Maybe The GOP War On Women Will Result In The Re-Release Of "Just Say Roe"

In 1987 I was running Sire for Seymour Stein. He hired me because he felt the powers at our parent company, Warner Bros, didn't prioritize his signings. He was in NYC and they were in Burbank and he felt he needed someone there. That was me. When this new music format came along-- CDs-- only priority artists were getting their records released as CDs… Dire Straits, Prince, David Lee Roth. The only Sire artist with CD releases was Madonna. But Seymour and I were both determined to break our "baby bands" and we both felt the CD was the future of retail. Our head of retail, though, told me the bums who bought our punk rock-- he kind of curled his lip when he said it-- weren't classy enough to even own CD players.

I took him at his word and tried to figure out a way to encourage fans of alternative rock to buy CD palyers and CDs, just like grown up Dire Straits fans. One night I saw Nancy Reagan on TV babbling earnestly about her "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign. She had even gotten La Toya Jackson, along with Stock/Aitken/Waterman to record a wretchedly insipid pop song called Just Say No. Suddenly it all gelled in my head: JUST SAY YES!

The idea was a sampler introducing some of our new bands on the new CD format. And I would basically give them away for as low a price as I could get away with, at cost, to encourage fans of this kind of music to go out and buy CD players. I tried to put a $1 price tag on it but the curly-lipped sales guy flipped out and made me take the price off the packaging and raise it to around $5 if I remember correctly. Fine… it was still a deal. (Of course, not having the price on the longbox made it possible for retailers to buy it for $2 or whatever we sold it to them for and then turn around and sell it to their customers for full price. Some went along with my idea though and it was a great success.)

That first version had 14 songs, including rare mixes and versions of some songs, songs by relatively known bands like Depeche Mode and relatively unknown bands like Erasure, who I knew Depeche Mode fans would love. That worked and it helped us break Erasure. Also on that first volume were songs by some of our British artists we were trying to promote in America, like Echo & the Bunnymen, the Mighty Lemon Drops, James, The Smiths (doing a then-rare Cilla Black cover, Work Is a Four Letter Word), Aztec Camera, and the Wild Swans plus some American bands we were having trouble breaking, Figures on a Beach, The Ramones, Replacements, Throwing Muses, Jerry Harrson's new band the Casual Gods and, just sort of stuck in there on a whim because I really loved his music, a remix of "Pimpin' Ain't Easy" by Ice-T that I thought-- mostly incorrectly-- alternative music fans might be open to.

It sold a lot and for almost all of those artists the song on that disc was the only way to hear their music digitally. Encouraged, the next year, I was out with Volume II, Just Say Yo. Introducing Depeche Mode fans to Erasure's music worked. This time I wanted to use Depeche Mode and Erasure to introduce an American band they were big fans of, Book of Love. I also had a feeling Depeche Mode fans-- who got a rare mega-mix of "Behind the Wheel/Route 66"-- to Israeli pop sensation Ofra Haza. We were also hoping to launch Morrissey as a post-Smiths solo artist and introduce k.d. lang as an alternative artist rather than just a country phenomenon.

A year later, 1989, the CD was already firmly established but the series was a good way to introduce new bands. That year Volume III, Just Say Mao has an over the top 17 songs. Again, a rare and otherwise unavailable Depeche Mode mix ("Everything Counts") to excite fans followed by a new song by Martin Gore, ensuring that Depeche fans would know he has a solo release. There were also rare remixes from Figures on a Beach, Throwing Muses, Danielle Dax, Ofra Haza, Tom Tom Club, music from new artists Royal Crescent Mob, the Ocean Blue, Nasa and Underworld. I knew including a rare Morrissey b-side (Lucky Lisp) would make it a must-have for his dedicated fans and I hoped those fans would be as enthusiastic about Lou Reed and k.d. lang as Morrissey was himself. I was sure a funky, lo-fi Replacements song with Tom Waits, Date to Church would be a big draw.

In all, there were 7 volumes, the last being in 1994 when I came up with a concept to punch back not at anti-drug conservatives but at anti-Choice conservatives. Just Say Roe had 16 songs all songs firmly opposing the Republican Party War Against Women. The big draw was an until then otherwise unavailable song Madonna gave us for the project, Goodbye to Innocence. Unfortunately, many Madonna fans aren't that open to the kind of alternative rock artists who were on the CD with her-- so the exposure for them for her massive fan-base was minimal. Two of the artists, John Wesley Harding and the Poster Children, wrote and recorded songs specifically for the project, respectively, "Right to Choose" and "Roe v Wade." David Byrne's song up top was the lede track on the album.