (
http://www.fineliving.com/fine/breathin ... 93,00.html )
Yes…After all this…I live with my mother. Hey…she helps with the kids!
I’m very enthusiastic to have found this happening here and look forward to reconnecting with ya’ll
Next confession…..
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) I'm also so glad everything is going so well for you!