The Indies: Beatnik Turtle Coaches On Coming Out Of Your Shell

Every few months an act breaks out of indie rock obscurity by intentionally sharing its music for free on peer-to-peer networks and blogs. But Chicago's Beatnik Turtle is dishing out another kind of freebie to the online community: advice.

Beatnik Turtle, a longtime working bar band with a slight novelty streak (think They Might Be Giants, Barenaked Ladies), launched its "Indie Band Survival Guide" about two months ago. Spearheaded by lead vocalist Jason Feehan and horn/flute player Randy Chertkow, the project has been a couple of years in the making.

A few days after launching the guide at beatnikturtle.com, Stanford law professor and frequent Wired magazine contributor Lawrence Lessig name-checked the site on his blog. It was a career highlight for Chertkow, who cites Lessig's "Free Culture," a book that looks at the intersection of new technologies and old copyright laws, as a prime influence on the band's Web guide.

The members of Beatnik Turtle have split the guide into about a dozen chapters, looking at everything from major-label contracts (they're against them) to file sharing (they're for it) and physical distribution (their expectations are low). Perhaps what's most notable about the guide, however, is that it strives to offer practical advice based on the experiences of an everyday band—most members of the eight-person group have a day job and a family.

"This guide has always been bubbling under the surface," Feehan says. "There's no sense for someone to reinvent the wheel. You can learn from our mistakes."

Chertkow says he purchased dozens of how-to guides while writing for the Web site but didn't find many that he believed related to his band. He also says he never thought about writing a book and pitching it to publishers, but if the blog community demands a paper version, he will heed the call.

"I bought a whole stack of books for research, and none of what's on our site was in one place, especially from the point of view of a band that isn't necessarily looking to find a big label," he says. "A lot of them are targeted at making your big break. From our point of view, we wanted to share what we learned, and we don't think we can charge for that. This is a living document."

To that end, the band will add new observations regularly. All chapters are annotated and linked to other sources, and the act is also working on an interviews section. It recently completed a Q&A with Bob Koester, who runs Chicago's Jazz Record Mart.

Chertkow says he hasn't received many e-mails about the guide, but he says he knows it's being read. He searches for it, and is happy to see some Beatnik Turtle work getting shared online.

"Rather than talking to us, people are just blogging about it," Chertkow says.



SALE SALE SALE: How tough are times for indie retailers? Chicago's Reckless Records found a storewide sale, in which every product that has arrived at the store in the past six months was tagged for 30% off, didn't generate a significant increase in foot traffic.

Despite this, head buyer Brett Grossman says that overall things are going well at Reckless, and that weather conditions may have contributed to the low turnout. He adds that the sale was far from "extreme" for the store, which at one time regularly staged 50% off sales to blow out inventory.

"I like the 50% [sale]," Grossman says, "but the purpose of this sale was more of an advertisement rather than trying to achieve a loss of inventory."



ETC.: RED Distribution in New York has re-signed Los Angeles-based Immortal Records. Sources say the deal keeps the label at RED for another three years. Immortal's roster includes rock/emo acts Scary Kids and Waking Ashland. ••••