“All (of the record people) were amazed by the service that they got. They were casually greeted at the door by one of our ‘staff’ members, dressed in NASA-looking Space Opera jumpsuits. The people who served the ‘guests’ must have been girlfriends, but not reduced to servile wenches or anything. They really liked doing it. The ‘guests’ would be waited on and we would sit down and give them our pitch. And in all but one case, we said thank you very much, we’ll get back to you. (More than once), we decided not to go with a label because they were telling us we were not going to get a better deal in this business. You’re hooked up with a producer, boys. That’s the way the system works. We were among the first to change that.
“We learned early on from the music and the music, in a sense, became our children. If you look on our album, there’s a statement that says everything you see, hear and hold in your hand was written, produced, arranged and compiled entirely by Space Opera, right down to the artwork. That was not done at that time. You could not get a record deal that allowed you that much autonomy. You absolutely couldn’t. Well, we finally did, in spite of what Bobby Colomby and Paul Rothschild and the others told us.”
Everything we had was self-designed to fit Space Opera, including our stance of what we would and would not do concerning record companies
“(Our attitude) came partially from our association with T-Bone Burnett. Well, not so much attitude as position, I guess. At the time, you either took the deal they handed you or forgot about it. There was no Internet you could use. You couldn’t press anything on vinyl unless you went to Nashville or California. The record companies had a system of extortion where you either did it the way they wanted or you forgot about it. You’re a garage band or a big star, one or the other.
Even those on the fringe noticed the stance. According to Claudia, “They were focused on ‘let’s get the deal’. I mean, they wanted to get a contract and do an album, but the one compromise they wouldn’t make was artistic control. It was unheard of in those days for a bunch of kids to demand that. Self-production, to record people, was out of the question.”
“I mean, if you’d go to Picasso and say ‘there’s too much green here, you should change it’”, agreed White, “he probably would have been a lot less delicate in his response than we were. The idea, like I said, of us changing so much as a brush stroke of any of our music was just not going to happen. That was the trouble we ran into with these record guys. When we talked about the bar being set, they thought we meant drinks. Musicians on the whole weren’t really concerned with their own excellence. (They were only) concerned with the buying and posturing to get the record deal. To get them out of Spokane or Bismarck or Cleveland or wherever they were practicing in the garage.
The idea of us changing so much as a brush stroke of our music at the behest of some record company guy was just not going to happen
“I mean, the record deal was the big fantasy. The record deal. And back then, when you dealt with record people, they would get you under their thumbs and let you know, well, we might be interested, we think what you have done here has a little potential, but… And it’s fair enough to say that they thought that way because at the time Columbia, Capitol, Epic, Polydor- all those labels- had huge staffs. A&R guys, producers, recording studios- and that’s how it was done. They had to justify their payroll by using the guys they had in those positions, so to have some upstart band come along and say they didn’t need any of those services, well…”
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