Milo Goes to the Bookstore

Me, Jim Ruland and SST Records

I got obsessed with record labels when I was pretty young. Mostly Blue Note, as I’d leaf through the CDs my local library had available to borrow and look for the jazz label’s logo as a sign of quality that I could trust. When I was 13 or 14 or so and I liked listening to jazz but didn’t know much about it beyond a few names and some songs I’d become familiar with listening to some left-side of the dial station. I didn’t know Charlie Parker from Louis Armstrong, basically. But I started to know Blue Note and I began to look through the liner notes at the various players on certain albums and worked my way through there. That’s how I gained any sort of understanding back then. Classic ‘90s kid/Gen. X tale.

Record labels, the really great ones, are more than just businesses that put out records. Chess, for instance, helped bring electric blues to a wide audience and could claim to be one of the big reasons rock and roll took off in its wake. But it also documented something, a moment in time when a handful of Black musicians migrated from the South and made their music fit the landscape of the Midwest by plugging into amps and making a sound that fit alongside the hum and roar of auto plants or steel mills. Elektra started out releasing folk albums in the 1950s, but by putting out psychedelic and proto-punk albums by the Doors, Stooges, Love, etc. in the 1960s, the label provided a historical document of how the two scenes blended into each other. The folkies turned into hippies. Verve, Def Jam, Sub Pop, Dischord and a hundred other labels served as documentarians of certain sounds from certain times and the one I think was most important for me after Blue Note was SST. And this Friday, April 29th, I’ll be speaking with Jim Ruland about his exhaustive history of the label, Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records, at Unnamable Books on Vanderbilt at 7 PM.

This is my first live event in two years. There’s something very odd about typing that and then looking at it, especially since I had a book come out in 2020. But I felt like this was a good way to get the rust off since Jim’s book looks at a very particular phenomenon that I’m fascinated to discuss, how SST, more than any label I can think of, truly helped shape the sort of music that I grew up with and still love to this day. Yes, Nirvana put out their first album on Sub Pop, I pretty much love every Dischord release (in theory…) and K had the whole weird Pacific Northwest twee thing, but Sub Pop didn’t have a particular sound in my mind and Dischord concentrated on a scene in a city and nothing else. And that’s all fine. Those labels are legendary. But SST was always a little more interesting to me because you can find the label’s DNA in so much guitar-based music of the last four decades and it wasn’t so much about a scene as it was the sound that label founder Greg Ginn liked. There’s no “SST sound” like there is a “Motown sound,” but there also sort of is. And that’s something I want to talk to Jim about. How Black Flag, Soundgarden, Minutemen, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth and a bunch of other bands that put out records on the label maybe seem like a somewhat random collection of now-iconic names on paper. But when you listen to the records they all put out on SST—which you can do now because of streaming services—the vision becomes a little clearer, at least for the first few years of the label’s existence. There’s more of a “feel” and not so much a specific sound. And I think that’s fascinating.