Cotton Mather’s Robert Harrison gets brownie points for ambition. Death Of The Cool (The Star Apple Kingdom) comprises 11 of the 64 songs he’s been writing in an extended fit of creativity inspired by the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text—one tune per hexagram (or reading). Seriously. Harrison will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
Harrison: One afternoon in 1993, while we were recording our debut album, Cotton Is King, in Memphis, the higher-ups at newly formed ELM Records made a requisite visit to Ardent Studios so that they could check on the progress of their first (and last) signing. They took us out to lunch and announced their latest marketing strategy. After a few beers, it was explained to us that our target audience would be … beach volleyball fans. If you think you heard that wrong, think how we felt. It seems our tall, handsome and tanned label manager, Wil Sharpe, was close friends with the world’s most famous beach volleyball superstar, Karch Kiraly, and their crowd was into Cotton Mather. So some plan had been hatched to run ads in beach volleyball magazines and have us perform at various key AVP tournament events throughout the summer of 1994. The “volley dollies are gonna love you boys,” we were told. I don’t know what a “volley dolly” is, but I’m pretty sure the last thing she was craving was some mop-haired dude from Texas hopping around and quoting T.S. Eliot with a Gibson 335 in his hands.
In any case, the idea was for us to play shows at a series of volleyball tournaments that summer, but we kept getting the word that this event or that event wasn’t going to work out. Eventually, the master plan did culminate in us performing at the AVP finals in San Francisco, where we were assured we’d be playing to an audience of 40,000! When we arrived in the van we were met by a very distraught Wil Sharpe, label owner, who’d just been informed that the last match of the day, after which we were to play, was actually going to be the consolation match instead, and the big event would be long over. However many who had paid and watched the finals that day I cannot say, but the consolation match was somewhat sparsely attended. The label kept urging us to make certain we were playing the first note just after “the last ball hit the sand,” and it would all be fine.
Well, the last ball hit the sand, and the crowd began to file out while four boys from Texas in sharkskin suits humped their gear out onto a catwalk in front of the scoreboard flashing, “ELM Records presents Cotton Mather.” And by the time I hit the opening chords to “Lost My Motto,” we were looking out at an empty arena apart from two little girls doing cartwheels in the sand and some very sheepish label executives flanked by a coterie of stoic and puzzled Japanese businessmen, who financially backed the label and had flown in to check out their investment. I think they’d also gotten JBL to cart in some fancy, schmancy PA for the occasion. In true Cotton Mather fashion, we played lights-out just to make a point. But I think that pretty much spelled the end of ELM Records. I told the guys that night to order plenty of room service because no way would anybody be recouping anything.
As ridiculous and misguided as that all sounds, I’ll give them this—there were dozens of labels that passed on Cotton Mather in 1993, and those guys believed in us and heard something worth investing in, even if they weren’t sure quite what to do with it.
