CARYN ROSE LLC
BRADENTON, FLORIDA

jukeboxgraduate.com is owned and operated by Caryn Rose. Caryn Rose began her writing career in 1980, when she tried to convince her high school newspaper editor to run an article she’d written defending punk rock. This would inspire her to take matters into her own hands during the 80’s DIY publishing revolution. The Who fanzine she helped initiate, Posted on 12 June 2012 by Caryn Rose I moved to Israel in the summer of 1988. The specific reasons why are complicated and irrelevant now, mostly; I was young and wanted an adventure. I thought it would all work out okay, and it did. Miraculously, despite only knowing how to say “orange juice” in Hebrew, I got a job within two weeks after arriving. The ad in the Jerusalem Post said “Wanted: Young person with good English and interest in popular music.” The job was Label Manager of Warner/Elektra/Atlantic (which included Geffen & MCA at the time), and since I had been stumbling around the music business before I moved to the Middle East, and had good English, I got the job. In Israel, being the label manager meant weeding through the international roster and figuring out what would sell in my territory and what wouldn’t, which then translated into what we manufactured locally (which meant the price was lower) as opposed to what we imported from Europe. Sometimes a “release” was importing 50 albums from Germany, and seeing if anyone cared. It is a small market: a gold record is 20,000 albums, and that was very, very hard to achieve. (There is also no concept of a singles market; instead, compilation albums still sold briskly.) One of the first things I was told when I started my job was that there were two types of music that weren’t popular in Israel: “Black music” and heavy metal, and that I needed to avoid those. But the advent of MTV and changing musical tastes everywhere also meant Israel, and Prince and Tracy Chapman sold well like they did everywhere. But an Atlantic box set tanked while the soundtrack to I wanted to sell records, so I mostly tried to take the advice of people who had lived there for years, but the indie-loving music fan in me followed my heart and my gut. I also went out a lot, helping my friend Liron (who’s in the picture above) DJ at the main rock club in Tel Aviv (which was called Roxanne, after the Police song – I still can’t listen to it), so I saw what kids were actually responding to and asking for, things like Jane’s Addiction and Guns ‘n’ Roses and Pearl Jam. We weren’t selling tens of thousands of those records yet, but I knew there was an audience for things that sounded different. (Then again, Nick Cave was enormously popular in Israel, as were many of the 4AD bands, for example.) There were smaller breaks I was also proud of, just getting a foothold for some artists, getting one or two people to champion an artist everyone told me wouldn’t sell felt like an enormous success sometimes. And I remain enormously proud of the fact that we sold enough R.E.M. records to rate them coming over for a promo tour during I got Mojo and the NME and Melody Maker couried over every week, and had video tapes from the States coming in, and kept up with things better than you would think in the days where there was no internet. My friends would send me mix tapes and important records, and I would beg the Warner people I talked with (okay, sent faxes and telexes to) to get me records that were on other labels, and they would occasionally be able to help me out. You would get on a plane when you absolutely had to see a band, you would figure out how to do it despite how crazy expensive it was and how little money you actually made. This meant I never got to see Nirvana, had to miss Pearl Jam opening for U2 in Rome, but did see the Stone Roses in Paris and U2 at Wembley during Zooropa. You had friends who were music crazy, as music crazy as any of my friends in London or New York or Chicago. And every time a friend went abroad, you gave them dollars that you bought on the black market from the candy store on Ben Yehuda St. and a list of records or t-shirts you wanted them to buy. Sometimes it was as simple as, “Just get me something cool.” I had to fight hard to justify releasing the record. My manager disagreed (he disagreed with just about everything I released, including the records that would later be huge sellers). He made a case in the weekly meeting that this wasn’t the kind of music that was popular here, that only a handful of DJ’s and music writers would care about the record. I asked him how on earth we would ever break anything if we waited for it to become popular. (This was an argument we had a lot.) , and it got enough attention from the right people to keep me out of hot water. We would play “Gentleman” at Roxane at night and the kids who sing along to it just like “Been Caught Stealing” and “Paradise City” and “Evenflow”. It helped that everyone on staff, including our PR people and the guys who worked in the warehouse, loved the record. It was one of those small successes that made me smile. So this week, when the Whigs are heading to Israel, I feel a particular kind of pride and happiness, that I helped kickstart a connection. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but at least I helped open the door.