Mike Varney Talks about the Shrapnel and Tone Center Labels

Mike Varney, Founder and Head of the Shrapnel Label Group

Mike Varney has a vinyl fetish. The founder and head of the Shrapnel Label Group started collecting records at the age of five or six and now owns over 40,000 vinyls and CDs, a collection that he’s put to good use. You’d be hard pressed to find someone more knowledgeable about the history of metal, hard rock, progressive guitar instrumental, blues-rock, jazz-fusion, and the various sub-genres those styles have produced, especially with respect to the role the electric guitar has played in such music.

Since the founding of Shrapnel Records in 1980, Varney has expanded the business into three imprints under the Shrapnel Label Group: Shrapnel Records, Blues Bureau Records and Tone Center Records, with each label having a focus on a different genre – metal, hard rock, guitar instrumental (primarily progressive) and rock tributes on Shrapnel, blues-rock and blues tributes on Blues Bureau and progressive-jazz-fusion and jazz tributes on Tone Center.

He has championed a number of both up-and-coming guitarists and seasoned veterans such as Marty Friedman, Paul Gilbert, Vinnie Moore, Michael Schenker, Steve Khan, Greg Howe, Tony MacAlpine, Jason Becker, John 5, Jeff Watson, Eric Gales, Yngwie Malmsteen, Rick Derringer, Leslie West, Marc Ford, Pat Travers, Richie Kotzen and many others. He is also well known for the Spotlight column he wrote for Guitar Player magazine in which he featured undiscovered guitar-playing talent.

Varney isn’t a sit-behind-the-desk record exec. His album credits include: executive producer, producer, guitar, background vocals, and photography. He’s also the visionary behind an excellent series from Tone Center that celebrates or pays tribute to important figures in jazz, rock and fusion:

Freeway Jam – To Beck and Back (music of Jeff Beck, 2007, review)
Viva Carlos! (music of Carlos Santana, 2006, review)
A Guitar Supreme (music of John Coltrane, 2006, review)
Vision of an Inner Mounting Apocalypse (music of John McLaughlin, 2006)
Fusion for Miles (music of Miles Davis, 2005)
The Royal Dan (music of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, aka, Steely Dan, 2005)

Each of the above titles includes contributions from a number of noteworthy guitarists playing arrangements by Jeff Richman of tunes written by or closely associated with the icon who inspired the album. Guest players have included Eric Johnson, Mike Stern, Frank Gambale, Albert Lee, Robben Ford, Pat Martino, Eric Gales, Vinnie Moore, Warren Haynes, Greg Howe, Larry Coryell, and Steve Lukather and others.

In addition to Freeway Jam – To Beck and Back, 2007 has seen the release of three other superb CDs from Tone Center: Steve Khan’s Borrowed Time (review), reed man Dave Liebman’s Back On The Corner (review) that features Mike Stern and Vic Juris, and Moe’s Town (review) with Brett Garsed and T.J. Helmerich.

Guitar International spoke to Mike Varney on December 29, 2006, as Shrapnel’s 25th anniversary was winding down, about the early years of Shrapnel and the birth of the Tone Center label in the ’90s. Due to an eight hour difference in time zones, the conversation took place at my 4 a.m. Luckily, Mike’s a talker.

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Tom Watson: Busy day?

Mike Varney: My accountant since forever decides he’s going down a different career path. Out of the blue. That’s a good part of my day. Typical. You taping this interview?

Tom: Yes.

Mike: Hit record and sit back. I’m going to tell a little Leslie West story right here, real fast. You know who Leslie West is?

Tom Watson: Sure.

Mike: Yeah, Leslie West invited me to a show in my own town here where I knew all the people in the club and everything. This was years ago. So, when I get there, the guy that I’ve known for a long time that runs the backstage won’t let me back there. I go, “What’s your problem? Move out of the way. C’mon, I’ve got to go back and see Leslie.” “No, you can’t come back here.” Then, you hear this “Ahhh, is that Mike Varney?” Leslie comes in and goes, “Look what I did.” He points, and he’s got a sign above the door that says keep Mike Varney out of the backstage at all cost. It was just him trying to mess with me. You ever play in bands?

Tom: Sure.

Mike: Where?

Tom: The Midwest.

Mike: What kind of bands?

Tom: Soul bands, rhythm and blues …

Mike: Any of them ever make a private record?

Tom: Never. Deals always fell through at…

Mike: Because I collect privately pressed records from bands of that era that made their own album. I’ve got basically 100 or 200 or 500 albums. I’ve got a huge collection of stuff like that. Believe it or not, that’s some of the most expensive, rare collectible stuff ever.

Tom: We had basement-recorded 8-tracks.

Mike: If you have that stuff and you were any good, somebody would actually release it on CD and put it out now.

Tom: I wish I had it. We started out as a rhythm and blues band, then turned into a soul band, then we did the Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears thing. We always had a horn section. Always had keyboard players. Big groups. That’s why I can relate to fusion. That’s where we ended up.

Mike: It grew out of it. Did anybody in that band back then go on to do anything?

Tom: They all stayed local. Most of them are dead.

Mike: Did any of them ever make a record, though, or anything?

Tom: I wouldn’t be surprised. I think the drummer and sax player may have.

Mike: How in the hell did you end up in Portugal?

Tom: I married a journalist over here, a Portuguese citizen.

Mike: How’d you meet her?

Tom: The Internet.

Mike: Man, you’re on fire. A lot of my friends have done really well by meeting women on the Internet.

Tom: Not that it was a weird deal. I was an editor for a culture magazine and got an email from a journalist in Portugal asking me a question about a writer. One thing led to another and here I am. We’re married …

Mike: You have kids?

Tom: We have a daughter and a son.

Mike: Is it expensive to live there?

Tom: The minimum wage here is only $300 or $400 a month, but if you go to a mall, the prices are pretty much the same as they’d be in L.A.

Mike: So, how is anybody getting by making $300 or $400 a month?

Tom: You can live well here for less than you could in the States, though that depends on how you define “well.” Mall rats would have a problem.

Mike: I live in Vegas part time, and the other part time I live here in California. Where I am in California, the average house, I think, is $960,000. Are you playing much these days?

Tom: I’ve got a guitar that sits next to me, but not much. How about you?

Mike: I play quite a bit. I’m collecting guitars like a madman but that’s nothing compared to my record collection. I’ve got about 40,000 records and CDs.

Tom: That comes as no surprise.

Mike: I’m wired to that. I’m always buying more stuff so I can find out about other things and get ideas about songs to cover or tributes. Always just going out and looking for new material.

Tom: How old are you?

Mike: I’m 49. I started my company when I was 22, in 1980.

Tom: Shrapnel’s first release came out in ’81?

Mike: Right. I started my company in 1980 and the first release was in ’81.

Tom: Congratulations on Shrapnel’s 25th anniversary.

Mike: Yeah. It really is the 25th anniversary of the first record that was released on Shrapnel. That anniversary will be gone in a couple of days.

Tom: This won’t get out before the first of January [2007], but at least we spoke during the 25th anniversary.

Mike: We did. I started off as a guitar player and was really into hard rock and stuff. I also collected fusion and I got turned on to Allan Holdsworth when I was probably about 12 and I bought a record called Igginbottom’s Wrench, which nobody had back then, but I was really into rare and interesting records. From there, I got the Tempest record [Jon Hiseman album featuring Allan Holdsworth], some early Ian Carr records [Holdsworth appears on Belladonna and Direct Hits] and then the John Steven’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble records [Holdsworth appears on Re-Touch & Quartet]. I really was into Holdsworth.

Also around that same time, I was really into Gary Moore and his band Skid Row. I had both their records. Then I followed him into his solo career and into Colosseum II which was a fusion band kind of loosely like Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. It was in the mid-’70s and Moore did three records with them. It’s full on. It’s Jon Hiseman and Don Airey, who later went on to play with Ozzy on keyboards. But they’re playing some wicked electrified rock-oriented jazz fusion. It’s not like Weather Report, it’s more like Romantic Warrior Chick Corea, but a little more rocky. Not quite as heavy into the jazz. But it is what you call fusion.

So, anyway, I was way into that. Then, of course, back then I bought all these English-British rock-fusion artists, there were all kinds of them. I was buying those records and really into the progressive rock thing and all this progressive music. I certainly like odd [time] signatures and playing over changes and all that interesting stuff.

Tom: I would have thought you were into punk at that time.

Mike: Okay, no, but let met get back into this. I started collecting records when I was about 5 or 6. I actually went out with the first money I earned – I lived on a golf course and I got golf balls out of the lake and stuff, you know? I’d sell them for a quarter each and take the money and go down and buy 45s. Then I would go to the cut-out records and buy cut-out albums. Then I got hip to buying DJ albums when I was about 11 or 12 that the magazines and stuff would turn away. I went into a record store where Rolling Stone used to dump all of their subscription offer records after the promotions were over, and they’d dump them on this store and I’d buy the records from them.

Tom: You’ve been a record freak from day one.

Mike: Exactly. By the time I was in high school, I had hundreds and hundreds of records, if not over a thousand. I can’t remember. I’m sure well over a thousand. I just piled the albums everywhere. Then I just kept on going and going and going. By the time I got married, which was around the time I started Shrapnel, and we’re still married to this day, I had tons and tons of vinyl. So, I was a mad vinyl nut.

Like I said, I listened to Allan Holdsworth the first time when I was about 12, and then I kind of followed him and bought all of his records. The same with Gary Moore, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Santana, of course, and Steely Dan. These were all the artists I was crazy about when I was a kid. When I got older, I was playing in a hard rock band, and the band next to me was this punk rock band. They couldn’t play too well, but they had a great look and interesting songs. So, I started playing with them, and the next thing you know I’m playing at the Whiskey in L.A, and I played at Winterland a couple of times – you know, that was the San Francisco Bill Graham venue. We were playing gigs with the Ramones and Blondie and Television and all those punk bands.

But at that time, I was way into all this European progressive rock and fusion stuff. I remember when I was rehearsing with this punk band called The Nuns, this other band came in to rehearse in the studio after us and the guy had an Area album, called Crac!, sticker on his case. I said, “Wow. I can’t believe you know who that band is.” It was an Italian progressive rock band that I was way into. Here I am in this punk band that is, at the time, probably the most popular … we’d sell out the venues here in the Bay area, the smaller venues and the clubs. But I was way into all this weird progressive music.

That guy ended up becoming my accountant, actually – the bass player that had the Area sticker. But Area’s an obscure fusion band out of Italy. Italy had this whole progressive rock fusion scene. And bands like Arti & Mestieri who made a record called Tilt that was really great. There were all these bands that had kind of a Jean-Luc Ponty sort of vibe with odd meters and a violinist playing progressive stuff with killer … you know, Saul Williams and stuff.

So, anyway, back in ’80, I had just graduated college with my degree in marketing. I had a record out on EMI, which was the musical I wrote with Marty Balin.

Tom: Rock Justice?

Mike: Rock Justice. I had done that record. I had made a little bit of money and I decided my dad and family expected me to kind of go and get out in the workforce. Of course, I was going to get married, so I didn’t even have a job. But I’d just been able to meet, through various people, a number of folks that were self-made millionaires. I heard their stories and I just thought, well, I’m never going to make any kind of money by making records like Rock Justice … I was such a horrible artist on EMI with such horrible sales. How could I do much worse than that if I go out find other artists myself? I figured I could find ten artists and work with them and do much better than if I put all my eggs in my own basket, which basket wasn’t as good as probably ten other ones I could find. So, I started looking around for guitar players.

At the time, I was painfully aware that the United States had really delivered very little in the way of amazing guitarists, in other words, in terms of the real heroes. Pretty much it was like Hendrix in the ’60s and Van Halen in the ’70s. But over in Europe it was Clapton, Beck, Page, Allan Holdsworth, Gary Moore. There were all these really, really ripping players. And Michael Schenker over there, and Uli Roth from the Scorpions and all these super technical players. I wanted to find the ten next big guitar players in the States. That was my big goal for U.S. metal.

So, I went state to state and called every magazine that I could find. I’d go to a local music magazine and say, “Look. I’m doing a record of the 10-best unknown guitarists in the United States. Is there anybody in your city that should be considered? Probably not.” They’d answer, “Are you kidding me? So-and-so is the greatest. You need to hear this guy.” So, all these music editors started sending me their guys and I started putting these records together.

The word got out and Guitar Player magazine wrote me and said, “Hey, we’d like to feature you in our magazine. We’d like to write about your search for these guitar players.” So they did an article on me and my searching for these guitar players, and that made a bunch of other people come forward. Then I went down to a party at Guitar Player and said, “Hey, I’d like to write a column for you guys about new talent. Here’s the idea. You’ve got these rock stars in their Ferraris and all these rich dudes, but the guy on the street is probably your average buyer who’s plays a little guitar when he comes home and beats out his frustrations on it. Why don’t we do a column that spotlights some of the guys out there in the underbrush that are really, really great talent but who really need a little push or encouragement to tell them that they’re okay and we’re interested.”

They liked it, so we started a Spotlight column. All this stuff started coming in. The labels started getting all these bands sending stuff because they were buying my records and going “this is what we want to do.” They start sending me tapes. I start getting flooded with all this material, and between my label getting bigger and Guitar Player magazine getting more popular, I started getting tons and tons of stuff. All of a sudden Yngwie Malmsteen’s thing falls on my desk, and Paul Gilbert’s demos, and Vinnie Moore, and Tony MacAlpine, and Richie Kotzen, and Michael Lee Firkins, and Joey Tafolla, one after another these great, great guitar players – Jason Becker, Marty Friedman.

So, we had this kind of shred thing cooking, and we kind of were the first guys to do the instrumental shredding guitar thing for the new market. My distributor saw that we were selling some pretty good numbers, so they went out and found Satriani and signed Vai, and the owner of the company said, “Hey, man. We saw how much money we were paying you every month, and we decided we wanted to get a piece of this.” So they, of course, had a lot more money than I did to promote and do things. They got a couple of great artists and they did extremely well. But, I continued to do pretty good.

Going back before that, back to 1982, I already had the idea of starting a fusion label.

Tom: Back in ’82?

Mike: In ’82 I called Allan Holdsworth in England. Here I am, just 23 or 24, and I’m like, “Hey, I’m starting a record label. I want you to be on my label.” He’s like, “Okay. I want to do it.”

Tom: Did he know who you were?

Mike: I don’t think so. I just told him I thought he was great and wanted to help him. At the time, he needed help. So, he said, “I finished a record here. I just need someone to put it out.” And I go, “I’m your guy.” He said, “That’s great.” So I said, “I can book you some gigs and get you hooked up with some clubs and stuff in California if you want to come out here. You can play some gigs and deliver the record to me.”

We had everything ready to go and we agreed on all the terms and stuff. He came out, he played the gigs. At some point, I don’t remember the timeline, he called up and told me that he decided to give the record to somebody else. After all that.

I consider Allan Holdsworth to be the best in that genre at that time, and that was kind of the impetus to get me to start a fusion label. Like, I’m going to start at the top here and work with the best. Since I’d been into Allan at that time since I was 12, which would have been 10 years, I thought starting with him would really be great.
I have tried to sign that guy for the last 25 years. He’s probably agreed to sign with me six or seven times and at the last minute somebody bigger always comes along and offers him a better deal. So, the last time I was going to work with him, he said, “Okay, Mike. I’d really like to do something with you.” I said, “You know, whenever you’re sucking wind and in a lull in your career we have this discussion, and it’s almost like I have to make you an offer and you have to accept it in order to get yourself out of purgatory for something better to come along and blow me out of the water. So, let me hear from you, and I’ll go through the motions – ‘Yes, I want to make a record with you. Yes, we’ll do it.’ Any day now, somebody else will offer you something better because that’s our history.”

He goes, “Oh, mate. It’s not like that. C’mon.” Then two months later, I haven’t heard from him and send the contract to his manager, and he calls back and he’s like, “Mike, these guys came to me with so much money.” And I’m, like, “Okay.” He has a family and kids, so what am I to do? It’s Allan Holdsworth. So, anyway, my brother started Legato Records in the mid ’80s.

Tom: That’s Mark, right?

Mike: Yeah, Mark was the first guy to sign [Frank] Gambale, and then Mark went out and did the Truth In Shredding album with Gambale and Allan Holdsworth, which is legendary among jazz-fusion guitarists. Then he did Centrifugal Funk. My brother and I grew up in the same house, from good parents, and we listened to the same records growing up and had a lot of the same influences and liked the same stuff. I’m sure my brother had a lot to do with shaping my musical taste also, because older brothers impact on their younger brothers. My brother’s six years older than I am.

Anyway, he started Legato and was doing pretty well, and at some point he decided to take a different career path and just folded everything. We recently, in the last couple of years, put out Truth In Shredding and Centrifugal Funk on the Tone Center label, we reissued them. They haven’t sold great, but at least people that were interested were able to get them for less than $200 on eBay, which is what some of them had gotten up to. When my brother kind of tossed it in, I was sitting around wondering if maybe it’s something I should do. I tried to buy Legato from him, but because of all the contracts and all the different relationships and things like that, he decided that it would be more of a hassle to sell it than to let it go. I didn’t want to sit there and read through every one of my brother’s contracts to make sure that every I was dotted and every T was crossed. I ended up just licensing those couple of records.

Tom: What year did you officially launch Tone Center?

Mike: I think it was ’97. The very first record would have been Vital Tech Tones with Steve Smith. Steve Smith lived in Novato, California, about eight houses from the house I grew up in. Maybe at the most ten houses, if you go one house over and then go up the block ten houses or whatever, that’s where he lived. I’d go to visit my parents, and sometimes I’d go visit Steve and hang out. I’ve known him since the ’70s. The week he got into Journey I met him.

We knew each other a long time and I’d run into Steve at various places so we said, it’s finally time we do something with this fusion thing. He had the recording studio there [in Smith’s home] and could get great people to come in. We could make the budgets reasonable so that it wasn’t one of those situations where a guy says, “Hey, do you know how to make two million dollars with a jazz label? Start with five million and then when you’ve lost the first three just quit.” I didn’t want to be one of those guys.
The first record we put out, Vital Tech Tones, sold quite well – in the genre it sold quite well. Steve really was a big inspiration to me in getting projects going, and he was a great producer and a great guy. He really had a vision. It was always my company, but he was right there with a lot of the creative ideas as far as projects and stuff. Of course, he got to play in most of them.

It was a great scenario. He was like Field of Dreams. The guy has a beautiful house, he builds a beautiful studio, and all he was really missing was somebody to get the stuff out to the world because he could invite people that could come and stay at his place and record and it was a really great scene. Of course, unfortunately about two years ago, he moved, and I really miss him. We did the last Vital Information record with him, and I’m hoping we work together more in the future because I really miss doing projects with him.

Jeff Richman is a guy I’ve known for probably over 20 years. Steve Smith had turned me on to Jeff and told me Jeff was this great writer. Of course, I’m using him mainly for tribute albums.

Tom: Richman’s a great arranger.

Mike: Yeah. He’s not really writing, but from his arrangements it wouldn’t be hard for one to extrapolate and see that with a guy that’s this good of an arranger, there’s a good chance he could probably write something decent, too. Richman just loves to work, and these records [the Tone Center tribute series] don’t sell a lot, but the people that buy them really, really appreciate them, and, recently, someone that really appreciated it was Carlos Santana.

[Note: Varney is referring to Carlos Santana sending the featured guitarists and Mike and Jeff Richman a bouquet of flowers thanking them for the Tone Center Carlos Santana celebration album Viva Carlos!.]

Tom: I spoke to Coco Montoya [one of the guitarists on Viva Carlos!] last week.

Mike: And he thought it was somebody pulling his leg, right? The only way you can make somebody realize it wasn’t a joke is you have to go, “Would Mike Varney spend $300 to play a joke on you?” And that pretty much just shut everybody down in their tracks. They go, “Mike Varney’s playing a joke on us, isn’t he? He’s playing a joke.” And somebody goes, “Well, 12 people got these things. That would be about a $4,000 joke. Do you think Varney would go to that trouble?”

Tom: Did you send the Viva Carlos! CD to Santana?

Mike: I’ll tell you the story. All the time that I was putting the Santana tribute album together, I was thinking to myself about having met Carlos a couple of times in my life. I’ve been in a recording studio working on a project when he’s in the next room, and I’d run into him at the popcorn machine or something or in the lounge. He might say a few words or whatever, but I never knew him well. And when Allan Holdsworth came to that gig in 1982 or 1983 and played that thing that I hooked up for him, Carlos was there in the audience, one of about 50 people or so there. At that time, he said he was really into Holdsworth and I talked to him for a little while at that gig, but that was it.

When I got Viva Carlos! in my hands I was emotionally overcome because the packaging looked so good and the music sounded so good. I thought this is just a great, great representation of his music played by some of the greatest guitar players in the world. I said to myself, this is really a wonderful achievement. Somebody said, “Man, you know, Santana, he might not like that.” And all this time, even though I didn’t know Carlos at all really, I thought to myself, when he sees that we’ve got Pat Martino on here and Eric Johnson and Frank Gambale, he’s going to have to feel good, and when he realizes that the other guys we tributed before him were McLaughlin…

Tom: …Miles Davis…

Mike: Miles Davis and John Coltrane. I mean, hopefully he’ll feel really good about what we’ve done. Anyway, this guy goes, “Well, man, what if he doesn’t like it?” Even though I was sure all the time I was putting it together and when I listened to it I thought he’s going to really think this is great, my friend put that in my mind and it was kind of like poison. It started really eating me away like, wow, what if he doesn’t like it? I live ten minutes from the guy, and although I never run into him anywhere, I just live within five or ten minutes of his house.

About that same week or so, I’m at a gig where this band was touring called Tishamingo, which are kind of like a young Allman Brothers band. They’re just awesome, from Georgia. I got to jam with them on a couple of songs. I came off stage, and this guy was there from Guitar Player magazine and said, “Hey, I want you to meet Adam. He’s with Santana’s management.” So, I started talking to him and I thought, well, great time to broach the subject. I didn’t say I made the tribute album because I thought, God, what if I say something and they don’t like it or something, so I said, “Yeah, you know these guys made this tribute to Carlos and it’s fantastic and it’s got all these … Coco Montoya on it, it’s got Albert Lee, all these wonderful players.” And the guy goes, “Yeah, I know. We got it.” I go, “Oh? It’s not out yet.” He says, “I got two copies of it.” I answer, “No, no. It’s not being released until today.” “Yeah, I got two copies of it. I’m telling you.” I said, “Not the one with Eric Johnson on it.” And the guy goes, “I know. I got it. I got two copies of it today. Carlos came to the office and picked one up and took it home to listen to it.” My heart’s, like … oh my God. I said, “How did you know about it?” He said, “We have a service we subscribe to that lets us know anything about Carlos that happens on the ‘net because we want to know what’s being said and what’s going on. So this tribute popped up and we’re like, what the heck is this? We don’t know anything about this tribute.”

So, he said they ordered two copies from some online place and it showed up at their office. I’m sitting there not knowing what to make of this whole thing. I’m thinking what a fortuitous situation to run into the guy from the management. How odd is that? And then the guy looks at me and goes, “Yeah, Carlos took it home to listen to it because he’s thinking about carrying it on Santana.com.” I go, “What?” He said, “Yeah, we sell things related to Carlos on our website, and Carlos was thinking this might be a really nice thing for us to offer people.” I said, “Wow. You’re kidding.”

A few days later, we get a call, and it’s like, “Hi, we’re calling to place an order for Viva Carlos! for the Santana website.” I’m like … wow. So they placed an order, and I just couldn’t believe it. Make a Santana tribute and Santana helps you sell it. What greater guy could you get than that? At that point in time, I thought that was the ultimate validation, to make a tribute album and that person actually wants to buy it and feels good enough about it to share it with people.

Then all of a sudden these flowers show up, and the guy that works for me goes, “Flowers for you? That’s kind of weird. Don’t you think that’s kind of weird?” I said, “Well, kinda.” My wife goes, “Well, I don’t know if it’s weird or not, but they probably cost about $300. This is the best florist in San Francisco and this is one of the loveliest arrangements I’ve ever seen.” I come upstairs and go, “Holy cow. These are beautiful. Who could have sent these?” So, in with the flowers was a really kind letter that said something like, “Thank you for selecting these luminary guitarists to interpret my music, your soulful gesture won’t ever be forgotten, I’ll remember this the rest of my life,” or something along those lines. “I pray for you and your family,” and then, “Carlos Santana.” We were really blown away that we would get that kind of acknowledgment from him. We still can’t believe it.

One by one, the various artists on the album would call me up and go, “Is this a joke? Did Carlos Santana really send me flowers?” Everybody’s just humbled. All the good things people have heard about Carlos through the years about how wonderful he is and what a nice guy he is, he couldn’t have proved any more to us, and he didn’t have to prove a darn thing. We already thought he was great. That’s why we wanted to do the tribute. But, wow, that was just too much.

Tom: Great story.

Mike: That was very, very exciting.

Tom: The tribute-celebration series is an excellent addition to the Tone Center catalog.

Mike: The Tone Center label was kind of conceptualized as a forum for freedom of expression of musical thoughts and ideas. With smooth jazz out there and, in my opinion, being the bane of existence on free-flowing and more progressive jazz, I wanted to do something. And, I was so tired when the grunge movement came along and made it uncool to be a great guitar player. All these guys had become great guitar players and then they couldn’t get any work because guitar solos weren’t cool anymore.

So, I had to kind of search my heart. Where can I go and still make great guitar recordings and have somebody care? I was limited.

I went to the blues and did Blues Bureau [1991] and started doing all these killer blues-rock recordings. Then from there I went to Tone Center, because that’s like the next frontier where guys can still express themselves freely. I thought smooth jazz was just something for great jazz players to do to make money. I thought it was kind of like the sellout thing. I learned the hard way that smooth jazz has players where that kind of music is what they have to give. That’s valid, too, because a lot of people can’t listen to any more than that. My wife gets thrown off balance when somebody starts going off into a really crazy sax solo that kind of loses the center, you know? It kind of makes her feel anxious. I’m sure the smooth jazz thing really has the opposite effect on people. It makes people feel kind of calm, and they can sit in their hot tub and have brie cheese and a piece of quiche and put the suntan lotion on their back and hang out.

I’m kidding. But basically, we’re not the smooth jazz lover’s best friend. Occasionally, if we have an artist that’s really, really great and is willing to solo, we’ll accept a more mellow format for them to express themselves in, but generally, if it’s on Tone Center, the guys are playing their butts off. They’re playing at max. It’s where finesse and ferocity meet. It’s a label kind of like the old jazz labels back in the day. We want guys to come in and blow. We want guys to come in and show why they were in their room for 20 years foregoing all the other pleasures of being a kid, learning how to play great.

We also put once-in-a-lifetime collaborations together with various people. We love it when they all kick in something. We love it when we walk in and there are solos from everybody and ensemble lines together, all this stuff that you want to hear from a great, tight jazz combo or five piece or whatever.

So, in the future, we have a tribute to Jeff Beck [Freeway Jam – To Beck and Back, released since this interview] we’re coming up with. Jeff Richman is working on that as we speak. We have a new Uncle Moe’s Space Ranch [Moe’s Town, released since this interview], which is a band with Brett Garsed and T.J. Helmerich with Dennis Chambers and the bass player Gary Willis, who’s over in Spain – you can probably go visit him, from Tribal Tech and Scott Kinsey from Tribal Tech. We have a new record called Back On The Corner from Dave Liebman, who was with Miles Davis in the On The Corner era and who’s recorded with Elvin Jones, Genesis and is on some of the killer jazz-fusion recordings of the early mid ’70s. Dave Liebman’s this awesome player. He got this thing together with Mike Stern and Vic Juris and Anthony Jackson and a few other guys. It really is the vibe of On The Corner, but played with crazy guitar soloing and stuff. It’s tough to keep creating new high-level recording and super sessions with these various players and continue the tradition of labels like Blue Note that put together these really great collaborations of people that resulted in some very special music.

Tom: What about more live recording?

Mike: I’d love to get more live recordings going. They don’t sell that much. We’ve put live records out before. [Scott] Henderson [2005, double-CD Live!, Tone Center] and [Michael] Landau are doing pretty well.

Tom: Enjoyed the Landau CDs [2006, double-CD Live, review].

Mike: That’s doing pretty well. We did Jing Chi Live at Yoshi’s with Robben Ford, Vinnie Colaiuta, and Jimmy Haslip. That didn’t sell nearly as well as the studio record before it [Jing Chi]. Other stuff we’ve tried live, it’s valid and I love it, but a lot of times, just financially speaking, it’s not as great of a return. Some people just don’t like the clapping and the noise, they don’t like the live environment. I don’t know why. I sure do.

Tom: How has the Coltrane tribute CD [A Guitar Supreme] done?

Mike: It’s got some killer playing on it. It’s just really, really great. Honestly, I’m sad that I only sell about 4,000 units of these on average in the States.

Tom: That’s it?

Mike: Yeah, you would think you could do a lot better. I don’t know if people are buying them and taping them for their friends or if it’s just that the people that are into this are so minute in terms of numbers.

Tom: That’s surprising.

Mike: I would think I’d really be able to sell some numbers with this stuff, but unfortunately not. In fact, with what it costs to get all these guys together and everything, I’m lucky if I’m breaking even on some of these. But, the bottom line is, I’m creating something for all time, something that will be here 10 years from now. In creating a great catalog, sometimes you can’t just look at the present, you’ve got to create something that will be valid in the future. I think those records will have some legs and be classics.

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