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CONTENTS
HOT
SPOTS
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Lifestyles
Of The Not-yet Famous
Continued
by Erin Kosnac
photos by Tim Harrison
"I buy pants at the mall."
  
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He walks into Ray's in all black except for a white T-shirt under a thin sweater. He sits down in the booth, and his dark hair falls over his eyes. As he pushes it away, a tattoo circling his wrist creeps out from beneath the cuff of his sweater. His foot taps almost nonstop under the wooden table, but it isn't because he's nervous. It all seems regular for him: running a record label, playing in two bands, working at the Kent State Ice Arena, majoring in graphic design.
It's all part of being Jamie Stillman.
Most freshmen and sophomores in high school are looking forward to going to their first homecoming dances or playing varsity sports. But when Jamie Stillman was at that age at Roosevelt High School in Kent, he was starting his own record label: donut friends.
"It started with these bands we just made up because everybody we knew played instruments," he says. "We'd just do that on the weekends and put out like 20 tapes or something."
Stillman was then undergoing a sort of a musical epiphany.
"I had just started figuring out punk rock," Stillman says. "I saw that record labels were basically being started by kids in their bedrooms. And I saw that it wasn't that hard to come up with the money to press records, or just to figure out how to do it didn't really take much thought."
This was something Stillman was willing to invest in.
"I'd been playing music since I was 5, so it was something I cared about," he says. "And there were a lot of bands that I like that I didn't think anybody would ever put out their records."
Stillman now deals with eight bands that keep doing records with donut friends and about four or five that also have records on other labels. Bands that put out a record through donut friends are not tied to the label.
And Stillman doesn't handle just one kind of music.
"All the bands on my label are totally different," Stillman says. "There's metal bands. There's pop bands. And there's bands that are just straightforward punk bands or rock bands.
"The only real thing that ties them all together is that they all have something that makes them a little bit off-center. They are pretty straightforward and accessible, but they're still arty. And all of them aren't afraid to write what they want to write. They're not trying to play to anybody."
These traits are also evident in Stillman's own bands: The Party of Helicopters and "New" Terror Class.
And people seem to like his bands a lot.
"We definitely have people everywhere we go that are like, 'Hey, that's that kid,'" Stillman says. "And then they'll ask me some insane question. And I'm like, 'I just go to school, and I'm in this band. I go out on the weekends. I buy pants at the mall. I'm not that special.'"
Maybe Stillman doesn't realize everything he does. And he definitely doesn't think anyone else fully comprehends it.
"There's like...I have to count on my hands. This is really embarrassing," Stillman says as he forms the closest thing he has shown to a smile so far and raises a finger for each person who lives in his house. "Right now there's like eight people living in our house, and five of us are in bands. They're in bands, but I seriously think they have like no clue what I do.
"I think they think I'm just on the Internet all the time just fuckin' looking at – I don't know what they think I'm looking at. But I think they think I just screw around all the time. Their job is to make fun of me for being on the Internet and ask me when we're playing shows. I get to be the businessman of the house or something."
But being the businessman of the house is quite appropriate for the man who runs donut friends out of his two rooms in that house on Lake Street.
Stillman is as comfortable talking about the business aspects of donut friends as he is the musical aspects. Like a person who's been in the business for years, Stillman cites all the lessons he's learned along the way about distribution, promotion, and business in general.
Bands record in a studio, then Stillman sends out the digital audio tapes to be made into records.
As he pulls out a Winston, Stillman rattles off the production figures as easily as he plays the guitar or the drums: For an LP $2,500 for 1,000; for a seven inch $1,500 for 1,000; for a CD $1,100 - $2,000 for 1,000. Everything is then sold wholesale to Independent Music Distribution based in Los Angeles, which then sells the records to other distributors and stores.
Stillman works on credit with Erika Records, a record pressing plant that is part owner of IMD. IMD pays Stillman for the records, and he uses that money to pay off his credit.
But this exclusive distribution with IMD is not the route Stillman has always taken.
"I used to have like 10 distributors, and it seems in my head like it worked out a lot better when I used 10 distributors," he says. "And in punk rock, people have a problem with exclusive distribution because they see it as being like a corporate conglomerate, and that's what everyone is aiming to stay away from.
"Because of that a lot of the same people don't really buy my records who used to. I kind of lost a lot by going exclusive, but I've also gained a lot by going exclusive because it's seen as being more, like, I guess, important. It kind of helps and hurts at the same time. I can't really tell which one it is doing more."
But both Stillman and donut friends have come a long way since his high school days of making only 20 cassette tapes.
"The way it's progressed is that the bands actually exist and play and tour," Stillman says. "When I first started, we just made bands to have a record label and to put out cassettes.
"But now there are bands that seem to stick with it, and I'll put out more than one record by them. It seems a little bit more permanent. Basically it's gotten to the point that if I wanted to quit, it would be just as big of an ordeal as starting a record label – not that I really want to quit or anything."