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"Music Man Plays On" by John Estus
/ Staff Writer
OSU Daily O'Colly (September 13, 2002)
Turn on the radio. Yawn. Flip to MTV. Yawn.
Watch the passion for any and all things music ooze
from 32-year-old Joe Cinocca's mouth and witness
the king of Tulsa-based Yawn Records.
Marvel.
The one-time OSU student is burning with a rekindled
flame to light a fire under his independent record
label. "I've been reinspired by the music I
put out," Cinocca said. "My fire is back."
He flashed back to 1996, a time when he was just
another music fan with an opinion.
But Cinocca, then an intern for Interscope Records,
was not content to watch anymore. He wanted to make
a difference. That's what brought Yawn Records into
his life.
"I would go club hopping on the weekends,"
he said. His job was to check out Tulsa bands for
reports to Interscope. "I had a three-song
rule. I'd grab a beer and watch a band and after
the third song, if I wasn't moved or motivated or
inspired or anything by the band, I'd move on to
the next club."
But cover bands ruled Tulsa and the picking was
slim.
"There wasn't really anybody who blew me away,"
Cinocca said.
That would change.
"Jify Trip. I went to the show, and I saw this
lead singer climbing on furniture and hanging from
the ceilings and he was walking around in the crowd
singing and just carrying on and going crazy,"
he said. At that moment, he knew his mission.
"I came up with the idea that we should form
a record label as a vehicle to promote the band
because everybody else in town had their own way
of promoting themselves that was only about themselves,"
he said, explaining that most bands were on vanity
labels. A vanity label promotes one artist only
and is typically run by the artist. "It was
like a way of saying they were on a label but really
weren't," he said.
Cinocca proposed the idea as a "vehicle to
learn more about the music industry. ... Yawn was
my response to things going on statewide in the
music scene. Not necessarily musicians, but attitudes,
perceptions. "Yawn," he announced, shrugging
his shoulders. "You bore me."
Interscope offered Cinocca a job in New York City,
but he turned it down.
"If I stayed in Tulsa, I could create my own
label, I could call my own shots, I could make my
mistakes and it wouldn't kill me. And maybe I could
do some good for some people in this neck of the
woods," he said. He would realize that "there
are so many musicians in this town that are just
gifted, it's unreal."
To fund Yawn Records, Cinocca worked as the manager
of Tulsa's CD Warehouse.
"At one point, I was working three jobs just
to pay for what I love to do at night."
At CD Warehouse, Cinocca met a ska band called The
Blue Collars. After selling more than 100 copies
of The Blue Collars' CD in a month, Cinocca was
hooked.
"I wanted to work with this band to gain more
knowledge,'" he said. With his increasing knowledge
came distribution work with Admiral Twin, Royal
Crush and Fanzine. At that point, Cinocca had moved
on to a higher-paying job to fund Yawn's growth.In
2000, Yawn signed Tahlequah's Rewake and Gore's
Formerly.
"I gave Rewake encouragement and let them know
that their music was valid and they've got to do
everything they can to get their music heard,"
he said.
Yawn released Rewake's six-song live EP, "Foreign,"
and its full-length debut CD, "Air Bubbles."
Yawn also scored a slot for Rewake at South by Southwest,
the internationally renowned annual music conference
in Austin, Texas.
Cinocca's other venture, Omnizine, a music promotion
network for the Southwest United States, led to
the signing of Formerly and the release of the quartet's
EP, "Into Uncertainty."
"I guess the things I've been known for are
my compilations," Cinocca said, moving to the
subject that obviously brings him the most joy.
Cinocca is out to help musicians, so it comes as
no surprise that the big-hearted guru drools over
the opportunity to hit multiple birds with one disc.
"Instead of working with one band and helping
one band grow, let's do something that has more
of an impact," he said. "I started working
on Woo Hoo Bank Volume 1." Cinocca dodges the
weighty caliber of the statement, quickly moving
on to the story behind the popular compilation.
Woo Hoo Bank
Volume 1 dished out over 70 minutes of music from
19 world wide artists for only $5. The Woo Hoo Bank
philosophy was "maximum value for minimum price."
People make mix CDs for their friends every day.
Cinocca wanted to make one for the world. "I
wanted to send a signal to the artists that I'm
not this corporate evil monster that's trying to
rip them off and just exploit them and make an assload
of money off their music," he said. "It's
more important that the word gets out about these
bands than me just making tons of money."
A joint project with Tulsa's Engine Shed Records
followed: two 15-band Omnizine Sampler discs honing
in on bands from the Omnizine region. Cinocca's
obsession with independent music magazines, "zines,"
led to the signing of the Ed Kemper Trio, a maniacal
rock outfit from Alabama. A
contact with the publisher of Michigan's Copper
Press zine led to EK3 sending their demo to Yawn.
"I was blown away. This was just a demo. I
was like 'wow,' " he said. "I was kind
of intimidated. I'd never worked with a band outside
of Oklahoma before. Especially a band of this magnitude.
... They're playing 80 to 100 dates in different
towns every year."
Cinocca put the trio through his "weed-out
process."
"Every answer they had for me was exactly the
answer I was looking to hear. ... I don't really
work with bands, I work with people," he said.
Also on tap for Yawn in the near future are the
releases of Jessi Canning and Nude Furniture, from
Virginia and Tulsa, respectively, and more compilations.
"We're getting submissions from Japan and England
and all over the country that want Yawn to put out
their album. It's just really inspiring."
Cinocca is happiest when "you go to a town
and you see a good quality show and it reaffirms
your faith that original music and original thought
really inspires people and motivates people."
Yawn Records works like a good quality show. Joe
Cinocca knows the show must go on.
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