Good Days, indeed: A conversation with Ben Jones, Owner of Better Days Records, West
by Jason Noble
Ben Jones has been a major part of keeping the music community thriving in Louisville for more than 20 years. He’s owned record stores in several communities and has always encouraged new music being created locally. He was central to Louisville’s alternative music period of almost two decades ago, releasing albums by and compilations of indie bands, supporting small labels and offering one of the area’s most diverse record selections at Better Days, the iconic stores that he operated in the Highlands and the West End. He closed his Bardstown Road operations but still owns and operates Better Days West, specializing in R&B and soul music.
LEO: While working on this article I saw a lot of people who are benefiting from having their bands online and self-distributing their music. But I also saw the downside, which I think is troubling, like smaller record stores closing. It seems technology has both a real positive and negative effect on people who have been doing music a long time — recording studios, independent record labels and record stores are all feeling an impact. I was wondering about your take on this.
Ben Jones: I had to learn, with any change, if you want to stay in business — whether it be the music industry or any business — you’ve got to learn how to adapt. That’s where the record industry has lost some of its appeal — worrying about the change in technology instead of embracing the change for all of us. It’s never gonna stay the same. It’s like, when I helped you guys out (the interviewer’s former band, Rodan, did a record with Jones’ Better Days Records) with what we called “the breakthrough of alternative” — now that’s turned into an “alternative method.” By closing my [other] stores — I knew I had to downsize — it was almost like the “new alternative”: I’ll go to a community where I’ll be the store that sells almost (solely) one genre. But technology will allow the new rap, the new R&B, the new gospel, the new soul artists to record at their home, you know, the same way alternative music was made.
LEO: Some of the rap, hip-hop and crossover R&B artists and producers, I think they’ve figured out a way to embrace technology, especially in the recording studio. If you look at the advancements of how music is recorded, the biggest producers by far ...
BJ: … are rap people. See, they learned how to embrace it by using the regular old “survival method”: less is more. Technology has taught us to need less — less space, less musicians — but you can make more. [The music industry has] always taken advantage of the little guy who didn’t have money to produce his albums, who didn’t have money to go on the road. I’m telling you — it’s the same thing when I used to sell Green Day years ago, talking to those guys personally. I was one of the few stores that had Green Day, in stock at Better Days, on record, getting it from Billie Joe Armstrong. It was the grassroots approach, a change in attitude that we knew was gonna happen — if we kept playing it, kept selling, kept saying “yes” to their game. We knew the larger stores weren’t gonna carry it, we knew the difference between mainstream and alternative, the large guy and the small guy. I used to talk to Ian MacKaye from Fugazi regularly. Ian used to come into my store all the time. The guys from Victory Records — they would come into the store and ask what was the “new wave.”
LEO: It’s funny — rap music gets bad press all the time, but it’s probably pushed the ideas of engineering and producing farther than anything in the last 20 years. You have all these independent producers, many of them self-taught, running their own studios.
BJ: We’ve learned how to do something without someone giving us “their way.” Now, there’s millions of ways to do the same thing, and that scares those who want to control it. We’re talking about millions of labels — we’re actually talking millions! We created that kind of thing in Louisville years ago. We had that right attitude — “let’s pick places for people to go, listen to our music, we’ll create our own genre, but it’s not the only genre!” We did it just like Athens or other parts of the country.
I still consider myself an independent record store because I’m still accepting consignments. I believe in first-time artists. I believe in somebody sending me something to listen to, and then selling 20 pieces of it. I think that’s good in this industry! The big guys just want to sell it.
Contact the writer at leobeat@leoweekly.com
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