Thirty-five years ago, in their one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, college student Erin Kelly-Burkett and punk frontman Michael John Burkett invited 10 friends to celebrate their new record company’s first seven-inch single. Because they were out of money for artwork, the assembled group doodled on the record’s label.
“We had Burgie beer and sat around in this big pile with markers,” Kelly-Burkett recalls. “I ended up doing a lot of the mail-order by myself in our kitchen. I didn’t expect to really make any money off it. It was just something we did for fun.”
On Wednesday (July 9), Kelly-Burkett and Burkett, the NOFX singer known as Fat Mike, will step back from Fat Wreck Chords, the label they founded in 1990 – a move made possible by a new partnership with fellow indie punk label Hopeless Records. (Neither side would disclose the financial terms of the deal.) In a unique arrangement, Hopeless will acquire Fat Wreck’s catalog of master recordings, while Fat Wreck will leave its more than 100 artists debt-free by wiping out their unrecouped balances (according to Burkett, the total amount of unrecouped balances being forgiven totals $3.5 million).
Additionally, Hopeless will be disallowed from signing new artists to Fat Wreck, and Burkett and Kelly-Burkett will retain ownership of Fat Wreck’s logo and trademark.
“Erin, towards the end of the deal, said, ‘I don’t want to give up what we built,’” Burkett says. “Say Louis sold it, and he sold the Fat Wreck Chords logo, any label or any other person could put out other bands on the label. We ensure that it’s pure. I don’t want any band on my label — that’s my namesake — that I don’t like.”
“We’ll be working with them on a ton of different things. They’ll be as involved as they want to be,” adds Louis Posen, who founded Hopeless – home of All Time Low, New Found Glory, Avenged Sevenfold and others – a year after directing a video for NOFX’s “Bob” in 1992. “I expect them to want to continue putting a spotlight on everything that they built.”
Fat Wreck Chords, which began as a means for Fat Mike to put out NOFX’s music, has, over the years, released albums by landmark punk bands such as Rise Against, Against Me! and Descendents, becoming known for a certain loud-guitar sound that draws from the Sex Pistols and the Clash but frequently adds pop melodies and a sarcastic, word-playing sense of humor. Its current roster includes Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Sick of It All and No Use for a Name.
“It’s very pure. It’s a punk-rock label where we’ve never got sued in 35 years,” Burkett says. “There were a couple of audits, but they didn’t lead to anything. No one can say that s–t.”
Kelly-Burkett and Burkett began discussing a partnership with Posen and Hopeless about a year ago. The former couple, who divorced in 2010 after 18 years of marriage, wanted to ease out of day-to-day label-management duties while finding a way to “give back to the bands and have them participate in this partnership deal,” Kelly-Burkett says. The Fat Wreck duo had conversations with a few other labels, she adds, but quickly chose Hopeless because Posen was “not wanting to change this 35-year legacy that we’ve built.”
Fat Wreck Chords is a profitable indie whose model is based on its long-running mail-order system. Overhead is more than $1 million annually, according to Burkett, including employees, insurance and warehouse space. “There is something to be said for volume,” says Burkett, whose band NOFX retired last October, “and we put out a lot of records over 35 years.” Kelly-Burkett adds: “Punk rockers love their vinyl, they love their collectibles, they love their one-of-a-kind. Streaming is the market share now, but not as much as you would think.”
With today’s announcement, the labels will release new albums by well-known Fat Wreck bands: Bad Cop/Bad Cop’s Lighten Up; a NOFX rarities album, A to H; and Strung Out‘s Exile in Oblivion. “It was important we didn’t announce, ‘Oh, there’s a partnership and acquisition,’” Posen says. “We wanted to have new releases and show this is an active partnership.”
Moving forward, Burkett and Kelly-Burkett plan Fat Wreck-branded pop-up shops and festivals. “I can leave some of the stress of running the daily business and just focus on celebrating it,” Kelly-Burkett says.
