How helping a classmate sparked a local music revolution
Tony Beram didn’t set out to create a label that would define the outer fringes of the Phoenix music scene as it existed in the 1980s.
It was just another way of doing everything he could to get the word out on a schoolmate’s band he’d started managing at 16.
“Most of what I did at that time was just part of what I thought were my duties as the manager of this band,” Beram says.
“I was trying to get them shows, trying to get things happening for them. And I actually started the label as a vehicle to try to get a record out for them.”
His classmate’s band was called Detente — at least initially.
By 1981, the year he launched Placebo Records with two members of that band (Mark Bycroft and Greg Hynes), they’d changed their name to Teds and traded Southern rock for New Wave.
Beram, who was 19 at the time, had changed his name as well — to Tony Victor.
He’d already been promoting concerts by that point through Mersey Productions.
“In those days, it was really hard to find a place to play if you were in a band or managing a band that played primarily original material in Phoenix,” Beram says.
“Most of the live venues wanted a band that would get up and play kind of 45 minutes of covers, take a break for 15 minutes, then get up and do another 45 minutes and kind of play a 9-to-1 thing.” Teds were not that kind of band. “It was hard to get an original band any kind of attention,” Beram says. “So that was the impetus for me to start those early businesses.”
How Placebo Records got started in Phoenix
Placebo’s first release was either “Blatant Localism,” a landmark six-song seven-inch by Arizona skate-punk legends Jodie Foster’s Army (JFA) or “The Eighties Are Over” by Teds.
There’s some debate over the timing of those two releases.
Having managed both bands, Beram seems convinced it was the JFA release, to which Maximumrocknroll reacted: “The songs are fast, catchy and pretty damn funny (”Beach Blanket BongOut”). Check it out today, and skate your troubles away.”
Beram says Teds were “intended to be the first record,” but he’d sent them to Los Angeles to do the record with his older brother Eddie, a session musician who’d toured with the Everly Brothers, and it took a couple of trips.
“In the meantime, I took JFA into a local studio called Desert Sounds with an old surf guitarist named Sandy Lamont, which was perfect for JFA to have an engineer that had experience with that sound,” Beram says.
“But anyway, I didn’t have a lot of money and JFA worked fast. They cranked out that first record in a day or two. And it ended up coming out first in September of 1981.”
‘It ended up being a pretty iconic record’
It was an instant hit — at least in terms of independent-label punk.
“Placebo was able to get it out there to college radio stations,” Beram says. “And it just seemed like every market in the country had a little scene of skaters that was ready to receive this. So it happened pretty quickly for them.”
“Blatant Localism” would go on to be regarded as a hugely influential and important record.
“We didn’t obviously know it at the time, but that turned out to be, I think, the first skate-punk record,” Beram says.
“It’s cited by lots of people as an influence on their careers, both musicians and skaters. So yeah, it ended up being a pretty iconic record.”
The following year brought “Amuck,” the first in a three-album series of landmark local-music comps that Beram says was “all the bands that I could find and get a good recording of that were in Phoenix at that time.”
It features JFA, Meat Puppets, Paris 1942 (a local group that featured Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground), Sun City Girls, Victory Acres, Tone Set, Killer Pussy, Dali’s Daughter and Teds, among others.
‘There’s a lot of wild and crazy weird stuff going on in Arizona’
Tom Reardon, a local journalist whose band the Father Figures features JFA’s Michael Cornelius, says he loves the way the scene here comes across on that first compilation as “a bunch of weirdos” all doing their own thing.
“It kind of cemented the idea that, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of wild and crazy weird stuff going on in Arizona,” Reardon says. “And I think, for me, as a musician, it said, ‘Just do what you feel.’”
That compilation marked the first appearance on Placebo by Sun City Girls, an experimental group that would become one of the label’s most-recorded acts.
To Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls, “Amuck” felt like a night at Mad Gardens, as people on the scene referred to Madison Square Garden, a space at 27th and Van Buren streets where Beram thinks he may have done as many as 100 shows.
“You could go in there and see a noise band followed by a three-chord punk group,” Bishop says.
“Then you’d see a psychedelic thing, beat poetry or maybe early synth-pop. It was all over the place. Whether it was considered punk or noisy or experimental or whatever, avant-garde, it was outside the realm of normal at the time.”
‘It was an acquired taste’
Placebo played a crucial “niche role,” Bishop says, in the scene that developed around the label and those concerts at Mad Gardens.
“It was an acquired taste,” he says. “Anything experimental or punk or out of the ordinary is only gonna translate to a certain amount of people at any given time. So for all of us who were looking for something different and unique or a vehicle to express ourselves, it was great.”
Sun City Girls’ first album on Placebo, a self-titled effort, was released in 1984. That same year brought the first release by Mighty Sphincter, another group that would become one of the label’s mostrecorded acts.
Bishop says Placebo played the “main role” in getting Sun City Girls’ music out there to the world outside Mad Gardens.
“Were we the kind of band that would have gone looking for another label outside Phoenix if Placebo wasn’t here? Would we have moved somewhere? We can’t answer those questions. We can just stay with the fact that Placebo was here and those guys were willing to release our music. So we had a start. We had something to light the fire,” he said.
Placebo also bought the rights to two iconic Phoenix punk releases of the prePlacebo era by Feederz and the Brainz, reissuing both records.
Reardon says Placebo was “a point of pride” for Phoenix at a time when it could feel like the city was living in the shadow of Los Angeles.
“It was our label,” he says. “And these were our bands. We could say, ‘This is ours.’ I remember when somebody hipped me to the fact that I could go and buy a JFA record. I was like, ‘What?!”
The operation at Placebo was as DIY as DIY can be.
“I just sat there and looked up the addresses of college radio stations, then I would take records and stuff them in envelopes and ship them to these stations with a note, just asking them to play it,” Beram says.
“By early ‘83, we had a list of 100some stations that when we pressed something, we’d just automatically go through that list and stuff those records into envelopes.”
Most stations were happy to be getting free music.
“You know, some of them were kids themselves,” Beram says. “They might have been older than me. But they were very young and happy to receive new stuff.”
At first, the focus was on local talent — “because there was so much of it.”
In 1985, Placebo started branching out into non-local music, releasing a self-titled EP by Artless and “Dry Lungs (A Compilation of Industrial Music From Around The World),” the first in a series that found them collaborating with New York industrial artist Paul Lemos.
In 1987, they released “Kill Eugene” by New York-based avant-garde jazz eccentric Eugene Chadbourne.
Releasing weird outsider music from another city didn’t necessarily lead to huge financial windfalls.
“I think I always thought that we were on the verge of something,” Beram says.
‘I’m busy. I can do other things’
Then in the late 1980s, a couple of big distributors went out of business.
“We never got paid for whatever the inventory that we had out to them at the time was,” Beram says. “And that hurt.”
It had been a really busy decade, he was tired and he didn’t have a lot to show for it.
So he took the advice of the brother who’d played with the Everly Brothers who said, “If you don’t make it in the music business by the time you’re 30, you’ve got to think about doing something else.”
He took the skills he’d developed at Placebo and Mersey Productions and applied them to a new career, starting a ticketing company he called Western States Ticket Service, which does “millions and millions of dollars worth of business every year.”
The last titles released on Placebo hit the streets in 1988. He kept promoting shows and doing work with JFA until a European tour he’d booked for JFA was derailed by the Gulf War.
“That was kind of it for me,” he says. “When that got scrapped, it was like well, you know, I’m busy. I can do other things.”