Best Record Label

While attending Palmetto High School, singer-guitarist Jeff Rollason played in a band called Strangelove, which recorded in some long-forgotten local studio. His next band, the underappreciated Mr. Tasty and the Breadhealers, recorded at Who Brought the Dog? studio. Then they broke up. Two years ago he formed Curious Hair and tried a new approach, recording in his home studio. Seeking musicians to join the Hair, Rollason released a remarkable homemade tape called The Curious Hair Is Not a Band, a sort of audio help-wanted ad. For it he created his own label, Evol Egg Nart (spell it backward while rereading the first sentence of this item). Eventually he decided to try a less formal approach, working with different backing musicians such as Jeff the Space Cowboy. "I always wanted to have my own record label," he says.

At the end of 1997, Rollason released two cassettes of Jeff the Space Cowboy songs under the Evol Egg Nart imprimatur. "I wanted to work with other musicians," he says, "and I thought about samplers, compilations. But we'd never get around to recording. You'd have to have ten tracks done before you could release anything." To avoid this he came up with the idea of releasing a monthly cassingle. "If an artist was chosen to be, say, Miss May, we had a deadline," he explains. "I mean, it would have to be finished by May, right?" He recorded the singles on his eight-track analog gear in the bedroom of his Perrine-area home.

Each month of the past year, these little gems, about 100 copies of each, were given away at local concerts, in envelopes with lyric sheets, notes, gew-gaws. Featured artists: local veteran Matthew Sabatella (Broken Spectacles); the legendary Rat Bastard (To Live and Shave in L.A., the Laundry Room Squelchers); Maria Marocka (the Elysian); Amanda Green (probably violating her Y&T Music contract); Joce Leyva (of Al's Not Well fame); Alex Diaz (of Ho Chi Minh); newcomer from L.A. Barbara Ann; former local, now Portland-based Raul Mendez; and Robbie Gennet (Rudy, Seven Mary Three). All these cassingles are now in the hands of music lovers. Which is something Sony can't say about its releases. (Taking matters a step further, Rollason and Sabatella recently compiled all twelve singles on CD and are offering the music free via compressed-sound download at www.slipstreampresents.com.)