As many Tegan and Sara fanatics know consistently one of the best places for up to date news and tour dates is Vapor Records Tegan and Sara website. For those that do not know about Vapor it is the brainchild of the great Neil Young and his longtime manager Elliot Roberts. It is a label for artists by an artist. To think that an independent label has Jonathan Richman AND Tegan and Sara is just incredible. We had the pleasure of getting to interview Vapor Records webmaster Jonathan Krop to talk music, technology, and about his friend Brian. Make sure to check out his really cool business site:
http://www.atomicpopmonkey.com you wont believe how many webpages he has designed!!
I know the Atari 400 was responsible for getting you involved with computers, but can you talk about learning web design and how you learned about that? About the time the web started to be noticed as the "next big thing" (1995-97), I was working at San Francisco's Academy of Art College in the Mac Lab as a tech. My job was to keep the computers running, and help students with their homework. The school had just started offering html and web design classes, so it was part of my job to be able to tutor and help students with it and I had to learn some basics. Edward was a fellow tech and was heavily into html, so I picked up some basic knowledge from him. He coded my first site for me, last I heard from him, he was the web master for the UMAX site. Websites were still quite new, and as a result were very barebones. Animation was mostly done thru .GIFs, and Flash was just acquired by Macromedia. I already had a solid background in design and in using programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter!, some 3-D modeling, and knew a little about video and using Director for interactive multimedia things, so it was just the next thing to learn.I taught myself a lot from
http://www.webmonkey.com . It's part of my nature to just jump in and find resources to teach myself something when I am interested in it. I was also fortunate in having that job at the time, and the opportunities that came along with it. My boss Paul Montwillo and I would get invited to go to companies like Macromedia and be given free tutorials/demos from the folks there. From there, things just kept (and keep) progressing, with the web and technology, and in my ability to use that technology and combine it with design.
You mention the 14.4 modem and AOL on your bio. Its incredible to think that many people on-line today have no idea what a 14.4 modem is today. Can you talk about how you feel the Internet and technology and computers in general have changed since those days and how it has altered web design?The quick answer: it's the difference between being able to drive a car to go shopping vs. riding a bike to do the same task ... how long does it take you, and how much can you bring home? The verbose answer: A 14.4 modem at the time was the fastest internet connection you could own (scary to think there were slower ones). You were actually charged by the MINUTE back then too. We've literally gone from dots and dashes (ones and zeros) to full screen video and audio in real time - that's really amazing when one realizes that it all happened in the course of about a decade. I can't even begin to imagine what milestones the next one will bring. It does keep things interesting. The first several months I was online, there were no web browsers, all that was available were usenet groups; you had to type in codes much like you do in UNIX to access these boards, and you could read and respond to messages, and in some instances download images and files. In this case, a small jpg file would actually be broken down to perhaps a dozen or so MIME files you had to manually download, then use another program to combine the pieces and extract them, and if you missed a piece you got a corrupt image. The whole process required several programs, knowing how to use them, and could take you a good 20-40 minutes to get a 68k jpg transfered. I'm sounding like someone's dad complaining about having to walk miles to school in the snow, but that's really how the internet worked just 13 or 14 years ago. I joined AOL, and it was a really new and excited thing. There were a lot less people online than there are now, since no one really knew what the internet was, computers at homes were not very common, and if they were, they were rarely wired to the internet. I was hooked, I saw so much potential in this new digital wild west. AOL broke a lot of ground for me at the time, and the music forums were a very cool area. There was a HANDFUL of people online, and there was a very different vibe then. There was no SPAM, the people that were online tended to be people who were maybe a little more intelligent and there was also lot more trust in the people you met online as a result. It was a smaller community, there was less riff-raff. The pay off was that it was expensive, slow, and often buggy. Web design was far more limiting at that time, there was no such thing as an MP3 file, Quicktime and video in general were new technologies, and at most you'd download a short 20 second clip of something the size of a postage stamp and that would take you an hour and half to download. Most computers only displayed 256 or on the high end, thousands of colors, so keeping to a web safe color palette was far more essential. It wasn't very pretty, but it worked, and was evolving. A little later the 56.6 modem was top of the heap, and it seemed so much faster, but the rule still was that a web page and all of it's related files should total 70k or less in file size. Web designers spent far more time using programs like Debabelizer to make image files as compressed as possible, and to ensure the colors would look the same on different platforms. It was a lot more limiting, it was a lot more challenging in those regards. I take for granted now that I can be working in a dozen programs at once, having a live video conference with iChat, burning a CD all at the same time. Back then RAM was very expensive, and you would have to quit the program you were in in order to be able to open and use a second or third one. Thus, the whole process took longer on every level - from creating and designing, to the end user's experience, and it was far less media rich. There were less file formats, and in some ways it was a lot simpler. Since hardrives were much smaller, you maybe had 5 megs of space alloted, 10 or 15 was considered generous. A web designer had to make the most out of very little. It's moving a lot faster now, not just over your browser - but in it's evolution too. Online copyright issues were far more forgiving then as well. There have been tons of changes in many aspects of the web.
Most people reading the T&S blog will be curious to know how you got involved with Vapor Records and what your day-to-day duties are with maintaining the site?To fully connect the dots, it goes back to my relationship with the band Redd Kross
www.reddkross.com . Once I had done their site, their friend Danny Benair (who was the drummer of The Quick and The Three O'Clock) asked me to do a site for his music licensing company (Natural Energy Lab
www.naturalenergylab.com ). Danny then referred me to his friend/client Blair Tefkin (
www.blairtefkin.com ), and I did a make over of her site. Blair's guitarist, Bernard Yin had seen the work and we did a few projects together (Stonegarden Records being one of them.) Vapor knows Bernard thru Jason Yates. Bernard played guitar with Jason’s band following the release of Jason’s album on Vapor and he knew Bonnie at Vapor Records. That's really how I get most of my work, is by word of mouth, it works out really well for me and I tend to work with a really cool, nice group of people as a result. I already had a history of working with a few indie labels such as Rykodisc (
www.rykodisc.com ) and Charlotte Caffey ( the Go-Gos) & Anna Waronker's label Five Foot Two Records (
www.fivefoottworecords.com ), and it was really an honor to add Vapor to my roster. I am a fan of Neil's as well as their catalog, and that always makes the experience much more pleasant and inspiring. Vapor was interested in bringing their site up to date and making it function/look better. Bernard is a really great guy, and a guitarist who plays with several bands, such as The Migs, he's finishing up a solo record that should be out sometime in 2006. He acted as project manager, with Bonnie letting him know what needed to be done, and then Bernard collected the pieces and worked directly with me. The site is hosted by a friend of Vapor Records, his name is Nels Johnson (
http://www.downrecs.com/). There's not much as far as my daily involvement with the site, when it's appropriate, Bonnie will get a hold of me to update the news and tour dates. I'm sure as soon as there are some new releases in the new year, we'll be adding that as well. Once in a while I'll get an email from a fan asking about Tegan & Sara or Jonathan Richman, and I'll pass it along to the appropriate person, but really that's about it.
Have you had any contact with the labels owners Neil Young and/or Elliot Roberts?I really wish I would! I've been a Neil Young fan since my late teens, and really respect him as an artist, musician, and human being. It would be amazing to have lunch with him or talk on the phone. But to date I've not been in touch with him at all. I do wish him the best in his health, and hope for him to be around and prolific for many more years. He's a viable and important artist and musical force, a legend. I still don't know what Neil thinks of the site or if he's really ever seen it. (hint hint!)
You did a great job on Vapor's design while staying artistically
visual but not crashing peoples browser with unneeded flash animation and java, what instructions if any did you get on how to design Tegan and Sara's portion of the site?Thank you so much. I have to confess, that there is a very subtle Flash animation on the site, in Chester (The wolf in Vapor's logo). His eyes blink and his paw and tail move every now and then just a little. There's a lot of cool things Flash and Java/Javascript can do, but if it's crashing people's browser - what's the point? If something is so buggy or limits the available audience, that's when one needs to make the choice, and it's good to be reasonable. I'm really over the long flash intros to sites, and I think most people are as well. When I go to a site, I want the most important information right there, not have to click thru or wait while something stalls me for several minutes. I think a lot of people feel that way - give me the news and the most recent information first, and then make it easy to find what I'm looking for. I dislike having to hunt on a site trying to figure out that clicking on the third mysterious celtic symbol is the link to the tour dates page. If using a website becomes an Easter Egg hunt for the user, it's not being effective, it's disenfranchising and frustrating to the audience. That doesn't mean it can't be aesthetic, artistic or visually appealing, I think the two can coexist; and that's what makes for a really good web site. Vapor gave me the basic content; their logo, the copy and some general direction as far as design. Due to the label's name they asked for something dark, somewhat earthy, can 'vapory' - which gave me the idea to use the trees which were some photos I had taken. We did several rounds of comps, experimenting with colors and layouts, the purple comes mostly from their logo, and the sepia-tan was chosen for it's earthy vibe. We ended up taking the aspects that Bonnie and the Vapor staff liked best and merged them into what's online now. It actually came together fairly easily. I had offered a few suggestions like a mailing list form, but they wanted to keep the site free of those. As far as Tegan & Sara's section, they and Jonathan Richman were to be the 2 main artists featured on the site, the label gave me all of the content and photos, and it's rather clean and simple. Our approach was to provide the essential information, and let the band's web site provide their fans with the details. I had quite a bit of creative freedom to explore styles and looks within some basic guidelines. That tends to be the best situation for me. If a client has a general direction, and still gives me the room to explore freely, and we share a common sense for aesthetics, it doesn't feel like work at all to me, it's becomes a very enjoyable experience.
Does it help or hurt you that T&S have their own official site?My opinion on this is that it helps. I can't stress how important it is for artists to control their own sites. I would be more than happy to work with T&S on their site, but I think their site works and looks fine, and that's the way it should be. Some labels end up hijacking the artist's domain name and then put up a label built site that only offers the music available from that specific label, neglecting any other projects that band may have done. I think in most cases, it puts more of a barrier between a band and their fans than building a bridge. The whole point of the internet is to connect, not distance. I think labels should build sites to market and promote the releases they have done, but I don't think they should own the artist's official site. Being under a record contract shouldn't mean a label owns the band and rightfully controls all the channels that band has to the public. Musicians and artists are free souls by nature, and need to have control of the outlets that connect them to their fans. A good band site should operate more like a fan-club than just be seen as a sales tool. Why do I feel that way? Well, going back to Redd Kross, their initial site back in 1996 was done by the label, and it was about 3 pages - a bio, 2 small videos from the new album, and a buy link - that was about it. It wasn't so much that time's technical limitations as the lack of artist's control and input. Here was a band that had some 18 years of history behind them, but the site reflected none of it. Since the band and I started their official site in 2000, we have done things like having an online radio show (well a year before iPods or Podcasts) that was updated weekly and provided via Real Player, we did an online variety show called "Bitchin' Ass" - 2 years before the advent or concept of video podcasting, and Steven had an idea to do a free online "art project" where he took the White Stripes CD "White Blood Cells", and added bass to the entire album, mutating it into "Redd Blood Cells" which was celebrating as being highly innovative and daring by the creative commons and tens of thousands of music fans
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/ . We released 2 MP3's a week (with Jack White's blessing). All of these ventures came organically from the band, and got us press, praise and increased web traffic. The fans enjoyed it as well. Many label run sites wouldn't take those sorts of risks or put in that sort of investment without promise of some sort of monetary reward making it worthwhile. Redd Kross and I provide those sorts of things on their site for free, it's a way for us to be creative and to share it with their audience. The "Redd Blood Cells" online album from Steve got some 50,000 visits in one day (crashing the server) after it was written up in the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. I've worked on a major label project advertised during the Superbowl that didn't get traffic like that. It just proves to me that a cool idea that starts as a whim with has no financial promotion can outperform something literally millions of dollars went into promoting. That's one of the many reasons why I think it's vital to allow artists creative freedom and empower them to operate their sites. Though there are musicians that don't care about the web or web sites, so for them a label run site might be the only option. That's fine in that case, but please allow the visionaries to be visionaries. After all, that's what makes things exciting, and is the environment where the next hip thing develops from. Cheers to Vapor for allowing T&S their rightful freedom and opportunity, and to all the labels out there who realize the same thing. The ones that don't are potentially suffocating their musicians, and might be missing out a wider fan base.
What contact if any have you had with T&S or managers?To date, none whatsoever.
What can we expect from the Vapor site in the coming year? Any chance for interview pod casts or anything else new?Bonnie would be the person to ask, I think there are things like podcasts, and ecards/media players that are almost expected from new releases these days, and I'd enjoy working on any of those if asked. I think podcasts are a great way idea to give people more insight into a band, or a label, and flash media players and eCards are a nice inexpensive way to do some viral marketing, and is far cheaper of a means to allow people to sample before they buy than say pressing and shipping promo CDs. Ultimately, it needs to be good artists making good music being able to connect with their audience. But as far as any major updates or Vapor related projects, I don't have anything booked at the moment.
One final question, you mentioned that you worked on your high school newspaper with the great Brian Poshen, as a Mr. Show fanatic can you tell us any interesting anecdotes or stories about Brian in high school? Do you still keep up with him?Brian and I go WAY back, in 1983/84 we both were on our highschool news paper and wrote the music column together. We did a lot of the usual things high school kids do, and we were both heavily into metal and punk music. The Brian you see on TV is very much the same guy I went to highschool with, and it's good to know that fame hasn't changed him.
We still keep in touch, I just got a Christmas card from him, and he's scheduled to be in San Francisco in February and hopefully we'll be able to hang out. He lives in LA, and I'm in the Bay Area, so we don't hang out that much in person. The last time I saw him was at the PunchLine Dec 2004, and that was fun, we talk on the phone every few months, email and such. It was great when Mr. Show went on the road a few years ago, and he put me on the guest list, so I did get to meet David Cross, though Bob wasn't around at the moment. I think it was the year I graduated when a few of us went to Santa Rosa together. Brian was driving this old car (I think it was a faded brown Maverick), and I was in the back with our friend Mike. Mike had just bought one of those high powered water guns, and we were messing around squirting people with water (this was before this sort of activity would actually get you arrested or shot and we don't recommend anyone doing it in today's world.) We were having harmless summer fun, and Mike squirted a blast into the open window of an SUV next to us at a red light. The driver started yelling at us, and as soon as the light went green, Brian gunned it, the SUV chasing after us in hot pursuit, we were going down side roads and such but couldn't shake him. Brian ends up pulling over and the angry guy stops behind us and started walking up to Brian's window. Brian looked at Mike and told him he'd have to deal with it since he was the guilty one. Mike was a smart ass and said "Uh-uh No way man!". Just as the guy got to our car, Brian floored it and we had made or escape! Well the following day, Brian woke up to an angry mom who just got off the phone with a Sherif in Santa Rosa, it seems the squirted party was the son-in-law of a police officer, and got Brian's license plate number and hunted him down. Brian got out of that by apologizing, it was really just some extremely bored kids out to have some fun after all, none of us had any malicious intent. The whole ordeal really played itself out like a bad 80's teen age B-movie. Remember kids - don't try this at home! Another story is actually documented! For my Humanities class in college, we had an assignment to make a movie. I ended up being the one of the two actors in what essentially was Brian's film debut. The 5 minute short was called "Dummy-lip Afternoon", and was a rather bad Wayne and Garth/Bill and Ted like movie where I break a guitar string and end up in a pot smoke filled closet with Brian and Billy the puppet from Pee Wee Herman. It was mostly improved, all done within two hours or so. I've threatened to blackmail him with it if I ever find it again. We ended up getting ourselves in a lot of mischief and mishaps back then, but not all of them are appropriate for this forum. Sonoma was a very boring town to live in as a teenager, so we had to find our own means of entertainment. I have fond memories of going to various rock shows, parties, and record shopping sprees with him, and I've got to say, Brian is very much the same guy now as he was then. I'm really proud of him and his accomplishments, he's worked really hard to get where he is, and he's really stayed true to himself.
