This week we launched a wee collection of t-shirts of Andy’s art along with a t-shirt for Almond River records, his shop, which was designed by Alan Forbes who did the famous Black Crowes artwork, which is very cool.
It wasn’t until we started to unpack what we do to keep DJTees on the road, as we educate Andy about it all, so that he isn’t just thrown in at the deep end, that I realised how much work it all actually is.
The main thing though is to keep plugged in to your musical passions and let them guide you. For example, in the last week, we’ve created a lot of new t-shirts largely driven by mine. The thing is, I know we won’t sell many Brian Auger and the Trinity t-shirts, if any, let alone any of Edinson Lighthouse, but I hope there’s always a select few who have been waiting to express their passion that few probably understand.
And that’s a common spirit that runs through everything we do, not just t-shirts. In art and writing, you don’t try and second guess what people will like, you just pursue what you enjoy and hope it resonates with at least one person.
That’s all a bit of a hit in the dark, I realise and probably not very good business. I see all these other t-shirt websites and they usually seem driven, rather anonymously, by their product. Rarely do you know who’s behind it all, let alone that their favourite jazz-rock band is the Mahavishnu Orchestra and that you prefer Kaleidoscope to Kanye West. Maybe that’s the way to do it to make money, I don’t know. But what I’m telling Andy is the exact opposite. For me it’s always seemed that being personal and sharing your loves plays to the strengths of being online and being able to connect to people in a way you can’t in real life. I think that, in a profoundly negative world, is the positive approach.
Then again, I could be wrong because although we’ve survived since 2002 but are hardly rolling in money. But the rewarding part of it over the years has come from the people I’ve connected with. My current editor, Robert, started out as a customer, for example. And over the years I’ve ‘met’ people who were at the Fillmore East, saw Hendrix, were at Woodstock, saw Zeppelin at Earls Court and King Crimson in Hyde Park and many more. Many times, people who were at the same gigs and the same pubs have got in touch, even remembering the same characters.
That’s so much more rewarding than just stocking your site with shirts of people and bands you’ve never even heard or heard of. Or at least it is to me, anyway, but then most people probably haven’t spent their life travelling the highways and byways of rock n roll and collecting 10,000 albums.
I’m using the next few months to try and pass all this on, so that when the time comes (some months away, judging by how slow the interest in selling our house currently is) it can be continued and even moved on. Andy, like me, prefers music recorded before 1975 and especially anything by the Band and I think running a record shop inevitably gives you a breadth of knowledge and taste just because you’re selling music as different as The Searchers, Stone the Crows and Metallica.
It also shows you how varied people’s passions are (even if it’s Edison Lighthouse!) and also how they can be about the obscure, the non-mainstream and long forgotten. Which, of course, is why we’re here.
