PROGRESS REPORT

Some thoughts after 42 years of life and 5 years of Blonde Medicine.

January 1, 2023 

Stan Freberg. Steve Martin. Martin Mull. Alongside the hundreds of rock albums my father had in his collection when I was growing up, there was a decent little section of comedy vinyl to dig through. While Weird Al’s Dare To Be Stupid got enough spins that the opening beats of “Like a Surgeon” played back quietly from overuse, it was albums like Albert Brooks’ Comedy Minus One and the discography of The Firesign Theatre that I grew to appreciate at an early age.

Smash-cut to 1990. My family had recently moved from San Francisco to about an hour north of the city and my mom, in a very well-constructed plot to help me adjust, brought home a stack of cassette tapes from the local record shop: MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em, Fat Boys’ self-titled album and Heavy D & the Boyz’ Peaceful Journey. Adding those to the rotation of BBD’s Poison and ATCQ’s People’s Instinctive…was enough to get me through my first months in a new town. Thanks, mom.

By the time ’95 rolled around I was shoulder-deep in Wu-Tang and Nas, wanting so badly to be the next Puff Daddy that I printed business cards for my someday-label, Global Records, on some terrible inkjet printer that my folks had gotten along with their first computer. Spoiler alert: I never became Puff Daddy. I did, however, go to San Francisco State University to study Radio & Communications, and Music Business. I founded my own indie label, Loud Minority Music, and put out a handful of records that I still believe in to this day. Records from Noñameko, Tanya Morgan, and Che Grand.

Shortly thereafter, I was asked to help found a new label with a bigger appetite. We were going to throw 7 figures into our first few years of operation and put out records with national buzz, helping break new artists like K’Naan and helping resurrect established artists like Can-i-bus. My interests were in bringing the likes of Tanya Morgan & J*DaVeY to every living room and pair of headphones in America. And while that never happened, we did put out records along the way that I will argue to my death are classics (see Tanya Morgan’s Brooklynati & J*DaVeY’s The Beauty in Distortion). The label continued to get in its own way, wasting significant momentum from the artists we worked with as well as some of my best years.

What happened next? I quit the label on principle after closing the loop on two large projects that had been impossible for the label to put out until they fell on the shoulders of myself and my partner & mentor, Ian Davis. And on the heels of that second project, Can-i-bus’ ‘C of Tranquility’, I checked in with the ownership about what was on the horizon, heard that it was precisely bupkis and got out of dodge. There may very well be other versions of that story. I haven’t heard ‘em. And I’d argue that this is the only true version. That’s less important than what came next…

2010 was a year of great change in my life. On the doorstep of my 30th birthday I’d had an engagement fall apart, had left my job and began a new relationship and new job managing acts who I cared about deeply in an effort to help see their goals through: I helped Trackademicks release his State of the Arts album, complete with limited edition lyrics booklet. I worked with Tanya Morgan to rebrand the band and handle design and fulfillment of merchandise as they moved on to self-release new content. And I worked with bay area all-star collective The Park to help put together their debut release as well as form Grillade with producer Keelay and vocalist Ragen Fykes, along the way making some of my absolute favorite recordings of all time. And then I got an e-mail.

An old friend, Gavin Rhodes of Audible Treats, shared a posting for a Label Manager job in San Francisco. It was at a startup I had never heard of called Rooftop Comedy. I sent along my resumé and figured nothing would come of it. A month or so later, I sat through a 4-hour interview at Rooftop and the next day got the offer. After spending my whole life to that point wanting to work in Music, I found myself working in Comedy – but at least I was at a record label.

While I knew nothing of Rooftop Comedy, it was a place that had some history. They were one of the first companies to film comedy sets from clubs all around the country and their plan was to help promote, distribute, and license clips from those sets to help bring exposure and money to comedians. This is back in 2006 or so… perhaps too far ahead of the curve? And my job at Rooftop Comedy was to produce and distribute albums. I was the audio guy at the video company.

In 2014 after only a few years in this new position, I could feel the pressure. Nothing was ever explicitly stated but I would get the feeling that we were not long for this world – that we were going to see things close up.. shut down. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, we were acquired by Audible, the world’s largest Audiobook company and a subsidiary of Amazon.

Great changes were on the horizon: resources, stability, plans for growth, stock options. We went from working in a charming (but falling apart) office to taking up in Amazon’s SFHQ, complete with snacks and bottomless coffee and insane security measures just to access our floor. And I went from producing stand-up comedy albums to producing stand-up comedy specials. I had gone from being the audio guy at the video company to being the video guy at the audio company. Weird.

While I’m grateful for what we got to do there, I was certainly not a fan of the corporate structure nor the red tape that came with it. I loved producing specials and live events but loathed the amount of pressure I had to put on the AP department to get people paid. And so, a few years into my role at that company, I quit to start my own thing. I knew then that I wasn’t going to be Puff Daddy - and I was fine with that. I didn’t even want to be Bad Boy anymore. In my adulthood I had become a much bigger fan of indie labels like Stones Throw and Quannum and Sub-Pop. Places where you could take risks and make crazy shit and do it because you wanted to instead of just trying to serve someone else’s bottom line.

And so, in 2017, I tendered my resignation, spent a couple of months getting my ducks in a row, and on January 1 of 2018, opened Blonde Medicine with designs to produce comedy and music (and whatever the fuck else sounded fun) and we have been at it ever since.

We’re young. We’re still forging ourselves. But we’re 5 years in and looking back on the work we’ve done, I’m proud of it all. And I can’t imagine where we’ll be in another five years. Stay tuned and find out with us.

Dominic Del Bene
Founder, Blonde Medicine