Cary Baker Interview (Conqueroo PR)
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. If you’re not familiar with the newsletter already, click here to find out more.
Cary Baker is the PR guy behind Conqueroo, a firm that specializes in “rock, soul, blues, country and countless hybrids thereof.” In an earlier life, Cary spent a great deal of time at music publications (Creem, Billboard, Trouser Press, Chicago Reader, etc.), so I felt like he was well-placed to talk about music journalism from both sides.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I was smitten with pop music from the time I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1963. I was eight and in 3rd Grade. Jump to junior high school, my science teacher for some reason had a subscription to Billboard and brought the old issues to me, which I read and memorized. I paid attention to every label, every label head, every chart.
When I was 12 or 13 or so, I heard Muddy Waters from his Electric Mud album on Chicago underground FM radio and my life was changed, especially when I realized that both Muddy and Chess Records were located short miles from me. I went down to Chess Records at 14 or 15 and was given the grand tour, and records and swag that you wouldn’t believe.
Jump then to freshman year at high school in the Chicago suburbs where my progressive high school had a 33-watt FM radio station (WNTH-FM) that blew some signal into the city. I immediately became blues DJ, and then, in a frighteningly prescient bit of 14-year-old career focus, became the radio station’s music director and public relations director.
Music director meant calling record companies and their local distributors to chase down product for airplay. Often times after school, I’d head across the suburbs to MS Distributors and Summit Distributors in Skokie which distributed such labels as A&M, Liberty, Fantasy, Ovation and Warner Bros. between them. By then, you could say I was working in the biz—I certainly wasn’t doing homework, and failed freshman algebra.
Then, for some reason, I launched a blues fanzine. It was called Blue Flame, and I soon had subscribers throughout the world—including a few famous ones: Nick Tosches, Peter Guralnick, Concord A&R man Joe McEwen, Vintage Guitar’s Dan Forte. I was all of 15 by now, and blues labels were sending me LPs and 45s to review. Blue Flame lasted 13 issues before I figured I’d better spend some time as a teenager doing teenage things.
I wrapped it up by age 16. But by then, I’d started to notice an alt-weekly starting to permeate the nearby Northwestern University campus called the Chicago Reader. I sent them a record review, typed, and they ran it. The next phase of my career had begun. Around that time, a package from United Artists Records to the radio station contained not only some cool records by The Move and Family, but a copy of Greg Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp. I’d never thought of rock ‘n’ roll in the way that Greg Shaw, Lester Bangs, and other contributors had. That too was a turning point. I sent them some articles too, and Greg Shaw printed them. I started to subscribe to all the current crop of fanzines, and write for most of them.
By the time I graduated high school and headed on to Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill. to study journalism, I’d taken a solid J class in high school and was already an accredited freelance music writer. I became pop music critic for NIU’s Northern Star daily newspaper, and soon dropped out to edit Rockford, Ill.’s decidedly non-alt weekly newspaper called Lively Times. The breakout bar band in Rockford went by the name of Cheap Trick. I saw them in many shot-and-beer joints for $5 cover and three sets a night. And again my life was changed.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
I had many mentors and they’re all surprised to learn that they were mentors: Bob Koester, the owner of Delmark Records; Bruce Iglauer of Alligator Records; Bob Roth who co-owned and edited the Chicago Reader; Patrick Goldstein, later of the L.A. Times, who was the slightly older version of me and had just graduated Northwestern; Don McLeese, who was a step ahead of me at the Reader; David Webb, who hired me at a little Chicago label called Ovation Records straight outta college; Scott Cameron, who managed Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, gave me many valuable tips and served as my champion; and eventually Jay Boberg, my boss at I.R.S. Records; and Hale Milgrim, president of Capitol Records while I was there. Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra and later a little label called Discovery Records, was also something of a mentor when I worked at the latter label — my final of six label gigs — from about 1996-98. So many artists I’ve worked with have imparted wisdom upon me. Peter Himmelman, a deep thinker and a mensch, comes to mind. And in his odd way, longtime client Kinky Friedman has been a bit of an influence, having eschewed convention at every turn in his life.
Just to bring the narrative to the present, I launched my own indie music PR firm, Conqueroo, in 2004.
Walk me through a typical day-to-day.
So here at Conqueroo, I work a solid shift of 11.5 hours, five days a week—and I’m very assiduous about people leaving me alone on weekends. I am up at 6 a.m., and corresponding email by 6:30 a.m. PT. All my major pitches are first thing in the morning. I may have written them the previous afternoon. But they emerge from my Drafts file at dawn, being a big believer in proper timing. I rarely generate email on weekends because I feel it’s important not to presume upon my associates that they be their ‘work selves” on a Sunday afternoon.
But of course I take care of media on deadline 365 days a year. I usually pitch on weekday mornings, take a phone meeting at 11, do a quick lunch to-go at noon, and come back here and work some more til 4 or 5, upon which I do online yoga (I’ve been liking Yoga with Adriene) for 30 or so minutes. I swing back by my desk after that and finish my work day, including creating a list of action steps for the following day. I may return to my desk at 9 p.m. to do a “brain dump,” jotting down any concerns, problems, misspoken words, unspoken words, worries, resentments, must-do’s, etc. I try to write for 12 minutes or so, sometimes in illegible shorthand as it’s only for me. By doing that, I can get to sleep with a minimum of “monkey brain.” Which is to say I otherwise struggle with a bit of insomnia.
How has the PR industry changed over the past few years?
Well, let’s quickly go back to 1979 when I began at Ovation. There were four things on my desk: A phone, an IBM Selectric typewriter, a Rolodex, and a cup of coffee. Of the four, the latter was the most essential. I pitched newspapers, magazines and sometimes TV. Cut to 2020: So much has changed, of course. The majority of our outlets are online, though there are newspapers and magazines. NPR and public radio in general remain the needle-tipper, and are overpitched accordingly. TV remains a thing. And now there are podcasts. It’s still the wild west in terms of podcasts; obviously a few like WTF with Marc Maron result in sales upticks, and are now booked by a Hollywood casting and booking outlet seeking “A” names. A lot of former terrestrial radio personalities are now podcasters and also Zoomcasters.
The other thing that’s changed is the emphasis on premieres for IG (instant grat) tracks, or pre-release digital singles. The trouble is that within the media, premieres have largely come and gone. So pitching a greater number of tracks on specific break dates has become a challenge. And of course since the pandemic, a lot of our job has consisted of livestream booking, It takes a lot of effort for an artist to do a livestream, so it’s our job, as always, to sort the wheat from the chaff and present the worthwhile ones. We look at a lot of social media following statistics in order to make our determinations.
What's one thing that journalists and editors don't get about what you do?
I can speak from a certain amount of experience on this seeing that I was a journalist, and have a degree in journalism. I‘m also married to a woman who was an editor at the L.A. Weekly for two decades, and who is—among many other responsibilities—our in-house editor at Conqueroo. So I often feel like the perception is that music publicists are shallow telemarketers, when in fact, I can write as well, or even better, than many journalists. And I know my music as well as they do.
I assiduously keep up with new Americana, indie-rock and roots music, while also listening to lots of old music, including pre-war blues, bebop jazz, ‘60s folk, Nuggets-era garage rock, power-pop. I have rooms of CDs and LPs. I’m a collector and fan. So again, the often unspoken but implicit perception that publicists are shallow flacks is my greatest nemesis. I’m always happy to stop talking about the artists I’m promoting and to shift gears into a discussion as to why Townes Van Zandt or Thelonious Monk or Howlin’ Wolf or why the Zion, Ill. power pop band Shoes are great.
What's one thing that artists don't get about what you do?
I love artists, of course. They’re our lifeblood in music PR, and the world revolves around them. They’re the stars; we’re merely the boys and girls in the back room. But we still have boundaries. I work 11.5 hours at a stretch, five days a week, at my desk—sometimes with only a 30-minute break to grab a quick lunch and check our PMB (mailbox). I respect hard-working desk people and I seldom initiate email on weekends—certainly no pitches. So when I receive an email containing a demand or concern on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I’m not always pleased.
Being an artist is not a Monday through Friday job—that I get. But I do try to gently suggest to clients that there’s a Drafts file on their email software, and there’s the Boomerang app. Probably better to time the transmission of your email to when I’m all for business instead of taunting me at brunch with my wife or waiting for a Saturday night movie to begin at a theater. But you’d be surprised.
I do take a week’s vacation every year in which I bring no phone, no laptop, no iPad, no desktop. Unplugging is divine. Oh, but returning to 1,400 unopened emails requires a few deep breaths, a dropperful of CBD, and possibly a Xanax.
What's one tip that you'd give a PR person starting out right now?
I’d tell someone just starting to learn to write. REALLY learn how to write. I see pitches from other publicists that make me cringe. We need to be masters in the art of presentation. I can only imagine the lead pop music critic from The New York Times suffering emails that are poorly written. And we must keep our ears open for new music, whether it’s music we represent or not. It’s very important for me to know a bit about Billie Eilish and Phoebe Bridgers, even if ours isn’t exactly a millennial-dominated roster. I’m competing against Phoebe Bridgers for space when I pitch 86-year-old blues legend Bobby Rush. So how am I going to assert him in the quest for media space?
Where do you see music journalism headed?
It’s been sad to see the contraction of daily and weekly newspapers over the past few years, a trend accelerated by the pandemic of course. But it’s been encouraging to see the ascent of music blogs, podcasts and other innovations in the media landscape. One of our great outlets is DittyTV, a 24/7 actual TV channel via Roku, TiVo, AppleTV, PrimeTV. It has a news department like the old MTV. They present live performances. It’s a real ray of sunlight in the dark skies of music media, and altogether unexpected.
Online media is healthy—sometimes enabling daily and weekly newspapers to retreat on the cost of print production—which is good and bad. Another trend is that we book a lot of Instagram live events—I guess that makes us influencers of a sort. I’m also seeing a lot of Spotify playlists and YouTube embeds in online articles. This is great because they’re generally monetized by the artist. We’re placing stories that not only serve as good PR for an artist but a chance for fans to hear their music, thereby financially supporting them.
Did I mention that while we certainly have the capability to service music to journalists digitally (downloads and streams), in a cost-saving measure as well as to take the pressure off the beleaguered post office, we do still send physical CDs—sometimes as many as 100 to 125 of them per title, though sometimes as few as 30—as music is not always “real” to journalists until it lands on their desk. And a few have confided that since they’re not being paid much (if anything), the CD trinket is sometimes their sole reward for their hard work of writing.
Journalists are also writing more books. A lot of them may never recoup. But I feel they’re important to have out there. I have two books—both nonfiction, both about music—that I hope to write two or three years from now. I have some book publisher contacts. But if I need to go the DIY route, I am prepared. These books will be my children, what I leave behind on this planet when I’m gone.
What artist or trend are you most interested in right now?
Musically, one of the more encouraging trends I see is the overall diversification in once all-white Americana. I can remember heated debates about Americana being a white thing. Now it’s a white thing, black thing, young thing, old thing, straight thing, gay thing, transgender thing, disabled thing. I cite artists like Yola, Orville Peck, Cidny Bullens, Brittney Howard, Gaelyn Lea, Cary Morin, and am very encouraged. Americana has also given a home to artists like Booker T. Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Dan Penn, Big Star, The dB’s, Swamp Dogg and others who had no other genre going into the 21st Century.
What was the best track / video or film / book you've consumed in the past 12 months? Anything you want to plug?
Lots of little discoveries, past and present. Omnivore Recordings, the Los Angeles-based reissue/etc. label, which is our longtime client, has opened my ears to a lot of things I’d not otherwise have heard, like late ‘70s Memphis power pop singer-songwriter Van Duren. Boy he did write and record great music! But totally under the radar. I guess that’s a plug, given my Omnivore affiliation.
A lot of my favorite films lately have been music documentaries—the real movie about Echo Park (not the one that starred Jakob Dylan), the Creem Magazine doc, the Go-Go’s doc. (I will never be a documentary filmmaker, but they have hastened my desire to get my book projects underway.) And while I rep many very worthwhile projects by artists who have helped transform music on some level—the Mavericks, most iterations of Big Star, James McMurtry, Swamp Dogg, Marshall Crenshaw, Bobby Rush—I’m very excited to have just completed work on Cidny Bullens’ first album as a transgender man. It’s a really swell album, and I feel every human being needs to hear it. I guess that’s my plug. But there are 50 other artists I’m working on—all projects hand-picked by me and my staff—for whom I take satisfaction in knowing I helped make a difference.
The best compliment anyone has given me, really, is my friend and client, 86-year-old blues legend Bobby Rush, who told me one day on the Grammy red carpet: “I know you’re doing things for me that go above and beyond that I’m not even paying you for.” And then a pause. And then: “I appreciate you.”
I appreciate you.
That alone makes the 11.5 hours a day, pitching all day long, dealing with rejections and concerns by clients, all seem worthwhile.
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