History
John's passion for rock and roll began when he was five years old and discovered radio. When his friends The Lazy Cowgirls couldn't find a label for their live album, John volunteered to put out the record himself. After he thought of the name for the label he started doing a series of 7-inch singles. Before he knew it, Sympathy for the Record Industry was a real label, one in which the proprietor's personality was very much ingrained. A tone of irreverence was immediately set by the label's moniker, by its Margaret Keane-style, sad-eyed waif logo, and by its motto: "We almost really care." By 2006 he had released the recordings of over 550 bands from all over the world.
Some of John's celebrity Sympathy alumni are Courtney Love and her band Hole, The White Stripes, and The Donnas' first incarnation, The Electrocutes. Some of John's less famous but yet still very notable Sympathy acts over the years have been Buck, Billy Childish, Dwarves, The Gun Club, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, Inger Lorre, Man or Astro-man?, April March, Motel Shootout, The Muffs, The Mumps, The Pooh Sticks, The Red Aunts, Redd Kross, Rocket from the Crypt, Scarling., Suicide, Jack Off Jill, Turbonegro and The Von Bondies.
Sympathy Records continues to be one of the more successful indie labels in the US. Many releases also involve commissioned artwork from well-known artists such as Mark Ryden, Todd Schorr, Chris "Coop" Cooper and Robert Williams, often involving subversive riffs on other famous works, like the album cover of The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request .
Along the way, John has compulsively amassed a vast collection of art and pop ephemera. After seeing an inferior version of the character Enid from Daniel Clowes' Ghost World comic, John was motivated to enter the collectible toy game. His new company, Necessaries Toy Foundation, started in 2003. It allowed John to finally slow down his label in order to work and focus on manufacturing a line of toys and publishing art-related books.
The documentary film The Treasures of Long Gone John was released in 2006. [4] The film chronicles John's eccentric art and musical obsessions. It also explores the work of some of the artists he collects and collaborates with, including Todd Schorr, Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, Camille Rose Garcia and Robert Williams. It features a wall-to-wall soundtrack of over 40 Sympathy artists, original animation and time-lapse photography. [5]
Raymond Pettibon is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his older brother, Greg Ginn. He has subsequently become widely recognized in the fine art world for using American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, and religion to politics, sport, and sexuality.
Sympathy for the Record Industry is a mainly independent garage rock and punk label formed in 1988 by John Mermis, known as Long Gone John. Notable artists who started on Sympathy and went on to gain mainstream success include The White Stripes, Hole, and The Electrocutes.
Mark Ryden is an American painter who is considered to be part of the Lowbrow art movement. He was dubbed "the god-father of pop surrealism" by Interview magazine. In 2015, Artnet named Ryden and his wife, painter Marion Peck, the king and queen of Pop Surrealism.
Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine is a magazine created in 1994 by a group of artists and art collectors including Robert Williams, Fausto Vitello, C.R. Stecyk III, Greg Escalante, and Eric Swenson to both help define and celebrate urban alternative and underground contemporary art. Juxtapoz is published by High Speed Productions, the same company that publishes Thrasher skateboard magazine in San Francisco, California.
Anticon was an independent record label based in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1998 by seven musicians and manager Baillie Parker. It was collectively owned among six musicians, co-founder Parker, and manager Shaun Koplow. The original musicians signed to Anticon were once referred to as the Anticon collective. Following the death of one of its founding members in 2018, the label dissolved.
Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, is an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California area in the late 1960s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, tiki culture, graffiti, and hot-rod cultures of the street. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, impish, or a sarcastic comment.
Todd Schorr is an American artist and member of the "Lowbrow", or pop surrealism, art movement. Combining a cartoon influenced visual vocabulary with a highly polished technical ability, based on the exacting painting methods of the Old Masters, Schorr weaves intricate narratives that are often biting yet humorous in their commentary on the human condition.
Scarling. was an American noise pop band formed in Los Angeles in 2001. The band consisted of lead vocalist Jessicka Addams and guitarist Christian Hejnal.
Jessicka Addams is an American visual artist and former musician. Best known by her stage name Jessicka, she was the frontwoman for the rock band Jack Off Jill, and later for the noise-pop band Scarling.
The First Session is an EP by American alternative rock band Hole, released on August 26, 1997, on Sympathy for the Record Industry. The EP features the entire recording of the band's first studio session on March 17, 1990, and also a twenty-page booklet focusing on the band's early career prior to the release of their debut studio album, Pretty on the Inside (1991). The EP marked Hole's final release on Sympathy for the Record Industry.
Arthur Newton Rupe was an American music executive and record producer. He founded Specialty Records, known for its rhythm and blues, blues, gospel and early rock and roll music recordings, in Los Angeles in 1946.
Jonathan Hayes "Butch" Norton is an American drummer, percussionist and vocalist, best known for his work with the Los Angeles–based indie rock band Eels between 1996 and 2003. Since his departure from the group, he has gone on to work with notable musicians like Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman, Lisa Germano, Aimee Mann, Michael Miller, Michael Penn, Rufus Wainwright, and Lucinda Williams.
Thomas Cyrill Demand is a German sculptor and photographer. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He makes photographs of three-dimensional models that look like real images of rooms and other spaces, often sites loaded with social and political meanings. Demand thus describes himself not as a photographer, but as a conceptual artist for whom photography is an intrinsic part of his creative process.
Dangerbird Records is an independent record label in Los Angeles, California. The label is home to artists from around the world and part of the burgeoning Silver Lake music scene. The label has had international success from its small roster of artists including Silversun Pickups, Fitz and the Tantrums, Sebadoh, Minus the Bear, and The Frights
The Merry Karnowsky Gallery was founded in Los Angeles in 1997 by Merry Karnowsky. It is located on South La Brea Avenue in the Mid-City West district of Central Los Angeles.
Jason Freeny is an American artist specializing in sculpture, designer toys and computer-generated imagery. He is the owner of the Moist Production studio, which acts as the primary publisher and distributor of his works. He is best known for his anatomical art, where he produces cutaway drawings and sculptures of inanimate objects such as a Lego man, Barbie doll, the animated fish Nemo or a balloon art dog.
Brian McCarty is a contemporary artist and photographer known for his work with toys. McCarty's approach is based upon integrating toy characters into real-life situations through the use of forced perspective in carefully crafted scenes. Preferring to work in-camera and without compositing, McCarty creates his photographs by sometimes traveling to exotic locations, including active war zones. Although grounded in reality, because of his use of wit and whimsy, McCarty's work is often associated with the Art-Toy, Lowbrow, and Pop Surrealist movements.
Noah S. Purifoy was an African-American visual artist and sculptor, co-founder of the Watts Towers Art Center, and creator of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum. He lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California.
Dave Pressler is an American illustrator, animator, sculptor, character designer and painter based in Los Angeles. Much of his work focuses on whimsical portrayals of robots and strange, fantastical creatures. He is perhaps best known for his Emmy-nominated, short-lived Nickelodeon series Robot and Monster, which he created and produced with Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia.
Emilio Garcia is a Spanish artist and entrepreneur. He was raised between his home town of El Vendrell as well as in Barcelona. He is most well known for the "Jumping Brain" sculpture.
