Suburban Home Records: the ones that got away 

Behind every great victory is a pile of disappointments and, after 16 years in the business, Suburban Home Records has had its share. Of course your file-sharing, album-stealing habits have had an impact on it, just like every other label in the game, but Suburban Home has also dealt with the niche-market label curse: Bigger record companies can make better offers to bands. Because of this, label founder Virgil Dickerson’s come within a hair of inking some big names through the years, only to see things fall apart at the last moment.

“Take it with a grain of salt,” Dickerson says. “Obviously, those bands are big because they went to the label they went to, and had the press and the publicity and the right set of circumstances to turn them into big bands. Who knows what would have happened if I had actually put out these records?”

With Suburban Home celebrating its 16th anniversary with a two-day extravaganza at 3 Kings this Friday and Saturday, Sept. 9 and 10, Dickerson chatted with The A.V. Club about some of his favorite almost-was moments.

The Hold Steady
Virgil Dickerson: I was the biggest Lifter Puller fan on the face of the planet. I started hearing [Lifter Puller frontman Craig Finn] had this new rock band called The Hold Steady. Right when The Hold Steady: Almost Killed Me [came out], I got a hold of Craig via e-mail, and said how big of a Lifter Puller fan I was. I was about to start a series called Under The Influence, where bands do a cover of a band that influenced them. He said he’d definitely be interested in doing that, or a CD EP, or something on Suburban Home. It was just one of those weird things that we’d talk about here and there, but time kept going by. Then they recorded a second record, Separation Sunday. Obviously that record got a lot of praise, and they signed to Vagrant. We just lost touch and lost communication.

3OH!3
VD: I had a couple interns at the time who were all about all the videos and the songs that were popping up by this Boulder band called 3OH!3. My background is definitely in hip-hop and gangsta rap and whatnot, but the early 3OH!3 stuff is jokey and a lot like that. I liked it a lot, and I got to see them play. I got started talking to [3OH!3 members] Nat [Motte] and Sean [Foreman], and it looked really likely that we were going to put out that first EP. It was one of those things that we were talking and I was like, “Are you going to continue this?” They were like, “I don’t think so.” Nat, at that point, decided to go study medical school in France. The way we left it was, “If you guys ever want to do this seriously and start touring, I’d love to put this record out.” Next thing I’d heard, they’d signed to a major label and sold a kazillion records.

The Gaslight Anthem
VD: I was running the Vinyl Collective blog and store, and we carried their first album. We sold a bunch of them. I really fell in love with that first record. I started contacting Brian Fallon, the singer. We started talking about putting out at least a 7-inch, but we were also starting to talk about what they were going to with their next album. The actual talks for the album didn’t get too serious, because they were talking with Side One Dummy and a couple other labels at the time. There was a short minute where we talked about doing a possible record on Suburban Home.

Frank Turner
VD: He released a couple albums in the U.K. that weren’t released in America. I actually got pretty far along in talks about releasing the albums on Suburban Home in America. This little label called Epitaph came in, and I was out of the picture. Man, I love those early records that he put out in the U.K. They could have been out on Suburban Home. It’s pretty frustrating.