{"id":108698,"date":"2018-11-24T14:08:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-24T22:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/?p=108698"},"modified":"2023-05-31T20:21:05","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T03:21:05","slug":"josh-rosenthal-of-tompkins-square-records-on-the-primacy-of-the-acoustic-guitar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/josh-rosenthal-of-tompkins-square-records-on-the-primacy-of-the-acoustic-guitar\/","title":{"rendered":"Josh Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records on the Primacy of the Acoustic Guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“A solo acoustic guitar is\u2014when it\u2019s played right or, rather, when it\u2019s played a certain way that reaches me\u2014the most expressive instrument in the world,\u201d Josh Rosenthal tells me on a pleasant October Tuesday.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re sitting outside at the Battery, a club in San Francisco\u2019s Financial District, where Rosenthal sometimes works when he feels compelled to escape the confines of his nearby home office. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about opening a record shop in Gold Country [in Northern California], which would be the perfect spot. But that would never work\u2014because I hate people,\u201d Rosenthal says, laughing at the irony of his working in the Battery to escape isolation. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the owner of the multiple-Grammy-nominated Tompkins Square Records, the boutique label he founded in 2005, Rosenthal champions underdog and idiosyncratic musicians, a good number of them working in his preferred setting of solo guitar. Through his imprint\u2014whose small but extraordinary catalog now includes about 130 full-length titles, half of them archival\u2014Rosenthal has done much to contribute to the renaissance of fingerstyle guitar and vinyl albums in recent years, bringing to light the work of John Fahey<\/a> contemporaries like Max Ochs and fresh voices like Gwenifer Raymond.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the Battery\u2019s patio, obviously well-heeled people sit gazing into their electronic screens, some of them wearing headsets and teleconferencing, and at least one enjoying a surreptitious afternoon palliative. Rosenthal is dressed casually but sharply in an untucked blue button-front shirt. He is a kinetic presence as he talks animatedly about his work and his fondness for the acoustic guitar, all the while jotting down ideas that come to him on an old-school lined notepad. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Gwenifer
Gwenifer Raymond<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Long Island Sounds<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Still youthful at 51, Rosenthal grew up in the 1970s and \u201980s in Syosset, Long Island, not far from New York City. He credits his life in music\u2014and his archival inclinations\u2014to time spent as the program director of his high school radio station, WKWZ. \u201cRadio was really a cutting-edge medium in a way that it\u2019s not today,\u201d Rosenthal says. \u201cAnd it was incredible to be at that age\u2014you know, 15, 16\u2014and have access to so much music, when you didn\u2019t have it at all at your fingertips like you do now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With his friend and fellow disc jockey Judd Apatow\u2014the future comic, producer, and writer\u2014Rosenthal used media credentials to his advantage. \u201cEven though the radio station was only ten watts, we pretended to be big shots, and we would get backstage passes to clubs. I would interview bands like R.E.M. before they were signed to the majors, and Judd would interview all these incredible comics, like Henny Youngman and Jerry Seinfeld. He\u2019s still got it all on tape,\u201d Rosenthal says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 16, Rosenthal scored an internship at Polygram Records, taking the train into the city after school once or twice a week to work for a few hours. \u201cYou\u2019re talking the mid-\u201980s, which was such a crazy time in New York. My parents let me go alone to the city, despite all the crazy, coked-out guys who were walking around,\u201d Rosenthal says. \u201cIt was an amazing time. During my first year there, we put out three Van Morrison records, and all the Velvet Underground stuff got reissued for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After also interning at CMJ New Music Monthly<\/i>, where he learned the editorial ropes and wrote album reviews, Rosenthal attended SUNY Albany. In his senior year, he served as the musical director of the campus radio station, WCDB, and this set him up for high-level work in the music industry. When Elvis Costello came through town in 1989 to support his album Spike<\/i>, Rosenthal reached out to a record label representative to ask if the singer-songwriter would appear on his radio show. The request was denied, but Rosenthal, undeterred, found out where Costello was staying and delivered a collection of cassette tapes and a handwritten invitation to his hotel. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe called me at the station to accept, and then I had a stretch limousine pick him up,\u201d Rosenthal said. \u201cWe spent a very fun hour on the radio, and later\u2014probably because of the chutzpah I\u2019d demonstrated in going around him to get Elvis on my show\u2014the record label rep who had said no actually hired me at Columbia. I took the gig, even though I\u2019d already accepted a job at A&M Records in Los Angeles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting at Columbia in 1989 as a manger in alternative radio promotion and ending in 2005 as a vice-president of marketing and sales at parent company Sony Music, Rosenthal was at the company during a golden era of sorts. He worked on projects like Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings<\/a><\/i>, which sold more than 500,000 copies, the first archival set of its kind to go gold, drawing many new listeners into Johnson\u2019s shadowy music and to country-blues guitar in general. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKate Bush, the Psychedelic Furs, Bob Dylan, the Robert Johnson box set, Public Enemy, all the Def Jam stuff\u2014that whole run was amazing,\u201d Rosenthal says. \u201cI was also able to do a lot of stuff with jazz, and that\u2019s where I kind of got a taste for the whole reissue thing. So then, I started Tompkins Square nine or ten months after I left Sony\u2014the absolute bottom of the industry, when things had gotten very corporate\u2014and, admittedly, not the smartest time to start a label.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Detective Work<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Unsure of what to do next, Rosenthal started what he assumed would be a one-off private project\u2014a compilation of obscure solo recordings by guitarists whose work he admired. Rosenthal says, \u201cI loved those old [solo acoustic] Max Ochs and Harry Taussig recordings so much, and I got to wondering: Who are these guys who haven\u2019t recorded in decades? Where are they now\u2014and what\u2019s their story?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Answering these questions took considerable effort on Rosenthal\u2019s part; in the mid-2000s, far fewer musicians had online presences, and the Google searches he tried led him nowhere. But Rosenthal did eventually track down Ochs and Taussig\u2014the latter by noticing that his 1965 album, Fate Is Only Once<\/a><\/i>, was recorded in Costa Mesa, California, where the guitarist still lived\u2014and both were delighted to be rediscovered. \u201cThey were so cool,\u201d Rosenthal says. \u201cI recorded Max playing his tune \u2018Imaginational Anthem\u2019 and then found out he had previously recorded it for [record collector] Joe Bussard\u2019s Fonotone [the last 78-rpm record label, which he ran from 1956\u20131970]. We found the original version, from 1969, and I was able to put it on my first album, along with the new version. So Max is like the godfather of the label.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That compilation\u2014Imaginational Anthem<\/a> <\/i>(2005)\u2014offered a neat prototype of what the Tompkins Square label would be all about. The album combined archival recordings alongside new works by young players like Kaki King, whom Rosenthal had signed when he worked at Sony. Rosenthal says, \u201cThe concept was\u2014and is\u2014to combine the old and the new. I actually had no intention of doing anything with that record, other than enjoying it for my own pleasure. But a guy I knew from Sony\u2014Tom Overby, who wound up marrying Lucinda Williams and being her manager\u2014was working for this indie distribution company, and he convinced me to meet with him and sign the distribution deal that I\u2019ve now had for 13 years.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo that was just really lucky to have that deal fall into my lap,\u201d Rosenthal continues. \u201cAnd my luck was compounded by the fact that the album immediately got featured on NPR\u2019s Weekend Edition Saturday<\/i>. At that point, back in 2005, if you were on NPR, you\u2019d immediately sell thousands of records.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Rick
Rick Deitrick<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Connecting the Dots<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As the sole proprietor of Tompkins Square Records, which he named after the colorful public park near his old apartment in downtown New York City, Rosenthal has never had any full-time employees. The label has always been, more or less, a reflection of his personal listening habits and preoccupations, a record of the dots he\u2019s connected between music and musicians over the last four decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy first taste of it was when I was a teenager and heard Jimmy Page playing \u2018Black Mountain Side,\u2019 on the first Led Zeppelin album,\u201d he says. \u201cThen I read about how much [Page] liked Bert Jansch, and that opened up a window into the acoustic world. There used to be this bookstore on Long Island\u2014talk about what a dinosaur I am!\u2014where I would order John Fahey cassettes and things like that. So that\u2019s really where all this started.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In connecting the dots, Rosenthal has gravitated toward the obscure and the uncanny, often rediscovering unknowns, like Rick Deitrick, who privately released his own work in the 1970s. \u201cLiterally no one knew who Rick was before Imagination Anthem <\/i>came out,\u201d Rosenthal says, referring to the eighth volume of this compilation series, featuring the track \u201cMissy Christa,\u201d a delicate, harp-like instrumental by Deitrick.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRick had an album, Gentle Wilderness<\/a><\/i> [reissued on Tompkins Square], which came out in 1978 and was totally out of print\u2014but it was never really in print. He would take it out onto hiking trails, leaving his records for someone to find. Now he\u2019s just a chill old dude who lives alone in L.A. All of a sudden, people care about his music and maybe someone will come out and use one of his records in a movie or commercial. It\u2019s amazing to have helped with that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deitrick tells me via telephone, \u201cMuch of the music I recorded was on cheap or borrowed tape recorders. I just sent Josh this tape I found not long ago, where I was sitting at the kitchen table and playing a piece that I\u2019d written for my wife, while she was making dinner. You can hear a pan drop in the middle of it. It\u2019s been surprising and great to learn that people all around the world are enjoying my music. I just found out that I have a big following in Denmark\u2014and in Japan!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rosenthal\u2019s knack for unusual sounds has also led him to work with young and ascendant artists, like Daniel Bachman and Gwenifer Raymond, whose work is singular but clearly indebted to the American Primitive tradition. (See a full transcription<\/a> of Raymond\u2019s \u201cRequiem for John Fahey\u201d in this issue.) \u201cJeff Davidson at WFMU tipped me to Gwenifer,\u201d Rosenthal says. \u201cShe struck me as a sort of unicorn\u2014a young woman from Wales who channels John Hurt and Skip James. Then I found out she\u2019s an astrophysicist, so throw that in. She\u2019s a really cool person and is clearly very proficient, but brings in her own ideas, too. I gravitate\u00a0toward\u00a0folks who put an original spin on traditional music, and she certainly does that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWorking with Josh\u2014who feels like a genuine renegade in the contemporary corporatocracy of the music industry, a man out of time\u2014has been a pretty life-changing experience: going from playing glorified open mics with two men and a dog to getting really positive press from publications I respect; heading over to the States; putting a record out on real, honest-to-god vinyl. It all seems a little alternative universe sometimes,\u201d Raymond says via email. \u201cI had a lot of Tompkins Square records before any of my association with it started, and I really think the world needs a label like it, hipper than hip and stone-aged.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Rosenthal reflects on his work for the label, the subject of his own music comes up. A guitarist since he was a teenager, Rosenthal keeps his Healy Tompkins Square guitar (see below) in his office, a few feet from his desk, for easy access. Playing the instrument is part of his daily ritual, but he downplays his skills. \u201cI don\u2019t have any training; I stopped learning when I was like 15,\u201d Rosenthal says. \u201cI play purely for pleasure, hunting for chords and ideas. The only thing that\u2019s good about not being any good is you can\u2019t copy anybody. So my playing actually sounds very original because it\u2019s not based on anything real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Rosenthal confesses that he has an ambition to make his own guitar album\u2014not a solo outing, like many of his favorite records, but a collaborative effort. \u201cI think it\u2019ll be a collection of guitar patterns, because I don\u2019t even want to call my pieces songs, but I\u2019d love to come up with some halfway decent ideas and put them on tape. Then, I\u2019d ask some other, more skilled musicians to incorporate my ideas into something bigger\u2014and make it grand,\u201d Rosenthal says excitedly, before excusing himself to take a call from one of his artists.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

NOTABLE TOMPKINS SQUARE ALBUMS<\/b><\/p>\n

For a good overview of Tompkins Square Records\u2014including the music and musicians referenced in this feature\u2014check out these albums, <\/span>presented in the order of their release or reissue.<\/p>\n

<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Daniel Bachman – Jesus I\u2019m a Sinner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Gwenifer Raymond – You Never Were Much of a Dancer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Harry Taussig – Fate Is Only Once<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Various Artisits – Imaginational Anthems<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Max Ochs – Hooray for Another Day<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Rick Deitrick – Gentle Wilderness<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>

10TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIALNESS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Josh Rosenthal wanted to do something special\u2014other than release a commemorative album or box set\u2014to celebrate Tompkins Square\u2019s 10th anniversary, in 2015. For the occasion he wrote a book, equal parts personal history and music criticism, titled Record Store of the Mind. He also reached out to the luthier Trevor Healy, who appears on the Tompkins Square compilation album Beyond Berkeley Guitar, for a custom build.<\/div>\n
\u201cJosh said he wanted something like the 1930s Bacon & Day Senorita guitar that John Fahey had on the cover of one of his albums,\u201d Healy says. \u201cI hadn\u2019t built that style of guitar before, so I scrutinized the photo and figured out how I could best interpret it.\u201d<\/div>\n
Since much of the work Rosenthal does involves unearthing and reissuing old recordings, Healy decided to use only reclaimed woods in building the guitar. He visited Tom Thiel of Northwind Tonewood, in New Hampshire, and left with a set of interesting provenance. For the soundboard, he selected reclaimed Sitka spruce that was originally used in early 20th-century bridge trestles in British Columbia, streaked with mineral stains that came from years of battling the elements; for the sides, old-growth, figured mahogany. Healy says, \u201cThe mahogany came from a log that had been originally purchased in the 1960s and was salvaged from the basement workshop of the former de facto Latvian consulate building in the Bronx.\u201d<\/div>\n
Whereas the Bacon & Day is roughly the same size as a Gibson L-00, Healy opted for a larger body for the Tompkins Square guitar\u2014a small jumbo size, with a 16-inch lower bout. He borrowed the headstock silhouette from the Senorita, and painstakingly reproduced the font seen on Tompkins Square album covers for the face\u2019s inlays. \u201cI also played around with doing inlays of the birds on the Tompkins Square logo,\u201d Healy says. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll revisit the idea if we do a Tompkins Square line of guitars someday.\u201d\b\u2014AP<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This article originally appeared in the\u00a0January 2019\u00a0issue\u00a0of\u00a0<\/em>Acoustic Guitar\u00a0magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rosenthal champions underdog and idiosyncratic musicians, a good number of them working in his preferred setting of solo guitar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":108714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1155],"tags":[774],"ppma_author":[1541],"blocksy_meta":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/josh_rosenthal_roof.jpg?fit=750%2C500&ssl=1","authors":[{"term_id":1541,"user_id":24,"is_guest":0,"slug":"adam-perlmutterstringletter-com","display_name":"Adam Perlmutter","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Adam-Perlmutter.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Adam-Perlmutter.jpg"},"user_url":"","last_name":"Perlmutter","first_name":"Adam","description":"Adam Perlmutter holds a bachelor of music degree from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and a master's degree in Contemporary Improvisation from the New England Conservatory. He is the editor of Acoustic Guitar<\/i>."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108698"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138326,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108698\/revisions\/138326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108698"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=108698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}