Richard Foos on Rhino Records, Reissue Culture, and the Record Store That Started It All

Welcome to the Sharp Note's podcast. I'm your host, Evan Toath. Rhino Records began the way so many record stories begin with a little bit of money, a lot of taste and a store full of people who believe that above it all. It's the music that matters. In this episode, we speak with Richard Fuz co-founder of Rhino Records about the independent shop that became one of the most important reissue labels in music history. Before Rhino was a catalog powerhouse, it was a record store built on humor, deep knowledge, and the stubborn belief that great records should not disappear because the industry had moved on to the next thing. This is also a conversation between two record store owners from different eras. Fuz opened Rhino in the 1970s when independent shops were everywhere, and the major labels were letting huge pieces of music history fall out of print. I'm building the sharp notes now in a very different world where vinyl is returned. Physical media has become meaningful again and curation may matter more now than ever. So what's changed forever? Well, the prices, the technology, the business model, and the way that people discover music. What's stayed the same? The need for taste, the value of a good recommendation, the thrill of putting the right record in someone's hands and the belief that a record store can still be more than a place to just buy things. It can be a classroom, a clubhouse, and sometimes, if the timing is right, it can be the beginning of a lifelong love of music. Thanks for being an inspiration in the independent record store world. There's one thing that looks wrong with it. I've never seen before an independent record store. It's clean. Well, don't look too closely. And it looks so organized. No, it looks fantastic. It's so fun. Well, that's good. Well, yeah, I mean, listen. I want to talk about a lot of things with you today. But certainly, it's interesting how Rhino's story begins as a record store rather than a record label. And I'd love to just talk about that experience of how you got the idea to really begin the record store and where it went from there. So why don't you take us back to 1973? I guess it was really was when the physical space was open. Isn't that right? It was. Before that, a friend of mine's family had a surplus electronic store right off of the Santa Monica mall, which became like one of the most popular malls in the country. But at the time, it was maybe when there were a couple surplus sock and underwear stores and a 49 cent theater on the promenade. It was completely dead. And so they allowed me-- and their store was pretty dead. It was surplus electronics. And they allowed me to put a bit of records in the store. And it was mildly, very mildly successful enough that after a couple years, we had about $1,000 worth of inventory that gave me $500, which believe it or not was enough to open a record store in those days because rent in Westwood where we was $140 a month. So-- Well, we opened with $600. No way. We've gotten-- now I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. It was more than that. But not much more than that. And just so you know, we're in a mall. We're in the Garden State Plaza here in Northern New Jersey. So it's exciting also to be in a mall. Of course, you remember those days. I don't have to tell you when every mall had one or two or maybe three record stores, I remember. Correct. But they were usually changed stores. They were rarely independent stores. So that's what excites me about your store. And I can't wait for it in there someday. Yeah, absolutely. Well, the next time I'm from Northern New Jersey and I've lived my first five years in the Union and Orange. Oh, I didn't know that. I didn't-- I thought you were-- And the wife grew up in South Orange so we get out there occasionally. OK, so you're right in the neighborhood, as we say. You know, it's hard to think of a time when Rhino records wasn't putting out reissues. And the world is so inundated with reissues right now. So much of what our customers want and so much of what we stock are reissues of, as you know, albums that are 40, 50, 60 years old. And we love that. We love the old music. But it's still a concern about new music. And how do you feel? You were really the guy that started the whole reissue thing. And it got that off to a rolling start. So when you see today's world, what do you think-- what do you think about that? And what do you think about your role in how older music is celebrated almost too much today? You know, I never really thought about it till-- and this kind of what started me on doing podcasts a couple of months ago, I was talking to somebody and he mentioned the words reissue culture. And I said, what's that? He goes, you invented it. Right. It just hit me that the amazing thing was that when we started all record companies only focused on new hits. And they believe that the trajectory of a hit record is it was a hit record for maybe two or three months. And then maybe there's an album. And then people buy it for a little while. This is a stop selling. You better hurry up and get it back to the distributor because they're going to make it out of print. So you can get credit for it. And then it's never to be seen again, unless it's the Beatles of Stone, Zeppelin, something like that. But anybody under that, it's out of print and gone forever. They just didn't believe that anybody cared about these older groups, including stars, like one of the first big reissues we did. We were able to license from Polygram and then it became Universal Records. A James Brown greatest hit. So if you can believe it, this is 1978. There wasn't one James Brown record in print, except for his latest album, which wasn't selling. Right, isn't having any hits anymore. So it's hard to even imagine that if you couldn't go to a-- one of the few that weren't many used record stores and find an old James Brown album or something. Or 45 that you could-- other than that, you could not hear any-- think of any major James Brown song. And you couldn't buy it. You couldn't hear it. In my imagination, I think if you're there in your store in the late '70s, and we think about the used items that we get in here, I would think you would probably have been seeing a lot of lightly used pre-owned stuff that was really popular. I'm just curious, was it really difficult to get copies of things? I mean, I know you that's what you just said. So I'm sort of going back. But I just can't believe it that at that time, maybe people were hanging on to their records more or something back then. Yeah, there wasn't a thing to trade in. Use records from people didn't have many records. There weren't collectors with 10,000 records. You would buy-- what you would tend to trade in would be similar to that. For example, somebody showed me the other day a reissue of "Franctum Comes Alive." At our record store, within six months after it was the biggest hit that anybody had ever seen, somehow it got so popular that everyone started hating Peter Frampton. And we were selling used copies for a quarter. Everybody was trading them in. But people weren't trading in-- I don't know if the Rare Kings album they had bought seven or a year ago if they had it. And if they happen to have it, they were keeping it. So there weren't good records occasionally traded in, but most of them were Billy Joel album that people didn't want anymore. Things that weren't, we have to anymore. This was, yeah. Well, I was collecting records, of course, from the, I guess, really the mid '80s was when I started buying used albums. And back then, those Billy Joel records were, I mean, I remember them being $0.50, $0.75, maybe a dollar. And then as things got later in my life, they were definitely a dollar, maybe $2. Now, if you want to buy a vintage Billy Joel album in very good condition, excellent condition, you're looking at $20, $25. What do you think about the inflation on some of those records that were really, really inexpensive at the time? That, as you say, like Peter Frampton, they were just made in the millions and millions and millions. Right. Exactly, and yeah, records were tended to be giant hits or not. And there wasn't like, there weren't things were either hits or flops really. There wasn't too much in the middle, and if it was a hit, people got tired of it and started trading in, but they were good. We were getting tons of Eagles albums and maybe selling them for $0.50 or a dollar. But you know, everybody knew that the Eagles were Billy Joel was, were great artists. They're just, you know, popular. You know, there's an arc of how somebody's extremely popular, then they get too popular and then there needs to be a breathing period. And that's what the record companies didn't get that that people 20 years later would want to go back and explore the great artists like your save with Billy Joel today. Right. Right. And supply and demand, I guess it was just more of them and they were easier to sell at a low price. You know, nowadays, and I'm sure you're sure of this, a lot of consumers demand triple A, which means an all-analogory issue. They want their, they want these old albums, but they don't want them digitally with it, which is sort of the opposite of how you were approaching them back in the early 80s. What's your take on this sort of analog versus digital argument? And again, when you started doing these reissues, I think a lot of them, if I'm not mistaken, and correct me if I'm wrong, were digital to sort of give something to the, I guess it would have been the boomers who really wanted to explore CDs and digital media and they didn't want to use those old, those old records. Well, it's a really complicated answer, but a lot of it is taste of what the, and ears, whether you like analog or digital better, but one thing to remember is the, nobody really, in those days, nobody cared about sound that much. So they were, you know, record maybe flew to the Mac rumors or, but if it wasn't an artist of that status, it doesn't mean that anybody did a care that much about the mass-arranged and the process and, you know, we would go, we would go myself and my partner, we would go down to the jacket printing place and make sure that they had the right colors on the jacket. Nobody from a major label was doing that. And they were, you know, maybe printing it by different plants and so there was no real a lot of quality control. So CDs had a chance of, we would go and master from the original analog, you know, the original analog tapes, always 100% of the time on the CDs, so the sound would, and we'd remaster and the sound would be pristine, the best that anybody had ever heard those records. And if you listen to hear things, you never heard on the radio. And I think it's sort of a joke that somebody buys a analog or a record today and it's mastered from a digital source, which means that it's digital. You think that's a joke? You think that why I think it's wrong, that it's, you know, there's no reason you're not getting better sound. If you're playing a record, you know, master from a digital source, it's digital, not analog. Right. Well, I'm actually pleased and surprised to hear. I mean, I don't know really what I assumed, but so it sounds like all those early Rhino albums, all those early reissues were all analog at a time when people weren't and I'm talking about the vinyl, of course, the vinyl would have been analog reissues of direct from the tapes, which probably were to get back then, right? Those tapes were easy to get nowadays that you can't, you can't even get those. Well, a lot of times they wouldn't have the master. So like, a lot of the master, well, we took over Atlantic Records Reissue division. A lot of the, they had a fire and a lot of the original master tapes to burn, but a lot of times we could get the multi-trax. So our amazing engineer going a lot, who is the best of the best, that he would go into the vaults and get the remix the original four or eight-track tapes, but he'd never try to enhance it or make it better. He'd also make it sound exactly like the original album. So, interesting. Further, you can get back to the original sources. The better it's, the better it's inside. You know, we do a lot of work listening to our customers here. We're always taking notes about things that people are looking for that we want to stock for them and we want to order these things for them. How did you, from the reissue standpoint, how did you determine what to reissue because you were looking at such a fertile history of rock and roll music and you could have, you know, I could go crazy here and just buy a million things and not know if it's going to sell or not and because I'm a music lover myself. So how did you sort of decide, well, look, let's do the turtles. Let's figure out the turtles stuff or any other artist. How did you sort of narrow down who to attack first? It started with what we love. So, the turtles were one of our favorite groups. My partner Harold actually went to high school with them. I was just high and was friends with them and they were one of the few groups that got their masters back because their record link will went bankrupt and they owed the money. Most that's maybe two to three percent of artists were able to get their master back. So we were able to deal directly with the turtles. They had all the tapes. So it was a great relationship for many years. But, you know, we just went through, we loved 60s pop rock and we just kind of go through what do we love and then see if we could license it from independent labels, occasionally the artists, usually the major labels. And then we also, you know, went through every genre. So soul, we did soul reissue blues, duop. I love duop and we ended up doing lows up duop, which was probably our most successful various, was our most successful various artist reissue. And that was a case of, it took us many years to do a box set of the 100 greatest duop records because we thought it was, we thought it was would be a commercial failure. We wanted to wait till we had a really good year. So we gave all of ourselves a do and it turned out to be by far the biggest sign box that we ever did. Hundreds of thousands, like Hoppy sold, it spawned a PBS special, the 50th anniversary of duop, that was the most successful still to today PBS blood show in history. I'm believe so. I mean, we had to burst out alive and then second out of will this sell it up to at least breaking it? Yeah, it's fascinating to think that you did so much of that just by trusting your gut instinct and stuff you liked and to think about how things are done today with the marketing, marketing groups and polls and all kinds of crazy information. But you guys knew your stuff. I guess if you know your stuff, you can make some informed decisions. Yeah, we also were, we were very lucky. I joke that my partner and I were record nerds, but we could occasionally get a date. And so we weren't like digging into people's basements, trying to find the white label, you know, you know, it led Zeppelin, Album or something like that. We were, we just, we liked the hits and the near hits. So our tastes connected with the vast majority of people not as opposed to, you know, many record collectors just want things for how rare they are. We wanted, we, we listened and collected records for how good the music was. In researching Rhino, I was really interested to learn about the social consciousness that the company had. Can you tell us a little about the push to keep social issues connected with you and your staff in those early days with the, with the shop? Well, it wasn't so much for the shop. It was later on when we finally made enough money, but with the shop, we were occasionally like when the record companies with the bravest of prices, we would boycott those records. So we would do things like that. And then, oh, we, we did a major boycott when they started, when they started, you know, cutting cutting records out and going to CDs we had we boycotted our own store and had it's what we would do fun stuff we're in the record store you know to me especially in those days music was so bad in you know 73 74 finally 75 you start getting you know funk and even this even this go was an improvement and punk but a musical is so bad that we had to do fun things to to satirize it and make fun of the record industry wherever we could but but with the writer label you know once we start getting successful we really started thinking about how can we marry social consciousness and we gave a percentage of our revenue to nonprofits we had people to be had to do at least 16 hours of community service we brought in speakers etc etc. Right you mentioned you mentioned boycotting records when they raise the prices well of course I'm not telling you anything you don't know but how do you feel when when I tell you that an independent store like this of course you know we have to pay sometimes up to 33 dollars wholesale for certain albums and then you know market up on our end for profit what do you I'm sure that number is very beyond what you were paying the distributors back in the late 70s yes it was it's insane amazing how records used to be so cheap and then CDs were so expensive that we got you in we're about first two years of CDs they were I don't know three dollars two and a half dollars to to make and records were 60 cents 70 cents and now it's turned around the other way and that's blows my mind I feel really bad or that I don't get why they cost 30 dollars 40 dollars retail seems makes no sense to me when did it become apparent to you that rhino was more of a record label than a record store um a lot of it was our preference so I just helped my dream was having a record label and I I said grew up obsessed with records and the labels and to think that I could have a label of my own was like a fantasy and so within a couple years you know we had put out a 45 there was there was a theme song to our store and lo and behold you know my partner Harold since is a rock rock writer he sends a copy of the theme song to John Peele who was the biggest GJ in England and lo and behold becomes the number 50 record of the year on this show they order a thousand records and we're in business and that was just when most exciting times in my life that we actually sold had to press and sell a thousand records and then we it was just so much fun making our own records and we started out you know making Harold and I love novelty songs and in the 60s there was always you know at least one on the charts at a time and we shared that love and we started making our own novelty records one of them became a very very minor hit on the local underground radio station LA what song was that it was the temple city kazoo orchestra doing a whole lot of love kazoo version of whole lot of love and it was so popular that we had to form a group we started getting asked for you know for live performances and our first performance we actually opened for X and the red hot chili peppers and was like no it was X and not the chili peppers were informed anyway X and another big pump band and then I quit the band because I had to run the record label and my eventual wife took my place because because of us but once we started putting out albums we really saw that what we loved what we loved and then what the market was missing were compilations and reissues right and where did the little the little rhino avatar come from where where did that originate you were talking about record labels and just thinking about what your record labels look like we you know we we named it rhino because it a friend suggested it and we just said that's it we just loved the name rhino and at the time at our store we were carrying bootleg records and we become friendly with a person who was designing the bootleg records who became a big artist built style a big comic book movie poster set designer and he decided in the way the rhino has kind of like a punk a punk rhino yeah punk rhino he was very strong very well it was it was really I guess it wrapped up a lot of your philosophy you were just a you know barreling into the music industry there like yeah yeah rhino yeah like a rhino right right a rhino in a record shop we just celebrated record store day of course and there's a lot of support for independent record stores at the moment and of course rhino was one of the most independent however eventually you ended up selling the company in two parts to time Warner can you talk about that transition just for our our listeners about you know how did you you went from independent record store then on to record label and then of course it became big enough that time Warner came came in knocking well it's pretty organic in in the late 80s finally the major labels were starting to look at us and say wow maybe we can have every issue label why are we licensing it to rhino we had a couple competitors by that time right at that point they started their own divisions so the biggest one was Sony started Sony legacy and at norm for their big opening big opening party they showed a video and they were the video open with a rhino big shot there you go there's more they were almost saying was there yeah the the major labels be where we're coming after you but ellenic records which was my favorite label growing up by far had never reached had never had a reissue division and you know we needed a distributor and so we entered a joint venture with them and they gave us sort of a whole back catalog which they had done almost nothing with so we had a ball and sold great there was a great marriage but they wanted for doing this they wanted to write many years later 10 year steel to be able to buy the other half of our company and so they did and at that point it was really time to move on our timing was amazing because that's when the record industry took a giant giant dip and not to be and even the reissues have nothing was selling because you had a Napster and then you know Apple and you download and some physical sales crashed you know only to come back many years later in the form of vinyl and what do you think about physical media nowadays what do you think about this return to people wanting to go to record stores or book stores and hold stuff in their hand and there are some people are although even people are streaming and owning vinyl of course it doesn't have to be one of the other but what do you think about that return to physicality in media love it it does my my heart wonders you know and also I guess one thing we didn't talk about with the boom and reissues about a year and a half ago I went to there was a unbelievable best by far rock festival music festival I never gone to that was at the South by stadium parking lot and it was a solo and R&B festival that had if we made a list of the 50 greatest living R&B solo artists and groups 49 of them were there only Stevie Wonder it wasn't but wow and I so I saw unfortunately you know there were probably there there were fifth you know 49 groups or whatever and you know you could see maybe six or seven in a day so there were dozens I wanted to see that I missed but I saw I saw, I would say, Spoky, then Al Green, then the Temptations, then Los Lobos, and Malo, were the five groups that I saw. And there were tens of thousands of young 20s and 30-year-olds singing every word to these great artists and knew the songs as much as I did. And it just made my heart feel so great as when you see younger people buying reissues of these great artists that maybe feel, OK, we were right that this music is great, and it's obviously going to live forever now that it's been adopted by 20 and 30-year-olds. Which is beautiful. And I totally agree that that must have been an exciting moment for you. But what do you think about the state of new music, like not necessarily feed away in on any new music? But does it take, by the way, this is our UPS man coming in delivering us records so that we can sell behind us? So that's what's happening. Thank you very much. But what do you think about new music? Does it get shortchanged because of the focus on reissues or older music in this day and age? You know, it's sort of pretty democratic today, which is amazing. And when those 20 and 30-year-olds are listening to the great music of the 60s, I don't think they weren't alive. So they can't put it into any political, social, logical context. So it just exists at its competing against all the new music. So I just care about listening to great music wherever it comes from. Good music is good music no matter when it's released, right? Yeah. So tell us what's going on currently with you. Where are you in the industry? What's happening? And what are you involved in? What are you excited about? What are you excited about with records and record labels and releases in the 21st century here all these years later? Well, just to catch up with the HES 25 years, I started another company called Shout Factory. And we ended up being sort of like Rhino, but we're more of a video focused. But when the business crashed, we pivoted doing the same thing with TV shows and films. And recently, we sold to a private equity company. We combined with another company we're now called Radio. And it's an amazing company now with homes like 70,000 TV shows and films, homes and licenses. But I'm not involved in day-to-day, but a company is great. But what I do mostly is nonprofit work. And it's sort of at the same fields that I always thought I worked with my wife was a nonprofit called The Narrative Method. And it's about bringing people together through storytelling and teaching people empathy and all through writing and poetry and talking. And it's like the form of an hour zoom every week called The Narrative Method. And she gets diverse people from all over the country. So it's wonderful. In a way, as if you're getting your best friends together and listening to the great music. But you don't know that you're a great friend still, but you're meeting them online. And it's a wonderful, beautiful experience. Right, wow. And if you had to put on your future glasses, given your experience in the industry, what do you see happening in the music world? What do you see happening in the record industry or just the music industry in general? Where do you think we're going here in this day and age? Well, I think with AI's either going to be horrible or great, but somebody sent me the other day, said this was the number one Spotify song of the week. I think the same was Eddie Dean, and he was an AI picture of a middle-aged black man. And I played it, and it was a great cross between Sam Cuckett and I was writing the amazing song. I don't know. So on one hand, maybe we'll hear the greatest music that we've ever heard. On the other hand, it's pretty scary. And the other thing that makes it really difficult is that something like 100,000 new songs get loaded onto YouTube a day. And it's not like we have more time. We still only have two years. And so it's really hard to digest. So I think what we did, curation, is needed more than ever. And how many records do you still have in your collection or have you gone fully digitally? You still got your vinyl. You got a good vinyl bunch of stuff at home. I've been calling you through the years. I'm down to maybe a few hundred. And again, I was always curating at the height. I had 3,000 albums. That's funny. Anybody who would come over that wasn't in the music business or a giant collector would come over, and their mouth would open and go, I've never seen so many records. This is amazing. And then a record collector would come over and say, that's all you got. [LAUGHTER] So imagine I have a few hundred records now. And somebody would say, how could you be collecting your whole life? And that's all they have. And then other people would say, wow. We move so many times. And we just said to move our house got not burned, burnt, but compromised in the fire left here. And so we moved to a much smaller house. And I don't even know where my records are going. This storage and that storage, et cetera. But I'm blown away by having YouTube and Spotify. And I'm discovering new records from the 60s. I'm still discovering, now I can find groups that I-- You miss, things you miss. One minor hit. And then I'll see, no, they had 10 more records. And there's not a week that goes by that. I'll discover great music from the '50s '60s. So I don't even know how somebody who-- like my kid who likes all music could ever even come close to discovering all the great music out there. You know, maybe through the years, or even now, are there other companies that do some great reissue work that you have been impressed with? Or you just think they do a really nice job? Or have there been any reissues that you've sort of seen or experienced or felt or picked up that you thought, hey, this is really nice. Well, obviously, light in the attic is amazing that days. Yeah. Egotistically, we thought, hey, we've discovered all. We put everything out that should be put out. And they came and looked at the '60s through a whole different eyes and found groups that were really good and reissued of them. And international stuff, too. Yes, which I haven't really gotten that much into. So yeah, I think they're really, really good. There's so many new companies now that are doing it. I don't know. You know, it's good or better than us. And some of these new Marindo is still doing amazing work with their high-pice series. And then I guess all the majors now have their version of a high-pice series where they're doing really great, great stuff. But what's not being done, which is kind of a shame, is half of the work we did was compilations on genres. So I guess the genres are now done by playlists and whatnot. But I don't really trust any of them. Because I don't know who is-- for us, we would find the definitive-- we'd search and find the number one definitive expert on the blues to do our blues series. Who now can we say is the number one definitive expert on gangster rap or whatever. Whatever. There's so many out there. Right. Well, it's funny to bring up compilations. I had a couple of great compilations on CD growing up, some of which were on Rino. And it's true that the whole compilation-- you know what else is different? Movie soundtracks. You used to get a good movie soundtrack and learn about a couple of songs or artists or have a rare cut that you couldn't get anywhere else. We did kind of lose that compilation aspect to our listening in the 21st century. Absolutely. Correct. Yeah. Well, what would you tell a-- Crazy middle-aged guy who opened an independent record store in a mall. What's it? What advice would you give the the record store expert there of the Rhino expert? What would you say? What would be one thing that you'd say to To say hey do this I'd say it sounds like you're already doing it being you're really being attentive to your customers You know departing that knowledge is Really really important and not only departing them the knowledge but doing it in a really passionate way so they know that you're really passionate about the music that you're Telling them about be passionate and the rest will the rest will follow, right? Exactly. Yeah, well Richard is a real pleasure to talk to you today and I Loved here in your story and I wish you continued success and I hope you stop by one of these days when you're on these coasts Absolutely will I'm back a couple times a year and I'm gonna make it a point