Eugene is a city just big enough for some places to remain long unnoticed by most people’s radars. Leisure King Records is one of these locations. Hidden in an office building across the street from the post office Downtown, the label and its recording artists are slowly gaining recognition.
The label was founded in 2001 by President Scott McLean. McLean spent three years drumming in the band “Los Mex Pistols del Norte.” He said he got tired of touring but wanted to remain in the music business, so he started a record label.
“I had the time, and we had the cash at the moment to start it up, so we did,” McLean said. “We went into it with the idea of having fun and making good records.”
Leisure King Records has two other employees. McLean’s wife, Annabelle Garcia McLean, serves as vice president, and Spirit Cole is the manager. Cole managed “Los Mex Pistols del Norte” until McLean asked her to join the company. She previously taught at Oregon State University after receiving her master’s degree there. She said she was getting tired of it, so she turned to rock ‘n’ roll.
“I utilize a lot of my teaching skills in dealing with rock ‘n’ roll musicians,” Cole said. “It’s kind of like wrangling young people around.”
Leisure King currently has three artists signed to its roster: Dan Jones, Tom Heinl and The Visible Men, who were the first to join the label. The Visible Men keyboardist and vocalist Dustin Lanker also plays with The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies with bandmate and bassist Dan Schmid. The Visible Men, which formed in fall 1999, recorded their first album, “In Socks Mode,” shortly after the formation of the label. Lanker said he felt lucky to be signed so quickly and praised Leisure King’s support.
“We got signed to a record label with basically no fan base,” Lanker said. “We essentially started from scratch.”
McLean said he is taking a cautious approach to signing more artists; he briefly considered expanding the company’s local scope to include a band from Los Angeles, but quickly reconsidered this due to monetary factors.
“The time and expense of monitoring something like that would definitely be prohibitive,” he said.
Label musicians record at the local Gung-Ho Recording studios, and the label’s albums are released through Burnside Distribution Corporation in Portland. Design and work on the label’s Web site is farmed out locally.
Although Leisure King’s albums are available at Tower Records stores, most of the label’s sales come from online retailers. McLean cited CDBaby.com, although Amazon.com also carries Leisure King albums. Locally, the label’s releases are available at Compact Disc World, Face the Music, House of Records and Borders.
McLean said in spite of distribution, the label struggles to make itself visible. He expressed surprise in how well online sales worked and said he doesn’t consider the label’s success typical.
“In the standard world of business, are we successful? No, we are not,” he said. “On the other hand, the point is to make some damn good records. And I think that makes us successful.”