User:JamesHX/David Ferguson (promoter)

David Ferguson is an American as a music and arts promoter, record label founder, and alternative culture impresario. He has been referred to as “the West Coast Andy Warhol” and as due to his contribution to the West Coast punk music scene of the late 1970s, early 1980s, first, a concert promoter, then as founder of the San Francisco Bay Area independent music label, CD Presents. Ferguson played a major role in maintaining a music distribution system independent of that run by major music labels. Starting in 2004, he began restoring the massive archives of his CD Presents label at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch under the guidance of Grammy award engineer/mixer Leslie Ann Jones. The restoration was completed in early 2008.

Ferguson founded and presently heads the Institute for Unpopular Culture (IFUC), a San Francisco-based alternative arts organization which continues Ferguson’s mission of discovering and nurturing artists whose work typically resists mainstream accommodation and commercial sensibilities. Recent projects undertaken by the IFUC include promoting and exhibiting the art of a San Quentin-death row inmate and orchestrating the renovation project of the legendary German silent film classic, Pandora's Box, (which the IFUC has scheduled for debut at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival) which starred the American actress, Louise Brooks. In a career spanning nearly four decades, Ferguson has worked with an array of influential underground artists including The Sex Pistols, the performance art group, The Cockettes, illustrator Vaughn Bode, and the New York graffiti artist and painter, Jean Michel Basquiat.

Early career

Student

In 1965, Ferguson enrolled at the University of Miami. His leadership role in a number of campus Vietnam War protests eventually led to his expulsion, but he scored his first public relations coup by bringing Andy Warhol to speak at the campus in 1968. Warhol’s largely unknown status outside New York worked to Ferguson’s advantage:

"The jock students at his college weren’t too hip to who Warhol was, so Ferguson had time to strike up a friendship. The relationship must have meant something, because some have called Ferguson the Andy Warhol of the west coast.” --New York Arts Magazine, “Basquiat’s Rediscovered Punk Art at Art Basel, Miami,” Angela Holm, 2008

San Francisco/Cockettes

Following his dismissal from Miami University, Ferguson relocated his progressive politics and embrace of the outsider ethos to the hotbed of 1960s counter-culture, San Francisco. Ferguson met The Cockettes, a notorious performance troupe of psychedelic drag queens, on a beach north of San Francisco. He managed the group’s public relations and theatre production from 1969-1972, conducting a worldwide public relations campaign for the group. A Rex Reed article about a Cockette’s show in San Francisco triggered a media blitz (cite Rex Reed article) that transformed the group from local cult heroes into internationally renowned figures. The Cockettes augured the arrival of glam rock, helped advance the worldwide gay pride movement and, with their in-your-face performance and audience participation antics, the group became a major influence on punk music.

Lecture agency

During his tenure as the Cockette’s public relations coordinator, he founded the David Ferguson Lecture Agency. Over the ensuing 5 years, Ferguson arranged college lecture tours for some of the most sought-after luminaries in progressive politics and the counter-culture movement. His clients included Elaine Brown (Black Panther Party), Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television), Ernest Callenbach (Ecotopia), Malvina Reynolds, Jo Ann Little, Paul Krassner (The Realist), Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog), Michael McClure (Beat Generation poet), Carlo Prescott (who worked with Philip Zimbardo, on the Stanford prison experiment), and Trina Robbins. Despite establishing relationships with some of the foremost intellectuals in progressive and liberal politics, Bored with the lecture circuit, Ferguson folded his business in 1976. He sought a new direction -- but something that he hoped would recapture the off-kilter, helter-skelter, performance-based unpredictability that characterized The Cockettes.

Prelude to punk

That new thing turned out to be punk music. During the second half of the 1970s, San Francisco was a player in the underground music scene often identified as the pre-cursor to punk and the hardcore offshoot that would later rage up and down the West Coast. Crossing paths with a music before the word ‘punk’ had even entered the cultural lexicon, Ferguson found the DIY tangibles of the music and its live performance thrilling, as he did the ethos of defiance that permeated the whole of the punk community.

From a production standpoint, Ferguson’s discovery of this new musical environment allowed him to redeploy the concert production skills he mastered while producing of The Cockettes’ live performances. Ferguson produced and promoted shows for Sylvester, Iggy Pop, and the Penelope Houston-fronted San Francisco group, The Avengers, a group that Ferguson also managed. As a manager, Ferguson took to honing a personal brand of mentor-protégé relationship – a model of patronage that would serve him well in the coming years. It was also while managing and putting together shows for punk acts that Ferguson noticed the stranglehold major record labels held on music sales and distribution. Confronting that domination held a quixotic, David-vs-Goliath allure for Ferguson that harkened back to the anti-authoritarian crusading found in the Vietnam protests and The Cockettes live shows.

CD Presents

Ferguson founded CD Presents, Ltd. The name refers to both Ferguson’s concert production company and his recording label. In terms of live show recording, CD Presents quickly expanded beyond San Francisco to become the leading alternative music concert production company on the West Coast. Ferguson arranged for Public Image’s shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco during PiL’s first American tour. The year before, CD Presents had orchestrated and promoted New Wave 1980, the first ever punk music extravaganza that brought together punk acts from all over the West Coast including Vancouver. That show featured some of the best remembered acts on the alternative music scene, including DOA, X, The Weirdos and The Dils. “Stick with this punk thing, Ferguson” advised friend and New Wave attendee, Tom Waits. “it might just catch on.”

With the dawn of the 1980s came the onset of the Reagan-era expansion of corporate marketing and that began to saturate the country’s artistic and entertainment industries in a suffocating cultural conformity. A growing discontent emerged among the more marginalized music scenes toward corporate music labels and the mainstream sensibilities they accommodated. These colluding and colliding sets of circumstances helped position CD Presents at the forefront of an artistically fruitful period of punk music. The label’s reputation for producing outstanding live-recording sound quality, along with Ferguson’s growing profile as a maverick willing to promote riskier, commercially untenable music, appealed to an ever-growing cadre of alternative and punk artists. Eventually, the list of bands either recorded by CD Presents or distributed through his Buried Treasure label numbered close to 3,300 artists. At any given time, the label recorded either in studio or in concert, The Avengers, The Offs, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag w/ Henry Rollins, Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, Flipper, Billy Bragg, Lydia Lunch, The Subhumans, D.O.A, Butthole Surfers, Tales of Terror, NOFX, T.S.O.L., Minutemen, MDC, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (D.R.I.), Corrosion of Conformity, Naked Raygun, Mojo Nixon, The Adolescents, and The Dwarves. CD Presents would also produce pioneering electronic acts, producing records for Tuxedo Moon, Minimal Man, MOEV and others. Notable artists outside the punk scene, including such prominent rock acts like R.E.M and Chris Isaak recorded their first demos at the CD presents San Francisco studio.

Buried Treasure

As with CD Presents, Ferguson built his distribution company, Buried Treasure, from the ground-up, calling upon the promotion talents and network of contacts he cultivated in his previous incarnations in the arts and entertainment industry. Many such contacts headed independent record labels themselves. When, in the mid-1980s, major record labels began clamping down on illegal importing and squeezing out legal independent distribution channels, the overall indie record industry fell into crisis. Ferguson moved in to assist, at which point in 1987, he put his CD Presents promotion and studio enterprises in deep freeze and concentrated on distribution. Under his Buried Treasure Distribution company, he distributed the record catalogs of nearly 100 defunct, failing or financially precarious labels. Newer labels, too, such as Wax Trax! Records, first gained traction in the industry by turning to Buried Treasure which became that label's first distributor west of the Rockies. Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, Treasure also distributed various singles from pre- Nevermind Nirvana, delivered records for the labels TVT Records (Nine Inch Nails) and Sub Pop, and distributed product for Epitaph Records, culminating with The Offspring's 1994 breakout album Smash, which sold 16 million copies (the highest-selling independent album of all-time) and, for the first time, established independent distribution as a commercially viable business.

Institute for Unpopular Culture (IFUC)

With the desire to aid artists from other genres using the DIY method, Ferguson founded the Institute for Unpopular Culture in 1989. Continuing his tradition of discovering and mentoring unique creators, the Institute assisted Obie-award winning performance artist Holly Hughes, environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, and graffiti superstar Barry McGee (aka "Twist"). seventeen years in the arts charity sector have allowed him the unique ability, insight, and innovation to unite the diverse interests and audiences of the music and entertainment industry with those of the artistic community.

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• Taught Fat Mike how to run a label. Most of Fat Mike’s senior staff worked as employees for FERG at Buried Treasure. Fat Reck Chords. FAT MUSIC FOR FAT PEOPLE…refer to blog

• Bomp – pioneered punk, Iggy Pop. Fell on tough times in 80s…ferg had deal where they would trade product for studio time in Ferg’s studio.

• REM did first demo in Ferg’s studio that was Rough Trade label which was rejected by RT (81-82)

• Chris Isaak did series of early demos at Ferg’s studio (CD Studio)

• need to distinguish between Studio, Label, and Distribution company

NOTES

1. Holm, Angela. “Basquiat’s Rediscovered Punk Art at Art Basel, Miami", New York Arts Magazine, 2008