This is part two of a discussion I had with Charlie Lange earlier this summer. In this installment Charlie discusses what has become a blues institution, Bluebeat Music. For the sake of continuity, I urge you to read the first part of this discussion entitled simply, Charlie Lange.

David Mac (DM): Where did the concept for Bluebeat Music come from?

Charlie Lange (CL): The seed had been planted years before than when I was working for the record companies and doing research. I was doing record shows like the Orange County Record Show and the Pasadena Record Swap. It was all vinyl back then.

It started in earnest when I got carpal tunnel syndrome and really couldn’t produce in those years. I was a production potter. I was using eight tons of clay a year. I made thousands of cups, bowls, dinnerware sets, lamps, water crocks and tile. I made all kinds of stuff. It’s like CDs, you have to sell a lot of that shit to make any money.

My wife wasn’t working at the time. She was going to school to be a nurse and I had to provide. I had to do something.  So I started small and began investing what little bit of money I had into buying CDs and vinyl records. I started buying record collections. You have to go out and find the stuff.

DM: How did you go about doing that?

CL: That was the hard part. I had to “dog” a bunch of other retailers early on to get phone numbers and addresses that carry that kind of product. I asked a lot of questions, ‘Where did this come from?  Where did you get that?’ During that period there was a lot more of a distribution network than there is now. I’d spend hours in Tower Records trying to figure out where the different labels were located and then I would contact the label directly.  If they didn’t want to sell to me, I’d ask them, ‘Who’s your distributor?’  I’m pretty persistent. I stick with it until I find out. I eventually find out what I want to know. That’s the way I am.

DM: When I first visited the Bluebeat Music booth at the 1996 Long Beach Blues Festival, it appeared that you had already a pretty established inventory. How many titles do you carry with you to these festivals?

CL: I carry somewhere between three and four thousand different titles.

DM: All I know is when I am at the Bluebeat Music booth I feel like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store. How many festivals do you do a year?

CL:  Of course over the last few years, the festival scene has diminished rapidly. We first lost a lot of big festivals and we are starting to see the little ones drop off as well. At the height of it, in the mid to late 90s, I was doing I was doing 20 – 25 a year.  I’m down to about 12 to 15 a year now. I did pick up a few new ones this year. 

DM: Besides the drop off in the number of festivals, how has the festival experience changed for you through the years?

CL: When you lose the Long Beach Blues Festival that hurts. That was the big one. The festival business is not like it used to be. In the 90s there was an enthusiasm for CDs. There was an interest in the music.  Now I get the impression at a lot of the festivals, most people that come to Bluebeat Music want what they just heard on the stage.  They want the latest CD by the person they just heard and preferably every song they just heard. They don’t want to look at anything else in the booth. They don’t take the time to look, they just want what they just heard and that’s it, period.  It used to be, at Long Beach for instance, people would ask, ‘What’s new? What’s good? What do you like?’  They were more inquisitive in those days. Those days seem to be gone.

DM: In those days you didn’t have festival promoters pandering to a classic rock audience. You had these people booking acts that the audience trusted would be first rate, even if they were not familiar with their recorded catalogues. There was an educational curve that was taking place with the audience that you were a part of. Now what is someone going to do at a blues festival? Walk up to you and say, ‘Hey Charlie what can you tell me about this recording?’ as they hand you a copy of The Doobie Brothers Greatest Hits?

CL: That’s a good point. I did start the business at the right place and at the right time.

DM: What do you mean?

CL: During that period a lot of people were converting their vinyl collections to CD and the economy was good. It wasn’t like it is now. There were jobs and people had money. There was still an enthusiasm for this music. I benefited from that.

DM: Let’s talk about the mail order end of the business and how that has evolved.

CL: I started a fledgling mail order business in 1990. We were still printing catalogs and mailing them out and we had this archaic form of computer ordering where you downloaded the form off the internet and then printed it. Then the order form had to be mailed in.

When the internet first came on the scene as a viable place to do business, I jumped on that. I didn’t know anything about the technical side of things but I learned.

DM: Your site to me has so much quality as well as quantity. It is a testament as to how much great music there is out there and how much of it is available in one place, Bluebeat Music.

CL: My site has always been associated with the unique hybrid West Coast/Chicago sound that people like William Clarke, James Harman and the Hollywood Fats Band were playing. People came to my site for that specifically.  My ears are much bigger than that but that was the feedback I got during that period in the 90s when there was so much product coming out. People were excited about new bands, they liked new stuff. 

There was another whole group of people who were interested in the vintage and historic stuff too.  So I was never at a loss for what to buy, I knew what I needed to get. I just had to find it.

DM: How do you go about looking for new product these days?

CL:  Now I have almost twenty years of daily feedback from my customers about what they like, what they buy and what they’re willing to spend money on.  Let me give you a good example. I sold three hundred Junior Watson CDs in the last couple of months.  I’ve never sold any more than 6 or 8 CDs total in the mail of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, Tommy Castro, Coco Montoya or any of those guys in the twenty years I’ve done this. That’s my business. I cater to a certain clientele who likes certain things.  I have all the other stuff for sale but for some reason no one ever buys it.  I don’t know if no one ever buys it in general or if it’s that they just don’t buy it from me.

 DM: To be honest, we know people are buying posthumously released Stevie Ray Vaughan CDs for instance.

CL: I carry that stuff at festivals because that’s a totally different market. I do sell that stuff there, online NEVER.

DM: Another big change in the blues is the emergence of talent from overseas, particularly Europe. Let’s talk about that.

CL: Jerry Hall was a producer for Motown for a number of years and then produced all the really good James Harman records. He had a label called Pacific Blues and he was the guy who first started working with a lot of the European blues bands.  They would come over and want to have him produce them and he would pick up their CDs.  That’s where I really got into that European scene.  At that time he had a mail order business, so I never really jumped into it because there were plenty of other things to sell during that period.

DM: You are into it now.

CL: Oh yeah...It’s only the European bands that seem to care about that period of music from Johnny “Guitar” Watson to Hollywood Fats, that whole span. Most bands in this country don’t aspire to that.

DM: I have been fortunate enough to get to meet with many of these musicians when our friend, Jeff Fleenor would book them at the Doheny Blues Festival. I can actually have conversations with these guys about blues music that I can’t with a lot of young American musicians.

CL: Not only that, these guys know about Bluebeat Music. A few years ago B.B. and the Blues Shacks from Germany made a special trip to shop in my garage up here in Santa Cruz.

DM: Many of the things we have talked about obviously have contributed to the success of Bluebeat Music. What are some of the things we haven’t talked about that contribute to your success?

CL: I’ve never tried to sell something that I didn’t like myself or believe in. I also think when someone wants to buy a record they want to hear it immediately. I turn my orders around fast. People have come to expect that and I don’t let them down. My philosophy has always been, treat people right and treat people with respect. They won’t forget that. More than anything else, I think that’s what it is.