NEWS	BANDS	DISCOGRAPHY	ABOUT UHR

A Brief History of Unsung Heroes Records

It's not everyday that something that started as a lark on hand-cut-and-traded tapes ends up with bands releasing on labels as far and wide as Shadow Kingdom Records, Autopsy Kitchen Records, Barbarian Wrath, Paragon Records, and even Osmose(!). And I guess there are more than a few that would say that's a good thing.

But fuck 'em if they've got shit taste in metal, right?

So, it's like this: it was 1996, I was between my last band and striking out on my own, and the Internet was only just being brought up from university compter center basements to people's living rooms by way of this newfangled thing called 'AOL' - The days of torrents, Youtube, eBay, and iTunes were years in the future, and if anyone had heard of mp3s they were more than likely to go "what's that?" instead of "oh, you mean like RealAudio?". CD longboxes were just fading out, vinyl had not yet made its resurgence (in fact, most of the first wave of vinyl was rotting away in cutout bins in the front of places like Camelot Music and Turtles. And I bet that's still Greek to most of you young'uns...), and CD burners, if you could even find someone who had one, were somewhat cost-prohibitive, both for the drives, which would run you a few hundred bucks, and the blank CDs, which you were LUCKY to get at less than $1 per disc in bulk.

And I realize how close I am to sounding like a Yorkshireman ("Now, look, cherie..."), but that picture is essential to understanding just how I saw a niche that could be filled by someone with a bit of lucky access to certain things and shitloads of free time looking for a way to be wasted. I always joke that the label started as a combination of a bootleg label and a vanity press, and that's not an exaggeration.

On one hand, the vanity press hand, I had a new band that I was in the midst of writing songs for and working on a way to record. In between both hands was the set of tapes I had of my older bands - the bands had split or changed between then and farther-back-then, but I still liked the songs. And all the way on the other was some music that wasn't mine, really (or at all), but I thought it deserved better than rotting in the 'out of print' status that most of the classic 80s underground metal I loved was relegated to in the early 90s. If they weren't going to sell it, why should it remain un-heard and forgotten?

Hence the name: Unsung Heroes Records

So, I started slapping that name on every copied disc and dubbed tape that I traded (or sold for cost-plus-shipping-ONLY - except for my own music, of course), hand-printing and cutting the inserts and disc-face labels, and printing them up to order. Kinda like craft-brew beer - if you skip the pleasantly-drunk part and go straight to headaches and vomiting. Over time, of course, I met other musicians who liked what I was doing and asked me to help them out by putting out their music on my label, and that's when it became a real Label - as real as any label is that exists only for music, not profit, anyway - and so the 'bootleg' side of the equation faded in execution. But not in spirit, or at least I like to think so...

More of the history is told through the releases themselves, so I won't bore you any longer here. And I realize I'm glossing over nearly two decades of stuff here, but the short version is that times have changed and so have we - at least in the realm of execution, but hopefully not in spirit.