The Mechanic's Guide: how two DC punks taught the American underground to start labels

This is the first of a few posts about the Simple Machines label and DIY culture before the Internet.

Punk is protest music. Its bands have targeted fascism, the patriarchy, racial oppression, consumerism, neoliberalism, and cultures of substance abuse for the entire history of the genre. Different causes but one big idea: society is fucked up and should be different.

I'm going to tell a story over the course of a few blog posts that starts in an anarcho-punk DC  activist organization in the 1980s, tours all across America, makes a pit stop at a meeting Apple held to get indie record labels to impulsively sign contracts right before the iTunes store opened, and arrives at the rocky coast independent music is marooned on today. 

It's one about people who didn't just think society should be different, but saw really specifically how it could be different. It’s the story of a record label called Simple Machines—run by Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson—and some really fascinating network-focus projects that came out of it: the Mechanic’s Guide, The Machine, and the Future of Music Coalition.

And like Neil Young sings in “Big Time”—”I’m still living the dream we had. For me it’s not over.” Toomey and Thomson are still active in music today. Their band Tsunami is enjoying some renewed notoriety thanks for a wonderful retrospective box set Loud Is As put out by Numero Group last year and they’re on tour literally right now .

Thomson and Toomey are significant players in tradition originating in punk scenes called DIY—short for Do It Yourself—which has been empowering generations of musicians, artists, and activists to confront and counter what seem like monolithic antagonists with creativity and enthusiasm. DIY is an attitude and ethos as much as it is a way of doing things, and it’s been one of the key ingredients in creating a grassroots music culture in America well beyond the genre confines of punk—one built, powered, and maintained by everyday people. 

Their Mechanic’s Guide is a great example of the DIY way: a simple and fun-to-read zine that could tell you everything you needed to know about getting your music out into the world. It’s the kind of labor of love that needed to exist in a world before you had the pleasure of Googling “how do I layout cover art for an album Reddit.” 

Before the Internet, resources like this were crucial to the independent music world, and Thomen and Toomey were savvy enough at the time to recognize that their community would need resources on the burgeoning Internet too. The fourth and final edition of the Mechanic’s Guide was printed in 1998, and its successor was a forum called The Machine.

And while it's not the main thing I'm going to focus on I think the Simple Machines story illustrates really clearly that the Internet didn't destroy the independent music industry, but that capital found a way to use the Internet as a cudgel to stamp out decentralized, widespread competition and consolidate all of the money and up-and-coming talent with a bespoke distribution apparatus—Spotify, let’s say.

So yes, in some ways this story resembles the Edgerton photograph of a bullet tearing through an apple. In vivid slow motion we can see all this granular detail of the way the American independent music industry has been blown apart in the Internet age. 

But I'm too excited and inspired by the Mechanic’s Guide and the history of Simple Machines to make this just another chapter in a grand theory of Spotify's ills. Plus, I feel quite liberated from harping on Spotify since my friend and colleague Liz Pelly has truly written the book on the topic. It's not just a must read, but a fun read—and you should read it. I'll reference it here or there, but I'm grateful to just be able to focus on some inspiring stories from the DIY music world for a moment.

My next post digs into the history of DIY culture as a whole, but let’s begin that journey with a look at the thing thing.

Looking at The Mechanic’s Guide

I invite you to follow along and really look at the Mechanic’s Guide—they put up the fifth and final edition from 2000 as a PDF on the Simple Machines website. Find it on Internet Archive if that link isn’t working.

If you wanted to produce a vinyl record, CD, or cassette in the 1990s and didn't know where to start, the 24-page Mechanic's Guide would give you a full tutorial. All you had to do was order one from the record label Simple Machines and you'd get literally all of the information you needed to do it yourself—DIY in the punk parlance.

Jenny Toomey and Kristen Thomson compiled it for a simple reason. As Toomey explained to me in an interview, producing records was industry knowledge guarded by the major label record industry. The process for making a 7" single is an elaborate one. Understanding it, and knowing how to navigate an entire supply chain to get it produced, was something that gave your company a competitive edge against potential upstarts.

In very plain terms, if you have a band and your band doesn't know how to press a record, you have to work with a label that does know how to press a record. Or, if you want to start a record label but don't know the manufacturing process, you simply can't start your label. Maybe that's not a problem if you're in a hair metal band cutting your teeth on the sunset strip and dream about seeing a million faces and rocking them all.

But what if you're making explicitly anti-commercial, aggressive music that no existing record labels want anything to do with? Well, you have to figure it out yourself, or you have to learn the trade from another record label head generous enough to offer the knowledge.

On that front, Toomey and Thomson were fortunate and they knew it. Since the 1980s, DC’s own Dischord Records has been one of the most influential and successful record labels in American punk music. 

As Toomey told me in an interview, they “When we started putting out our own records, it was largely because Dischord didn’t want to put our records out. So we’re going to have to put them out ourselves.

But the folks at the label were generous with advice and time. They “modeled best practices to put out your own records, and then helped everybody put out their own records. [...] You just go over to their house and they would just explain things to you. Like okay, here’s how you lay out the artwork.”

Few upstart labels in other cities would have access to such a local resource as one of the most successful independent record labels in America of its era. So the Mechanic’s Guide is very much a way of paying forward—extending knowledge and know-how to all punks, not treating it as privileged information for their local scene.

The guide starts simple, with the section "Let's say you're in a band." Before it even gets down to the brass tacks of actually making the thing, the guide dispenses some crucial wisdom.

"Don’t expect record label moguls to approach you with some 3-record, $1,000,000 deal. In almost every case, if you want to make a record or CD of your musical project, you’ve got to do it yourself (for good up-to-date information on home recording subscribe to Tape Op magazine). Or, say you’re not in a band yet, but there’s a band or bands you love and you’d like to try putting out a record/CD of their stuff. It’s probably best to start with a band you know personally, or one that genuinely wants to help with the process.That way, no one will be surprised or angry if there are problems like unexpected costs or delays."

This happens throughout the Mechanic’s Guide—some sort of commentary or context is dispensed along with the actual knowhow. The guide wasn't just trying to teach a reader how to do something, but how to do it successfully—and as anyone participating in any form of DIY knows, whether that's throwing a show or knitting a sweater, the wrong expectations will completely ruin your experience.

They strike a conversational tone throughout the guide, defining esoteric jargon in an accessible way wherever possible and explaining the production process like they're telling a story. Take for example this excerpt on mastering a record:

"Did you ever wonder how those secret messages get on the inner groove of vinyl records? It’s not actually a bored worker at the vinyl pressing plant sending secret messages out on freshly pressed records (although that would be nice...). Those etched messages are inscribed by the mastering person in the lacquers. If you want a special message etched on the hubs, you’ll need to include that on your letter, too."

This type of thing happens over and again in the Mechanic’s Guide. When I read through it, I end up getting the impression that the production process is fun and interesting, which isn't really a feeling that I would come to just researching it myself. I imagine if you were reading other industry materials about the process published in the 1990s, it probably reads something like this paragraph I plucked from the website of current-day record pressing plant Gotta Groove:

"The building’s floorplan is designed around creating a near-cleanroom environment for the plating laboratory, extensive space for an ever-expanding mothers and masters library, new technology and equipment never before used in record plating, and additional space for a cutting studio. Every square foot of the facility has been laid out with a focus upon making the best and most consistent phonograph metal parts anywhere on the planet, and we are excited for the world to get to hear the records produced from them."

This is basically marketing copy for insiders. I’m truly blessed that I can quickly Google terms like "cleanroom environment" and "cutting studio" to try to figure out why it's relevant that Gotta Groove has good ones, but if you got your hands on the Gotta Groove catalog in 1995, you'd just have to take it on their word that their facilities are in fact special and not just the standard that the place down the street charging $1 less per record has.

That's the magic of the Mechanic’s Guide. By making information about this process easy to get your hands on and wrap your head around, the Simple Machines crew created conditions for musicians and labels to have confidence that they'd be able to successfully produce their own records and get them heard by the world. 

They even include a section called "Art Lesson 101" that gives some tips for making your record look nice and understanding all of the materials and processes that go into that side of things. Effectively what they're doing here is helping anyone who wants to put in the time and elbow grease get their record to some standard that a listener would be excited to pick it up. Like the guide says "[...]A lot of people may 'see' your music before they ever hear it. Take the time to make the outside as unique and interesting as the music inside."

And actually getting it to a listener? Well they cover that too, sharing secrets about finding a distributor, selling product to local record stores and at your shows, and even finding buyers on this new-in-1999 thing called the Internet.

The thing that's so powerful about the Mechanic’s Guide, in my opinion, isn't that it helped new bands and labels enter the market. For sure, it did.

But its real power was in helping stoke a culture where the people who made music were empowered to get their music heard, regardless of if it fit trends of what was getting played on the radio or was selling in record stores at the mall. And culture is the best way to understand this because it was a whole musical landscape of artists creating a viable, robust alternative. 

The 1990s punk and underground rock scene in America made scene epicenters out of far flung college towns. Artists were experimenting with aesthetics and sound all the time and hungry listeners had open ears. 

All these new sounds travelled the country via a robust cottage industry of music publications and independent record stores. Record sales and scrappy touring supported independent artists financially meaningfully, letting them devote weeks or months or years to focusing on music, not just weekends and evenings.

In the next post, we go back to Simple Machines' activist roots in Washington DC.

What I’ve been listening to

Basically just Parliament Funkadelic this past week.

Really dig this Mineral Stunting album.

And just some absolute comfort food.