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from url to irl is a podcast about music, community and the experiences that bring people together both online and in real life. each episode features thoughtful conversations about connection, identity, creativity, and the moments that stay with us long after the show ends.
from url to irl
From Bedrock and Beyond: Building Community Through Music
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In this episode, Cosmo Jones shares his 25 years of experience in the music industry, the story behind founding Bedrock LA, and his current nonprofit work in Oregon. I discover insights on building community through music, managing a successful studio, and fostering diversity in the arts. Thanks for listening!!
Episode Credits:
Produced, and edited by Full and Thriving Media
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Hi, you're listening to From URL to IRL, the podcast of where online connections, music, and real life collide. I'm your host, Valerie, and music has always been a huge part of my life, from growing up, going to concerts to finding comfort and community through artists and songs that I love. Every week I'll sit down with artists, fans, creators, and music lovers from all walks of life to have real conversations about identity, creativity, and experiences that bring us together. Whether you're here for the music, the stories, or just to feel a little less alone, I'm happy you're here. Hello and welcome to From URL to IRL. I'm Valerie, and today I am sitting down with Cosmo Jones. He is a former independent creative director, co-owner of Bedrock LA. He has 25 years of experience in the music industry and now runs a nonprofit out of Oregon. So today we're gonna sit down and talk. And yeah. So how are you doing?
SPEAKER_00I'm doing great. Still raining in Oregon per usual.
SPEAKER_01Shocker, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're not allowed much sun.
SPEAKER_01I actually used to live in Seattle, so I know all about the Northwest all too well. Although I've noticed June can be a little bit of a hit or miss. Like sometimes it was sunny. The first year that I was there was in 2021. It was sunny. But in 2022 and 2023, it rained the entire month of June. And then July suddenly it was bright and sunny. And I'm born in July. So I was not happy because I actually love the rain and I was excited. But yeah, so tell me a little bit more about Bedrock. How did that come about? What was your process? How did you and the guys that you worked with meet? Just kind of tell me the background.
SPEAKER_00Sure. It started out of a kind of a need. I had a band put together and I hadn't been doing any tours or anything for a while. So I didn't have a lockout rehearsal space. And so I called downtown rehearsal, where we rehearsed for years before, to get a lockout room. And I could just never get a call back. And I realized there's a gap in the market here. So what can we do about it? And then I came across this building that was available where some other people had a similar idea of we want to kind of do a music studio. And so it came about in a convoluted way because this is something I was doing on the side as opposed to, you know, where I'm making money doing either marketing or design for not just the music industry, but for a lot of different industries. So I was already working full-time and it wasn't like I was looking to invest in something and build out a business. It happened really just on kind of willing it into existence and working with the right people and creating a good foundational group. So the first couple of years we started building out the space so that we'd have lockout rooms for bands to rehearse. It was 40,000 square feet, and it was a former jewelry manufacturing plant. So there's no windows, which is great. It was all brick. It had a parking lot in the back and in the front, which in Los Angeles that's gold. Parking sucks. It did in 2008 when we started it, and it's only progressed for the worst. And it had as much power as you could possibly need because they did jewelry manufacturing in there and they moved out because they were using a chemical that was banned in the United States. So of course it went overseas. So most people can can you know inhale fumes. You know, it had everything we needed, and it was kind of like this crazy rabbit warrant of rooms because as they shifted from manufacturing, they turned it into a multi-room online company. So they had this fat internet connection already in there. The whole place was wired with Cat5E at the time, I think, Ethernet cable, which would let us move data around the place really easily. And it had big bathrooms.
SPEAKER_01That's nice.
SPEAKER_00It was weird because the second floor had these huge bathrooms and the first floor had smaller bathrooms. We're thinking that feels so backwards because the second floor is smaller than the first. Then we learned that these poor employees that when it was a manufacturing place, once they came in, they weren't allowed to leave because they had all these x-ray machines and stuff. So they had to eat their lunch on site. So they had to have bathrooms big enough for a hundred employees to be able to eat there because like you couldn't leave the building, which is crazy to me. Oh my god. Yeah, I feel like there's an employee rights violation somewhere in there, but that's not what we're here to talk about. So it was a space that we could like room by room just start to build it out. And what we initially worked out with the owner, he was just excited to have anybody interested in that building because nobody was doing manufacturing. There wasn't really a client for his building. I told him from day one that I would not lease the building, like I'm not gonna get suckered into a triple net lease. I know better than that. So we worked it out more like, okay, let's just do like kind of more of a management contract. We're gonna occupy X square foot of the building. You know, we occupied about 35% of the building with services and recording studios, hourly rehearsals, repairs, and then 65% of the building was lockout. And over time we built out all those lockout rooms. And so the lockout rooms essentially paid the rent. It gave us a position where we had very low overhead for our business because you know I know better than to saddle myself with debt and do things that are beyond you know what I can manage if something goes wrong. Fortunately, I already had really good lessons in the workforce. That was a big part of it, just being able to understand what to do and what not to do, and just being creative about working out a different kind of deal. And what it resulted in is the business in the last three to four years or so was paying probably 60 grand a month in rent. And originally he wanted to lease it to me for 27 grand a month, and then it would escalate. So, yeah, hindsight, I probably could have done a lease and made some money, but then I would have had been saddled with all the stress and responsibility that comes with that. So I can let that go because we did great just on our own. The reason I have a repair center is the first person I wanted to bring on was someone with great technical experience. Because the biggest thing that goes wrong with studios is they can't maintain their gear, and that can be a huge money pit because your customers expect the gear to work and it needs to be of a certain caliber if you're gonna attract all customers. We wanted to be open to every type of band, whether it's your first band, or you know, we hosted some of the biggest names out there over time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So having a repair guy who eventually became a partner was a great move because sending gear out for repair is an expensive and timely process. So being able to shorten the time if something goes wrong, or maybe being able to fix it right away, it was great. And our customers loved it because if there was something wrong, even with their own gear, our guys would help them out. So I basically put it together that we've got hourly rehearsal walkout rooms of different sizes. We had the repair facility. We were authorized to fix a bunch of different brands of gear. We had great recording services. The other partner I brought on who was really there from the beginning, we just couldn't figure out how to form our business entity until about three years into it. But yeah, come on B. He's a USC business major, but he's also a musician and a creative person. And so he headed up the recording part of Bedrock, and that was really successful. We had three different recording studios of our own that we managed, and then we had about 12 more recording studios with a bunch of different producers or engineers that we would sublet to, and we really curated who went in those rooms to make sure that people would get along and everybody's got the right attitude because we were a very open space where people hang out. It's not like Mariah Carey rehearsing and making everybody leave the building, which this is a true story that happened to me way back in the day. So, you know, not every band was a fit for bedrock, but most were.
SPEAKER_01So lockout room, what is that? Like, why are they called lockout room?
SPEAKER_00Oh, lockout just means you have 24-7 access. So our system was set up. So we had magnetic key cards for the parking lot and for the front door. So if you had a lockout room, you could rehearse any time of day that you wanted. It eventually grew to 10 a.m. to midnight.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And we were fully staffed during then. And then from midnight to 10 a.m., it would just be lockout people coming and going. So one of the first things we did was put in a vending machine that could sell all kinds of things. It was just a regular vending machine, but one of the spiral ones. But we were able to find fun things that musicians need. We had drumsticks in there, we had guitar strings, we had Oh, that's cool. When we first started, and it was not so well known, we had cigarettes, we had fear, we had condoms, we had just everything that the traveling or a local musician needs to stay creative.
SPEAKER_01Was there any particular like did you find that there was a certain like genre of band or anything that seemed to come to your studio, or was it just kind of everybody? I mean, I saw the pretty wide range.
SPEAKER_00It was everybody. What I said from the beginning, we all agreed that we wanted it to be a place for everybody. And so it really was a melting pot of musical genres and that it probably drifted over time as styles changed. But our goal was, you know, our staff made sure that people were welcome. Like we really treated our customers like they were our friends because most places you rehearsed back then before we opened, if you weren't uh a known artist, it could be a horrible experience. Like people would just be downright mean to you, and the gear would be broken. And it's just like, you know, why am I suffering through this? I'm just trying to rehearse. And then the rooms would just be gray carpet, four walls in a square, like no thought put into anything but a bit of sound dampening. So a big thing at Bedrock was every hourly room had a different vibe to it. And we put effort into the design of those rooms, and you can still see them on the website under hourly rehearsals. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, it was important to us that everybody get treated with respect and that it has a vibe and that it's very communal. So on the front porch area where people would go out and smoke, that's one of the funnest things is every time I would get there for the first time, it's fun to see who all is hanging out there because you never know. It just became a complete lottery of who you might see standing out there, and it was just so cool. And I'm a pretty private person, so I never outed myself as the owner unless there was an actual issue to deal with or as a partner because that way I could stand out there and listen. And I also played in bands, so a lot of people just thought I was playing, like, unless they were real good customers and new, the ones that are kind of touring through and leaving, they never knew. There's I really like to hear what people are saying about the space when they don't think someone's listening.
SPEAKER_01What are some of your favorite? Like, what are some of your inspirations, like artist-wise and favorite musicians? And did you get to see any of them at the studio?
SPEAKER_00The ones that had the most impact on me, like the best memories I have. One of the first ones was there's a band out of Compton called 1500 or nothing, and they are a backing band for a lot of different hip-hop artists. And they started rehearsing at our place, and they started bringing in artists. And one of those artists was Nipsey Hustle.
SPEAKER_01Oh, wow. Wow.
SPEAKER_00What I really appreciated about Nipsey Hustle was like I felt like he and I really had shared the same values about like, you know, helping out your community and giving back and all those kind of things. So it's tragic what happened to him. But getting to be there and having that as like one of the first kind of notches in our belt of hey, someone really cool is using our place. That's a great memory. I have another memory of walking in one day, and one of the guys working was like, Hey, there's this guy who sounds like Tom York. And several people said, I thought I heard Tom York in there. And we're like, No, he's not booked here. We don't have him on the books. That would be insane. And it turned out he was in one of the lockout rooms for some band that he had some kind of affiliation with. I don't know if he was producing them or doing something for them, or just guesting on a track. But yeah, literally, Tom York from Radiohead is in the building, and we didn't even know for sure until after it happened. So those types of things would happen.
SPEAKER_01That's crazy. That's so cool. That would like make it all worth it.
SPEAKER_00Another great memory for me because I came up listening to music on the 70s and 80s. So for whatever reason, I had this attraction to disco and hard rock. I liked both of them pretty much equally, which is why I played drums and guitar. I I refuse to choose between the two. I like to play them both. So there was a producer on site, Jeff Ellis, who's worked with a bunch of really cool artists. He had just come off of working with Frank Ocean, I believe. And he got a song for Cali Uchis, who's this Colombian singer, who's fantastic. And but the guest players on the track, Bootsy Collins from Paolo and Funkadelic, played bass. And so we had Bootsy and George Clinton wandering the halls of bedrock that day. And that's not something I ever expected to happen. So thank you, Jeff Ellis, for getting that gig. That record, that's one of the plaques for bedrock. That single did really well.
SPEAKER_01So the rehearsal spaces were they like rehearsal spaces for like tours, like when they were getting ready to do a tour, was that what they would do when they would come?
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay. Those artists I was referring to, 1500 or nothing was using one of our showcase rooms, which is like the very complete room. It had a big sound system, lots of monitors, a stage, you know, it's set up for practicing for playing live events on a fairly large stage. We only had so much room. So that's what they were using it.
SPEAKER_01That's so cool.
SPEAKER_00And then the Tom York story was one of the lockout rooms. And then Cali Uchis was one of the recording studios that was that was on site. Because we had somewhere around 15 total by the time the building was full, I think. So there was a lot of activity because you had fans coming to recording and they were in their own section.
SPEAKER_01That's so cool.
SPEAKER_00And then the you had all your hourly customers you'd see if every other day, sometimes daily. Yeah. And then you'd have that. I said recording customers, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00We'd also get random people coming in because we were authorized to repair for for brands like Orange Amplification or Telefunken microphones, because Phil, our other partner, used to work for Telefunken and is a mic designer.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome.
SPEAKER_00And he is now the head of product AKG microphones. He's doing really well.
SPEAKER_01That's amazing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a cool gig to move on to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00He deserves it. He put in a long haul at Red Rock and it it it's not like it paid great, but at least we didn't owe anybody money.
SPEAKER_01You know what? That's always a win.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, actually, it it it really made financial sense. That's why it was kind of a bummer that it had to shut down because the building auto refused to repair it. But we don't have to go to the dark side yet. There's a ton of good memories of all kinds, from just being able to play there with my own bands and getting to c oh, here's a huge thing that Bedrock has, because it was kind of a community, is so many people met each other there and people formed bands, and a few people even got married, and it was just a big that's so cute, a big place for opportunity, which is now really hard to find because places like this don't really exist. And seeing all these or having access to so many people, I was able to play on a bunch of different people's music. If I needed someone to play on mine, that's how I do it. I would just trade. I keep money out of the equation when I'm working on my own music. Yeah. So I'll go sit in and play a bunch of guitar for you know an EDM producer friend in exchange for some beats or something like that, or I'll do it just because it's fun, or I like the person or I like their music, because it was more important to me to get the opportunity than it was to try to set up any kind of deal. That's where that's the no fun, time consuming part, and most of the time it doesn't even come together. So if I acted like that, where I was like, Well, we got to figure out royalties before we do anything, and what's my payout on this, and how's all the business part of it working, just sucks the soul right out of the room. So I got to like sit in with people I really respected. Like uh one one time I did like two hours with Isa, who's the machine and Florence in the machine, and she makes all the music, and she's so freaking talented. So just to go in there, because I would just bring my guitar and my pedal board and make just tons of weird sounds, and it was up to her. My attitude was use them if you want. I don't need any credit, just here's a bunch of stuff for your sound palette. I have no idea where those ended up, and that's totally okay. I'm wondering one day if I'll hear some echo of it and go, that sounds familiar because you know, I know I know my own style, but I just like that there's so much stuff out there in the universe that exists.
SPEAKER_01That is so cool. With it being such a community that you formed, how come you decided not to just like move to a different building? Like, what made you decide not to?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, that's a great question. Finding a building like that that had everything I mentioned, all the parking, and it's very soundproof already and built out. We built that out over years, just slowly, bit by bit, that you know, instead of accruing any debt, we would just reinvest back into the business until everything was built out, and then the business became profitable, and it was always profitable. And the profit was a steady increase up until the pandemic. We even survived the pandemic, and we were able to pay our employees the entire time. Wow. And when we opened back up, we literally had three years of operating capital or more in in our bank account, and like I said, no real debt. Shit, I forgot your question.
SPEAKER_01How come you decided not to open up another building somewhere?
SPEAKER_00So because that building was kind of like capturing lightning in a bottle, it's really hard to do twice. So I can't tell you how much work we put into figuring out what else we could do. And I had already knew how hard it was because in 2016, I think, I took a step back and Phil and Comran really kind of took over running it because I had an opportunity to start this agency in New York with this director and kind of work on a bunch of different things. And I'm all over the place. Uh, I like working on so many different things, so I will totally just bounce around wherever. So one of the things I was looking for though was a place to do like a second bedrock. And I I spent time in Miami, I spent a lot of time looking in Detroit, but there was just nothing available. So if I couldn't find it in places like that, like finding it in Los Angeles for the type of arrangement we had, no building existed, and everything was going through the roof, you know, as far as property sales, which is was great for my house. I appreciate how much I was able to sell it for versus what I paid for it, but uh it really sucks for the music community because they're basically priced out of it. I in fact, I just recently got a text from an old friend, Downtown Rehearsal, the place I mentioned that I rehearsed before Bedrock, it was so full that they couldn't even call me back for three months. Um downtown rehearsal, they lost both of their buildings. And that that was kind of one of the sad things. When we first opened, a couple hourly rehearsal studios went out of business. And quite honestly, they were ones that weren't any they weren't any good. So we we thought, okay, well, that that's a good thing. You know, people have access to better quality, and we haven't changed the price, so that feels fair. But then bigger places started closing down, and you know, swing house closed down, and I can't even remember how many different ones, and now they're all gone. So I really don't know what's gonna happen to the music scene in LA. If you don't have a place for people to get together and rehearse, you don't have much of a music scene. And that's evidenced by San Francisco because they had one huge building that everybody rehearsed. Ironically, it was called downtown rehearsal. It had nothing to do with uh the one in LA.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And the owner of the building was really cool and he was happy with the situation, but he was an older gentleman and he passed away. And his son, as soon as he got it, this was in like 1999. So, right when tech was starting to blow up in San Francisco, and this guy had dollar signs rolling up in its eyes, and he kicked all the musicians out with 24 hours' notice. And uh now he owns some major beer branch that musicians are probably drinking, not realizing that this is the guy that helped ruin the San Francisco music scene. Because bands like Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Melvins, like from the biggest bands on the scene to everybody below it, all practice there. So it sucks to see because for me, going around to clubs in the 90s and from what when I hear the 80s and 70s was it was such a blast, and there was such a scene, and it was affordable. And now it's like younger people they don't have that kind of access because it doesn't exist and everything's gotten ridiculously expensive. So, how are we supposed to get every kid to the concert? And yeah, you know, these are the type of things that that need to be fixed.
SPEAKER_01I agree.
SPEAKER_00Just embracing people who aren't capitalists who might just be really creative because I'm not in it for the money. That's why I'm not good at promoting myself. I don't even really do interviews, I'd rather be behind the scenes and have someone else do that. I just really just want to make music, which is why it was really easy for me to divorce the dollar from making music and stand myself up by, you know, like working in marketing and other things to free me up to play whatever I wanted musically, which was really fulfilling because I started out as a touring musician and I thought, oh, this is great. You know, I'm gonna get to be a side person on some gigs, get some good tours, but I did not like that lifestyle. And a lot of the bands I auditioned for, I thought their music was no good. And so that that's why I kind of have a rule if I'm gonna do music with somebody, is I have to really like their songs or their style or what's going on. I have to really like hanging out with them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And we have to like not talk about the money aspect of it, it's that easy. And the good news is it's like when you're able to make that much music, some of it is gonna be successful, or at least that's how it used to be. So I I was able to play on some records that went platinum or gold, or and I got to play with some really cool bands that I do respect.
SPEAKER_01So for that's amazing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for every crappy audition I went on, let's I'd say I went on 20 crappy auditions, I probably got to play on one really cool thing that made it all worthwhile. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01So when you decided to close the doors because of everything that happened, did you immediately decide after that you wanted to move up to Oregon? Or was that like a slower process?
SPEAKER_00No, I was already in Detroit and we were still kicking around the idea because Detroit has all these buildings that are owned by either the city or the land bank. And the one thing that could have been cool was taking a Detroit school that isn't used anymore. Because the thing about Detroit is it's built for two million people, but right now the population's hovering around less than 800,000. So there's a lot of buildings that are just not in use, and they're in varying degrees of condition, right? So being able to build something like bedrock in Detroit made sense. So I was hanging out in Detroit. I only ended up in Oregon because of the pandemic, and kind of on accident, because in Detroit, what happened was everything closed down, and a lot of the music venues there, they don't own the building. And our shutdown was long enough that those people lost their leases or whatever their arrangement was, they couldn't reopen the club for some reason. So we lost just so many great venues, and it was a real kick in the gut, and it kind of halted momentum. So I was looking for something else to fill that void because I'm not someone who sits still for too long. And some friends of mine we wanted to invest in a building on the Oregon coast, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. So I agreed to do it, and then problems started happening, and I had to fly out to Oregon to kind of see what was going on, and then I realized, oh, they're gonna need a lot more help than they even know. So I ended up having to stay out here and to push this thing over the finish line, which it finally did. But man, it's been a rocky ride. Yeah, the business itself didn't work out, but the property ended up being a good acquisition. So I had the business, it was running for about a little under a year, but we just did not have the right team together, and we had to close down the business and sell the building, and it is now a Pelican brewing location.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And the only reason I'm still in Oregon is I'm into the Oregon Coast vibe, and I've made a lot of good friends here, and I met my future wife here, and these are the reasons not to leave. As much as I, you know, miss my Detroit family and those friends, you know, people have been really welcoming out here and supportive. And we, you know, we've got the arts and music nonprofit because I'm just like astonished at how bad it is for kids in rural areas. Like they have no access to art and music hardly at all. And this school district actually makes an effort and has a couple really good music teachers. And this all ties together because when Bedrock closed down, because this high school that's called Neakani High in Rockaway Beach in Oregon, because the music staff and the teachers were so fantastic and worked so hard with these kids and they wanted to build out a bigger program, we donated uh probably like $60,000 worth of equipment because when the building at Bedrock, when the roof caved in, and you know, we had to get everything out, we had stuff in, I don't know, 18 storage units or whatever. And so we just really needed to get rid of equipment. And here was this need, and here's a way that we could do a good deed, and it's a charitable donation, so we get a tax deduction. So it totally makes sense. So since then, the nonprofit started out just as a tiny little, you know, volunteer run organization, and this year we got over 60 grand in grants. We're doing our third annual music festival, we had our fourth annual creative writing event because everything starts with writing. You gotta be able to write, whether it's you whether you're doing music or art or anything, you gotta be able to write it out, even if it's in your head. What's the idea? We have a writing contest and we publish an anthology of the winners each year.
SPEAKER_01So cool.
SPEAKER_00And we brought in as a cultural foundation, and we're starting to do these uh events that are called blessings of the sea, which are through our indigenous population. And it's really cool to be able to make a dent and uh just some kind of forward momentum in bringing access to the coast. And I we really need more of that everywhere because community dies with no culture, and culture creates community over and over again. There's just a billion examples that are all the same.
SPEAKER_01And music is also so important, especially for young kids. I remember when I was in high school, I went to a really small school. It was like a little magnet school. I grew up in Houston, and I swear every kid that I went to school with was some kind of musician, whether they were a writer, like it was not uncommon for me to be walking out of a class and there'd be somebody sitting on the ground playing guitar, just sitting there, just screwing around playing their guitar. Um, we also did talent shows every semester at the end of the semester. People would sing or play in their band, or we had a couple of pianists and we had dancers. So music is just such an important outlet, especially for young kids. So, how did you get into that?
SPEAKER_00Like you meet somebody and decide to I will answer that question first of all, respond to what you just said about the importance of music. It's really important in education, and it's important to start it early on because music is actually how we communicate. Right now, I'm talking to you, and there's rhythm and melody involved. There's rhythm because we have to break up the beats of the syllables of a word and the spaces in between. And then we don't want to sound like a robot when we're talking to people. So our pitch goes up and down, and that just the pitch going up and down gives you more information when we're communicating. So when kids learn music, they're literally learning how to put words together syllable by syllable and tie it together. And it exercises an important part of the brain developmentally. Uh, when you're at that young, elastic age, it's the age where you could learn languages much easier than as an adult. And the same goes with music. It's important on a very basic human level of something that's been with us for so many generations. Uh I don't even know how to count it. And then the next part of it is when you start playing with other people, that helps you learn how to communicate with people. It also lets you understand how to communicate with different people because once you start playing in bands, you realize, oh, there's people with different personalities. And like, okay, if I'm talking to this person, I need to keep the peace, I need to, you know, do this. And if I'm talking this, you start to understand the nuances of that and figuring out how to get along and get together and create something that hopefully that needs to be the star. Like when I was in bands, is the song was always the star. And so we would all write for the best opportunity and agree that whatever sounds the best is what goes. And being able to come together and express that and have that early access is just something that would improve quality of life everywhere. So I got into music, I just started really enjoying listening to it. My sister's 10 years older than me. So when she was done with her albums, she would just give them to me. So I just started listening to what she listened to. So I got into bands that were kind of like 10 years out of what was popular at the time. And then I only had an AM radio, if you can believe that. And so I would fall asleep every night to this AM disco station in Los Angeles called Mighty 690. So I really think that my brain was getting programmed by beats and listening to music because I just became fascinated with it. And our neighbor across the street was the uh road manager for this band called the Electric Light Orchestra. And he would give me these albums that had colored vinyl, they were like special releases. And I was just so enthralled with the art that I thought the band was cool. And I don't get me wrong, I like Electric Light Orchestra, but now I can look back and go, that's one of my least favorite drummers ever. But at the time I thought he was the best because that was my favorite band. Yeah, and I really expressed the desire to play. So a family friend had given me a set of drumsticks with the instructions not to beat on the walls with them. So I used my mom's Tupperware and made a really badass, you know, drum set out of that. So all of her lids would have marks all over it from you know the stick impacts. Yeah, but hey, they still stored food.
SPEAKER_01That's amazing.
SPEAKER_00And my mom was like Tupperware salesperson of the year or whatever, so she was rich in Tupperware. So that escalated to a friend of mine who had like a snare drum on a stand and a crash symbol on a stand, and they weren't using it. And my mom offered to buy it from his parents, and they're like, sure. So I started banging around on that, but my neighbors didn't really appreciate a young drummer trying to figure out how to play drums.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because the houses were really close together where I grew up. So my brother-in-law, I would have been about 11. My sister, as I said, was 10 years older. So I think she got married at 21. And he gave me his old hollow body silver tone guitar, which I really wish I had hung on to. And so I learned guitar on that, and that thing was a beast because it was huge. And with 11, I hadn't really grown into my adult body and pushing down on the strings, it was really hard. So it was hard to grab chords, but I really wanted to play and I didn't know better. So I'm powering through it. So one of my earliest memories of, oh man, I can really actually do this was when I had saved up enough money to buy like a more kind of modern electric guitar. And so I traded that in and I got this ARIA Pro 2 that looked, it was basically a Gibson SG copy.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And then all of a sudden, it was like I could play 10 times better because everything just worked, you know, the guitar was set up properly, the action was really low. I had a little amplifier I could play through, and it just snowballed into I need to be doing music forever.
SPEAKER_01How old were you when you joined your first band?
SPEAKER_00I was 16, I think, maybe. And it was still the late 80s, so we were definitely in 80s mode. The band was called This Side of Sanity. Trust me, no music exists. It was pre-internet. In fact, a lot of what I did is pre-internet, but I have some of it, but there's definitely stuff that I'm missing. So unfortunately, I don't think I have any recordings from that band. I have recordings from a later band that was like two or three of the same people. But yeah, that was the first band. And I think our very first show, our first real show was at a club in LA called Madame Wong's West. And we were on the same bill as Oingo Boingo. And I thought that was like the best thing ever. That is cool. But let's let's clarify it. We weren't opening for Oingo Boingo, they were playing the main stage room in the main room, and we were playing some small room off to the side, but hey, it was you know, it was in the vicinity. It was the same night.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. So you said you toured. Which band did you tour with?
SPEAKER_00Oh, the first tour, I guess, was more of a band tour. There was a punk band that was pretty well known at the time in LA called The Adolescence. And I think a lot of other punk bands and non-punk bands would count them as an influence if they came up in the 80s and 90s. And so these guys were, I don't know, maybe I'd want to say somewhere around 10 years older than me. And you know, they had already done a bunch of tours and released records, and they had a world record for this song called Amoeba.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I actually know that song. I didn't know though. That was that one that sang that. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So uh unfortunately, they're they were recording a record, and their guitar player was maybe having a bit of issue with substances, and they only had like two days left. It was at Soundcastle, which was a really nice recording studio in LA. I think it's where Michael Jackson did Thriller, if I recall correctly. So might want to fact check that. But there were some big albums that were done at Soundcastle, and so it was expensive, and they hadn't really gotten the guitar parts down. And the bass player at the time, Mike Rouse, because Steve Soto had started Joyride by then, so he had his own band. Mike was friends. How did I know him? I think he dated a woman who played bass in a band, and that band I was in, This Side of Sanity.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Michelle, yeah. I think she started dating Mike Rouse. That's how I met him. And so Mike knew I could play and was like, hey, is there any chance you could learn 12 songs overnight and come record them? And I'm like, Yeah, I can totally do that because it's punk on. It's not hard. And so that's exactly what I did. And that turned into like, I don't know, I probably was with them for a year, and we did some short tours and played gigs on and off. Sometimes it was the adolescents, sometimes it was called the ads, which was like an evolution of it. It really just depended on the situation. And they were really fun times. Everybody was so cool in those bands. It was nothing like, you know, when you start touring with more known musicians. Yeah. Yeah, playing with the adolescents was fun because they were just all about playing shows, getting with the crowd. Uh, it was a badge of honor if an ambulance had to show up and we had to stop the mosh clips. Oh my god. We played with so many fun bands. We shared a lot of bills with the Vandals and the Offspring and Guttermouth.
SPEAKER_01And the offspring.
SPEAKER_00I got to play to show with bad brains. So I got to meet HR from Bad Brains, and that was amazing. I can't even remember. It was so long ago, and I played on so many things or played so many shows. I wish I could remember. Yeah, I mean, I want to say bands like the germs and black flag, but I don't remember for sure which ones we played with or if they were just so on the scene. Yeah, that was fun. And then touring later on was less fun for me. I realized that any more than two weeks is no good. You never want to commit to more than that.
SPEAKER_01No, that's understandable. I had another musician on my show who's been in a few bands and he loves touring, but he's adjusted easier to it. But I'm in a Reddit sub for touring musicians, and so I read all about it and I couldn't do it. The constant like upheaval of your life all the time, and then from doing it, I don't know how people do it for six to eight weeks at a time. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And my issue was I have some kind of sleep disorder. So if I'm in a different place, that's enough to for me to get no sleep. But sleeping on those tour buses, like when I was a kid, I used to fall asleep in the car, but somehow that shifted as an adult, and you know, trying to sleep on the tour bus would be like impossible. They'd cram shows together. So I was just constantly sleep deprived. So we play, say we play Philadelphia, and then we drive to Washington, DC, or something like that. So we make the drive overnight, and then typically what happens is there's usually some sort of like radio promo that time. It was more about radio back when the Dead Sea was only sick and I was touring. So we'd have to get up early and do these radio promos, and then we go to soundcheck, and then there'd be just a lot of sitting around or waiting, and then you finally play the show, and then you got to do it all over again. And it's like if you don't have brakes and you don't set up your tour intelligently the way that Iron Maiden does, you're gonna run out of energy.
SPEAKER_01I can imagine.
SPEAKER_00And then that's when bands get cranky and start fighting and break up. The only thing that'll break up a band more than touring is the first record contract because that's when the drummer realizes he doesn't have any value because he hasn't written any of the songs, and he should have paid more attention to the fact that Neil Purt wrote all the lyrics for Rush. Smart move on Neil Pert's part.
SPEAKER_01So I want to kind of shift gears a little bit back to the nonprofit. You have the festival that's coming up, the Rockaway one that you mentioned.
SPEAKER_00Rockaway Beach Music Festival. I just finished recording the audio for our commercial, and I'm doing a spoop on a 90s monster truck commercial, which had a very particular sound and look and feel. So I got the sound nailed, and my colleague Azure in the video is working on it right now. So yeah, we got two days of music at the coast in August, where that's the only time we're pretty much guaranteed sunshine. Last year, the day before, we had one of those atmospheric rivers, and it almost threw a big monkey wrench into it, but you know, like karma was on our side and everything sorted itself out, and we made it through the event, and we were really only an hour off schedule, which is just amazing when you're considering what we're doing with that here. And so this year, yeah, we have 12 bands over two days. We invite a bunch of artists to set up booths, and hopefully, someone is gonna be there. We're checking in on the legalities of doing like tattoos or piercing outside of the building. It's kind of hard in Oregon. The health department is pretty all over things. So I don't know if we're gonna do that, but that would be so cool. That could happen. And it's all ages and it's free. So that's why we work on getting these grants because to put a festival together here, it costs a decent amount of money. And it's a small enough community that unless they have someone that knows what I know about how to do a music festival, I learned that from Bedrock because we started a festival called Bedrocktoberfest, and we had some great players on that. The first year we had Riza from Wu-Tang. So Wu Tang and Run the Jewels are pretty much my two favorite hip-hop bands. That's what I'm doing now. I'm still making beats for hip-hop teams.
SPEAKER_01Hell yeah.
SPEAKER_00But yeah. So Bedrock Toberfest is kind of where we learned how to make a festival from top to bottom and do everything. And that actually expanded into Echo Park Rising, which is uh a festival that continues today in LA that's put on by the city. And at the time, my business partner was helping run that. And he was also not on the city council. I don't know. He had some kind of collaboration. Oh, Echo Park Chamber of Commerce. He was on the board for Echo Park Chamber of Commerce. That's cool. And yeah, so that and that's a festival that's really cool because there's 30 venues over an entire weekend, and it's amazing. But out here on the coast, there's just not a lot of opportunity to provide that conversation. Of entertainment, so I'm grateful that we've got a bunch of grants that have sponsored us, and it's a handful of people doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. I spend way too much time on this nonprofit, but you know, things need to get done. I want to see it through. It's grown, so I don't want to just say, okay, you guys deal with it.
SPEAKER_01What kind of artists are gonna be there? What kind of bands are gonna be playing? Is it mostly gonna be like local um bands?
SPEAKER_00This year, our grant cycle ran late, and we weren't sure what our budget was gonna be. So I needed to go conservative with booking. So this time I didn't go out looking for like a headliner, like we had Glitter Fox last year, and they were amazing. I would definitely love to have them back again. It's just that's a more expensive bill to pay. So I just decided to reach out to kind of all of Oregon, and we have two sponsors that are in the music scene: Five Star Guitars, which is an amazing guitar shop in the Hillsboro uh area, and Revival Drum, which is the best drum shop in Portland, dare I say, the nation. And it's Jose, who owns it, worked at Pro Drum Center in LA. And any drummer who has spent time in LA will tell you Pro Drum Center is the best drum story you could possibly go to. So it's kind of cool that there's that connection there. So yeah, uh I just reached out to them and said, hey, just send the coolest bands. It doesn't matter if they have four followers or 40,000 followers. People are gonna come out here because it's a sunny weekend at the beach, it's a pre-concert. So glad I did it because now we've got a really good variety of bands. We've got country, we've got outlaw country, we've got like pop punk. This year we were able to get a cumbia band. I've been trying to represent all the communities out here, and I'm telling you, Oregon, especially on the coast, is gotta be one of the whitest places I've ever lived. Coming from Detroit, it's insane. So we have a Spanish-speaking community and we have an indigenous population, and then it's really hard to represent anything beyond that. And so we're working with Consejo Hispano, which is a local nonprofit, and one of their people is on our board. So we're trying to expand more to and get those groups active and involved in what we're doing. So I'm super excited that we have Josefina del Norte. She's got like a five-piece cumya band. She's excellent, that'll be exciting. We've got alternative, we definitely have uh a couple bands that are rep in the LGBTQ, etc. Love that. Love that. So I think we've done a good job of diversity in age and style, but we all like the same music. We can agree on a lot of music that we like. Let me put it that way. And we've got people playing the show that are in their 70s, we got people playing the show that are in their 20s.
SPEAKER_01I love that.
SPEAKER_00It's cool to see that because when I was coming up, age was like a stigma and an issue. It's like you didn't want to play with another band that was 20 years older, you know, unless they were hugely popular or something like that. And I'm really glad that's gone away.
SPEAKER_01I am too. I remember when I was younger, warp tour was a big thing. And I'm a big Paramour fan. And I remember hearing all the stories of all the shit that they had to deal with because, you know, I'm the same age as Haley, the lead singer, and she dealt with some shit. Like I've seen videos of someone throwing a condom at her on stage. Like they dealt with some crap because they were the youngest ones on the tour. And I remember her talking about things that, you know, other bands said to her that were 15 years older than her. And they were treated so much differently than the bands that were in their late 20s and their 30s. And on top of that, her being a girl, that was not a very common thing either with that scene when I was a kid. So I'm glad that it has kind of become more accepting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And audiences out here are great because they're excited that we've made the effort to bring something out here. So they're very supportive. You have to be pretty bad for them not to clap for you.
SPEAKER_01That's true.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I probably should start winding this down. We've been talking for an hour. It's been so nice talking with you, Cosmo.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I'm glad I'm glad to be able to do it. I'm coming out of my shell because now I've got to spread the gospel of hey, we need to have more arms and music, or humanity is gonna have issues, as if we don't already.
SPEAKER_01And community is so important too, especially with the way things have been going in this country over the last few years. Community and having music involved is just an extra thing, but community in general just really needs to be stepped up. I remember growing up, they talked about you take the village for everything, and people don't have villages anymore.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and sometimes that feels intentional, but as artists, we really do have the power to reach people still and come together. So that needs to happen. Don't be discouraged by how fucking batshit everything is, because quite honestly, it's always been bat shit. It's just a different flavor, and every batshit thing feels a little different. Yeah, but we'll power through it, you know.
SPEAKER_01That is true, that's very true. I think also it's because I'm old enough now to really notice it that I'm like, oh shit. But that's probably why I started this podcast, is because I really wanted to carve out my own little niche area of community for people, especially around music.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, that's awesome. I'm glad they're no pal.
SPEAKER_01So thank you for coming and thank you for watching this episode of From URL to IRL. Thank you for listening to this episode of From URL to IRL. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow along for more stories about music, connection, and the people who bring us together. You can find me on social media at From URL to IRL Podcast. Maybe I'll see you in the crowd someday.