The Definitive Phil Klygo Interview and Chronicle of the Rise of the Small Label
Teenage USA recordings
PO Box 91
689 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON
M6J 1E6
http://www.members.tripod.com/~teenageusa
“Zines are dead,” announces Phil Klygo between sips of coffee at a downtown Toronto cafe only minutes from the Queen Street headquarters of his fledgling record label, Teenage USA. You can tell he’s only half joking, focused, as he is, partly on the future and partly on his own past. His mildly dishevelled look – glasses taped together with duct tape, scruffy Pussy Power baseball hat – is a clue to his in between demeanour; Klygo’s the kind of guy who knows what you know, even before you know it. He’s the kind of guy who can never stay in the same place, he has to keep moving – from zine editor to indie pop agitator to big time dreamer. But let’s start at the beginning, before zines were dead.
Way back in ’94, a guy name Phil started small. He’d been around the Toronto scene for a while, going to shows, reading all the rags, doing the Saturday afternoon record-shopping marathons. He’d done a bit of writing, sent it off to Exclaim! and Sonic Unyon’s Stink, “and they printed stuff. That was pretty cool, you know… seeing your stuff in there and saying hey I did that.” It just made sense to start his own zine, so he did, and he called it Skull Geek.
The first few issues of Skull Geek were cut and paste calamity; splattered bits of Phil’s brain on paper, ink blots in the form of comics, zine reviews, some political commentary – everything a person looks for in a good zine. Slowly, issue by issue, shades of things to come crept in; more music. By issue #3 the lens had definitely shifted its focus, notably with the inclusion of the first “indie guide to punk rock death” featuring the Toronto band Pecola. A few months later, the first demise of this story; no more Skull Geek, Klygo’s zine was henceforth to be known as the Skull Geek Bible, a music zine with serious aspirations to be more.
“The first 7 inch with Pecola came out of an interview I did with them. They were nice guys and I liked their music,” says Klygo. “They wanted to do something with Tony Ratboy Walsh, and I was into the whole comic thing too, but they didn’t have the money and, at that time, I did. So…”
So, another addition to the ever-evolving cast of Skull Geek entities – the Skull Geek Record Label. “It wasn’t about making money, it was about doing it, making it happen,” recalls Klygo.
After the Pecola 7 inch, Klygo says there was just a flurry of activity; more writing forExclaim!, more interviewing, more releases, going to more shows, and doing more zines. And over the next year, Phil was prodigious, putting out secret agent s first 7 inch, Slowgun’s first full-length release, smallmouth’s second full length, as well as mounting a few showcases and small tours, not to mention his day job.
“It was all exciting, all new, I wasn’t looking for projects, but just from being involved I heard about bands who had interesting stuff and things just kept going. But as he got further into the music side, he found himself becoming less interested in the zines. There was nearly a year between issues 5 and 6, and when 6 did finally emerge, it read like the farewell tour it was.
“People were hassling me about it, saying when are you going to put out another issue and I just thought, man, it s a zine, get a life.” So when he finally struggled out the last issue, he put on a Death of Skull Geek show and shut it down. It was clear, from the tone of the event, that Klygo was getting frustrated with the small-time life of the zine operator. His aesthetic – showcased in the jangly, reinvented, instrumental mood-pop of a band like Smallmouth – was becoming rapacious; it was growing out of proportion to the format Klygo had built to present his vision.
“Skull Geek needed to be bigger than it was, which was basically me,” Klygo says. And just around the time this was going through Phil’s head, his buddy Mark Dipietro was also thinking ‘label’. He’d been around, working in the music business in TO for about 10 years. The two started talking about a partnership, who would do what etc…Then the space above hipster local record store Rotate This came available and the newborn Teenage USA moved in.
“I thought, yeah, I can devote a year to this, to see if we can make it happen. So I quit my job.”
Klygo says that going into it feels really good. “I want expand what I did with Skull Geek; but now we can actually act like a record label and take advantage of being a business, like having an office and hardware, having a partner and all that. So it s not really like starting from scratch this time.” Teenage USA immediately re-released the Pecola 12″ and Smallmouth’s full length CD and have just put out their first new full length, This Land is Your Land, the solo project of Lonnie James (of the Superfriendz), which Klygo figures will become an indie Canadian classic. They’ve set up solid distribution through Bottleneck, Southern and Sonic Unyon, and are ready to spring several new releases from the likes of Gaffer, SolarBaby and Joshua WM (of Poledo) on an unsuspecting crop of American teenagers in the next few months.
Oops, did I say American? Yes, kids that’s right, Teenage USA is unabashed in their desire to get invited to the largest consumer love-in on the planet – the orgy of buy and sell that typifies our neighbours to the South. But there’s a slyness to it, a mocking self deprecatory attitude that is all part of the Klygo mystique. When asked about the record label s name, Klygo gets a coy grin on his face and refers you back to a certain Pecola song, even as he alludes to other hidden meanings. But forget lyrical meanings and coded inferences. What it all comes down to is economics. Klygo figures that no matter how much they distribute in Canada, it is the US mega-market that will make it possible to keep going.
And hey, that’s what it’s all about for Phil: The chance to keep doing it, keep making something, anything, happen. Although he’s currently looking for a part time job to stretch things out, and is visibly run down and over-worked, he remains optimistic, even wired to the positive plug, when he gets to talking about their upcoming releases. As for doing another zine, he says maybe he’ll put some of that sort of thing in the Teenage USA catalogue but beyond that…he doesn’t have much time for kid stuff anymore. Klygo’s got bigger things on the agenda. He’s got to save pop rock from itself. He’s got to give the geeks what they want before they even know it.