It was 1998, and Tom “Buffalo” Kinzer, a Texas rodeo cowboy by way of California, was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on business.
Kinzer, who lives in Denton County and bears more than a passing resemblance to western legend “Buffalo Bill” Cody, describes himself as “a cowboy in the rack business.” While spending the ’70s and ’80s in the rodeo arena, he also became a representative for clothing manufacturers, from the sporty Ocean Pacific line to Manuel, legendary Western clothier to country music stars. On this day, he was sitting on a deck with his boss from Ocean Pacific.
“Along comes this 40-foot boat,” Kinzer recalled. “This guy with glasses jumps off and yells, ‘Good mornin’, motherf—–‘!”
The guy was Rick Smith, a fellow Texan. Smith knew Kinzer’s boss, and they all got to talking – about Kinzer’s nickname and their respective North Texas hometowns. Soon Kinzer, his wife, and his boss were out on the sailboat with Smith.
Smith was a Haltom City native who had relocated to Florida temporarily for his business. Back in the 1980s, the company, Smith and Alster, liquidated music and videos for rental stores and bought inventory from record stores that were going out of business. So Smith had been dancing around the edges of the music business for years. That night on the boat, Smith struck up a conversation with Kinzer and told him he wanted to get into producing country music.
In that case, Kinzer said, he knew just the man Rick needed to speak with. He called his friend Billy Minick.
Eleven years later, the family-owned set of companies conceived that night is one of Cowtown’s most successful business stories. Housed in the historic Stockyards, it’s a multimedia enterprise that now includes live music and DVD production, record distribution and promotion for almost 100 artists, a concert business, and both worldwide electronic distribution and physical merchandising in more than 6,000 stores nationwide. Smith passed away in 2004, but his younger brother Randy and son Rick Jr. still oversee the operations.
“Rick was quite the visionary,” said Pam Minick, marketing director for Billy Bob’s Texas. “He was always looking at the glass as half full and relished a challenge. He saw obstacles as steps to the next level.”
His first challenge in getting into the music business in Fort Worth, as it turned out, would involve buying a pair of cowboy boots.
Billy Minick is a former bull rider, rodeo producer, and the current chief operating officer of Billy Bob’s Texas. The Stockyards club was originally a giant cattle barn that was turned into an airplane hangar that was turned into a department store so large that the stock boys wore roller skates. The venue, billed as the World’s Largest Honky Tonk, opened in 1981, during the Urban Cowboy movie craze. After founder Billy Bob Barnett’s plans for expansion failed, the club closed in early 1988. Later that year, local investors financed its re-opening. Minick came on board as a partner and manager in 1989. He brought on his wife Pam, a rodeo competitor and television commentator, to run the marketing department. Throughout the club’s history, anyone who was anyone in country music has played there.
Although Smith grew up in Haltom City, he’d never crossed paths with Minick.
“To run into the Minicks, you’d have to hang out at Billy Bob’s Texas, be around the rodeo circuit or on the golf course,” Randy Smith said. “At that point, Rick was spending most of his time in Florida.”
But the next time Rick was in Fort Worth, after his conversation with Kinzer, he called at Billy Minick’s office.
During the meeting, Smith pitched what would become the Live at Billy Bob’s music series. Minick and his partners had the idea of recording the artists who played at Billy Bob’s. Smith would exclusively market the recordings through the network of retailers he’d already established in his work with Smith and Alster. The preppy, Armani-clad Smith didn’t resemble the cowboys with whom Minick was accustomed to dealing. “He was wearing a white shirt and pointy-toed shoes,” recalled Kinzer. But Smith’s knowledge, upbeat personality, and drive were enough to convince Minick to seal the deal, despite doubts about Smith’s wardrobe.
“Billy said, ‘I’ll do a deal with you, but you need a pair of Wranglers and some cowboy boots,’ ” Pam Minick recounted. And that was the start of Smith Music Group.
Smith understood that a hefty catalog of hits would be the money-maker for the enterprise. At that time, country music legends Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson were both between record labels. An artist signed to a label is contractually prohibited from recording any music not on the label. Conversely, an artist without a label needs a way to get his or her product to an audience. Live at Billy Bob’s provided a well-known name and a virtually guaranteed distribution conduit. Minick and Smith wanted Haggard to be the first artist to record a Live at Billy Bob’s release at his concert scheduled for New Year’s Eve, as 1998 turned to 1999.
But believing the axiom that anything that can go wrong usually does, Minick suggested recording another concert, prior to Haggard’s show, to work out any kinks or equipment problems. So on Dec. 4, a little-known Texas musician named Pat Green became the first artist to record a Live at Billy Bob’s release. These days, the Fort Worth-based Green, now with BNA Records, is capable of selling out the 6,000-capacity Billy Bob’s Texas. In 1998, it was a different story.
“Pat had maybe 500 people at the venue,” said Pam Minick. “But that CD is one of our most popular sellers.”
The 11-year catalog of Smith Music Group releases includes current hitmakers (Cross Canadian Ragweed, the Randy Rogers Band), country legends (Willie Nelson, Janie Fricke, Asleep at the Wheel), and rebels (David Allan Coe). Live At Billy Bob’s is distributed at all 2,200 Wal-Mart stores nationwide, which means that people who will never set foot in the club still have a chance to listen to the music played there. On June 26, Austin-based Micky and the Motorcars will record the 36th Live at Billy Bob’s CD.
If Smith Music Group’s catalog ranges broadly across the country spectrum and beyond, music experts say there’s no doubt that it’s played an important role in the spread of the particular genre called Texas Music or more broadly, Red Dirt music.
Through marketing and distribution of the Live at Billy Bob’s material, Rick and Randy Smith met up with Frank Jackson. Jackson went by “Frank the Crank” during his stint as a bass player for the ’90s band Love Survival and Drive (check the initials for the full effect). When his music dreams couldn’t support his kids, Jackson began working for Southwest Wholesale, distributing CDs to chain stores. Jackson’s time spent traveling the state and listening to independent Texas singer-songwriters resulted in both his passion for the music and the development of a specific Texas Music category at retail stores like Wal-Mart.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Texans Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson led an “Outlaw” movement against softer, slicker mainstream Nashville country, while Fort Worth-born Townes Van Zandt established cult hero status as country’s hippie-folk prince. Guy Clark, born in Monahans, and Houstonite Rodney Crowell carried the torch, achieving substantial success writing brainy songs with catchy lyrics for other artists.
Justin Frazell, host and creator of the “Texas Red Dirt Roads” radio show currently on Fort Worth radio station 95.9 The Ranch, has worked in North Texas country music radio for a decade. He says that the music is hard to define. It isn’t simply music from Texas because many of the artists, including bands No Justice and Cross Canadian Ragweed, come from Oklahoma. Transplants, like the four Braun brothers – Willie and Cody, who front the band Reckless Kelly, and Micky and Gary, who are two-fifths of Micky and the Motorcars – actually come from Idaho. And the music has a following throughout the American Midwest and internationally as well.
For decades, musicians in the scene faced a dilemma: Either play the circuit of the almost 200 clubs in the Texas-Oklahoma-New Mexico area and knock on the doors of radio programmers, hoping that a song would catch fire with a local audience, or leave Texas for Nashville, where the bulk of the country-genre music companies are located, as Jennings, Nelson, Clark, and Crowell all did.
Rick Smith cemented his company’s place in the genre by creating a way for Texas musicians to get their music to radio listeners and the general public without having to move out of state. In 2003, Jackson and Smith combined Smith’s existing label and distribution conduits with Jackson’s ties to independent artists and launched Smith Entertainment. The premise of Smith Entertainment was different from Smith Music, which owned the material produced on the Live at Billy Bob’s CDs. With Smith Entertainment, the artists own their own recording masters. Smith licenses the rights to distribute a single album for a period of time and pays royalties to the musicians for everything that’s sold.
Even today, it’s an unusual concept. Traditional record companies may pay an artist an advance to record his or her work, but then they start charging for almost everything else. And the artist may be beholden to the label for a multi-record deal that, five years into a career, isn’t profitable. At the end of the day, the artists may have very little to show for their hard work. Additionally, if the record companies don’t like the material, they have the option to shelve it indefinitely without releasing the songs back to the artist – sometimes even after the artist fulfills the terms of the contract.
“In a regular record deal, artists only get 10 percent of gross revenue and have to pay 100 percent of expenses,” said Jackson, who now does artist recruitment (A&R) for Smith Entertainment. A label will “charge $5,000 to work a radio single, another $3,000 for promotion.”
Smith’s model is different. They’re not paying artists to record; they’re simply distributing the product.
“Each record is a one-off, and we don’t tie people down,” said Jackson. When the time comes for the next record, he said, “hopefully they want to work with us. That’s what we’re counting on.”
Micky and the Motorcars are set to record their Live at Billy Bob’s CD next weekend, but they’ve had a long climb to get there. The group self-released its first CD, Which Way from Here? in 2003, to limited success. “That’s probably why you can’t find it anywhere,” singer/guitarist Micky Braun said wryly. The band’s next three releases, Ain’t In It for the Money, Careless, and last year’s Naïve, were all distributed by Smith Entertainment with much better results.
“I’ve never been put in a position of someone wanting to pay me in advance,” said Braun. “An advance [from a traditional label] would be nice, I imagine, but you’re running the risk that your material might never see the light of day.”
Much of the Smith catalog sounds like traditional country music, but there are exceptions. Take the conjunto-flavored music of the Tejas Brothers. Or Bleu Edmondson’s gritty, wailing, rock-driven guitar-heavy sound. Or the virtually unclassifiable music made by newcomer Stephanie Briggs. All these artists are distributed by Smith Entertainment but don’t fit into the classic country mode. And Smith Music embraces every one of them, unconditionally.
“Nobody [at Smith Entertainment] has ever said to change anything,” said Briggs, a New Braunfels-based singer/guitarist whose influences are decidedly un-country grunge, big-band swing, and pop. “They just told me to do what I do, and we’ll go from there.”
Smith Entertainment also launched a digital arm in 2003. SE-Digital allows musicians to retail their songs through iTunes and MSN Music Store, whether or not they’ve ever put the songs together into an album. The distribution channel is critical because iTunes won’t take unsigned artists’ music directly, Jackson said. He estimated that up to 20 percent of Smith Entertainment’s business comes from these virtual stores. And he said that electronic distribution will become even more critical in the next few years.
“People just aren’t buying as many CDs,” he said. “And a lot of music stores don’t exist anymore. There’s no more Warehouse Music, no Sam Goody, and Borders is getting out of the music business.”
Smith Entertainment is not alone in the local music marketplace. Fort Worth’s Reload Records technically beat Smith into the “independent” business by three years. Reload began in 1985 as a “little vanity label” according to founder Earl Musick, who formed the company to distribute music by his Americana band, The Unsung Heroes. Unlike Smith Entertainment, Reload distributes its material only electronically. There are a handful of other recording/distribution companies in the area, including Arlington-based Aaron Ave Records, founded in 1994, which releases music in the same genre as Smith Entertainment. Fort Worth’s Quiet Boy Records, founded in 1992, produces and distributes hip-hop, while Brainticket Records (also in Arlington) releases heavy metal music.
Musical brainstorms must have been in the air around the Smith Music Group offices in 2003. Besides Smith Entertainment and SE-Digital, the group branched out into the business of concert promotion. The company leased 40 acres of the Stockyards just east of Billy Bob’s to produce Hank Williams Jr.’s “Stockyard Stampede.” Then Rick Smith convinced Willie Nelson to hold his annual Fourth of July Picnic there in 2004, and Smith Music Group produced the event through 2006, after which Nelson moved it out of town.
“Rick had a special relationship with Willie,” said Pam Minick. “He’s the one who got Willie to move the Picnic here.”
The too-rock-for-country band Cross Canadian Ragweed, which still distributes three of its back-catalog albums through Smith Entertainment, played at the Picnic, and in 2005 the members decided they wanted their own show, produced in partnership with Billy Bob’s Texas and Smith Music Group. Thus began the Cross Canadian Ragweed Red Dirt Roundup, a showcase of Texas music, held in the Stockyards around Labor Day for the past three years.
Expanding the vision for the company still further, Smith Entertainment added radio promotion services in 2004, headed by veteran Bob Mitchell, who worked for Sony Music Nashville and DreamWorks’ Nashville arm before signing on with Smith. His experience helped raise Smith Entertainment’s profile with radio decision-makers. While people may argue about the value of marketing radio singles versus simply downloading music one song at a time, there’s something to be said for hearing a song on the radio. Look at Shane Media’s Texas Music chart, which represents the top 50 songs played by 80 participating (mostly Texas) radio stations each week. Between 10 and 15 Smith artists are consistently represented on any given week.
Last year, the company added publicist Leah Lavine, mainly to assist young roster additions who haven’t yet acquired a PR person. The radio marketing and PR services are “value added,” according to Jackson – part of the package an artist gets when he or she signs with Smith Entertainment. With Mitchell dealing directly with radio, Jackson with retail, and Lavine with everyone else, Texas music artists can reach at least the front door of the big-time without having to sell their souls – or worse, move north.
Frank Jackson likens Smith Entertainment to the farm team system in baseball.
“We’re the triple-A farm team right before the majors,” he said. “Smith gets the young guys going, and then maybe they go on to do major-label stuff.”
Local singer/songwriter Maren Morris is a great example. At age 14, Morris released her first CD independently and sold it through her web site and at her shows. Morris and her parents toured tirelessly through Texas over the next few years, building up an audience. But growing a fan base by selling one CD at a time is difficult.
“It was crucial that we get our CD out to more people,” Morris said.
Smith Entertainment approached the teenage phenom, who’d never heard of the company but had worked with many of the artists it distributed.
All That it Takes was released by Smith Entertainment at the end of 2007 and was distributed through the Smith Entertainment channels, including the brick-and-mortar Best Buy, Borders, and Hastings stores, as well as through Smith online. A few months later, the album’s title track became Morris’ first number-one song on the Texas Music chart. She credits Bob Mitchell with that success.
“Smith has been the greatest at radio promotion,” she said. “Bob Mitchell is really good at what he does. He’s really diplomatic, and he essentially got us our number-one single.”
Frazell agreed that Smith accomplishes a lot for their artists.
“I think that what Bob [Mitchell] does at Smith Entertainment is top-level without being Nashville,” he said. “I don’t think they get the same accolades as bigger companies do.”
But sometimes the players outgrow the farm team. The Randy Rogers Band did well with two Smith-released CDs between 2001 and 2004. Rogers’ Rollercoaster CD stuck on the national Billboard chart at number 41 for months, something almost unheard-of for an artist without a national label behind him. Rogers ultimately signed with Mercury Nashville for the Just a Matter of Time and Randy Rogers Band releases but chose to continue to distribute the band’s back catalog through Smith Entertainment.
“Smith has always been good to us,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail. “They believe in loyalty and so do we.”
Bands like Cross Canadian Ragweed and Randy Rogers “could easily move their back catalogs to their new record company,” said Frank Jackson. But, he added with a laugh, “We pay our artists for everything they sell, 30 days after they sell it. There aren’t a lot of companies doing that right now.”
Currently, Smith Entertainment distributes the most recent releases by Texas singer/guitarists Johnny Cooper and Bleu Edmondson. Both artists have toured relentlessly and gained a substantial following outside of Texas. Cooper just finished the follow-up to last year’s Ignition; Edmondson is at the tail end of promoting his Live at Billy Bob’s CD/DVD recording. Randy Smith confirmed that Cooper’s July 10 release will not be distributed by Smith Entertainment; instead, the forthcoming CD, entitled Follow, will be on Tenacity Records, part of a New York-based conglomerate that also distributes music nationally for The Smithereens and Dr. Dre. Edmondson’s camp is coy about whether he’ll hook up with a national label for the next CD.
According to Randy Smith, the company doesn’t have time to sweat over which artist might or might not leave. Smith Entertainment receives a couple dozen demos each month from new artists. And they try to listen to each one. “We spend a hell of a lot of time listening to a hell of a lot of music,” Smith said.
Pragmatically, Jackson cautions artists who jump to companies that make over-the-top promises: “Be good to us on the way up, because you’ll see us on the way down,” he said.
Rick Smith died of complications from a sudden heart attack in the summer of 2004, during the planning of the first Red Dirt Roundup. He was 47, and he never got to see the concert “from his earthly home,” as Pam Minick said. His wake was held in the VIP room at Billy Bob’s.
Randy Smith said his brother “enjoyed life.” As Pam Minick put it, “Rick was the last guy to leave the Colonial Country Club’s 19th hole.”
“To sit in the room with him [Smith], you just felt the energy buzz off him,” Kinzer recalled.
Justin Frazell remembers the music company founder’s involvement in a non-corporate kind of financial transaction. “Rick Smith took quite a bit of my money rolling dice of an evening backstage at Billy Bob’s,” he said. But Frazell added that Smith’s spirit lives on through the company and the label.
Last year, Smith Music started producing a second Red Dirt Roundup in Nacogdoches. The effort literally shut down part of the burg’s access to its downtown, as two of its streets were blocked for the festival. Jackson said that the “untapped market” in East Texas creates a win-win situation. “The artists make money, and Smith sells records,” he said.
Tickets go on sale next week for the fourth annual Fort Worth show on Sept. 6. In addition to Ragweed, the lineup includes ’90s indie-rock band the Wallflowers, the Randy Rogers Band, and Robert Earl Keen.
Frank Jackson said the Red Dirt Roundup has “an awesome vibe.”
“We’ve never had any arrests,” he said. “Just a few drunk people you have to run off.”
