ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 13, 1996 TAG: 9612130009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL STASHENKO ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bruce Iglauer says he started recording blues musicians because he admired their work, not their ability to make money.
When he took his first artist into a recording studio, the juke joint legend Hound Dog Taylor and his HouseRockers, his aspirations were to make one album by each of the Chicago blues bands he liked.
How serendipitous, then, that he chose ``Alligator'' as the name of his fledgling record company.
``Later, I found out in black slang from the '30s that an `alligator' was a music fan but not a musician himself,'' he said. ``I am certainly a nonmusician.''
But 25 years and 175 albums later, Iglauer has proved himself a shrewd judge of talent and commercial viability in what was at first an ignored, but recently a hotly competitive, segment of the music industry.
Most of the best American blues players in the past quarter century have appeared on Alligator, including Son Seals, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, James Cotton, Lonnie Brooks, Albert Collins, Koko Taylor, ``Gatemouth'' Brown and Luther Allison.
Twenty-eight Alligator albums have been nominated for Grammy Awards. Two won - Clifton Chenier's ``I'm Here'' in 1982 and ``Showdown,'' a 1985 collaboration between Collins, Robert Cray and Johnny Copeland.
The Chicago-based label also has sustained the careers of less mainstream acts like Saffire - The Uppity Blues Women and Michael Hill's Blues Mob and given listeners access to largely forgotten figures like Billy Boy Arnold and Charlie Musselwhite.
Typically, the label's releases sell only in the tens of thousands of copies each, but Iglauer said it has been enough.
``The majority of the records on the label have made some kind of profit - sometimes an extremely modest profit,'' he said. ``One thing I am proud of - and I came from an era in which capitalism was regarded as evil - is that I have learned to be a good businessman and learned to play that game. I pay amongst the most generous royalties in the record business.''
A Cincinnati native, Iglauer was bitten by the blues bug in 1966 while he was a student at Lawrence College in Wisconsin when he saw Mississippi Fred McDowell perform.
By 1971, he was a shipping clerk for Delmark Records in Chicago, which produced some of the best blues records of the 1960s with Magic Sam and Junior Wells. After failing to persuade Delmark to record Taylor and the HouseRockers, Iglauer used most of a $2,500 inheritance from his grandfather to record the band himself.
An album by Big Walter Horton followed in 1972 and one of Seals' most highly regarded albums appeared in 1973. The next year brought another Hound Dog Taylor release and the critically acclaimed ``Somebody Loan Me a Dime'' by Fenton Robinson.
The label was off and running.
Iglauer, meantime, promoted his records in a new way. Instead of aiming for the black- and urban-oriented radio outlets where blues had usually been played, Iglauer sent his records to white-oriented rock stations.
``I wanted to reach beyond the hard-core blues fans and turn on new people to the music,'' he said. ``Luckily, I started the label at a time when disc jockeys were programming their own shows. That was the peak of progressive rock radio. Had I started a few years later, I wouldn't have had the success I did.''
Iglauer takes no credit for being innovative in the way he selected or recorded the artists that established Alligator during the first decade. Most were veteran performers who had been around since the 1960s. When recording them, he said he aimed for a clean, balanced sound that captured as much as possible what these savvy performers were like live.
``I think I look more important in retrospect than I should,'' he said.
Seals, who just marked 23 years with the label, said Alligator has gotten bigger but Iglauer, now 49, hasn't changed.
``From the beginning, all we did was a handshake deal,'' Seals said. ``Even though he has gotten to the point where he is big business, he thinks with a small-business mentality.''
Alligator continues to diligently promote its releases and artists, said Corey Harris, a new act on the label.
``It's definitely a good feeling to go to a gig and they know who I am,'' he said. ``They know about me. It shows that Alligator has been doing its job.''
If there is a complaint about Alligator, it's that the label's releases have sometimes sounded too polished and slick for the blues, an idiom usually known for raw, forceful singing and musicianship.
Iglauer, who produces many of Alligator's releases himself, bristles at the criticism.
``Raw is good. Out of tune is bad,'' he said. ``A live feeling is good, not having a full dynamic range because you don't have a mike on the cymbals is bad. If people sit down with our records, they will find them as gutsy and live-feeling now as in 1975.''
Ironically, Alligator's success is one reason why the blues industry has become so competitive. If the major labels are not issuing blues recordings directly, like Capitol, Epic and Columbia, they've set up subsidiaries to do so, such as Virgin's PointBlank label, Sony's Legacy and OKeh records and Verve's Gitanes label.
And Alligator is far from alone on the independence blues label front. Blind Pig, Rounder and Arhoolie are among several companies that have found a niche, however tenuous, in the market.
It's all meant an explosion in the blues recordings available to Americans since the late 1980s - too many, according to Iglauer. He said he would not be surprised if some of the majors' subsidiaries folded because of the glutted market.
The blues must reinvigorate - if not reinvent - itself to thrive in the next century, Iglauer said.
``At this point, a new body of material must be established as blues standards,'' he said. ``It's got to speak to a contemporary audience in terms of its lyrics. I think the blues has to incorporate elements of other kinds of music - rap and funk and more contemporary types of rock 'n' roll. It has got to keep sucking in other kinds of music.
``I don't want blues to be the next Dixieland jazz,'' he said. ``And I can't become an old fogey, either.''
LENGTH: Long : 116 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. For the past 25 years, most of the best Americanby CNBblues players have appeared on Bruce Iglauer's Alligator label.
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