The story of Terry Tolkin’s record label, No. 6 Records, has been somewhat lost amidst the nostalgic hosannas for mid- to late-90s indie rock. A new compilation of No. 6’s 7-inch output, titled Speed Dating [No. 6], will hopefully change all that.
Speed Dating has the feel of a great lost mix tape. If you think about it, a 7-inch is basically a band’s thesis statement. Speed Dating captures that headlong rush of great pop ideas —the fizz and pop— many times over. Stylistically restless but aesthetically consistent, Speed Dating is also a reminder of a more innocent time, when a band could make its mark with an A-side and a record label’s careful connoisseurship still meant something.
Luna’s Dean Wareham once said of Terry, “You meet two kinds of people at major labels —those who live for music, and those who live off music. Terry lived for music.”
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PICTURED: TERRY WITH DEAN WAREHAM, 23RD ST. PHOTO COURTESY HOWARD THOMPSON
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Originally a Deadhead from New City in Rockland County, Terry’s musical paradigm was forever shifted in 1978 when he moved to NYC. Turned on to punk rock by his boyfriend, who ran a small record label, Terry was enlisted to take records around to Ed Bahlman’s influential 99 Records on Macdougal.
It didn’t take long for Bahlman to offer Tolkin a job. From there, he became involved with the day-to-day operations at the store and at Bahlman’s label, 99,* home to ESG, Liquid Liquid, the Bush Tetras and Glenn Branca, among others. At this time, he also started DJing and booking shows at NY venues like Danceteria.
It was the start of a career that would include A&R jobs at Touch & Go, Dutch East India Trading Co., Caroline, Rough Trade and Elektra, where he became VP of A&R from 1992 to 1996, signing Stereolab, Luna, the Afghan Whigs, Scrawl and Jennyanykind.
He started No. 6 in 1989, when he was at Rough Trade, and disbanded the label ten years and fifty releases later. During that time, he released records by Dean Wareham, Tindersticks, Cagney and Lacee (Dean Wareham’s band with his first wife, Claudia Silver), Ornament (an Afghan Whigs offshoot) and Unrest, among others.
The high-flying “alt-rock years” finally ended at Elektra in 1996 with a huge personnel shake-up. This was an incredibly dark time in Terry’s personal life as well —his apartment building collapsed and he lost everything in the resulting fire, including all the No. 6 masters and artwork, as well as his three cats and his record collection. (This period is covered in great detail in Dean Wareham’s memoir Black Postcards.) Terry currently lives on a farm, as far away as you can get from the insanity of NYC.
Terry chatted at length with me about the genesis of the label and his wayward adventures in the record industry.
INFLUENCES
At what age did you first get interested in music? What were some of the first bands to make a lasting impression on you?
My Mom says that I always liked and reacted to music. [My parents] spent a lot of time (and money) sending me to different music lessons on all kinds of instruments. It always ended the same way: "Terry just doesn't want to play music.” I remember performing in front of my family and at a couple of recitals and just hated being stared at!
I [went] to the same summer camp in upstate New York for 11 years from 1967 to 1978. My counselors were all Dead Heads and would go on weekends to see the Grateful Dead when they would play. At night they would load up the reel-to-reel and play their tapes of live Dead shows as we went to sleep. By the time I was 12 I knew the words to most of their songs and I still love and listen to them (up to and including 1979's Blues For Allah).
After Jerry Garcia started working on their movie and locking himself in an editing room with mountains of cocaine and heroin it all went downhill. But they remained an important influence on me throughout my "career.” For many years as a teen, the only records I owned were their albums and boxes of live tapes.
I grew up in New City, an upstate suburb of NYC. When I was 17 I moved into Manhattan on my own. I lived in a small studio above the Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village. There were record stores all around me and I became friends with some of the employees.
That's when my music education really started to diversify. There was WNEW-FM in NYC. This was in the days when the DJs could play whatever they wanted, so it could be John Lennon then Bob Marley and then Elvis Costello all back-to-back. You would never hear that today. But the "Go-It-Alone" aesthetic of the Grateful Dead in their heyday still inspires me now.
When you first moved to NYC, you worked at the original 99 Records shop on Macdougal. 99 only released a handful of records over the course of its short history, each one of them reflective of owner Ed Bahlman’s impeccable ear. Working alongside Ed must have been an incredible learning experience.
Working with and becoming friends with Ed Bahlman was one of the most important relationships that I ever had. It was one of those relationships that sends your life pinging off into a completely different realm.
I went to the store every Friday after I got paid. Ed would be spinning records and a pile would start to develop. I always left by telling him that if he ever needed to hire someone that I would take the job. He worked at the store seven days a week and worked as a maintenance man at an Upper East Side condo building full time.
After about four months he asked me if I would start working there. I didn't even give notice at the office job I had been at for a year. I just started the next day. I went from making about $300.00 a week to $125.00. I didn't care. I thought I had the best job in the world.
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