Label Spotlight: Fat Wreck Chords, with Fat Mike

09 October 2012

by Poppy Reid

More than two decades ago when Fat Mike started Fat Wreck Chords, the NOFX frontman’s motives were simple – he saw friends doing it and thought he could do it just as well. Since starting the label in 1990 with his then wife Erin (who remians his business partner), Mike Burkett has created an iconic brand, home to the biggest names in American punk rock.

With releases from Against Me!, Anti-Flag, Rancid, No Use For A Name and Rise Against in the past and acts like Lagwagon, Descendents, Strung Out and Frenzal Rhomb on the current roster, Fat Wreck Chords is still weaving its legacy and helping like-minded folk keep the culture alive – all on a one-record-deal policy. But as the prolific and candid founder tells TMN, there did come a time when he considered throwing in the towel.

I remember selling Lagwagon records, and I think we sold 2,000 the first year. There was Epitaph and there was Lookout! and Dischord, and there weren’t many good labels besides that. I just saw a lot of good bands on tour and I thought I’d give it a shot, but you know, in the early ‘90s selling 10,000 records was as much as you could sell. Bad Religion’s Suffer (1988) had sold 12,000 records and that was unbelievable; you don’t think you’re going to be a successful label, but I guess I thought I could make money doing it - I had no idea that we’d have bands that would sell millions of records.

I’ve thought about giving it up for the past few years, we had a couple of years where we were losing money, terribly.

Look at the Billboard charts, records sell one tenth of what they used to sell. You sell 50,000 records and you can be #1 on the chart, so it’s just the music industry is failing and it’s going to keep failing but I think to have a small label, if you do it right, you can still survive.

 

What happened then was we cut down people; we went from eighteen people to five people. We had two choices, the choice that was the smartest one was to stop the label and just sell the back catalogue, and then you have no expense, just money coming in. We didn’t want to do that, so my wife and I at the time were like, ‘Let’s just revamp it and re-work it and see if we can make money out of it still’. So we did. That ended up being a really smart thing, now we’re making money again, and we’re selling records that are pretty good. All we did was trickle back into the label we were igniting.

I want to keep the label as a punk rock label, I don’t want to go into emo or weird shit, I don’t want popular music I want to keep it a punk rock label about good music.

Fat Wreck Chords have recently released new material from NOFX, Morning Glory and Cobra Skulls, and reissues from Lagwagon and Less Than Jake. The Fat Wreck Chords store in California is open Fridays from 3-6pm, they offer free beer to anyone who walks in.