LISA FANCHER
Frontier Records
“I think my secret to still being around is that I never had any ambition to take over the world or have offices in Tokyo and be like guys who want to be number one. I just want to put out records that I like and it’s been a good strategy.”
interview by Danielle Maggio for Women in Sound #6
released February 4, 2019
Lisa Fancher has been described as an unsung heroine of Los Angeles punk history. After spending a few hours with her at her home in late October 2018, I understand why. Having put out records that helped to define and document L.A.’s early punk scene, Lisa has witnessed the music industry transform over the last four decades. I sat down with her to talk about the ‘boys club’ culture of record collecting, keeping an archive, and founding Frontier Records, L.A.’s oldest and longest-running punk label.
It’s obvious why women were excluded from the formation of American record collecting culture in the 1930s and ‘40s. They were relegated to the private, domestic domain of the household —
Women didn’t have free time to buy records!
Totally. So, why do you think there’s still such a serious and competitive nature to record collecting that has allowed it to remain predominantly male-dominated?
Some guys won’t even tell you where they get their shit, or they’ll tell you some war story about how they got this one record. I used to go to the Capitol Record Swap Meet and I would be holding [a record], looking at it, and some guy would talk to whoever owned it and go, “I’ll buy that.” I’m like, “I’m looking at it. So back the fuck up and get out of here.” Guys just always want to be the number-one record collector. I never felt compelled to do that.
Is vinyl still your preferred listening method?
It definitely is my preferred listening method, because I grew up on it. I was die-hard. I would not get a CD player. I didn’t get one for, shit, maybe eight or nine years. And then you couldn’t buy some things anymore! There was no streaming yet, so you had to buy stuff on CD.
What do you think listening to records could do for young people that streaming online can’t?
While you’re watching YouTube, you’re looking at the sidebar, going, “What can I click on? I want to see cats!” So you never really sit and listen to a whole album and have a connection with it, just sitting there turning the record over and over. It used to really matter. It’s just cooler all the way around to listen to records.
When did you start to notice a resurgence in vinyl?
Let’s say ten years ago, maybe. [The major labels] just started reissuing everything, regardless of whether anyone wanted to buy it. They had already shut down all their own pressing plants, so they not only choked indies out of record stores, they took over plants, including Rainbo, which I had been at since 1981. The turnaround time once Rainbo had all the parts — approved test pressings, labels, jackets and inserts — was usually two weeks to a month. When the majors were vinyl- happy from 2011 to about a year ago, suddenly it took six months to get a new order or even a small repressing of 500. I can't tell you how devastating that is financially when you have to pay for all the jackets in thirty days and you don’t get your stuff for six months.
Why do you think vinyl came back?
I think it was an ironic thing, like, “I like old stuff! I’m going to read a book, not a Kindle.” It was really great when there was a resurgence of vinyl, but I think it’s tapered off a whole bunch. I know the wait time at my pressing plant has gone down a whole bunch, from six months to maybe two. Now that the majors are over it, you can get your records pressed again in a timely fashion.
Why do you think it tapered off?
The major labels say no more physical product. Within the next three years — all gone. Downloads only. They have always shot themselves in the foot. They are such morons. Good for indie labels, though! People take it really seriously and I’m sure some tiny percentage are still buying the actual records and going to swap meets. There’s no shortage of places to buy records.
That’s also been my experience. When people who don’t know me come to my house and see the record collection, they always turn to my male partner and compliment him.
That would be me in a record store. There would be me and a guy standing next to me, and someone will turn to the guy and go, “Who does Rock the Casbah?” And I’ll go “The Clash.” But nobody would ever ask me anything unless it was like, “Help me with the bongs.”
When did you start working in record stores?
The first record store I worked for was Bomp! I worked for Greg Shaw. It was very late 1976 or early 1977, so I was 18. It was a very small space up front and the back was where they ran the record label, the magazine and mail order. And that was right when punk was starting. Greg was managing the Flamin’ Groovies. He knew Jamie Reed. He knew all the Sex Pistols. He was stockpiling all this shit like the first Damned records, so when we opened people came from all over. A lot of people that I know today came in to shop there, so it was really great to be at the counter.
Lisa in her Bomp! days
How did you get the job?
Greg called me up and asked me. I wrote for Bomp!1 I wrote the cover story about The Runaways. I was local. They didn’t have to import someone from far away. I think we opened at 11 a.m. and closed at 5 or 6 p.m. And over the weekend we would have incredible in-store shows, because Greg knew everybody: Blondie and The Damned and the Dead Boys. And all the weirdo bands did in-stores on Saturday. People came in, all the musicians — before they were even in bands — like Stan Lee from The Dickies, Chris D. from The Flesh Eaters. And the bands brought their records in. When Devo moved here, they brought us “Mongoloid.” They came in like, “Would you want to carry this single?” And then I put it on and was like, “Oh my God, my mind is completely destroyed forever by this!” And The Cramps. All those bands brought in their stuff. It was the perfect place to be. It was so exciting to be there.
How long did you work there? About a year and a half. I loved that job a lot. I quit in May 1978 to go live in London. [laughs] Was that ever a terrible idea! When I came back two months later, I got a job as a clerk at Licorice Pizza, which was an atypical chain store. Proud to say I had the number-one most complaints because I was a little snot-nosed jerk! Customers would come up to me and say, “Take this shit off!” and I’d reply, “Fuck you!” or turn it up louder. I did not understand customer service, clearly.
What type of content were you writing for Bomp! fanzine? I wrote about local bands and did record reviews. Did a kind of longish feature about The Hollywood Stars and the cover story about The Runaways. Bomp! got into punk a bit after 1976, but mostly it was into the British Invasion. There were long, dull articles about record labels and rare records. I don’t know if they had distribution then. I think they sold to record stores and they sold tons of copies via the mail order division. I think it sold 2,000 to 3,000 per issue, maybe more.
When did you personally start publishing zines?
I did a fanzine with a guy named Bob Morris from Texas. I wrote my bits and mailed them to him from high school, 1974 to 1976. He had lots of listings for rare records for sale. He moved to Los Angeles and that’s when it became Street Life. Street Life was 1976 and maybe 1977. I did Biff!Bang!Pow! somewhere overlapping, ending in 1979. I would slap it together while working the counter at Bomp! Records. I did an issue or two after I returned from London, where I saw many great bands like Generation X and even interviewed Midge Ure from Rich Kids. I would say all the fanzines were a mix of punk and power pop. I was always really into pop music — all kinds of music. I refuse to be pigeonholed. And let’s face it, I wasn’t a punk at all visually, just internally. I never wore a safety pin or had blue hair. My fanzine goals were just to turn people onto bands they might have never heard of. I never considered breaking even.
You also wrote concert reviews for newspapers?
I think I wrote for the L.A. Times in late 1976 and the Herald Examiner from 1978 to 1980. The L.A. Times was a true fiasco. There were times that I wish I wasn’t such a hothead and that I had stuck that one out. It was such a great opportunity, but I was a teenager — 17 or 18 — and I thought I knew everything. [My editor] Robert Hilburn kept disagreeing with my rave reviews and saying he listened to the record and it wasn’t that good. I’m talking AC/DC, The Ramones, Blondie’s first LP. We didn’t get in a fight; I just said, “I don’t think this is the job for me.” Maybe I would have been there 20 years, who knows? The Herald was way different because Ken Tucker was my boss and totally got my aesthetic. He let me tell him what I wanted to review — usually punk or power pop, naturally — and didn’t edit me too heavily. It was a blast to get in free and get a tab to eat and drink anything you wanted, plus a guest. I was working at Bomp! then so I had to write the Herald pieces after a show at 2 a.m. and drop it off at Ken’s apartment. Exhausting.
And all of this was before you started Frontier Records. How did you conceive of that?
Me and my friends were originally going to do a record store because we thought it would be such a cool living to sell records to people! I even went as far as buying the bins and shelving and stuff and, for one reason or another, it all fell through. I started Frontier on my own and never wanted any partners because I knew we’d go to war at some point. The Herald wasn’t going to pay my bills, so at some point I just decided I was going to put out one record. I worked at Bomp! so I knew all the stuff that you had to do, like how to master a record. I was just going to put out one record to see what it was like, so I interviewed this band called The Flyboys and I liked them a lot. I had seen them open shows forever — they were always the perpetual opening band — and I was like, “Damnit! I’m going to put their record out and show everybody how great they are!” So I think I hatched the plan somewhere in ‘79 and we recorded it at Leon Russell’s studio on Magnolia in the middle of the night. I would pay for X-number of hours, but we’d just keep going all night long. The engineer was a guy who was in the original Sparks, Jim Mankey, and another friend of mine was a roadie for The Dickies — I used to run the Dickies’ fan club — so they produced the record. I couldn’t tell you how long it took. All the other records I did after that were very compact, like three days, five days, but this one was a weird experience all the way around. And so I finally got it together, found a manufacturer, a place called Alco in Sun Valley, where I was from. It took me probably months longer than I intended. It came out in March of 1980 and by the time I put the record out, I told The Flyboys to come in, get their copies and say hi. And they were like, “Oh. We broke up.” So it was already a total disaster. There was no support for the record or anything.
So after the first record, did you just have the itch to continue putting out the music you liked?
No. I was like, “That’s it for me.” I didn’t have the money. But this was the thick of the hardcore scene and I was crazy for it. I had written a story for the New York Rocker called The New Beaches because I was always going to Huntington Beach and Orange County to see bands play. There were so many bands coming out. It was just great. I loved Keith Morris in Black Flag, but I loved him in the Circle Jerks. They were just amazing. I had heard they had a finished record. They had recorded before for Robbie Fields at Posh Boy Records and they absolutely hated him, so they were shopping the new record around and I just called up the drummer, Lucky, who lived right by the Whiskey a Go Go and said, “I have a record label and I would like to put your record out.” But I had no reputation at this point. Luckily, I had very little competition. So they relented. Definitely some eye rolling that a girl was going to put their record out. But that just changed everything when I put out the Circle Jerks. Then it was just like, “Oh, you’re a real label.” I started putting out two or three records a year for quite a while.
Was there a conscious effort on your part to emphasize that your label was run by a woman?
I always wanted to fly under the radar. The name Frontier is extremely generic. And I just did not want it to be like, “Some girl’s got a label,” or anything like that.
Yeah. It often seems like the marketing efforts towards female-fronted bands, deejays, producers and sound artists over-emphasizes their sex to fetishize or glamorize them.
And you’re expected to be a sexy deejay! I just wanted to put out records and did not want to be known as the label that a girl owns.
Looking back now, are you happy you did that?
No, honestly. Because every single time when you’re left out of every documentary and every story about punk, it really fucking pisses me off, really bad. So maybe not such a good strategy, because many people just have no idea about it. God knows I’ll take being the token! How many labels were fronted by women? Just because they did bad research doesn’t mean I should be mad, but it makes me really mad. The 2006 film “American Hardcore,” for instance. I was so nice to those guys in the film crew and then when I saw the movie there was not one frame of me! People will remind me that my bands got in the film, but I want to be known for it, too.
Erasure of women in sound is not something that is just specific to punk. I’ve found the same thing in my research on blues, jazz, soul and funk. The canon is always male-centric. And if people do shitty research they simply go and look at other things people already did, they don’t start from scratch like they should. They have a whole research archive at UCLA, a punk archive, and totally, 100 percent dissed me. Then they lied to me after the fact and said that all the people that were in the archive had come to them. I said, “Don’t even lie to me and say they came to you because they told me that you called them! You live in my town and you didn’t ask me and I have boxes of fanzines and records.” If you Google “L.A. punk” or “L.A. fanzines,” my name will surely pop up. I could have provided them with incredible knowledge and archive materials.
It’s an untapped resource!
Yeah. And it would be nice to have somebody store it properly and go through it and everything.
photo provided by Lisa
When did you start reissuing older punk records?
I did The Weirdos comp in ‘91. It took me well over ten years to do it because they never put an album out the first time around. They had some singles and they had an EP on Rhino and a million demos. Then after that, I got the two owners of Dangerhouse Records, which is a very big, very important L.A. record label, to contribute to a label reissue. Those guys hadn’t spoken to each other for ages, so I got them speaking and put out two compilations of Dangerhouse.
What have you most recently put out?
I just put out The Stimulators record. So that’s going to be in the final episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show, which is just him and Harley Flanagan going all over the Lower East Side. Him and Harley were friends. So that’ll be neat!
Your life story is so fascinating. It should be documented for others who are interested in creating similar careers, or who just want to learn about punk and hardcore history.
I think my secret to still being around is that I never had any ambition to take over the world or have offices in Tokyo and be like guys who want to be number one. I just want to put out records that I like and it’s been a good strategy.
What advice do you have for someone who is looking to take that first step and start their own label?
Crowdfunding is bullshit. Find a band you like well enough to max out a credit card or savings account for. Don’t worry about distribution or social media or any of that. Just see if you can get through figuring out how to take a band in the studio and make a record without killing each other. It sounds super fun and sometimes it is, but mostly DIY is about putting your money where your mouth is. If it’s a good record and the band helps you by playing live, you might sell some copies. Or they may fill up your garage for ages. But at least you tried!
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1. Originally, Bomp! Records started out as a fanzine published by Greg Shaw titled Who Put The Bomp (also known as Bomp!). In 1974, the fanzine evolved into the Bomp! Records label and store.
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