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lot has changed since Joe Sib and Bill Armstrong founded SideOneDummy Records in 1995—nearly 400 releases ago—but their office situation has remained the same. “We don’t have separate offices,” Sib says. “With the exception of going on a family vacation, Bill and I have seen each other or spoken to each other every day for the last 25 years.” Sib and Armstrong’s friendship is what has kept the label going, from SideOne’s first release—Uncle Bob by Sib’s band 22 Jacks—to Flogging Molly, Gaslight Anthem, Title Fight, and Andrew Jackson Jihad today. Two decades later, Sib still looks forward to work every day: “When Bill and I are sitting in the office, and I look at the clock—I get in at 8 a.m.—and all of a sudden it’s 1 p.m., and then before I know it, I have to go pick up my kids and it’s 5 p.m., I’m like, ‘How did that day just go by like that?’ That is when you know you love what you’re doing. And that happens to me, I swear to god, every single day.” How did you and Bill meet? Bill had been in L.A. a little bit longer than me, but both [of us] were guys in bands. Bill needed a roommate, and I moved in. I ended up sharing a room with Bill, but I didn’t even know who he was. [My band] Wax had just made their first record for Virgin, and we were touring a lot. Bill and I realized we were the same dude in our bands, […] the guy who got paid at the end of the night. We were the guys who were able to rent vans because we had credit cards. We were the responsible ones in a world where no one was responsible. How did that lead to starting a label together? Wax put our record out, and we end up getting dropped. There was this limbo period where I was like, “What do we do? I have this record, it’s finished, and I still want to go on tour.” I decide I’m going to start a label on my own and fall back on that DIY background I grew up on. While I was doing that, Bill decided, “Hey, I’m going to start a label too,” and I was like, “That’s going to suck because we live together, we hang out together, we drink together, we do @ NEWNOISEMAGS
everything together. […] It would be rad if we just did it together.” Bill was like, “Let’s do it. I was going to call my label Dummy. Why don’t we call it SideOneDummy?” He’s like the pun master. He loves puns. What were the early years like at the label? Wax ended up putting its record out, and during the time that it was out, we ended up falling apart. I started a new band, 22 Jacks, and that was the first record we released on SideOne. When I was out on the road, Bill was running the label. At that point, calling it a label was a pretty big word, because it was just two guys in a room with two phones and a lot energy and passion for music, but no one wanted to work with us… We ended up putting out a Swingin’ Utters record, but we couldn’t lock down a band that would really give us a shot to show them what Bill and I thought we could do with our company.
When did the label really start to take off? That went on for about five years where we were in this period of learning. We were chugging along and around that time, a friend of mine was like, “You gotta come see my band play.” That was Matt Hensley who is the accordion player in Flogging Molly. I got to the show, and there was no one there, but they were just off the hook. The next day I told Bill, “We’ve got to go see this band Flogging Molly. They’re playing in Vegas.” So we hopped a plane, and flew out to Vegas.
offered us each a beer, and said something like, “That was a load of shit. I’m sorry you had to come out and see that.” Bill and I were like, “What are you talking about? We loved it. We want to do a record with you.” And he kind of looked at us like, are
you kidding? At that point—for Flogging Molly, it’s hard to believe—everyone had passed on them. No one really got what they were doing. For us as a label, I think people liked ‘Joe and Bill’ as dudes, but it’s a big thing to say, “I’m going to [let you] put my record out, and trust
you with my career and my music.” Flogging Molly was the first band to do that. And that was a game changer. What do you look for in the artists you sign? When we signed Flogging Molly, for some reason all the indie [labels] at that time had a sound. The thing we ended up doing was all our bands sounded 100 percent different from each other. You would never listen to SideOneDummy and go, “Gogol Bordello sounds like Title Fight, and Title Fight sounds like Flogging Molly, and Flogging Molly sounds like Restorations.” Every band we started working with, even until now, they all were the best at what they did. Our theory has always been: do you love the band enough that—god forbid you didn’t have distribution and you couldn’t get the records out there—you would load up your car… In my case it would be a Prius… Would I load up the Prius with all the CDs and follow the band around, selling them out of the back of the car after they were done playing? And if you say yes, then that means let’s work with this band.
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Once again, [Flogging Molly] played in front of no one. We went backstage, and everyone in the band disappeared except Dave King, the singer. He sat down on the couch and
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