New book captures crescendo, and crash, of Bloodshot Records

In 1991, Rob Miller packed up his bags, his records and his memories and moved from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Chicago as an attempt to escape music.

“Obviously, my plan didn’t work out so well,” Miller joked during a recent Zoom conversation to discuss his new memoir, “The Hours Are Long But the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music,” (out Nov. 25 from the University of Illinois Press).

Ultimately, his escape plan would open a new door to running one of the city’s most prominent independent music labels, Bloodshot Records, until a scandal mostly shuttered it.

In his mid-20s at the time, Miller had already spent several years hustling as a college radio host, record store clerk, fanzine journalist and production manager — a job that entailed everything from fixing pyrotechnic fails at a Flaming Lips show, to confiscating handguns at LL Cool J’s gig, to encouraging a nervous Patti Smith to take the stage.

He was burnt out, disillusioned and wanted out. He figured Chicago was his getaway.

But just two years later, by 1993, Miller co-founded Bloodshot with Nan Warshaw and Eric Babcock, an idea they hatched on a cocktail napkin and with personal investments of $2,000 each.

Soon, the label became ground zero for a growing insurgent country scene, releasing more than 300 albums from its former offices at 3039 W. Irving Park Road and organizing thousands of tour dates over its 28 years for lynchpin talents such as Neko Case, Old 97’s, Alejandro Escovedo, Lydia Loveless and Justin Townes Earle.

Across 299 pages with highly entertaining footnotes and appendices (see: “The greatest hits from the demo wall of shame”), Miller recalls his three-decade journey through music, how he helped grow a prominent record label and, ultimately, how it came crashing down. He recollects his trials and tribulations with quick-witted, Gonzo-like detail, coming back to a main tenet he shares in the very first pages of the book: “I love music.”

Like any good record, the book is divided into Side A and Side B, which make up two distinct acts in the pages. Side A is “everything that built up to the label,” he said, including the foundation of growing up in Detroit alienated from pop culture (“It was a party town, and I had not gotten an invitation,” he writes) to find belonging in bands like Black Flag and Talking Heads. It navigates through Miller moving to Roscoe Village and picking up gigs as a contract painter and maintenance worker while laying down the seeds for the indie punk-country label at a time when Chicago was heavily focused on the blues and rock.

Still, he opined that Bloodshot could have only found its footing in a music hub like Chicago. “I've maintained since the beginning that we never would have thrived anywhere else,” he reaffirmed.

Other Side A passages recount cold calling artists to be on the initial “For A Life of Sin” compilation (Robbie Fulks was the first to agree) to hiring Kelly Hogan to work the desk before realizing she could sing. (“What the everlasting f—- is this person doing working other people's music?" he recalled thinking.)

Side A ends in 1998 at one of the label’s infamous SXSW shows where Alejandro Escovedo is announced as a Bloodshot artist for the first time and Miller learns an important lesson. “This room of 2,000 people erupted to see this amazing artist who was now looking to us to be the stewards of his art,” he recalled. “And I was just overcome with this sense of I gotta take this seriously.”

Side B offers a more pragmatic look at the record business and what it takes to run a label, plus “the decisions we made or didn’t make,” Miller shared in our conversation, noting that as the label took off, the team stayed committed to remaining fiercely independent. “We had a string of records do really well. And then all of a sudden we had major label goons be like, you need to get chrome furniture and potted plants and a nicer office,” Miller added in an interview. “But it didn’t seem right. My love of Black Flag and George Carlin made me very suspicious of these people.”

In the section, Miller tells tales of how he kept the label going through the 2008 economic crash (he wrote a “thanks for everything” press release as he considered shuttering), and how he and his partners waded through shifting music consumer preferences like Napster and streaming services. They also had to overcome tragedy, such as a 2009 bus crash involving the band Scotland Yard Gospel Choir that resulted in severe injuries and huge bills.

The idea of writing a book about running a label had come up repeatedly for 20 years. For the former English major, it was a dream gig, but Miller admitted that he struggled with how to fully tell the story at first. “To me, a history of Bloodshot would be boring and limiting. It would be exclusive as opposed to inclusive. And it wasn’t something I was really interested in,” he said.

When he started writing in earnest in 2018, the vibe of the book project was “more of a lighthearted, how to run an indie label for dummies” kind of story, as he describes it. But then, scandal hit a year later, in 2019, when label artist Lydia Loveless brought sexual harassment allegations against Warshaw’s domestic partner, who did not work for the label but often attended events.

Warshaw resigned, saying on social media at the time that she did not want the allegations to “be a negative distraction from the amazing work” the label and its bands were doing. (When reached for comment, Warshaw said she had not yet read Miller’s book.)

Additional allegations of unpaid royalties started to emerge in 2020, and Miller eventually shut down operations a year later. (Babcock had left many years prior.) “That took up all my brain space [with] all the lawyers and accountants and just a lot of tawdry ugliness,” he said, adding it also delayed progress on the book. “There were a couple of years of just absolute shell shock of just how astonishingly fast something you work so hard for your adult life can disappear because of something that was just absolutely out of your hands.”

Even so, throughout 2020 and 2021, he was still going into the office, “fulfilling mail orders, trying to get as much money out to the artists as I possibly could as everything was falling apart around us.”

Miller admitted that the fallout “made it impossible to carry on,” even though he added that “myself and the staff and most of the artists wanted to give it one hell of a try.” Instead, the label was sold in 2021 to the global investment group Exceleration Music, which Variety says “owns the catalogs of or has strategic partnerships with other legacy labels like Alligator Records and Kill Rock Stars.” When pressed on the new owners, who have been issuing additional releases and archival works in the years since, Miller said, “I have absolutely no comment. I genuinely and sincerely have no idea what they're doing.”

In his memoir, Miller only briefly touches on what he called “the ugliness at the end,” conceding, “I just didn't want the book to be about that. It’s pretty bleak, and that’s not what music ever was for me, a bummer.” Rather he wants readers to feel “uplifted” by what independent music communities provide. As he said, “I may come off as Eeyore-ish but at the heart of anyone who runs an independent label or bookstore, you’re an optimist. You believe in this stuff.”

Today, as Miller focuses on his writing and splitting time between Chicago and his cabin in Michigan, his advice for anyone who wants to start a label is “don’t.” But he adds a caveat. “If you hear that and think that guy’s full of s—-, I can do it, then exactly, you should do it,” he said, comparing it to the same contrarian mindframe he had years ago. “I had no idea what we were getting into, but that just freed us up to do a lot of stuff that worked.”