Vinyl Frontier

You wouldn’t guess from the black Beachland Ballroom T-shirt, featuring an illustration by Cleveland cartoonist Derf, but Vince Slusarz was a corporate bigwig not so long ago. For almost 25 years, Slusarz worked for Newbury-based Kinetico Incorporated, a plastics-manufacturing company. He liked his job as chief operations officer. But after the company was sold in 2006, a new CEO came in, eventually eliminating his position. Unemployed at 51, Slusarz suddenly had lots of time for soul-searching.

“I had to ask myself, ‘What do I want to do with my life,'” he says.
“I could go work for someone else, but that didn’t appeal to me. I’d
always wanted to start a business. I did go through the whole ‘What do
you like?’ thing. I like beer, but there are too many people making
beer. I looked at restaurants, but that seemed like a tough
business.”

A muse appeared in the form of a new turntable. He bought one for
himself and gave his old one to his 19-year-old daughter, who told him
that all her friends were buying turntables with USB ports so that they
could download music onto their computers. That got him thinking.
Pressing records, he figured, wouldn’t be a huge departure from his
plastics-manufacturing experience.

When his friends Mark Leddy and Cindy Barber, co-owners of the
Beachland Ballroom, heard about his interest in starting a
record-pressing operation, they were enthusiastic and encouraging. Exit
Stencil, a studio and record label just down the block from the
Collinwood club, was looking to start pressing titles on vinyl, and
Music Saves, an indie record shop next door, regularly stocked new
vinyl. (A used-record shop, Blue Arrow, is also located near the
club).

In July 2008, Slusarz visited Musicol Recording in Columbus. He
liked what he saw, but the owners weren’t interested in selling their
equipment. Next, he sent e-mails to four other plants. One said no and
two didn’t respond. But the owners of Dynamic Assets in New Jersey
replied and said they were thinking about selling.

“It was pure serendipity,” says Slusarz. “If it had been a month
earlier or later, I would have missed the opportunity.”

He flew to New Jersey and checked out the plant. He then put
together a business plan, made an offer and closed the deal. Then came
the hard part — moving the business here, to an old warehouse
near Superior.

“I wanted to do it in Cleveland,” he says. “I was born in Cleveland,
and I think it’s important to do things in the city.” The relocation
required six flatbed semis and a veritable fleet of lifts and tools
designed for moving big machinery. The whole operation took about three
months to get up and running.

Slusarz recruited his friend Dan Greathouse, who had worked in
molding at Kinetico, to help get the heavy equipment working. “He loves
machinery and is turned on by the whole thing,” says Slusarz. “If he
hadn’t been on board, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

Gotta Grove Records pressed its first album in late August: a
Freedom/Deathers split 12-inch for the local bands’ CD-release
party.

SLUSARZ VISITED six different plants to see how other operations
run. He’s also learned that it’s “a small, close-knit business.”

Perhaps that’s because pressing vinyl is an art form. The process
requires precision: Raw vinyl goes into a hopper, where it’s melted
down to the size of a hockey puck. The labels are baked on and a press
makes the record, slides it back and trims it. The machines Slusarz
bought will produce 700 to 800 albums a day. The two seven-inch vinyl
machines are rusted and corroded and haven’t run in years, but Slusarz
plans to convert a 12-inch machine to cut seven-inches, something he
hopes to have sorted out before the year’s end.

His timing couldn’t be better. Unlike CD sales, vinyl has steadily
risen over the past decade. According to Nielsen SoundScan figures,
year-to-date vinyl sales for 2009 stand at 2 million — a 37
percent increase over last year’s. While CD sales continue to plummet,
vinyl sales might just save what’s left of the music business.

“Vinyl has come a long way from the period in the ’90s when it was a
format that was almost exclusively used by underground rock bands and
DJ-oriented genres,” says Billboard‘s Glenn Peoples. “Many years
passed when most artists — especially mainstream artists —
did not have vinyl releases. Though it gained momentum toward the end
of the decade, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s, when new releases of all
stripes were being released on vinyl, when it was seen as a purer way
to experience music in an era of near-ubiquitous digital music. Labels
started offering MP3 downloads with vinyl purchases, thus creating a
great digital-physical combination. Today, consumers can find vinyl in
both mass merchants and the usual independent stores.”

Matt Earley, a music-industry veteran based in Columbus, agrees. He
was looking to buy a pressing plant at the same time as Slusarz. But
after learning he’d been beaten to the punch, he tracked Slusarz down.
Earley is handling Gotta Groove’s graphics and artwork. He thinks that
CDs were doomed from the start.

“The jewel case was never a sexy package,” he says. “Records are
like a piece of art. In particular, there’s a younger generation that’s
rediscovering them. When I go in the store on my street, the owner is
always telling me that it’s the younger customers who are buying the
vinyl and the older ones who are buying the CDs, which is completely
ass-backwards. Albums have a sense of value that CDs don’t.”

Earley says there’s always been “a select group” that goes for the
sound quality. But he doesn’t think they’re the ones fueling the
resurgence.

“In the past two years, we’ve really noticed tremendous growth, and
part of that is because the labels are doing less licensing and now
putting their own vinyl out,” he says. “A few years ago, they didn’t
even put out everything on vinyl. Now, the vinyl sometimes comes out
before the CD. Animal Collective put their last record out first on
vinyl and then put it out on CD.”

At indie record shops like My Mind’s Eye in Lakewood, you’ll find
more vinyl releases than CDs. In fact, some indie bands are releasing
their albums on vinyl only and including download cards so you can get
digital copies for your computer and portable players. For independent
bands, pressing on vinyl is essential, even if it is more costly than
CDs.

“When I see bands touring with CDs, I just want to ask what they’re
doing,” says Ken Janssen, who plays in the local rock act the Hot Rails
and handles some of the Beachland’s booking. “Nobody cares about [CDs].
They’re coasters. There was a local band that played the Beachland and
was charging $12 for their CD. Even FYE knows that’s a bad idea. Vinyl
is the way to go. You got the download codes on there, and people just
want something to hold. Vinyl is way better. I think Gotta Groove is
going to do really well from the beginning.”

So far, local bands have gravitated to the plant. Drummer, the band
featuring the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, enlisted Gotta Groove to
print the vinyl version of its debut album. Local singer-songwriter
Sloth did a limited, 100-copy pressing of his experimental Messages
in Samsara through Gotta Groove, packaging it in a hand-painted
cover as well.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum president Terry Stewart is
hoping the museum can collaborate with Gotta Groove too.

“I think it’s exciting for a city that has such a long musical
legacy,” says Stewart, who estimates his vinyl collection is “about a
half million” and includes the first album he ever bought in 1948. “The
fact that we now have one of the few vinyl pressing plants in America
and it’s right across the street from Ante Up Audio, a state-of-the-
art recording studio, gives a certain cache to Cleveland. The museum is
hoping to do something and start a Rock Hall label. A lot of our
inductees and legacy artists don’t have labels anymore, and it’d be
great if, while they were in town, they could cut two sides, because
I’d really want to do 45s. I have to put together a business plan. It’s
all pie in the sky stuff at this point.”

THERE HAVE BEEN OBSTACLES,of course. Recently, Slusarz and
Greathouse had to contend with a burst water pipe that nearly wiped out
all their progress. In the boiler room, you can still see the gaping
hole in the floor where the burst pipe shot up a geyser. “We heard
someone say water was coming off the roof,” says Slusarz. “The water
main broke and lifted concrete and the boiler up; the amount of
pressure was huge. Water shot up through the roof and while it’s been
repaired, it set us back about a week.”

Another challenge was much more specific to the industry.

While Slusarz has had to farm some jobs out of the shop, he hopes
eventually to do everything in-house and has signed a contract with
Clint Holley, a local singer-songwriter and soundman, to do his vinyl
mastering. For this process, the audio is cut onto a lacquer plate
using a specialized machine called a mastering lathe. The lathe takes
the electrical energy of the digital or analog recording and turns it
back into mechanical energy as a needle cuts a groove into a record,
which is then sent to a stamper.

Because only 700 lathes were ever made, the last in 1984, Holley had
to do some research before he found a guy who would make him one
­— 82-year-old Albert Grundy, who lives on Long Island.
Holley put up $30,000 to have the tool made.

“This is something you can’t do in your basement,” says Holley. “I
think it’s cool that we can look beyond Cleveland and bring attention
to the city in terms of the music. I think [Gotta Groove] lets
Cleveland be on the map, especially since there are only 11 plants in
the country still doing this. Vinyl is coming back because of the
uncertainty of what the next format will be. I tell people that when
you buy an MP3 online, it has zero value. There will never be a used
MP3 store. Kids are finding out the artwork has an aesthetic to it and
there’s a certain quality about playing a record.”

Slusarz is hoping that’s the case.

“As I looked at this business, I thought it’s a lot of capital and
risk, but right now, it’s still a growing segment of the market,” he
says. “And it’s survived all these formats and all these years. If you
think about it, you go, ‘OK. I want something physical that represents
music.’ What are you going to turn to?”

“It will be interesting to see how it all unfolds,” he admits.
“We’ve gotten some interest from major labels simply because things are
so busy. [Other vinyl plants are] backed up by two months. So if you
order something today, you’ll be lucky to get it two months from now.
We’re not in that situation. What we’re hoping to do with our
manufacturing background — and I’m sure it won’t be easy —
is put a process into place that gets records out quicker than that and
still satisfies customers. Our goal is to be a quality shop. Not just
in terms of the record itself but in terms of the service that
customers get.”

That much, at least, is the same as it was in his former gig as a
plastics executive. This new venture is just a lot cooler.

“I have some gas left in the tank,” he says. “If I don’t do it now,
I might never do it. It’s a unique opportunity. It’s something I love.
It’s worth a shot. Let’s see what happens.”

jniesel@clevescene.com

This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2009.