Tommy Boy Can CD Future

Step off the elevator at Tommy Boy's 13th floor offices in the Flatiron district of Manhattan and you find a company under construction: building materials and unopened boxes line hallways; an architect checks the lighting on the distinctive company logo executed in stainless steel and embedded in a slab of concrete in the floor; an electrician wires a bank of light boxes that will eventually display photos of label artists. The activity is both a sign of the company's stunning success and a metaphor for its secret: Tommy Boy has always been under construction. Working from a blank sheet of paper - without organizational models or previous industry experience - Silverman and Lynch designed a company in response to rap's volatile market, which changes faster than that of any other popular music.

"Desperately seeking guy/gal Friday for new record company," went the Village Voicead that Silverman placed in December 1981. His fledgling label had already scored a regional hit with its second 12" single, "Jazzy Sensation," by nascent hip hop legend Afrika Bambaataa, and Silverman was swamped - keeping books, producing records, scouting new artists, and even shipping to retailers from his two-bedroom apartment. He had arrived in New York three years earlier, abandoning his graduate studies at Western Michigan University after hundreds of job letters yielded two interviews and no work. Enticed back East by two friends from his days as an undergraduate music director at the Colby College radio station, he joined them in founding Disco News, soon renamed Dance Music Report, a tipsheet for deejays in New York's booming dance club scene.

Silverman soon began exhibiting a skill that has become his trademark: leveraging knowledge. In 1979 he convened the first New Music Seminar, at which 200 representatives of clubs, record labels, and college radio stations gathered in a New York rehearsal studio for a one-day meeting about "new wave" and rap music. Since then, the annual event has become the largest and most important music convention in the world, with up to 8,000 delegates, including 2,000 from more than 30 countries outside the United States, offering hundreds of symposia, and showcasing more than 400 new musical artists each year.

As a tipsheet publisher, Silverman was constantly having demo tapes thrust upon him by hopeful artists of little interest to major labels because rap was regarded as a singles market rather than as a higher-profit album market. He set up Tommy Boy in case a promising artist came his way. Six months later, after the modest success of "Jazzy Sensation," he placed his want ad.

Lynch, sometime during her fourth or fifth interview with Silverman, found herself stacking boxes of records at a pressing plant in Queens and assumed she was hired. Though she had neither a college education nor any industry experience, she was not without resources: "I was working with all types of people - being a waitress, being a go-go dancer. I was in a punk rock band. I worked for a fashion designer. I was a disco doyen in Chicago and hung out very heavily on the gay scene. That helped me when I got into the music business. I had to be strong and assertive; otherwise I wouldn't have survived."

In mid-1982 Tommy Boy released "Planet Rock," by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force. Produced by Silverman and Arthur Baker, the bizarre and exhilarating record laid the spirit of a South Bronx throwdown over synthesizer lines from "Trans-Europe Express," by the German technoband Kraftwerk. It was a runaway success. For a time, "Planet Rock" seemed to be coming from every open window in New York, every cellar club stairwell, even from cracks in the sidewalk.

The success of the record plunged Lynch headfirst into the business: she cut deals with artists, dealt with lawyers, designed all the company's ads, wrote a column for Dance Music Report, and spent long evenings in clubs. Meanwhile, Silverman began computerizing the company, programming the machines himself and groping for reporting systems and databases keyed to actual sales and airplay, unheard of in the record business then and, outside Tommy Boy's technology-filled offices, not that common today.

But no matter how much they learned about - and improved upon - the mechanics of the business, their sternest teacher remained the market and the consumers who drove it. Early warning signs came when rappers Kurtis Blow and Whodini, neither of whom was a Tommy Boy artist, succeeded with albums. Tommy Boy had not bothered to secure the album rights to its artists, seeing little future for album rap. The epochal event, however, occurred with the emergence in 1984 of rap's first superstars: Run-DMC, on archrival Profile records. Run-DMC took album rap to new heights, scoring the first gold, platinum, and triple platinum albums in the music's history. Most significantly, their records sold to white and black record-buyers alike.