Features / Interviews

If you’ll forgive the stupidly obvious lede, Dan Schlissel takes comedy pretty seriously.

As the founder of Minneapolis-based Stand Up! Records, he’s carved a considerable niche in the music industry as one of the longest-lasting and most stalwart homes for stand-up comedy on CD, LP and many other formats. Schlissel, a first generation American whose parents came from Israel, first started the indie-rock label -ismist, which provided a crucial stepping stone to an up-and-coming band of masked alt-rockers called Slipknot, who’d become one of nu-metal’s pre-eminent acts in the late ’90s and early ’00s. He transitioned to stand-up sets after meeting Lewis Black, the cantankerous commentator from hit comedy news cable showThe Daily Show, and when his 2000 debut The White Album outsold anything in the -ismist catalogue, he pivoted to comedy and didn’t look back. (Schlissel, who is extremely hands-on in every aspect of the label’s output – even recording many of the sets himself – won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album as the producer of Black’s The Carnegie Hall Performance (2006).)

While most of the Stand Up! discography is either new material or format exclusives of recent sets – including works by Patton Oswalt, Maria Bamford, David Cross,  Schlissel did recently make a strong foray into deep catalogue. After Omnivore Recordings reissued three early expanded CD sets of albums by comic legend Richard Pryor – 1968’s self-titled debut, 1971’s ‘Craps’ (After Hours) and the posthumous Live At The Comedy Store, 1973 – Stand Up! was on hand to press each set on vinyl, making much of the bonus material available on that format for the first time. With the recent release of Pryor’s later material on record in Rhino’s vinyl box set I Hope I’m Funny: The Warner Albums (1974-1983), the time is right to give these terrific pressings (also available in a variety of color variants) a second look.

Schlissel was kind enough to talk to The Second Disc about his vision for the label, the challenges of reissuing comedy catalogue, the years-long journey to work with Pryor’s material, and the intriguing piece of humorous history Stand Up! is highlighting this year.

What was it about a comedy label that kept you in the business?

At the time that I started, nobody else was doing it. There were a couple of legacy record labels left over – “truck stop” stuff and all of that. But as far as bigger labels were concerned, major or indie, there really wasn’t a lot going on in comedy. It just seemed like “here’s a space.” It wasn’t really analytical; I didn’t look at it ahead of time and go, “This is what I wanna do.” I was a fan of a specific comedian, happened to get to meet that comedian, happened to be able to make a pitch, and then somehow that became a record [Lewis Black’s The White Album]. It was stumbling onto stuff and looking for stuff to do, ’cause I get bored. As I made this pitch –  it took months for that to unfold – but as it unfolded, it was had been such a great experience, and the record’s actually selling, which in music , was a lot harder to get records moving.

In my old indie rock music days, if if a record sold out, you won. If you were out of copies, and you didn’t have anymore to move, you were ahead of the game. With Lewis, it kept selling and selling and selling and selling. Things are just moving along. Then Lewis’ managers connected me with another comedian, Doug Stanhope, and those records did well. Pretty soon I was dealing with three comedians, four records and if you combined them, they were definitely outselling the 70 records I’d done in regional indie rock. I was not having fun on the music side, and this stuff’s moving, so let’s just focus on it.

Makes perfect sense to me.

And nobody else was doing this. I started my label two years before Comedy Central decided to start a record label. I wasn’t analyzing the market. I just saw something I enjoyed and it was moving, so I just focused on it. I put all my punk rock energy into doing comedy stuff.

What do you look for when releasing album? Is it just as simple as “it makes you laugh”?

Simple and complicated. It has to catch me by surprise and make me laugh. I don’t care about the popularity of something necessarily; something could be wildly popular, but if I don’t find it funny, I don’t wanna work with it. That kind of limits to what my taste is, but whatever.

That’s one of the things I really admire about Stand Up! Records: there’s a vision. Reissues are their own form of storytelling – that’s how I always looked at it – and I guess, in some ways, comedy is similar to that.

I would say so! It’s funny: when you’re dealing with publicity, you’re always trying to ask: “what’s the hook to catch people?” I’ve done some of that in the past, but trying to catch that hook is also not really what I’m interested in. I’m interested in things that make me laugh. The best laugh to me is the kind of where you laugh and then you realize you do that thing [that the comedian is joking about], and it’s embarrassing, and you should probably be better. The truth that you see in yourself that burns a little bit  That’s the best kind of laugh there is.

Stand Up! has reissued vinyl of some of Richard Pryor’s earliest released material. Would you consider these your first catalog releases? You’ve done more recent sets on vinyl, but going back decades…

I had reissued the second Joan Rivers album on CD [The Next to Last Joan Rivers Album (1969)]. It was a pretty big thrill. It was a tough one to navigate, that one. We did it as a Record Store Day release, but I didn’t do vinyl. It had never been on CD before, so I did CDs, even though it wasn’t the popular format at the time. Comedy records in the used market that are 50 years old don’t sell for a lot of money, generally. So if you’re gonna make a $30 record and compete with six dollars in a used bin, you’re not gonna win that battle.

How did the opportunity to reissue Richard Pryor come to you? Did you approach the estate or the rights holders, or did they approach you?

That had been a really long dance, actually. When Shout! Factory did that box [No Pryor Restraint: Life in Concert], they had approached me about doing that Comedy Store record on vinyl, as well as some other exclusive tracks that were only ever released on that box set. [An early assembly of that material was included as a bonus disc with some copies of the box. -MD] That opportunity faded, then I saw that Omnivore was doing these releases for digital and CD. And to my to my surprise, they were not doing vinyl. So I wrote to them and I said, “What I’d like to do is figure out a way to partner with you and the estate to do these as deluxe double albums.” They wrote back – very excited – and we started talking; they started making sure that the estate would be cool, and they very much were.

Things just sort of slowly fell into place, but manufacturing is always a bit of a grind. but when doing that in the wake of a global pandemic, we were moving a lot of pieces around the chessboard. We were shipping stuff across the country at a time when you couldn’t really do it very easily. Richard Pryor is the best stand-up comedian that we’ve ever had, and I wanted to see these monumental releases get the treatment that I felt they deserved, in the format that I thought they deserved them in.

At first, when I was talking with Omnivore, it was just about the self-titled record and ‘Craps’ (After Hours). The third record had not been announced yet. So as the negotiations were happening, somebody at Omnivore said, “By the way, there’s going to be a third record, Live at The Comedy Store. Would you like to have that one as well?” I started laughing, and I told them how I was supposed to have it through Shout! Factory years prior.

For someone who might be reading this after seeing the box at Rhino, can you take us through the providence of this material? What, either aesthetically in terms of ownership, makes this a little different?

[The Rhino box] is already a little bit into Richard’s career. The records that I reissued are just slightly earlier than that. Richard Pryor’s career evolved from being a Bill Cosby sort of clean, thin tie, suit wearing sort of guy, to becoming the revolutionary that we always associated with at this point in our history. He made that break very clear with the cover of his first album, in which he posted himself in a National Geographic homage, based on some cultural stereotypes. Richard really wanted to play with those stereotypes in a pretty confrontational way. He’s wearing a giant septum ring and dressed like a native. I don’t even know what kind of native – I don’t think he knew what kind of native – but he’s looking very confrontationally at the camera. He knows he’s provoking a confrontation, and he wants you to feel a little bit of unease when you see it at a record store. He really sort of propelled forward with that voice, and what we’re seeing is the groundwork of all that we see of him performing live later on in his career. It’s fully formed, and informed as well.

My understanding is that he had recorded some material for Laff, and if you look back at his discography, almost every time there was a Warner record, that material would crop back up in some sort of way in the market.

That’s actually a very controversial part of his career, that took a pretty big lawsuit to clear up after he had passed away. Richard was a colorful person with some demons, to put it mildly. It led to some unusual business practices early on in his career. The deal he signed with Laff, I don’t think it’s any secret to say, wasn’t a great record deal. And they were entitled to manipulate their recordings however they saw fit, so whenever they saw another record was coming, they would rush to get one out – almost always from the same set of base recordings.

It’s funny: I think now, the way the music industry works, we don’t really get that a lot. Like, say somebody sang a bunch of publishing demos. Those don’t often get released if that singer signs a major deal. One of those weird fly-by-night CDs that you can find at an FYE or something.

Well, we also don’t have rack jobbers filling out shelves at the truck stops, so there’s not this gray market that there used to be. And not to not to pick at anyone’s proclivities or habits, but Richard having a pretty wild cocaine addiction, and signing papers without really considering anything, didn’t help the matter. God bless him. He had a lot of demons to deal with from his youth, but from a business practice standpoint, it wasn’t exactly firm footing.

Stand Up! is kind of famously “you.” A lot of the early records the label put out, it is sort of a one man show.

I do have a team I deal with, but it is still my hand on the rudder.

To that end, considering how your business is structured, what makes reissuing an older comedy album easier or harder than than putting out a new one?

It’s just very time-consuming. When I was getting the rights to Joan Rivers, there was a very big question as to what the actual release date was. And I had to prove to the folks at Sony Music that they didn’t actually know what the correct release date was. When you’re in that ground, it’s very easy to let things slide and just go along to get along. I knew that I was potentially causing a wrench in the works by trying to be right here. But if you’re trying to set the record for a comedian, you kinda have to be correct. So I went and did the research to find out what the actual release date. When I spoke to the producer at Legacy, he said, “Are you telling me we’re wrong?” I go, “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you guys weren’t even the original label. What you have in your archives might not be complete, and a lot of those archives might’ve disappeared during all the transitions of the catalog…here’s the Variety article that I pulled it from.”

It wasn’t a battle. We weren’t fighting, we were just trying to make sure the record was straight. So was everyone at Sony at that point, but it’s really easy to go with inertia and publish the legend, rather than make sure that the legend is correct. There’s always little pushes and pulls when you’re trying to dig for as much of the information as you can get through. I’ve had that happen repeatedly. You still get arguments [like that] with a newer record and the people involved on the other side, but usually those arguments are a lot fresher, so you’re not digging into 50 years of history.

We love that Stand Up! is not format specific. You will put stuff out on CD as well as LP. How do you determine what works for each project?

It is case by case, and nowadays CD is more of a rarity than anything. A lot of things exist primarily as a digital release first, then CD is the next affordable format, but the marketable ones tend to be just the vinyl releases. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the markets there for you when you release it.

For me, it’s a matter of how important, historically, do I think the release is gonna be versus how well it’s gonna sell. And also, what previous format was it available in? I reissued Dana Gould’s first album, Funhouse, and I wanted to do that on CD and vinyl. But we couldn’t get the digital rights because the previous rights holder was not gonna let those go. When I talked to Dana, he said, “Yeah, if you think you can move eight-track tapes…” I said, “Incidentally, I wouldn’t mind making some. It’s not easy but I can do it.” He said, “If you want to, go ahead!” I’ve done cassettes, I’ve done reel-to-reels, flexi-discs. I like weird stuff.

It’s known that Rodney Dangerfield’s No Respect is your favorite comedy album of all time. Have there ever been conversations with his estate of putting out any of his material on Stand Up!?

I haven’t. There was that big archival release of of stuff after he passed, mostly tracks from that album. There’s a lot of archival stuff I’d like to get – I’m not gonna give names, so I don’t give everyone else a glaring signal of what I’m looking at.

No, it’s totally OK!

But I am working, currently, on a reissue that’s gonna come out in September, for unknown mystery comedian Dick Davy. When you hear his record, if you don’t see a photo of him, you think, “This is a Southern black gentleman from the ’60s.” In fact, he was a white guy from New York, the son of a rabbi. And he just was really kind of swept up with the Students for a Democratic Society and the Freedom Riders. He was really into social justice, so he decided to start a persona, and nobody knew this until after he died, for the most part. He did two albums on Columbia and then disappeared. Jason Klamm is the producer on that; I’m the executive producer. Jason was tasked by Kliph Nesteroff, to figure out who Dick is. We haven’t started the press cycle for that. Not a big name, but a real interesting story. The jokes are dated, but they have a charm to them.

We also, over the Christmas season, put out a Tom Lehrer 45. Tom had released all of his music to the public domain.

Any final thoughts on your work here?

My aim wasn’t necessarily ever to be the biggest or the best at this. my aim was to do what I do, and I’m glad that I get to do it with a level of access that would’ve shocked me, had I known it was available to me in my early 20s. It’s really gratifying to be able to work with some of this stuff and to be entrusted to give it all a shine.

You can check out more of Stand Up! Records’ catalogue here. Schlissel recently released The Headliners, a 5LP colored vinyl box set of noteworthy sets by Marc Maron, Hannibal Burress, Maria Bamford, Chad Daniels and Lashonda Lester. Limited to just 100 copies, it’s a tribute to the 250 (and counting) releases put out by the label thus far.