I found a direct link that worked.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0809-confidential-atkins-20130809,0,3035384.column
Hey, Martin? Why didn’t you mention your SCHOOL in this talk about education? Or were you afraid the author might see the obvious and tie in the sad irony of “Welcome To The Music Business: You’re Fucked” with the plight of hungry children paying to be exploited by you?
Carry on . . .
So, I wasn’t able to make the article work on my phone even with Java off, anybody feel like copying and pasting for me? I actually was dumb enough to want to go to his “school” at the time he announced it, totally thought about moving to Chicago for it, but didn’t have the funds. Then I heard what was really going on and, well… dodged a bullet there.
Here you go:
[i]British drummer Martin Atkins came to Chicago to chase down a local concert promoter who owed his band $5,000 and wound up staying.
So it should be no surprise that Atkins, 54, has written a book titled, “Welcome to the Music Business … You’re F-----.”
That’s the light version of two textbooks Atkins has authored, “Tour:Smart” and “Band:Smart.” Both are written for musicians wise enough to realize that knowing how to use Microsoft Excel is as important as knowing how to run a sound check.
Atkins, a veteran of punk and industrial bands Public Image Ltd., Pigface and Killing Joke, is organizing his first Band:Smart conference this weekend at the SAE Institute, an audio engineering and entertainment industry school that opened its seventh U.S. campus in River North last year. SAE hired Atkins this month to chair its music business department.
Atkins has wispy, gray hair populated with a few dreads. He wore a gray suit worthy of a North Shore country club to our Thursday interview. But it had a twist. In a handful of spots on his jacket, he had screen-printed images of bugs in various shades of gray. Scary bugs. On a pinstripe suit.
“Why is anybody teaching business plans anymore?” Atkins said. “You don’t need a business plan. You need a marketing plan. You need to learn how to crowd fund your band. And f— the banks. It’s momentum that matters. Not money. If you have momentum, you can get anything you need.”
This is how Atkins talks. His speech is as scattershot as Dick Cheney on a deer hunt. And incredibly entertaining. And vulgar. So we will note that the book’s actual title spells out the expletive. And from here, we’re editing his quotes because he curses a lot, and we’re a family-friendly publication.
So back to how a British punk rocker came to live in Chicago. Atkins said he flew in from New Jersey to hound the promoter, and, while here, “stumbled” into the studio with the metal band Ministry.
The band asked Atkins to join its upcoming tour, which he agreed to do on the condition that Ministry didn’t work with the promoter who owed him money.
He later discovered the band and the promoter were working together. And moments before a sold-out New Year’s Eve show, Atkins threatened to take his drum kit off the stage unless his band got paid. The promoter delivered the $5,000 check.
Atkins’ face lit up with pride while delivering that punch line. He had beaten “the man” — that time, at least.
He was far less happy when recalling the financial inequity among members of Public Image Ltd., the punk rock band formed by vocalist John Lydon, also known as Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols.
Atkins joined Lydon’s group in 1979 at age 19. And got fired “like three times.” In a 2001 interview with a Public Image Ltd. fan site, Atkins said it was “because they were paying me every week. Let’s fire Martin, if we need him in two months hire him back! Save a bit of money. It was tough, it was tough to be in PiL and get fired.”
He left the band of his own accord in 1985. After nearly a decade of artistic success, Atkins said he had $80 to his name by 1988 when he became so frustrated with the industry that he started his own label, Invisible Records.
“If I hadn’t started managing Killing Joke, I wouldn’t have had a band to play drums in,” he said. “I felt there was no way I could screw this up anymore than record labels had screwed things up on my behalf.”
Here’s a sampling of what he’s learned:
Study Jay Z and Taylor Swift. And new business concepts like pop-up shops. Don’t dismiss them.
Don’t book a venue that’s too big. “A small crowd in a theater is a funeral,” he said. “A small crowd in a tiny bar is a riot.”
Learn how to screen print. You’ll be able to test your branding and merchandise ideas — before ordering 500 T-shirts to meet the minimum quantity for free shipping.
Email addresses are as valuable as cash. Give away free stuff in exchange for emails. Then use them to build your fan base.
Don’t tour west of the Mississippi River until you’re a big deal. The fuel costs alone will eat up your profit.
Don’t overbook your local market. Instead, cautiously expand one 50-mile radius at a time.
Don’t give away the rights to your songs.
And you don’t need a record label.
So says someone who owns a record label.
When I pointed out the irony, Atkins said that in order to make big things happen, at some point a band will need the alliances and leverage that a record label can bring.
“In general things are moving toward the place where they always were; core content, a message, an idea, a spark, a vision, the stuff that differentiates you from others is what matters,” he said. “The medium changes. The essentials haven’t.”
He credited teaching and having children of his own with putting him on a more, oracle-esque path. Atkins said he has learned that you should be “the nicest to the person you think you have the least reason to be nice to.”
He shared this nugget of wisdom after telling a story about getting into a fight backstage with Kevin Lyman, founder of the Warped Tour, over the rights to a six-pack of beer in the early '80s.
“It was a full-blown scrabble, rolling-around-on-the-floor fight,” he said.
Atkins said that four years ago, in front of 600 people at a music seminar in New York, he apologized to Lyman for the fight.
“One of my former students was out on the road with U2 last year,” Atkins said. "And he sent me an email saying, ‘Thanks for teaching me how to not look like a complete a-- hole.’
Back in '03, I went to see Bile at the now defunct Knitting Factory in Hollywood. Bile didn’t make the show for some reason. Instead, we got to hear Blowhard Atkins pontificate and name drop in a rambling 30-45 minute mess. He was way into his “Fuck list” at the time and decided to incorporate that into his act. I’m never getting that time back.
What a jackass. His list of “advice” for getting into music is retarded. As if anybody who isn’t lacking basic common sense wouldn’t have thought of most of that crap and you’d likely realize a lot of it before having to go through it anyway. It reads more like a “How to spend as little money as possible while doing anything” list.
Be nice to pplz.
Put gas in the van.
Keep in touch with the fans.
Don’t travel where u can’t afford.
YEEEEHHHAAWWWW!!! Rock superstardom, Here I come!!!
That’s pretty much all it was.
Be aware of extremely famous people
Don’t spend money you don’t have
Don’t spend more money than you need to
Repeat
Master of self promotion eh?
He dropped in on us Aussies a few months ago. Not only did I miss the show because of how badly it was promoted, becoming aware of it long after the fact, but I was told it was woefully attended.
I watched the videos of his school. While the set up’s pretty good, there’s something that reeks of ‘dodgy’ throughout every minute of footage. And a lot of those ‘students’ seem completely hapless and naive to the true machinations of the industry.
Those SAE schools, anything that teaches music industry related tripe, recording, etc, are a crock of shit. The only way to make it is to get involved, fuck up, learn the hard way, and get a thick skin in the process. Most of these kids go, get a certificate that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, and still have no idea about anything.
Hell yes! Atkins back on the prowl!
Who is Paul Natkin and how many used Pigface and Lab Report cd’s did Atkins have to give him to use that quote?
Who is Paul Natkin and how many used Pigface and Lab Report cd’s did Atkins have to give him to use that quote?
Given the orthographic similarity of “Natkin” to “Atkins,” maybe it’s just an alias.
This bit of thread necromancy forced out some bitter laughs here, particularly reading about the people paying to be interns.
I did the same kind of drudge work when I was living down the street from Invisible HQ, but at that time Martin was marginally more generous. There were some spare rooms at the Invisible compound where you could crash for the night, and it wasn’t unusual for Martin to get some Connie’s pizza for the office crew or take everyone out for lunch in Chinatown nearby. There was also none of this patronizing “now if you’re REALLY good, you might get to see Ogre!” kind of nonsense being waved in front of you.
I’d guess that when he began siring his brood of children in the latter half of the 90s, he started realizing how expensive kids are to care for properly, and that’s when the schemes from “Ministry fence” to “pay me to work for me” really started to gain traction.
Haha! I love Martin Atkins. His finest moment was when he established a “school” to teach kids about the music industry . . . He charged them $3K-$5K in tuition fees and then made them work for him packaging orders and cleaning his office. Brilliant.
A real class act, hey!?
I will say his percussion greatness was sorely missed on that stage on NYE…Aaron was fine but it felt kinda empty without Rieflin & Atkins bouncing off each other, ya know [:|]
Who is Paul Natkin and how many used Pigface and Lab Report cd’s did Atkins have to give him to use that quote?
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I guess I wasn’t the only one to notice that.
I thought maybe it was a fictitious person too. I searched him out, though, and it’s some photographer in Chicago, so I’m guessing he was desperate to get his start or exposure and Martin probably said “Hey, I’ll tell you what! You go ahead and do the photography for my book tour and we’ll give you credit for it and you can put that on your resume and tell everyone you are a bonafide rock photographer dude. Heck, I’m not even gonna charge you for it. Be sure to give my book and lectures a good review, though.”
[reply]Who is Paul Natkin and how many used Pigface and Lab Report cd’s did Atkins have to give him to use that quote?
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I guess I wasn’t the only one to notice that.
I thought maybe it was a fictitious person too. I searched him out, though, and it’s some photographer in Chicago, so I’m guessing he was desperate to get his start or exposure and Martin probably said “Hey, I’ll tell you what! You go ahead and do the photography for my book tour and we’ll give you credit for it and you can put that on your resume and tell everyone you are a bonafide rock photographer dude. Heck, I’m not even gonna charge you for it. Be sure to give my book and lectures a good review, though.”[/reply]
Invisible used to work with some pretty cool photographers, actually. My friend Steve Goedde, most well-known for some ‘fetish girl’ types of coffee table books, did some quality band shots for them back in this mythical era when Martin wasn’t in full-blown huckster mode.
But, like pretty much every one else who worked with Martin and had some self-preservation skill, he’s presumably moved on to other things and wouldn’t condescend to having a “Martin is awesum OMG” quote coaxed out of him.
I will say his percussion greatness was sorely missed on that stage on NYE…Aaron was fine but it felt kinda empty without Rieflin & Atkins bouncing off each other, ya know [:|]
Percussion greatness? Gimme a break, dude.
[reply]I will say his percussion greatness was sorely missed on that stage on NYE…Aaron was fine but it felt kinda empty without Rieflin & Atkins bouncing off each other, ya know [:|]
Percussion greatness? Gimme a break, dude.[/reply]
Like I touched on in another of the Martin-bashing threads, one of his greatest assets is / was a bag of smoke-and-mirrors tricks that made it seem like whatever he was playing was way more distinctive and complex than it really was. The water splashing off the drum heads, the manic gum chewing and electrified shocks of bleached hair etc…
On one of the later Pigface tours, they advertised that the band would feature a “wall of drums” (i.e. 3+ drum kits) at each show. Mick Harris was on the tour as Scorn, and I was so hoping that he would be one of the guest Pigface drummers, and would absolutely run rings around Martin stylistically. Sadly it wasn’t to be.
DUT DUT
dutdut
DUT
That, my friends, is the entire summary of his “percussion greatness”. And he’s only responsible for 1/2 of it.
Yes, the intro to “Breathe” on ICYDFLSU was incredibly monumental. But that was one performance.
It happened over 25 years ago. It’s over.
Let’s try and get on with our lives.
Rieflin joined R.E.M., for crying out loud.
That should make him dead to us.
Must say with absolute pride that my three favorite drummers of all time are in no particular order:
Bill Rieflin
Stephen Morris
Martin Atkins
special shout out to Dave Grohl!
Neil Peart is the greatest drummer of all time so mentioning him is the same as declaring The Beatles or Elvis is the best which obviously goes without saying.
DUT DUT
dutdut
DUT
That, my friends, is the entire summary of his “percussion greatness”. And he’s only responsible for 1/2 of it.
Yes, the intro to “Breathe” on ICYDFLSU was incredibly monumental. But that was one performance.
It happened over 25 years ago. It’s over.
Let’s try and get on with our lives.
Rieflin joined R.E.M., for crying out loud.
That should make him dead to us.
i was very happy for Bill Rieflin when he joined REM, it was like kismet: 2 great forces merging together fulfilling an existential prophecy
I am more of a Ginger Baker,Elvin Jones,Terry Bozzio kind of guy…
Even with all the Atkins bashing(well-deserved)there was a time when Pigface shows were just a blast of fun…I had some really great times seeing some of those shows…