Indie haven

Parasol's 10th anniversary

by Jonathan Perry

Bettie Serveert

It's no small feat that Parasol, the superb Urbana/Champaign independent mail-order label, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Especially when you consider that its owner's earliest attempts at working in the music business resulted in not one but two cease-and-desist orders, as well as a lawsuit brought by the very industry he was trying to break into. It was not, according to Parasol founder Geoff Merritt, a particularly auspicious beginning.

"I was in college and they wouldn't let me into business school because I wasn't smart enough," Merritt says of his days at the University of Illinois, where he settled for a psychology degree. His legal troubles began soon after graduation, when he and a friend opened That's Rentertainment, a CD- and record-rental business in Champaign that thrived -- sort of -- for two years. Then the RIAA got wind of it and sued, demanding an immediate halt to the fledgling enterprise.

Legal hassle number two began when Merritt teamed up with roommate Ric Menck (who with his pal Paul Chastain would go on to form the power-pop outfit Velvet Crush.) "Ric and I started a cassette label called Popsicle and we put out, I don't know, 15 cassettes of local stuff that we thought was really cool. And the company that owns the word `popsicle' threatened to sue us. I have no idea how they heard of us, but we got a nasty letter from their lawyer saying we can't use the word `popsicle.' So we folded."

Frustrated, Merritt took a road trip to the record-store mecca of San Francisco. "I was just going around buying records left and right with no source of income. Then I had this huge pile of records and needed money, so I started selling the records through Goldmine. And that was sort of the start of Parasol." Before long, he was corresponding with like-minded indie-music fans who had also started their own tiny labels. He began selling their stuff, too. This time he got no nasty letters from lawyers. Merritt cribbed his label's name from a song Chastain and Menck had written for and about him called "Parasol," and he was on his way.

These days, roughly half of Parasol's retail business is generated from its comprehensive Internet Web site (www.parasol.com), and its customer e-mail and snail-mail list peaks at around 6000. Last year, the company broke even but approached $1 million in sales for the first time. So even if Merritt and his eight employees aren't exactly getting rich, they're sure having a good time trying. Or, it would be more accurate to say, not trying. "We're not making big stacks of money that we're putting in boxes in the backyard. But we get to put out records that we love and we get to talk to people we've idolized our whole lives. When [ex-dB's member] Chris Stamey calls me and says, `Hey, you wanna do my new record?', that is worth more than anything else."

In addition to its mail-order activity, Parasol also operates four in-house labels: Parasol Records (guitar pop); Hidden Agenda (usually higher-profile acts such as Bettie Serveert and the Posies' Ken Stringfellow); Mud (Champaign/Urbana-based bands); and Spur (alternative country). Recent releases include veteran psychedelic outfit the Green Pajamas' new EP, In a Glass Darkly (Hidden Agenda), ex-Sneetches' songwriter Mike Levy's debut, Fireflies (Parasol), and Bettie Serveert's finest album in years, Private Suit (Parasol).

"My mom always told me, `Find a job that you love,' and I've followed her guidance," says Bill Johnson, a long-time employee who spends 40 hours a week wading through the stacks of demos and discs sent by prospective artists. Johnson, who in the early '90s played with a couple of members of Hum in an earlier band called Honcho Overload, ultimately decides whether Parasol will sign or carry an artist's catalogue. "I think one of the great successes for Parasol is that we've always followed our ears. In the 10 years we've been around, you can certainly find brighter lights for three-year periods or whatever. We've always been very understated and just continued to put out good records. I don't think we've ever reached for the brass ring just to cash in."

Recently, Parasol joined with the EMusic subscription service, which carries the entire Parasol catalogue in downloadable form. Even if at some point CDs cease to exist, Merritt argues, there will always be a demand for good music. That's where Parasol comes in: "If in 10 years, they're implanting chips in your brain that're stocked with all the music in the world, then, yeah, I'm part of that."