While the artists are the centerpieces of the music industry, the people behind the scenes are often just as important. It takes as much blood, sweat, and sacrifice to create and maintain success for those who work off-stage. We are taking an opportunity to spotlight one of these unsung heroes, metal industry veteran, Ula Gehret. He was a pivotal figure in Century Media’s rise in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. He now runs his own consulting firm with fellow industry vet, Leif Jensen (vocalist for DEW-SCENTED). We reached out to Ula in his homebase of the Netherlands, who was happy to share his journey through the metal scene.

APESHIT: What do you currently do in the industry?

Ula Gehret: I’m a consultant for bands, mostly on contractual and business things. I have a partner (Leif Jensen, some may know him as the singer of the German thrash band DEW-SCENTED), and we have a company called Clandestine Music which helps bands do things like find and negotiate a new deal with a label. We’ll also help them understand the agreements they’re being asked to sign (publishing, merch, management, booking, etc.), and help them safeguard themselves and get the most out of any paperwork they’re handling.

I also do some work for a few labels, just licensing their catalog to foreign territories (getting CDs out in Japan, Russia, Brazil, etc.) and doing things like vinyl licenses for labels. That means taking their catalog and seeing if any other labels out there want to release some LPs from their repertoire. It all sounds pretty dry and boring and I guess it would be to most people, but I’ve always liked being particular with language, and I feel like I’m not only making a difference but getting to give something back to some bands (including some bands I grew up listening to), as I mostly deal with metal bands.

Some of the bands we work with that you might know include CYNIC, ATHEIST, THE CROWN, MISERY INDEX, ANAAL NATHRAKH, JAG PANZER, IN FLAMES, FORBIDDEN, DESTROYER 666, DARK TRANQUILLITY, Stephen O’Malley, WATCHTOWER, GRAVE, WOE, SACRED REICH, RAZOR OF OCCAM, PAIN OF SALVATION, PSYCHOTIC WALTZ, TERRORIZER, BELIEVER, THE OCIAN, etc…. it really keeps us busy. Some of the labels we’ve helped out with licensing include Relapse, Season Of Mist, Century Media, The End Records, Indie Recordings, Prosthetic, Candlelight, Ibex Moon and Unique Leader.

I’m also sitting on the foundation for the Roadburn Festival in Holland, I contribute a few things here and there for Decibel magazine, and I’ve retained quite a lot of useless trivia in my head, like it or not.

APESHIT: What are some notable positions that you’ve held in the past?

Ula: I worked for 13 years for Century Media, starting off doing publicity in 1994 in their L.A. office, then and I started up the mail-order/distro in 1995 which would later become CM Distro. I learned a bit of contractual stuff in the late ’90s and was licensing in the rights to titles for some stuff they released like SOILWORK, KATATONIA, MAYHEM and BLIND GUARDIAN. In 2000 I moved to CM’s German office in Dortmund, was doing their contractual work while handling the mail-order and distro there, and in 2003 started managing CM’s European operations. I quit (amicably) in 2006 to start Clandestine.

I also wrote for Metal Maniacs for about 7 years, doing reviews and interviews from 1991-1998, did some things for some regional/weirdo magazines around that same time (East Coast Rocker/Aquarian Weekly, Huh, Disc Respect), had four issues of a fanzine called Comedy of Errors from ‘90 to ‘91, and, surely the one you’ve all been waiting for, did administrative insurance work for Aetna Casualty & Surety in Wyomissing, PA for 6 years until I quit to move cross-country and start working for Century Media.

APESHIT: How and when did you get your start?

Ula: I used the fact that everyone thought I was a woman based on my name to get ahead in the business world. No, actually, it really comes down to Borivoj Krgin (a/k/a The Malevolent Croation, but since he’s not really Croatian a better name might be The Perturbed Serb), who used to be a writer for Metal Forces (my favorite metal magazine back then). He was reviewing fanzines for Metal Forces back then and I sent him a copy of Comedy Of Errors, and he just called me out of the blue. He said he really liked it, and said he also wrote for Metal Maniacs (which I’d honestly never heard of at the time, I guess their rural PA distribution wasn’t top-notch), and said he showed me stuff to the editor of MM and they wanted to know if I’d be interested in trying a couple reviews. I gave it a shot, they were happy, and I stuck with it, and I kept in contact with Borivoj.

Later on he was offered a job at Century Media to do A&R, and said they needed a publicist so he threw my name in there. I was hating life at my insurance job and drinking a 6-pack each night just to cope with the misery, so I flew out there, met with the people, liked them, and agreed to take the job so I flew back, marched into my bosses’ office the next day, and handed in my 4-week notice.

In L.A. I was roommates with Borivoj, and we just both learned about the business as we went. He was always talking to bands, exchanging metal news and demanding they send him their latest demos, and became such an institution in metal news that he left CM after 3 years to start his own thing, called Blabbermouth… and the rest is history. I learned everything along the way, but honestly, without his help at the beginning I’m not sure I’d ever have gotten out of that damned insurance job, and by now I’d probably be up to a daily 12-pack.

APESHIT: At what point did you realize that you were a lifer?

Ula: Well, there’s two parts to that… there’s a lifer in terms of being a fan, and in terms of making a career of it.

For being a fan, I really didn’t know if I would still love metal when I would turn 30 or 40, because you just can’t predict your tastes and how they change. But here I am, like 25 years after I started listening to metal, and I’m still listening to the same damn records – in the past week I threw some old records on my turntable from bands like METAL CHURCH, SACRIFICE, OBITUARY, PSYCHOTIC WALTZ… my tastes haven’t really changed there. So I think once I hit 30 and was still not only an avid fan of metal, but fine with my family and “respectable” friends knowing I was into the music (and not keeping it quiet), I pretty much felt it was always going to be a part of my life.

Career-wise it took a bit longer. It was definitely a thrill to realize that you were making a living out of working with metal, even when I was just doing publicity which I wasn’t very good at (when people you know from magazines are asking how that latest DEMOLITION HAMMER album Time Bomb is, I just couldn’t lie). When I was younger some people in my family or friends would tell me my interest in metal was fine but believed it was a fad, but in the end my fastidiousness, like covering every inch of ceiling space in my bedroom in metal posters since the walls were already full ("MEGADETH…def. 1: Unit of measurement equal to the death of one million people; 2. A state-of-the-art speed metal band"), probably helped me to get the metal ‘bug’ and just never lose it. I think once I moved to Germany and was doing this work, and noticing that a lot of the people whom I’d met years ago were still in the industry, I began to realize that you could make a career out of this, but I needed to find my angle, because doing the purchasing for a mail-order and deciding how many copies of the new PROSTITUTE DISFIGUREMENT CD you wanted to pre-order just wasn’t going to keep me happy forever. And a lot of those people I dealt with are still around today, like Borivoj, Jeff Wagner, Gordon Conrad, Marco Barbieri, and a lot of others.

APESHIT: I was hanging out Devin Townsend back in the STRAPPING YOUNG LAD days and he told me that he wrote City while living on your couch back in LA. What do you remember about that time period?

Ula: That would have been late ‘95 I suppose. Borivoj had signed SYL to the label, and Heavy As… came out at the beginning of that year. I had met Devin doing promo for Heavy As…, and liked him right away… it’s hard not to like him.

It came up that he wanted to come down to Los Angeles to help write a new STRAPPING record which was about living in a big city, and he wanted to be closer than his Vancouver confines since he really hated life in a metropolis and thought it would give him the proper motivation if he was amidst it for a while. We didn’t know how long it would last but we said he could live with us as long as he wanted, so he stayed on our trusty guest-couch in the living room (right between the two small bedrooms Borivoj and I each had at our place in Mariner’s Village in Marina Del Rey, on the coastal outskirts of L.A.). We let him do his thing, and he needed a bit of getting-around money so he agreed to intern at Century Media for probably minimum wage, just stuffing mail-order catalogs in envelopes and helping with promo mail-outs, just menial things like that.

I had this 27" Panasonic TV back then, and Devin would plug his effects pedal directly into the TV, just putting it on the “AUX” channel so you’d get this blank blue screen with his guitar sound coming through. I’m not sure how he was recording or storing his ideas, but I do remember him either viciously riffing away or playing these slow, looping sort of chords, which sounded very different from each other. I don’t know if he intended it at the time, but it was actually material for what would become City as well as material for the Ocean Machine record (which was the slower, moodier material).

Devin knew some folks in L.A. from his time with Steve Vai, so he would go off for a few days here and there to stay with friends, but it was great when he was around. I was in workaholic mode back then, often doing 12-hour days, so I’d normally be home around 9 or 10 in the evening, and we’d regularly keep a bottle of Stoli vodka in the freezer. I’d come back, Devin would be playing guitar, and I’d grab something to eat, bust out the vodka which we just drank straight, and then we’d talk a bit and either watch a movie, or if it was midnight we’d switch on Mystery Science Theater 3000, watch that and just laugh ourselves to sleep.

His wife Tracy drove all the way down to visit at one point, as they were missing each other, but he stuck it out for about 3 months, I think, until he had the material for City pretty much ready to go. I do remember that while he was there I was looking through the L.A. Weekly, the regional paper, and they announced they were having a special pre-screening of MST3K: The Movie in Hollywood with the cast and crew of the show on hand for a Q&A, and that a limited number of tickets were available for purchase. I rushed and bought a pair, and then took Devin to that some weeks later, which was a hilarious night out. Yeah, sure, we’re both nerds, but when you get older you realize that being a nerd is actually a pretty cool thing and can lead to some pretty interesting careers as well.

APESHIT: As you know, independent record stores are virtually extinct in the U.S. What are record stores/record store culture like in Europe?

Ula: It’s the exact same, there’s nowhere in the world that’s immune to the current situation. Most kids download, most kids will never see the reason (even morally, forgetting the legal aspects) as to why they should pay for music they can get for free, and older people buy less and less records.

I can’t blame them, as it’s just a different era. I taped records from friends, sure, but if I liked them I bought them. And I’m basically a vinyl guy now, so even those records I bought a few times in the past (original and reissued versions of the CD, maybe the cassette too) I’m now getting on LP as well. People here like record stores, but they’re just disappearing. The ones that exist tend to not be very interesting, because they’re just new product only at chain-store prices, just like you see at the US chains, without a lot of deep back-catalog. Generally I’ve always been a fan of buying used music, and I love searching for out-of-print stuff as well, and the second-hand shops have all but dried up and gone away.

I was in London recently and looking for stores, and I had done the same thing back in 1993 when I first visited London, and it was incredible how many stores are gone now. The ones that remain tend to be “boutique” stores, catering to a specific clientele (jazz, classical, oldies), and those can do OK. But the general, all-purpose shops are a dying breed.

Mailorder is obviously a lot more important now as a result – where the hell could you find an older catalog record, like SOILWORK’s The Chainheart Machine as a random example, if you’re not ordering it via mail? The better ones have been doing good business, but they’re not doing enough extra business to offset the loss of the brick-and-mortar shops. And that’s a huge, huge shame.

I used to hit every record store I could find when I went to new cities in the past buying every hard-to-find record I could find, but now I barely bother, I’ve tried it recently in cities like London and Birmingham, for instance, spending hours walking around with a map marked where some second-hand stores were, and there was almost nothing to see or find.

I think the US should organize more record shows, like in Utrecht, Holland twice a year they have these huge collector’s shows which has one absolutely enormous room dedicated to music, which is basically just used CDs and LPs, and it covers all styles. It literally takes you over a day just to see all the stands, and I always go home with some nice rarities, and am still emotionally torn about whether or not I should have thrown down $50 for a Brazilian vinyl copy of ANATHEMA’s Serenades. I think if they had more shows like that in the US, which they used to every so often at Holiday Inn convention rooms or such, you could do some decent business. Obviously that won’t help the industry at all since it’s all basically second-hand stuff, but it does help the collectors who miss that sort of experience, and if you’re buying any kind of music, whether new or used, that has to count for something.

APESHIT: Speaking of Europe, metal never died there. A band like DESTRUCTION struggles to sell out a small club in the U.S. whereas in the Europe that is certainly not the case. Can you compare and contrast some of the major differences between the metal scenes in the U.S. and Europe?

Ula: That’s sort of true, that metal never truly went away in Europe like it seemed to in the U.S. between 1993 and the end of that decade. Even in Europe it also suffered and underwent a radical attack from the “groove-metal” onslaught, but still survived pretty much intact.

But that’s one thing I’ve seen in Europe. You mentioned about when I knew I was a lifer when it came to metal. I think a lot of the US fans, and I’m just talking about the majority here and not everyone, tend to follow trends a little more closely, and what’s cool or what’s not. You know, the people that were into grunge in the early ’90s, then anything on Epitaph in the mid- ’90s, and then got into MACHINE HEAD, and maybe now they’re into bands like WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM or GHOST or whatever else is ‘in’.

In Europe, there seems to be a higher percentage of people who just get into something and stay locked into it for life. I’m not saying that’s always better, since I’ve also met my fair share of DESTRUCTION fans, for instance, who would defend anything and everything the band ever released, whether it was Cracked Brain or The Last Human Cannonball or whatever other DESTRUCTION records were definitely sub-par. I mean, you’ve no doubt seen the METALLICA fans who will defend a very, very lackluster record like Death Magnetic – because it’s and because it doesn’t suck quite as bad as the few records before it – so you know what I mean, but imagine that sort of myopic defiance for even the smallest of bands.

But the flipside to that is that if you establish fans with some good records, then unless you fuck up very, very badly, you stand a chance of keeping those fans for pretty much forever. That’s why MANOWAR can still draw huge numbers over here, despite the band basically date-raping their listeners with ridiculous ticket prices, charging $75 for a ticket and $200 for a signed Picture Disc LP, and things that would probably cost a band all of their following in the States (and in the case of MANOWAR, rightfully so).

So there’s being too loyal, but nonetheless, the loyalty is there. I totally respect that, and you really have to go to a European festival like Wacken to see that. That dude wearing the WARLOCK back-patch and Viking horns? He didn’t just bust out that vest for this festival, I can pretty much guarantee you he’s wearing Doro’s air-brushed face on the back of his jean-jacket every single day of his life. And while most people would consider that crazy, I have a weird respect for that sort of single-mindedness. Fortunately, despite that sort of fanaticism, the fans are still pretty open-minded about what you might like, even if it’s at odds with their own tastes.

APESHIT: I think one of the biggest misconceptions by metal fans is that metal isn’t trendy. Whether it be black metal, metalcore, or retrothrash, there’s always a hot, new thing. Since you’re so immersed in the industry, what is the next trend in underground metal?

Ula: Trust me, if I knew the answer to that, I could probably get a six-figure job tomorrow. Every label is trying to figure out what will be the next thing to ‘pop’, and black metal had a decent surge which is still having ripple effects. Metalcore was a bit briefer because it was fascinating for about 6 months, and then it was simply beaten to death, its corpse paraded through the streets and then hung from the town square.

Thrash was talked about as being “hot,” but I honestly don’t think it was even a trend. MUNICIPAL WASTE did pretty well, but show me another new thrash band who sold more than even 20,000 records. I don’t think there are any. If you can’t even get 20,000 people behind you worldwide, how much of a trend is it, really? I think it was just highly visible since you saw these 17-year-old kids in sleeveless denim vests covered with patches – something I fully support, by the way, anything that gets younger kids into metal is just fine by me – but I don’t think it really ever took root. And why? Because those bands just couldn’t/can’t write songs as good as the prominent bands from the ’80s and ’90s did.

It was the same with technical death metal, and all the MESHUGGAH-inspired bands, whether “djent”-metal or otherwise. I’ve yet to hear one new thrash band that can write songs that stand up alongside vintage SEPULTURA, VIO-LENCE, KREATOR, OVERKILL, EXODUS or any of the rest. They have the spirit, and they have the musical ability, but if you can’t write a riff that will hold up for a decade, then neither will your band.

But I really get asked a lot what I think is next, and I honestly don’t have the slightest clue. Those things seem to come about naturally and aren’t really manufactured, so I’m curious to see what comes up next. Just as long as the rap/metal revival doesn’t come storming back, or all those PANTERA-alike bands that plagued the mid-’90s.

APESHIT: Top 3 rock ’n roll adventures?

Ula: They’re pretty tame since I was never a guy who felt really comfortable hanging out with bands backstage or went on tour or whatever, I feel my place is in the audience, and not on someone’s bus. Let me think…

January 1990, driving 2.5 hours by myself to a CANDLEMASS/ATHEIST/SUFFOCATION show in New Jersey, my old ‘78 Chevy Nova blew a belt about a half-hour away from the venue. It was a work night, so I could either choose to get the car towed to a mechanic and miss the show, or abandon the car. A guy pulled over offering to give me a lift wherever I wanted, and so I just went to the club, saw the gig in front of about 80 people, met and interviewed CANDLEMASS and ATHEIST, had great time, and got a ride with someone back to my disabled car. It was about 10 degrees that night and the heater wouldn’t work, so I just slept in the front seat with my coat pulled over me, waiting for the dawn so I could call a tow truck. I definitely made the right decision by seeing the show.

I once visited the KRISIUN brothers in Brazil at their apartment near Sao Paulo, which was situated on a middle floor of a high-rise block of dozens of apartments, all inside a gated community (a necessity in Sao Paulo). They asked if I wanted to watch them go rehearse, so I said, “Sure, how far away is the rehearsal space?” Alex hitched his thumb over his shoulder to the door behind him, “It’s in there, man.” It was just a bedroom they had set up as a rehearsal space, and within 5 minutes they were blasting away at full volume, with a handful of egg cartons on the wall to help muffle the sound. I thought it was great. Needless to say, they didn’t last too long in that building!

And it wasn’t that adventurous, but probably flying back from Europe to see the Thrash Of The Titans event in San Francisco, the benefit for Chuck Billy with LEGACY, VIO-LENCE, HEATHEN, SADUS, FORBIDDEN, DEATH ANGEL, etc. I hadn’t ever gotten a chance to see some of those bands live before as a few of them really didn’t tour much, and I was a huge Bay Area fan. There was no way I was going to miss that, even if it cost far more money than I had any right to be spending for one gig.

APESHIT: What accomplishments in music are you most proud of?

Ula: I came up with some ideas on the packaging of records that I liked (like the reversible booklet on the ICED EARTH Blessed & The Damned). I came up with some slogans for bands, campaigns, album titles, tours, etc. One was a quote for TIAMAT, “that which appears most beautiful is often evil in disguise,” which was badly worded but whose theme I still like a lot, and I came up with a whole lot of bad puns.

Sometimes you have unreleased material that you think is great and you want the world to hear it, like the two SENTENCED demo tracks done just before Amok ("Amok Run" and “The Glow Of 1000 Suns”) that I always thought were great so I pushed the band to let them be released, and they were finally put on a reissue last year. I’m close to getting the debut JAG PANZER record Ample Destruction re-released, which took some work, but should be worth it.

Things like that are really rewarding. And getting the mail order started and running for CM US was cool, it was started in 1995 with just myself and the warehouse guy Chris Elder, and I moved away in 2000 but at least they’re still going, even if I have nothing to do with it anymore.

Nowadays most of my satisfaction comes from helping the bands and feeling like I’m making some kind of difference in their career and understanding of things. I can’t really play a guitar but at least I can make a difference, even if it’s stuff that nobody ever sees or knows about. I’ve never been much for pushing my name forward, I’d rather remain in the background to be honest.

APESHIT: Best thing about working in the industry?

Ula: Ehh, I actually don’t know if working in the industry is something that I would consider great, because there’s a lot of politics and bottom-line bean counting and financial decisions that are not made in the best interest of the art itself. But that’s why it’s an industry, you need to feed all those mouths and keep the ovens stoked.

I love working with music, and I specialize on the business side of things, but only because I know how badly a band can get screwed if they’re not careful. There are still some perks that are still special, like getting on the guestlist for a show or maybe even a festival you really want to see, but I think what I like most is having met a lot of good people over the years.

In the industry you either meet people who are out to further themselves, or who are there because they love the music. The former tend to go far and burn a lot of bridges, and generally speaking I despise those people. The latter tend to stay in more or less the same field for years and get underpaid, but those are often the people I get along best with, because the love of music is something we have in common. And once you have that, it’s very, very easy to strike up a friendship. Some of my best friendships were established because of a random encounter somewhere, with someone walking up and saying, “Hey, nice ANACRUSIS shirt,” or whatever you’d happen to be wearing, and off you go.

APESHIT: Worst thing about working in the industry?

Ula: Those self-serving people I mentioned before. Or seeing bands’ careers get caught in the crossfire of commerce and changing tastes (and sometimes doubting themselves as a result). Worse yet is when a band signs a long-term deal and the people who brought them on board and who championed the band leave the company or are fired, leaving the band tied to a label with nobody there who cares about them. Or running into industry people who can only talk about business, and who even after years of encounters can still never say a single word about their private life or their outside interests or passions or endeavors. Or having a front-row seat and watching the entire infrastructure of the business crumble due to continually declining sales – people always think that some millionaire label owner won’t miss another few bucks, but it also means that some very good, dedicated people get laid off, and bands can’t get the budgets they need to record an album the way they’ve envisioned it, or get the money they need to tour.

APESHIT: Given the power of the internet and the decline of album sales across the board, do you see the metal labels changing/evolving their business models to fit in with the times?

Ula: A few of them have tried to make more advantage of the power of the internet, but when you’re talking about the major labels (and by majors there are only 4 by definition: Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI) then no. And unfortunately unless the majors agree on something, it won’t happen for the indies.

Case in point, I really think the subscription model is the way to go: you have a local, authorized provider where you can download or stream unlimited music each month, with a catalog of basically everything you can think of, which could be played in any device in your household or your car or portable devices. You get a monthly bill, just like you get a utility bill for electric or water, but it’s a flat rate regardless of usage. No DRM, no restrictions. And then after the provider takes their cut, the labels split their share of the income based on what was played/downloaded. If that happened, and if you were paying let’s say $15 a month for such a service, that’s $180 from one household. There are over 100 million households in the US, so even if one-quarter of households signed up, and that’s being conservative, the industry would be making more money than they did last year via record sales.

And of course you could still sell limited versions of LPs and CDs to those dinosaurs like me who want the real thing, but it would just be so convenient, especially if you could really find everything. And it’s been talked about, but of course the majors can’t agree on how that money would be divided, so they continue to hope that digital sales will cover the shortfall of CD sales (dream on, folks) and that reissuing that JETHRO TULL Aqualung album on four 200-gram LPs with no bonus tracks for $80 is a realistic way to increase your revenues.

So even if some independent labels come up with absolutely ingenious ideas, unless the majors agree and get the entire industry to change, it’s really just a drop in the bucket.

APESHIT: The most cherished item in your music collection?

Ula: I may have lost that one already. I had a cassette copy of ATHEIST’s Piece Of Time album that I had the whole band sign at that ATHEIST show I mentioned, a few weeks before Roger Patterson was killed on the band’s drive home, and I can’t seem to find it anymore. I think at one point after I’d moved out of the house, mother threw a bunch of my cassettes at one point when cleaning the house, along with my whole stash of Metal Maniacs and all the mags I’d kept that I had articles or reviews in that I’d written from over the year. D’oh.

I’ve got stuff that’s worth money, but normally the most cherished things are the simple records it took me a long time to find that I just tend to play a lot, even if they’re only worth $5. All those mail-order limited-edition box sets and such are nice to have, but what do you actually DO with them, other than sit them on top of your rack and just sweep the dust off them every so often?

APESHIT: Guilty music pleasure?

Ula: Tough call… I’m not too embarrassed by anything I listen to, I think years ago it would have been much easier when I was a teenager for me not to want to admit to adults or to girls I hoped to impress that I liked these bands with silly-looking album covers (I’m looking at you, Raging Death Vol. 1), or dudes with teased-out hair, silver masks and roses (what’s up, CRIMSON GLORY), or guys that couldn’t sing like Sean Killian and John Connelly, but nowadays? Fuck it. I’m not out to impress anyone, I just listen to what really gives me enjoyment. I’ll hear stuff now that I never, ever liked before, probably because I wrote it off as being wimpy or stupid, but can now admit it’s a good song. A good example is probably “Nobody’s Fool” by CINDERELLA. I don’t own any records, I only have that song, but I’ll still stand behind it. And there are probably songs that nobody understands why I like, with good examples being MATTHEW SWEET “Devil With The Green Eyes” or BECK “Lost Cause,” but I think they’re brilliant. They don’t out-shred old PESTILENCE in the riffs department, but they all mix amazingly well on shuffle play.

APESHIT: Shameless plug time (Plug anything you want)!

Ula: Nah, I’ve talked enough, I’m not that shameless. Thanks for the opportunity and I hope this wasn’t a waste of bandwidth. I’m horrible at responding to personal e-mails (ask my friends) but if someone needs to reach me for something, you can mail me at: ula [at] clandestinemusic [dot] com . Cheers!