Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Smoking Popes frontman Josh Caterer and Brett Newski analyze radio "shock jocks", songs as NFT's, future of live music, absurdity of songwriting as a job, and the Mick Jagger workout routine.
More on Smoking Popes: https://www.smokingpopesmusic.com/
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SNIPPET:
Brett: You guys were a band in the pre-social-media era. It must have been wild to live in both worlds. In the 90s, did you find that to be a more magical time? Were things less complex, and just happening more naturally?
Josh: That’s an interesting way to put it. The things that happened to the Smoking Popes, as far as promotion and the trajectory of our career, and getting exposure...you had to go through certain channels. There were certain publications that had to agree to cover you.
It seems like the possibility of self-promotion didn’t exist as much. You would have a publicist who would try to get you covered in these established publications. But now you have the same actress to the internet as everyone else does. It’s an entirely different animal.
It’s cool now because you can be the pilot of your own destiny, as far as projecting yourself out there into the world. Before, it seemed like you needed to “get a break,” this idea of getting a big break.
Brett: Yes, yes. What was that moment for you, for Smoking Popes?
Josh: There were a few dominos for us. One of the big ones was when Green Day came through Chicago. They were touring for the Dookie album in 1994. They had been a punk band for several years, but they became one of the biggest bands in teh world at that time. They were part of punk, which had been mainly underground, becoming mainstream.
So when they came through Chicago touring for Dookie, they asked us to open for them at the Riviera. I think it was at the Riv. And the cool thing that they did, and were doing, and I believe continue to do, is that they were champions of bands that they believed in. LEsser known bands. They’re really good about using their platform to give smaller artists some attention and opportunity.
And they did that with us. And they not only had us open for them, but they talked about us. And they would do that with other bands too. When they were being interviewed they’d mention the names of bands they thought were cool. And we were one of those bands. So the fact that we were getting attention from Green Day at that time was a huge step, that first domino that pointed to us being on a major label ourselves.
It brought us attention from a variety of people, including Green Day’s managers at the tiem who were trying to start their own record label. So tehy contacted us to be one of the first bands on that label, which we didn’t end up going with, but the fact that they contacted us started what is classically known as a “bidding war.” We had a handful of major labels offering us record deals at the time.
I can connect that directly back to Green Day. They started that for us.
Brett: That’s the dream, right? A bidding war on your band. Nothing better than that.
