John Mark on signing Creed with Wind-Up From: "April Leigh" <Tremonticized14@AOL.COM> To: <CREED-DISCUSS@WINDUPLIST.COM> Date: Thu 25 Oct 2001 13:35:17 EDT

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Here is an interview with John Mark, one of the founding people of wind-up (he's at MCA now) and how Creed got signed.  I get this through an independent A&R newsletter (TAXI) I cut out the beginning and end and just got to the part about how he ended up with Wind-Up and so on...For your reading pleasure!
Leigh
   
How did you end up doing A&R?
I was in another band after that first band, and we actually got a little record deal on a label called Grass Records out of New York. It was a little college, indie rock label that had Brainiac. We loved Brainiac, so we signed with their label. That band was called Nectarine. We kind of started out like Sonic Youth meets Pavement, and by the end, we were more like if Ornette Coleman played guitar for the Velvet Underground (laughs). The popularity just diminished. We actually were doing alright for an indie band. We could play some cities and have like a hundred people show up. And then we got more into improv and jazz and did what we thought was really cool music, but no one else agreed (laughter).So then the label was bought by someone. They went from indie distribution to BMG Distribution as we were going further and further out there. The label didn't fit us anymore. I actually went to New York to talk to them about leaving the label. They had long ago fired the person that had signed us. They said that's fine, we have too many bands anyway. So it was very friendly, and I was still booking a couple of their bands. I said, "What are you guys going to do for an A&R person?" They said, "We're looking." I said, "That's what I want to do." I had put together this Tom Petty tribute record that had Everclear and some other rock bands on it--maybe half the bands on there wound up being signed. Everclear was the only one that was big. They said, "Wow, that Tom Petty record sold more than any of our records. Why don't you work for us?" That became WindUp Records. The first band that we signed was Creed, six weeks after I got there I think.
What's the Creed signing story?
They had been sent over to us by Mark Fisher, who works for Bill McGathy, the rock radio promotion guy. Mark Fisher's wife was the head of our radio department. They had already played it for every A&R person in New York. They did a showcase in New York and everyone hated them: "They're like Pearl Jam rip offs. Who wants this shit?" But we didn't know anything about it. We were so out of the loop that we had no idea. Nor did we have any idea that we weren't supposed to be signing rock bands, because that's when everybody was signing electronica. "Rock Is Dead" was the cover of Spin Magazine the week after we signed them. Then the Chemical Brothers came out, and we went, "Oh wow." We didn't know. I was still living in Chicago, basically, and still in a rock band. When you're in a rock band and you tour around, all you hear is classic rock radio, because that's all there is in the Midwest. So you're hearing Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots every day. So to me, that music wasn't dated. It was current. There were four of us at the label that signed all the bands together, and none of the other three people in the signing decision process had any idea of what was going on musically. So we were all just, hey, here's a great band. They're on the radio. McGathy loves them. And they are already selling 300 or 400 records a week just in Tallahassee. It was just out of control -- more than they could handle. They were a band that had done their record at their producer's house. Their manager was a friend of the guy who promoted the radio stations. He put it on the air, and the lines lit up immediately. No one had heard of the band. I think they were playing at like a TGI Fridays because they couldn't even get gigs in town. Their manager also booked a club, so he started putting them on shows. Then they started selling out 500-700 people. We flew down to see them a week after they had just been in New York where every label had seen them except us. We just loved them and said, "Let's do it!" They came to New York the next week, and we signed them there. The next weekend we started the record.
So you didn't know all the other labels had already seen them and passed?
No. We were so out of touch with what was going on, there was no baggage. And not everyone had passed. A couple of labels had said, "We'll do this, but we can't do it until next year. Our schedule is full," and this was in May. We had nothing scheduled at all. We had no releases. This was going to be our only release and we could start now.
Most A&R departments are really concerned with what other labels are doing.
We wouldn't have done it because everyone had passed. Honestly we didn't know anyone at the time, and you hear these songs and . . . I put in the tape and I thought I had accidentally turned on the radio. I thought, is this a tape or is it the radio? I wasn't sure. And then I checked and realized it was the tape and said, "Oh my god."
How many did that first album end up selling?
I'm not sure, 6 million maybe. And the second one sold around 10 or 11 million. It was crazy. Because you say things like, "Oh this will sound good on the radio" when you're mixing it, and you take it out to your car and listen to it in the car trying to get some of the radio feel. Then you realize it's actually going to be on the radio. I worked on records for years that maybe 2,000 people heard.