Fully Aware
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Latterman, now 30, founded Aware almost exactly five years ago, when he was still working as a CPA for Coopers & Lybrand in Boston. Sick of the grind, he’d been mulling a number of ideas for a company of his own, among them an all-natural clothing store, but in the end his knack for turning friends on to unknown bands seemed the most natural of his interests to parlay into a career. That’s not really an unusual route into the music business, but unlike many of the industry’s better-known mavericks, Latterman has never shown even a superficial interest in pushing the artistic envelope. Like many other white, middle-class Americans his age, Latterman digs straightforward, melodic, guitar-based “meat and potatoes” rock. The stuff he was putting on party tapes for his pals, he says, “was just like R.E.M., Toad the Wet Sprocket, or Big Head Todd, but it was a few years prior to the bands putting out a record on a major label.”
Aware 1 came out on Latterman’s final day as an accountant, in July 1993. That fall he moved to Vail, where he taught skiing and began assembling his next project. At the end of the ski season, after learning that he’d been accepted at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, he packed his bags for Dallas to hang out with Jackopierce, a band on the first compilation that had signed with A&M. There Latterman finished Aware II, which would firmly establish him as the man with the golden ear: among the then-unknown participants were Hootie & the Blowfish, Better Than Ezra, the Verve Pipe, and the Edwin McCain Band. All in all, about a third of the 70-some bands Latterman’s worked with have gone on to sign with major labels–an astonishing batting average.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Greg Latterman photo by Jim Alexander Newberry.
