Anyone who becomes familiar with the music of Kristin Hersh, and is led via that to her website at www.throwingmusic.com, will also before long become familiar with the name Billy O’Connell. Her husband since 1992, Billy has managed Kristin & her band Throwing Muses for many years. However, he is also an inspired user of the internet, and throwingmusic online, which he runs, gives Kristin a presence on the web you would be unlikely to encounter with any other independent artist of similar stature. O’Connell has also for the last ten or fifteen years been particularly interested in thinking about new ways to distribute music. As well as that, he runs one of the world’s more innovative ticketing agencies, virtuous.com.
  He also drives their tour bus… 

Billy O’Connell talks to Francis Dutton, 4/11/03

B: Ye..e..e..s…?

F: Hello Billy, how are you?

B: Real well, real well. What can I do for you?

F: Look, I would just love to ask you about the beginnings of throwingmusic online and a little bit about virtuous.com.

B: Oh yeah, by all means.

F: Because throwingmusic online, which is Kristin’s web site, has a terrific reputation, for several reasons… it’s got a very vibrant message board…

B: That’s for sure.

F: …and I know that is a slightly symbiotic relationship, from what I can gather. 

B: Yeah, I mean absolutely so. I mean in 1994 we started building things for the web. That was still… not a very popular thing to be doing. And so we were spending some of Warner Brothers money on our teeny little infrastructure. I remember when we were recording University we had an electronic press kit that we were suppose to create, and we did that, we created this little electronic press kit that, but at the same time we built a web site for throwingmusic that was meant to be used for the then only browser for the web, Mosaic, and so that’s how early days it was. But it just seemed like the right thing to do, you know, to my idealistic mind, that the web was an opportunity for a musical utopia, where on the web we weighed every bit as much as Metalica did. At the time it was always like a page or something, and we could reach our audience just as they could reach theirs and if our audience was a fraction of theirs, that didn’t matter. We could still reach them.

F: Yes, it’s just as much there isn’t it?

B: Yeah, absolutely right. We simply wanted to created a congregation point for people and at the same time America Online which was still in its infancy had a very vibrant Throwing Muses message board there, and so we were really impressed by the people that circulated through that forum and immediately took the opportunity to establish a direct relationship with the fans, to make sure that when we went to gigs we knew who was what screen name

F: So it was partly a response to what was there already in a way…

B: Absolutely, yeah that is exactly right, and so it became something that was a logical extension of our overall philosophy and at the same time it became a reason to have that philosophy. It wasn’t just a philosophy without a basis. It became a philosophy with a concrete manifestation, and we could point at it and say “see, I told you so”. And through that time we had a really great time building stuff that nobody else had, and being an early adopter in that area was really gratifying to us.

F: There’s just something about it, it’s like an artistic endeavour. There is just something about being, you know, at the forefront…

B: Well yeah it is, I think you really have to be able to use your imagination, but really I don’t think that you have to be such a futurist to understand why it is people want to have one to one relationships in this world, whether it is between artists and fans or just people who agree on any one point of view. And also working in groups, those things are integral to our existence as people, and so not to get too high minded about it, it’s is a great reason for the stuff to work and it’s a great reason to do it.

F: It makes very good sense to me. The standard on the throwingmusic online message board constantly amazes me, it’s just fantastic. There are some brilliant things written on there from time to time.

B: Yeah… I hope you realise it is a completely un-moderated board. While I do tune in often and make sure that I’m paying attention as often as possible, we don’t censor anything. I mean for a while, we began patrolling and asking people to take the high road, but no, we let it be a self governing entity and the only thing we ever remove from that board is spam, and that would be spam in the broadest sense. I mean even if somebody says “ if you’ll like Throwing Muses you’ll probably like…blank”, that’s ok with us. At least they know who they’re talking to.

F: Yeah, exactly. I sometimes fantasise about somebody getting together a kind of “best of”.

B: YES! That’s a great idea! It’s something that… given some greater resources then those which we have. That’s the other special part of the story, I mean it’s funny, I don’t usually talk to anybody about this stuff when it’s a Kristin thing, but you sure know how to get me going. These are things that I really care about…

F: I’ve been itching to talk to you about this.

B: And that’s what’s so great about it, the fact is that we’ve done this with no resources. I don’t think we put more then $100 into our web site because we simply can’t put more then $100 into our web site in any given month.

F: Wow…

B: So we run this thing on good will and returned favours and symbioses of all sorts, and that’s a big part of it. So with a little more capital, we could do something like that. We could gather… we could plunge the depths.

F: The material’s there…

B: It is all there.

F: Oh, for sure, I’m sure there are some fellow archivists out there that are…

B: Yeah, I’ve seen people compile web chats and things like that very efficiently, so I know they must be gathering this text.

F: I think the people that visit the site could co-operatively somehow do it.

B: You’re right about that, that’s a very high minded idea. I think it would be really fascinating to everyone, but not least of which would be us. But then throwingmusic became the logical base for our exploration of mp3 technology and again early adoption there…

F: Yeah, I was going to come to that, the Works in Progress series that is now onto its third volume, which is great. I just cannot believe that more people are not doing that.

B: I know, well, I think that to make it what we made it where we really share bedroom demos, and things that otherwise “shouldn’t” maybe see the light of day, let alone wouldn’t… takes a certain amount of stupidity-slash-bravery, and I think it was very un-precious of Kristin to allow me do that. It’s not like it was a big deal but Kristin has never been one to try and create much in the way of mystique or to create artifice around her.

F: The albums do that anyway. She doesn’t have to try…

B: That’s pretty good of you to say, but you know, nothing artificial is a pretty good motto. Yeah, and so sharing the process seemed interesting to me as a person and so I was greatly relieved to see it would be interesting to fans as a group.

F: Well, like I say, I just find it odd that… well I’m really no expert but I’ve been around the web a bit and I haven’t run into anything like it.

B: Yeah, and we have really good feedback the whole time, and there have been people who have expressed a desire to do it, but then there are others who I thought would be very into doing it, you know, artists who shall remain nameless who just sort of shrink at the idea, who would only want to control the output, and fake the process of it. We had David Bowie as a subscriber who gave us unbelievably sweet feedback in an email, and yet I haven’t seen him do anything similar, but I wish that he would, what would be fantastic to me.   

F: Yeah! That would be interesting.

And of course the other hat you wear is virtuous.com which is a ticketing agency, and that’s an interesting organisation.

B: Yeah, it’s electronic tickets, and again it comes from the same place, it comes from the same impulse. Through throwingmusic we got a lot of feedback, [……] and so we just thought there has to be a way we can help these people directly. We thought, oh, I know what we should do, we should fake them being on our guest list. We’ll take money from them and put them on a guest list and no one will have to know, and then we then had to build a system by which we could do that.

F: Right, that’s how it started…

B: And that was built for free as well by some really talented people from within the site who knew what we were going through and what we needed to do and just offered their services, and I have to say that something very close to that engine is running today, so it was a pretty well built system although it is being updated now. You know the sad thing is the battle we fight on a weekly basis for ticket stock is a never ending one, and […….]

F: It’s one door-bitch of a world… the whole industry basically.

B: Yeah, I mean that one of the big problems is that someone like us, we always tell clubs that, you know, [……..] go ahead, just offer people a *chance* you know, a choice of some sort. […..] If you have the choice of paying $1 on a $10 or $9 on a $10 ticket, really, you’re going to choose the $1, no matter what it means to you. But hell, it isn’t rocket science, if you can get on an airplane, on an international flight with an electronic ticket just by showing your passport, you should be able to get into a rock show

F: Yeah, for god’s sake. For sure…

B: And then part of it was that we needed to demonstrate that we weren’t about the money, so we created a charitable imperative to the business model.

F: I was going to mention that too, how do you decide… because what you’re referring to is that virtuous.com puts some money back into the community.

B: Yes, a portion of proceeds of after tax profits goes into, that sounds like a stiffly couched term, but I have to be, I am being completely honest, we make our profit margin and then we take before tax profits and divert them to grass roots organizations in the community where the shows happen. Each show had a code, and included in that code is a regional location code, and in co-operation with our promoters and clubs, we contact grass roots charities that are responsible for caring for people as human beings, providing basic human needs, non-political, non-religious based charities that simply provide the function that until recently in our human history extended family filled that role, so that is to say that we work with charities that feed, that shelter, that care for, that provide that which an extended family would otherwise provide.

F: Basic sort of stuff, yeah. That’s great. Well I’m delighted to hear it. And I know that  […..] love you too, Billy! (laughs)

B: Yeah, (laughs) …I get letters from them all the time. I should think of them as love letters…

F: You could frame a couple and put them on the wall. Yes, [……] sounds like a certain software company that I won’t name.

I vaguely remember reading ages ago that you trained as an actor originally.

B: I did originally yeah. I lived in New York City and went to NYU and studied with Lee Strasburg Theatre Institute as an actor, and ended up moving out to Los Angeles, I mean long story short… I moved out to Los Angeles for a part on a TV show, didn’t get it, went back to rock clubs where I had worked in New York to put bread on the table, and I somehow got one foot stuck in the quicksand of the music business, I guess I struggled. because I was followed up, and not long after that I was the label manger at Sire records in New York where I met my wife.     

F: Yes, and one day these demos arrived from Throwing Muses…

B: Yeah, I got House Tornado as an advanced cassette, that’s how long ago it was. I walked around cleaning the house on a Saturday and, I dunno, something happened where I listened to the tape on repeat for a couple of hours. You know, I was always impressed by the band, I always thought the band was special, but I didn’t get the band. I had much more basic tastes at the time, but I don’t know, something happened that Saturday where I felt I was tapped on the shoulder and I turned my head and was socked on the jaw by this band. That’s the best way I can describe it. Doors opened up to the records prior, and all of a sudden I understood where they were coming from. It was a genuine epiphany for me. And so I became this unbelievably enthusiastic advocate for the band at Warner Brothers, and so it was a fairly logical progression for them to offer me to go work for them when I was done working within the structured environment of a record company. So I was invited to go and work with them.

F: One thing lead to another…

B: Yeah one thing lead to another yeah, four kids later…   

F: And here I am talking to you on the telephone.

B: We’re very lucky…we have an incredible family of fans and friends. We have this wonderful cottage industry that is an independent entity. We’re more independent now then ever. We have and incredibly exciting new project with 50 Foot Wave just rising up with the Kristin stuff…

F: Yeah, I just talked about some of that with Kristin. She described it as being like a whole different thing…

B: It is yeah. We’re not going through the record business in America we’re doing it all ourselves and in the world outside America… 4AD is sort of allowing us to lead the way. We sort of radicalised our marketing concept, we’re giving fans the chance to buy records wholesale and to sell them themselves, and become a part of our organisation. We’re giving away mp3’s of the all songs on the discs and online, we’re bootlegging live performances as we go. We’re adding value to the discs that we sell. We’re adhering to a five song CD model on every release, five songs every nine months or so, so that we can keep things fresh and keep things manageable for people, both in terms of what they can digest in terms of new material and also in terms of what they can afford. I think if we can give people a compelling five song package, you have a dramatic little story-arc there. You have a couple of songs in, a pivot point and a couple of songs out. And if you listen to that on repeat three or four times you get to know that material so much faster, it’s so much better.

F: Well, I hope that there’ll be some people listening to this that’ll be inspired by that kind of approach. I think it’s very inspiring.

B: Well, on the other side of the coin is the touring picture, if we are dealing with those who wonder if we will ever be back in Australia, and we have always struggled to get back, but we haven’t found the ability to get back so far in the last seven or eight years. You know we are doing one hundred and twenty shows a year here in America. We are going to be doing a month every six months in Great Britain and Western Europe, and part of that month of every six months over there will be exploring *new*  territories, places we haven’t been, Poland and Portugal, Eastern Europe, and more the Southern European cities and countries… being able to get out into Greece for instance where we have been asked to go a hundred times and have always had to say no. And of course, that means that we will insist in working in your neck of the woods as well. We need to… we need to. There is no more independent radio for us as a rule. It just doesn’t exist in *our* world. So we have to be the broadcast. We have to play the music for people. There isn’t strong independent retail, Mom-and-Pop stores have been driven out of business around here in America.

F: That’s where community radio can help, of course…

B: That’s right, exactly. It’s where people like you and your station are invaluable. I mean, we have no retail points of availability to speak of, so we have to be the means of distribution as well. So that’s why we’re not taking it easy. We’re really hell-bent on doing an unbelievably aggressive amount of touring, and just reaching people directly. Again, furthering those one-to-one relationships.

F: It’s a much more tactile approach really, isn’t it…

B: Yeah, and it’s also a much more immediate band in that way I think. It’s a much more immediate process. But it is also this band, you know… this band is built for the ground up as a live entity because we believe that’s where the business was heading. That we had to take it back to live music, and so when I say built from the ground up to be a separate entity, think of this as Kristin’s second career. Think of anyone else being faced with a second career choice. You work a job your whole life, and you’re thinking all the while, “if I had it all to do over again, I would do it this way, I would do it this way, I would make this choice, I would make that choice” and when I get to a certain point of achievement I have the opportunity to jump off and do the second thing that I have always wanted to do. That’s what this is for her as a band. She’s able to say “damn, I’ve got all this experience and all this knowledge and all this awareness”.

F: What a great opportunity too, because that’s what one does. One does pile up a kind of brief of things that one would do, if only one could write seventeen drafts of…

B: Yeah, yeah, and imagine how great it is to be able to build the band that is ok an a bar room, it’s ok in hall, it’s ok in an arena if the opportunity presents itself. It’s a band that if you are the first band on the bill at a festival at ten o’clock in the morning, you just get up there and you just blow people away, you just rage you know, this stuff is just blow your face off strong material, strong band. The whole concept is just built for you to take it out and throw it off the stage at people.

F: And no matter how well an album is recorded, there is just nothing like seeing a band live is there?

B: No, that’s exactly right. The album is “the movie”, and the live gig is the performance, it’s the theatre performance. It’s one-to-one times as many people who are in that auditorium. It’s the band to the listener. It’s amazing how individualistic an experience that can be, playing in front of all those people.

F: My wife’s an actor so… she would appreciate that.

B: Yeah, that’s wonderful. It’s an understanding that I think we all have. So it’s our job to figure out how to get this in front of enough people, how to get around enough. It’s not that we have to play in front of big groups of people, it’s just that we have to play a lot of dates for as many as care to come.

F: We mentioned radio… you do have a fairly strong public radio sector in the States don’t you?

B: Hmmm…it’s eroded significantly. Public radio now has to compete with commercial radio, because commercial radio has been distilled down to this horrible, sterile, formatted commercial entity, and public radio stations are being held up as irrelevant by the established radio stations, by the establishment. They are being held up and being marginalised for their “kooky” content and “kooky” perspective. And that’s so dangerous, it’s so terrible. We are watching these stations having to morph themselves into something more “regular” in order to compete. 

F: Oh dear… I’m sad to hear that.

B: Well, there are those stations that do a great job of providing an alternative that is then funded by the public, by pledges and things like that, but there is just an unbelievable paucity of government money for these stations. The government is not about diversity in radio, that’s for sure.

F: Well, it’s become a little bit more sink or swim over here too, actually. We have a hard time staying afloat financially here too. But the good news is that, here at least, in Sydney, they just granted a strong licence to a community radio station in Sydney. I don’t know how many watts it is, but it’s big. It’s right up there with the commercials. It’s the first time it has happened in Sydney, I think there’s one in Melbourne…

B: How wonderful when the government acts in the best interests of its people. What a novel approach!

F: Funny thing that…

B: It must be very strange to have a government that actually behaves in a way consistent with its mandate. It’s a bad dream over here, to watch the government side with corporations, with big business and to destroy mercilessly.

F: So many people seem to swallow it too…

B: Well, that’s the other thing… the American public’s famous apathy.

F: Well, there is a fair bit of that here too. It’s world-wide.

B: That’s why we have to take it straight to everybody. That’s why you are really lucky to have the means to reach people like this.

F: Well good on you.

B: We are tremendous supporters of those independent stations like KEXP in Seattle and KCRW in Los Angeles. There are great independent stations everywhere in America, WLXY in Ohio, I mean there are really great places in America where free radio really still lives. WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey, but there are just huge places to go still, but they are disappearing fast. Like the environment. People just seem to watch it go and don’t seem to realise that their station is next. Who is going to speak up for me when they come to get me.

F: The old frog-in-hot-water thing… ah, dear…

B: Yeah. Well, on that note…

F: Well look thanks Billy, it’s been great. And by the way, I congratulated Kristin on the birth of your youngest child…

B: Bodhi Bill! He’s a great little guy…

F: …and I thought I’d take the opportunity congratulate you too. He’s been doing a little live gig here! (laughs).

B: (laughs)Yeah, I know! He’s sort of got run of the house here. He’s bursting in on everybody. He decided to be heard.

F: Well that’s good, that’s fine by us.

B: Apparently he is fond of lolly pops.

F: Oh god. You’ve got years of that ahead of you, I can tell you right now.

B: Right. Well, it was a pleasure speaking to you Francis. I thought I’d hate it, and I loved it.

F: Well it’s been a great honour having you both on the program, and we hope to see you in Australia before too long…

B: Oh yes, and we hope to be there.