Cellar Door Records

PODCAST INTRO:
Hi, I’m Al Letson—and you’re listening to the State of the Re:Union podcast. Today:
how often does being a teenage band nerd turn into owning your own record label? State of the Re:Union went to Cleveland, Ohio to look at the new entrepreneurial energy that was bubbling up in that old rust belt city. And SOTRU Producer Tina Antolini found one guy whose love of rock… turned into a business.

TINA: Justin Markert was the kind of teenager who was always in a band—from a cover band when he was 14 to one called “Blender”—worst band name ever, he says—later in high school. Justin grew up on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, and guesses that, by the time he turned 21, he’d already been in 5 bands. And that’s the way of it, in this area, he says.

CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 30:00ish Everybody’s cousin or uncle or nephew or son is in a band.  You know, and I almost, for a number of years, I stopped saying that I was in bands because I was so sick of hearing about other people’s bands, so like the market’s definitely flooded.

TINA: And, for a music fan like Justin, that flooded market has been a real bonus to the area... Always a good show going on, if not 3 in the same night. For a long time, he was either IN a band, or going to see one… Then, about 7 or 8 years ago, he his buddy, Rick-- whom he’d met through an online music forum-- were walking down the street in Madison, Ohio, a smaller town, outside of Cleveland.

CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav :45ish… and we saw this empty storefront and we actually saw the space before we had the idea and we were sitting there one night and decided, you know what if we did something in this space?  … so by 6am the next morning, we had a business plan drawn up for how we were going to open up a coffee shop / music venue / art gallery, and you know it seemed kind of lofty but three days later we had keys and had signed a lease.***0:01:10
2:45ish… TINA ANTOLINI:  …  It was kind of like, you know 24 hours kind of, what if we did this?  Ok, let’s do this.
CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 2:30ish… JUSTIN MARKERT:  Yeah, his dad owned a karate dojo actually next door, which that’s the back room in which we played and practiced and there was an empty space on this – it’s kind of an old town main street storefront and there’s this empty space sitting there, and we were like what if we did that?  So we did.

TINA: All of a sudden, Justin and and his buddy, Rick, found themselves the owners of a coffeeshop and… night club. They called it the Cellar Door… And almost as soon as they got the keys to the space, they started booking shows.

MUSIC UP… FROZEN HELLSICLES: “Street Justice?” “Beauty & the Bitch?”

CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 1:15ish… We booked bands from out of town, local bands, we had been musicians in the scene so we knew a lot of people so we were able to pull in a lot of resources and from me playing in other cities with my band, I was able to pool from other scenes I knew, and we were the perfect stop between Chicago and New York.

TINA: Now this was a tiny space, in a town far enough out of Cleveland to feel like the middle of nowhere. But they quickly got a reputation for being… well, awesome.

CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 1:30ish… it was about 135 capacity and we were able to sell it out almost every weekend and bands that came through, bands that like we would be apologizing to, sorry about the space, you know would be like, “No, no, this is incredible.  We’re making more money here than we made last night in Pittsburgh,” you know. So we realized we were onto something.
MUSIC UP…

TINA: And the thing about the Cellar Door was that the bands that played there mirrored Justin’s eclectic taste in music. You never knew what you were going to get.

CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 4:00ish… it would be anything from like an instrumental like jazz trio to like metal hard core bands, which I gotta tell you, seeing like 135 sweaty kids like and being really nervous, but you know it all worked out.  We never had a complaint from the cops ever…
0:04:14 JUSTIN MARKERT:  We never had a problem.  So the genres went from like you know 65 year old folk singers to these 20 year old metal kids.

MUSIC DOWN AND OUT…

TINA: After a few years, they decided to sell the coffeeshop. But at that point, they’d gotten totally hooked on bringing the music of the region to the public. They thought: why not our own record label? So they started with a compilation of the best of bands in this area.

CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 4:45ish… JUSTIN MARKERT:  There’s actually, there’s so much going on in Cleveland musically.  There are so many different pockets of creativity and there are so many different like bands making great music and me and Rick felt that we had kind of a better business sense or at least cared about it – it might not be – some people, they just wanna create.  They wanna make music but we felt like more people should be hearing this music… So the first album was just, it was burned CDs that we got the label printed on, and I was cutting out booklets and putting the spine things in, like for like hours the night before because the release show was the next day.  So it was that kind of ordeal.  It was very DIY. *** 0:05:25

TINA: And from that first compilation, Cellar Door Records has gone on to release a series of albums, most of them with the surprising diversity you can find in Cleveland’s music scene. From…

MUSIC UP: THE LIGHTHOUSE AND THE WHALER “Under Mountain, Under Ground”
CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 0:16:51 JUSTIN MARKERT:  The Lighthouse and the Whaler they’re kind of an indie folk band, very heavy on thick melodies, very heavy on kind of percussive ideas, more of an auxiliary percussion than a straight head drummer almost sometimes.

TINA: To…

MUSIC UP: E. REACT “Patience Slays the Dream.”
CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 12:40ISH… E-React is the hip hop track, it kind of comes out of nowhere on the album.  He is a local DJ, he actually is in Tiffen right now, is the director of instrumental studies, but he’s like big in alternative hip hop and very prominent in that scene, but him and I grew up being in cover bands and trying to record like, trying to do like 90s rock songs.
0:12:56

TINA: And then there is…

MUSIC UP: FROZEN HELLSICLES “Everybody Getting Naughty”
CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 23:00ish JUSTIN MARKERT:  Frozen Hellsicles, Everybody Getting Naughty, is from their album Oh, No, Wait a Minute that we put out, they’re just like, they’ve got this kind of Rolling Stones slash The Who but like with Iggy Pop as a front man kind of a thing….
JUSTIN MARKERT:  Live-- They’re aware of the absurdity of a rock and roll band you know, and at least they’re like, you know strong enough to admit it. I’m standing their at their studio release show and I’m just watching them and I’ve got this grin on my face, I can’t get it off me.  I look around me and everybody’s just smiling.  And it’s good for music to do that instead of having us all crossing our arms and looking all cool, it’s nice for a band to just kind of lighten the room up a little bit.***

TINA: And of course, there’s the occasional cut of Justin’s own music.

MUSIC UP: JUSTIN MARKERT “No Turning Back”

0:17:48 JUSTIN MARKERT:  … I you know, I played all the instruments and I sung all the vocal parts and I think was pretty awesome to do.  I do wish that I could have the time and energy or wasn’t so old and doing adult things to like really put together a band and do what these other guys are doing, but I thought this was good enough. …
 
MUSIC UP AND UNDER.

TINA: That is one thing about this whole record label evolution… There isn’t much time leftover for his own music-making… especially considering the day job he has to have to pay the bills.
CLE0724JustinMarkert2Interview.wav 0:30:25 JUSTIN MARKERT:  And you know we kind of make it very clear that we’re clearly not in it for the money.  The major labels aren’t making money.  Like we don’t expect to strike it rich, like we’re not, you know what I mean, it’s definitely obviously a labor of love.  You know like why would we be doing this other than the fact that we care about this music and we care about these bands?  … And I’ve always been a part of the scene so I’m always out seeing what’s going on.  And there’s almost, there’s too much stuff going on in one day.  Like there’s just so much going on in Cleveland.  Like, I didn’t even know what to do yesterday.

TINA: … And that’s what we found over and over again in Cleveland. It may have this reputation as down and out, a city still caught in the fading dream of the industrial era. But just beneath that surface, there’s a whole lot more energy than you might think—musical and otherwise. Cleveland, it turns out, is a really. Good. Time.
MUSIC UP AND OUT.

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