OK Go

I met OK Go front man Damian Kulash at New York City's Mercury Lounge before the band's headlining show, the night before their self-titled album hit shelves. He was excited. He greeted me with a plastic ball and bat, and suggested we play Whiffleball rather than doing this interview -- a request I politely declined. But when I mentioned the album's September 17 release, he shuffled his hands elatedly, like an 8-year-old before a trip to Disney -- or something like that.

OK Go is comprised of Kulash, who sings and plays guitar, bassist Tim Nordwind, drummer Dan Konopka, and keyboardist/guitarist Andy Duncan. When the Chicago-based band drove out to Los Angeles a few years back to open for a Weezer side project, they obviously hadn't foreseen the gig falling through. But the trip wasn't completely in vain -- the band had previously recorded an entire album on its own, and a friend of a friend handed the recording over to another friend, who booked the band as an opener for They Might be Giants, who loved the band so much that TMBG's John Flansburgh wanted to manage them. One thing led to another, and OK Go became the first signing of Andy Slater's stint as president of Capitol Records. The video for the single "Get Over It," from the band's self-titled album, was recently featured on MTV.com (you can check it out at the band's website,http://www.okgo.net).  Some guys have all the luck. Fortunately, OK Go is pretty damn good, too.

During the interview with StarPolish, Kulash was kind enough to offer advice -- based on OK Go's experiences -- to emerging artists about what to look for in a record label, how to choose management, the near future of mainstream music, touring, and why you shouldn't give away your band's CD.

A Capitol Idea

STARPOLISH:Can you tell me how OK Go got hooked up with Capitol?

KULASH:We recorded an album by ourselves and it took us five or six months to do it because we were doing it on such a [small] budget. We did it in friends' basements and free studio time in the middle of the night, that kind of thing. For five months we worked on this record while we all still had full-time jobs. And we finished it and then started shopping it around to labels. Right when we finished [the album], a guy who helped us record it, his girlfriend -- who lived in Los Angeles -- had a shady friend who was trying to manage a side project of Weezer, and they needed an opening band for a few shows.

So we went out to do these shows on the promise of decent guarantees -- enough money to pay gas to get us to L.A. They never paid us and it was sort of like a nightmare of a trip. But we wound up shopping our CDs, leaving CDs with a whole bunch of different people out there, one of whom was a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing, of a booking agent who six months later needed somebody to open up three shows on the East Coast for They Might Be Giants. When we took those shows, the guy from They Might Be Giants, John Flansburgh - who's one of the two original guys in the band - asked if he could be our manager since he really liked us. And he actually brought us to his manager because it became quickly apparent that he didn't have enough time to actually manage a band. So that got us pretty good management and they started helping us shop stuff to labels.

Around the same time, Ira Glass from This American Life  -- he's a radio host -- had asked us to go on tour with him as his back-up band. So collectively, the hype of all of that got a bunch of labels to sort of start paying attention to us. We went on tour with They Might Be Giants a couple of times. What happens with labels is, basically one of them decides they like you, and then all of them have to make a break for it. They all make this mad dash to try and sign you at the same time. [For] almost everybody who gets signed, there's this explosion of activity in which everybody wants to sign you. And only maybe one or two labels will be really serious about it, but the rest have to [cover their asses]. The people who sign bands at labels are called A&R guys, they're Artist and Repertoire persons. So when the Strokes blow up and their boss turns to them and says, "Why didn't you sign the Strokes?" they always have to turn to them and say, "I tried, but we just didn't win 'em. There wasn't enough money."  So, basically, every time somebody gets signed, every A&R guy worth his salt has to have some excuse for why he didn't sign them. So they all try to sign everybody every time. So as soon as one or two people like you, everybody likes you, at least temporarily. And they may not even like you at all, but they have to say that they do, because they have to make some sort of offer so that their boss can't tell them that they fucked up.

STARPOLISH:What was it about Capitol?

KULASH: The thing we liked about Capitol was that they were actually in kind of a rut. We were the first signing of a brand new president in a series of presidents that had serially not revived the label. For 10 or 15 years, the label was having less and less success in America, and our thinking was, even though it's risky, it was way better to go with a label who didn't have the kind of money or resources to just sign a million bands and throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, you know? We wanted a label that actually really needed its bands to do well, that couldn't afford to sign a kajillion things, and would have to actually care about us. Along with that, the president of our label really seemed to take a personal interest in it, and he's really a music guy. He was a producer the week before he signed us, and we could tell he was actually into the music and we would be able to make the record the way we wanted and we would have his support.

Once there was a competition going, the other contenders at the end of the day... most of them were more powerful -- one company in particular was doing really, really awesome at the time -- but it also meant that they had the money to sort of sign everything that they wanted to. And they just signed everything and dropped half of them before the record came out, or floated the record out with little or no promotion, or gave them these tiny budgets to make their records. So we liked the attention and the new musical ethic that Andy Slater, the president, brought to the label. Actually, it's only been a year since then, and he's already put out a lot of great stuff and is turning around the image of the label a lot, which is good.

STARPOLISH: So, what should musicians look for in a label?

KULASH: Dedication, and -- even though this is not what I did -- some sense of stability. Make sure that your champions at the label are firmly seated there. Because if you get signed by some A&R guy and he's fired the next week, you are essentially fired with him, and you've just signed away the rights to your records for five years or something. The worst horror story, and the most common horror story, in music is just that - that your champions at the label get fired. We took a pretty big chance going with a label that didn't have much power, but we also knew that our champion at the label was the president, and because he had just stepped into office that week, he was going to get at least a year or two to see what he could do with it. So even if he fails, we'll be in that period of time in which people are still giving him the benefit of the doubt.

I think record labels, like any other corporations or any other businesses at all, have characters. There's an attitude about the company... there's a corporate personality and it's pretty easy to tell whether or not you'd get along, and whether or not it fits. Obviously, every major label has a lot of the same shortfalls. They're obviously all about the bottom line, and they're obviously big companies that make simple jobs more difficult a lot of the time just by having too many people accountable for too many different things. But it's not that difficult to sense out whether or not you think you'll be able to get along with people and win arguments or even be able to have productive arguments with people. When it comes down to making choices about the way they market you and making choices about... everything, down to the type of stickers they make for you, knowing that you're going to a place where people will respect your opinions and where you're not going to get steamrolled is pretty important.

Timing a Record Release

STARPOLISH: In the past five years, there's been a transition in mainstream, successful music that has gone from something like poppy punk, to really pop, to nu metal... Do you think that because of the sort of cyclical nature of the music industry there is a right time for a band to release a record?

KULASH: Sure. Being ruthlessly honest with yourself about who's going to like your music -- and why -- is important. Obviously, every musician thinks they're making great music or that their music is not part of a fad or that it's timeless. But in truth, [it's good to] know where you fit in with respect to... if your goal is to get signed, obviously you think like an A&R guy and what they see is either a platonic model or copies of them. Like, there's Nirvana, and then there's all the things that sound like Nirvana. And it's really hard for anyone to break out of that, especially in this world. I don't know who the prototypical nu metal band is... maybe Limp Bizkit or Korn or something. But there's them and then there's everybody that sounds like them. And it's true that not every nu metal band sounds just like them. Right now there's not really an acting platonic model for what's next, I don't think. Some people would like to think that it's the Strokes or the Hives or the White Stripes or something...

STARPOLISH: You don't think that those bands have already become the model?

KULASH:Well, people use them as a platonic model... yeah, labels are absolutely trying to sign their own version of the Strokes. Everyone's also really skeptical, because the collective sales figures for the Strokes, the White Stripes, The Hives, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club -- the whole shebang -- still don't total a week's worth of P.O.D. or whatever. And labels that just chase money, for the most part, will sign Strokes bands until it's become clear that Strokes bands will not make any money. And right now it's just not clear one way or the other. Everybody likes the Strokes, everybody likes the White Stripes, everybody likes the Hives... The Hives are obviously getting -- what was that report of them getting millions of dollars recently? But until they've actually sold millions and millions of records, they're kind of a speculation. And so it's really a good time for anybody who's not a nu metal band. If you sound like Britney Spears, or you sound like Korn, or Limp Bizkit, it's a pretty bad time to try to get signed, just because everyone feels pretty sure, I think, that there's not going to be anymore nu metal blockbusters... Or, what is it called? Blockbusters -- that's for movies, right?

STARPOLISH: I think it's anything that's big in entertainment.

KULASH:OK, yeah, blockbuster. But the thing is that we get comparisons to all those new rock bands, which I love because those are the records I listen to. But we don't sound like them. Aesthetically, I think we're very different from them. But I like the fact that this new group of things that's emerging is really sort of aesthetically dispersed.

STARPOLISH: I think the reason people are finding similarities between you guys and those bands is because it's all just more autonomous music than what's been big.

KULASH:Yeah. And one thing that all those bands have in common is that they don't fit the ultra-segmented world of radio. The theory I have ascribed to, which is maybe a little bit of a highfalutin nowhere thought, is that a lot of the reason music has become so segmented has to do with the consolidation of radio, and if you have one company owning 10 stations in one market... say you've got any five given stations in New York or Chicago: Fifteen years ago, they would all be owned by different people, and they would all compete for the largest market share, so they would all look for the most accessible, thing that reached the most people. So it was usually very central music -- you could have Prince on there or you could have the Cars or you could have Gloria Estefan. It could be high art music or it could be total pop music, as long as it was stuff that enough people are going to get into.

But if you owned all the five stations, you wouldn't want them competing with each other. So if one company buys up all the stations, they've got to have a modern R&B station and an oldies R&B station and a modern rock station and a rock station and an aggressive modern rock station and an extreme modern rock station. Whatever it is, they have to segment it down so that you're not competing with yourself. So when certain unnamed companies go and buy up the entirety of the radio world, you wind up with a system that can really only promote or distribute very genre-specific types of music. So nu metal bands, whose songs sound identical from song to song, have a radio station. Or teen pop bands, whose songs sound identical from song to song, have a pop radio station. And I suppose the Hives songs have a basic similarity and you could make an entire genre [out] of music that was the Hives. But I think all of them -- the Hives, White Stripes, Strokes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and to a certain extent ourselves, the whole list that always gets reeled off -- none of them fit into any of the tiny segments. You could make a new segment for them, but in general what's happening is that rock stations are starting to have to bend over backwards to start sucking in things that actually go outside the bounds of another Creed knockoff, or another Korn knockoff.

Breaking In

STARPOLISH: So, being that the industry and radio are set up that way, how would a band break in?

KULASH: Right now is a particularly good time for content. People are actually listening to music now. They're waiting for a fad to arrive. And for all of their shortcomings, the people that work at labels do sit there and listen to things and say, "Is this cool? Is this good music?" And they're wrong most of the time, but right now, if something were just compellingly awesome, it would get [attention]. Right now everyone's looking for the next thing, and so fitting into that loose category of new rock bands seems pretty easy, because there's nothing you have to sound like. You just have to be good at it. And my own personal tastes... it's hard not to believe that melody is coming back -- singable songs, and likeable songs, and things where if it is testosterone ridden, it's not so obviously so that it has to be done with, like, more percussive shouting. But that's sort of more my taste than good advice.

STARPOLISH: What about indie labels?

KULASH: We didn't really go the indie route, so I would be a liar if I tried to give advice...

STARPOLISH: Why didn't you guys?

KULASH: There are a couple of reasons. One is that we made this record ourselves, and by the time we were done with it, it was expensive enough -- we had spent enough of our own money that to even be repaid what we had invested into it, very few indie labels would have signed a band that had never been heard of before that only had a following in Chicago and maybe two or three other cities. We actually saw ourselves as an arty indie band and thought that's where we'd end up. We were making the record hoping to shop it to Matador or Sub Pop, something like that.

But I think the thing is that little indie labels are mostly boutiques where people showcase their friends, which is good. But we didn't really have any friends who ran good indie labels, so that didn't help us much. And bigger ones are just like major labels, but with smaller budgets. And at some point -- and as it turns out we never got repaid for it -- we had made something that we thought was going to need more production money or more promotion money than most indie labels could have afforded, at least given that no indie labels really knew us. I think indie labels... it's weird, they kind of need more security than major labels because major labels can kind of sit back in a self-satisfied manner and convince themselves that if something is good enough, they'll break it. They can put you on tour over and over and over again...

STARPOLISH: Do you think that's true?

KULASH: No, I don't think that's true. But indie labels know they can't do that. They have to have a lot of... they have to really see a lot of signs that something is really going to take off by itself. But I'm talking out of my ass again because I really don't know much about indie labels. Which is funny, because I actually ran a tiny little label when I was in high school, which was like sub-indie label. We basically didn't even advertise. We had pretty minimal distribution. I think the biggest one we ever did, we sold like 5,000 of one CD, but it was over the course of three years. It was a compilation of D.C. bands.

STARPOLISH: Did you all grow up in D.C.?

KULASH: I grew up in D.C., Andy grew up outside D.C., Tim grew up in Kalamazoo, and Dan grew up in Chicago.

STARPOLISH: How did you end up in Chicago?

KULASH: All three of them went to college there. I went to join them after I was done with school.

STARPOLISH: Was it sort of a struggle to decide to do the band after finishing school?

KULASH: Not really. I loved school and my curriculum at school was basically recording music in the studio, so it was good training because I didn't have to pay my bills with it because I was in school. I could work in the studio 10 or 12 hours a day and not have to have a 40-hour a week job, too. And I learned a lot. It was great.

The Management Question

STARPOLISH: So, as far as choosing managers?

KULASH: Oh, I have good advice about this one. Do not just let the first interested person manage you.

STARPOLISH: Do you think it's totally necessary to have a manager?

KULASH: Yes, I do; for us, it has been. You don't need one from the beginning. The time at which you should get a manager is when you can find somebody who can manage the band better than you can. The things entailed in management basically are finding opportunities for the bands, being the voice for the band in arguments or discussions, and handling logistic bullshit, which is inherent in any operation. The reasons why you might need one are because you just don't have the time to do all those things anymore, or because you're bad at those things.

But the first people who want to be your manager -- and I think this is always the case, unfortunately  -- are like somebody who likes music or likes your music or likes you, and really just wants to be involved but really does not know what the fuck they're doing. It's usually pretty well intended. It's not necessarily somebody who's trying to screw you over, but it's somebody who believes, Look, you go write the songs, you make the art, I'll do the business bullshit. But, unless they really know the business, they're not going to do a better job than you will, and at the end of the day, they won't be as invested in it as you are anyway.

We had so many people offer to manage us who would have been so bad for us. The best manager you could find would be somebody who had dabbled in every part of the industry, because you really have to be able to deal with everything. If you're going to go the route of a major label and being on the radio and stuff like that, your manager needs to totally understand how radio works, how radio promotion works, how retail sales work, how touring works, how contracts work, how lawyers work, what parts of the major label budget are bullshit and which ones are not, which things your label tells you are lies and which are not. The best person you could find as a manager would be somebody that had been the president of a label before this, or who had been an enormous radio promoter.

And of course those things never happen, because those people have good jobs already, they don't go quit them to go manage bands. So basically, somebody who's been through it a little -- even somebody who's been in a band that got put through the system once. Because it really is an incredibly surprising game that happens in music, whether you're indie, or [with] a major or anything else. So you're best friend, or your guitarist's girlfriend, or that person who claims that, "My dad used to work in the industry, I know a lot of people" -- unless they really know what they're doing, do it yourself.

STARPOLISH: So it's not necessarily the person who loves your music most?

KULASH: No. I mean, they should love your music. They have to believe in you. And you have to trust them, because at some point you basically give them the power to either make decisions for you or oversee parts of your life that you will never be able to check. Like, they will have access to your finances in such a way that they could rob you blind. And on the business side of things, they're going to be your face. If they misrepresent you... if you meet somebody who likes one of your songs but not the ones that you like, or who thinks you have real commercial potential and doesn't get why you're doing it... it has to be somebody who you ethically, morally and aesthetically get along with. Our manager and I have relatively the same politics and when we argue about things, they're healthy and respectful and he's a mentor of sorts. If he were some guy whose motives I was always questioning, this would be a nightmare -- it would be the least fun. I would always be looking over my shoulder to see what he was doing wrong. So it's got to be somebody who you trust, and somebody who you know is more talented than you, or more capable than you at, at the very least, many of the important functions of the job.

Hitting the Road

STARPOLISH: Have you guys toured much?

KULASH:Yeah, we've toured a lot and it's cheap. It's easy to tour -- people should do it. What touring requires is enough time and patience to book a tour, which is a pain in the ass but [which] can totally be done. There's a really good pamphlet; I think it might be a Billboard publication. It's a bi-yearly magazine that has every club [listed in it]. It's kind of hard to find, or it was for us, but it has everybody's number. Call the booking agents, tell them that you're in a band and you want to get an opening slot in this particular week. Most of the people will generally find a way to get you in. You won't get paid much, but if you can afford to take two or three weeks off of work... in fact, you don't need two or three weeks. When we started touring we were doing four-day tours. You can sleep on people's floors or sleep on couches. It's totally doable. You can tour in your own car -- at some point you have to have a vehicle. You can rent vehicles pretty cheap. We bought a van for $4,000 and toured in it for two years. The only time we ever lost money was on major-label tours, because at that point we had to have more crew and stay in hotels because we had to be in particular cities everyday.

If you book the tour around your schedule and you know you've got friends in D.C. and you can stay there for four days, book a tour on the East Coast, and every night when you're done with shows just drive back to D.C. It's not that far from New York, [or] Philadelphia... it sucks, or it doesn't suck -- it's not glamorous and it's not fun, but it's not hard to book tours. And most bands know other bands and have friends in other bands and stuff, and you can get on opening bills for people and it sort of doesn't even really matter if you play to that many people, because if there's 10 people in the bar and you impress them, you now have 10 new friends that will talk about you and whose houses you can probably stay at, whose bands you can play with.

If you're kind and courteous to the people who work at the club, they'll want you back no matter what. Being overly kind and courteous to people who run a clubs is obviously a pretty good rule of thumb -- so many people aren't that if you can get the promoter, or the manager that night, or a bartender, to go back to their boss and say, "That band was really nice," you'll be booked back there a month later [for] as long as you want to be. I'm trying to think of how we didn't lose money... we made CDs -- you can press CDs for about $1 and if you sell them for $3, everybody in the bar has to buy one because they're cheaper than a beer. [But] don't give them away, because if you give away CDs people think you're a desperate and shameless self-promoters and they won't listen to it and they'll throw it out their car window. So, if you just sell them for three bucks and people like you, and you sell $10 of them that night -- that's $30, which probably covers your gas to get there. You might lose money on food or something, but it's not really that tough to stay alive on tour.

The New Album

STARPOLISH: The record is coming out tomorrow [September 17]...

KULASH: It was slated for four months ago at some point. It's been pushed back for a few reasons -- mostly because of other bands on the label having records landing the exact same time, bands whose success was more assured than ours is. A Coldplay record coming out at the same week as ours would mean... there's only a finite number of people to do an infinite amount of work, and if the radio promoters are calling radio stations saying, Play my Coldplay record -- and P.S., also play the OK Go record, it's not as good as them calling up and saying, Play my OK Go record, all the time. So they try to spread out releases such that everybody gets their fair shot. And we were low enough on the totem pole that we got pushed around by a couple other bands. As well we should have.

STARPOLISH:So you must be pretty excited...

KULASH: I'm terribly excited. This is the first time in a year that... this whole time so far, we've been speculating. We put everything we've got into making this band run, and tomorrow is when reports start coming in. If people like our video or people like our song, or stuff gets on the radio or we get a good write-up in a paper... that's satisfying enough to us, as the people who made this music. But the people at the label, for whom this is all one big numbers game, their ship starts coming in tomorrow. And either it's a little life raft that comes pleading onto the shore or it's like a barge. Just really nobody knows. It's really exciting, though.