Bloodshot Eyes the Future
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“We were living hand-to-mouth for the first two or three years,” says Miller. “We didn’t put out a new record until that last one had paid for itself. We had to stick by our guns and establish with media, radio, and booking agents that this punk-and-country thing could exist and develop a critical language around it.” Many of Bloodshot’s early releases were just short of unlistenable, as bands like Scroat Belly and its offshoot, Split Lip Rayfield, sloppily paired country cliches with hardcore velocity. But the blend was more successful in the hands of Fulks, Old 97’s, and the Wacos, who mixed punk attitude with the songcraft that’s been a hallmark of traditional country. Miller admits that in its infancy Bloodshot had a pretty limited range. “We had to keep that kind of focus to stake out some territory for a new label. Now that we’ve shown enough resiliency and dumb luck to stay around for a few years, it’s allowed us to do records that we would’ve wanted to do before, but that we didn’t think fit the pretty narrow idea of what we were about.”
Bloodshot has reaped the rewards of the majors’ scorched earth policy (Fulks returned to the label this year), and in 1998, a year after Babcock departed, Miller and Warshaw began drawing what they call a livable salary–though according to Miller they’re not “living large,” and he still “paints the occasional house to keep my bar tabs paid up.” They now employ three full-timers and two part-timers, and last summer the staff moved into a real office space on Irving Park after outgrowing Warshaw’s cramped Wrigleyville basement. “I had to constantly duck under the ceiling fans,” says Miller. “It was like a U-boat down there, and with all of the Sosa fans walking around it got to be too much.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
