A Q&A with Jordan Cooper of Revelation Records

This is part of an on-going piece we will be running with Jordan Cooper, a man who needs no introduction. Want one? Pull out The Way It Is LP. Yeah, that was his idea, start to finish...enough said. We pick some Rev releases with accompanying questions, and allow Jordan to inform us. More to come... -DCXX

Warzone seven inch: here is where it all kicked off. Could you tell us a good Raybeez story involving this record? I am sure he had some hand in it, and I am sure it is somehow funny. Also, for the first Revelation release, what do you think of this record?

Raybeez was one of the most gracious and friendly people I ever dealt with believe it or not. When Cappo interviewed me for the "Talk About Unity" documentary (coming...soon...not too soon, but soon) he asked me to talk about Raybeez and I said something like "he was a really nice guy," then Cappo cut me off saying something like "you can't just say he was a nice guy! Describe him! He was a big skinhead with tattoos. Paint the picture for people." He must have seemed like a scary guy to some people, but at that point, I considered the punks and hardcore people my friends regardless of what they looked like. Obviously he had a reputation and was a skinhead but I never saw anything that correlated with either of those stories or stereotypes personally so I accepted him as he presented himself to me...a decent guy. Really, the only funny things about Ray that I experienced are the things that everyone already knows about him. His handwriting was grafitti influenced and he always put quotation marks in all four corners.


NFAA seven inch: the first west coast Revelation release. Do you recall this being a big deal, getting a west coast band on the label? Did it mark Revelation at the time as a label that was just bigger than the NY/CT ties it previously held? Whose doing was the release?

Ray and Porcell were friends with Dan from touring and that's how that happened. It was only a big deal in the sense that it was the first band from outside the area we were going to work with. But it wasn't that much of a big deal, people seemed happy about it and then we started getting demos from other bands in CA too.


NYC Hardcore The Way It Is LP: to this day, if you had to pick a song off of that comp to represent that time and the record most appropriately, what would you pick? Why? Is there a song on there that still means as much to you 20 years later as it did when you heard it for the first time?

I'm better with the technical details than opinions, but this is pretty much impossible for me to answer. I had such a great time working on that record that pretty much everything on there meant something to me. The songs that Warzone and Bold and all the other bands I already knew were great. Talking to Neil from Nausea, Jason and Damon from Krakdown, Jeff from Breakdown and everyone else was really good and it felt like a record that everyone was going to like. I guess "As One" and "Together" were sort of theme songs for that comp because they definitely captured the spirit of it.


BOLD seven inch: to this day, many people can't get over how much this band "changed" from "Speak Out" the previous year, to this release. New splatter logo left of center, power trio photo, acid wash jean jacket, backwards sound byte. Do you remember thinking "Man, I guess Matt Bold has grown up?"


It's hard to believe that was only one year later, but there also must have been at least a year between the time Bold recorded Speak Out to when it finally came out, so maybe the actual musical transition wasn't so abrupt. Yeah...the photo. They got more shit from their friends for that than from anyone else. I thought it was a little over the top, but it wasn't too long before that record came out that our record layouts were done with photocopies and scotch tape so just having good production values on a record layout that I put together myself (under the band's direction) was probably all I was worrying about. I think that was the first record that we did that Dave Bett didn't design that went through normal (or close to normal) record sleeve printing production. Everything before that was done locally and had folded paper in plastic bag covers except for the first two thousand Sick Of It All records which were printed locally and then hand cut and glued into record jackets by me mostly and a couple of my friends.


Quicksand seven inch: in your eyes, did this band have future rock stardom written all over it with this release? What were your thoughts on the artwork then and now? Was it a real departure from hardcore to you? Could you believe that you were releasing a record that featured the lyric "excrementable?"

That's funny that you mention that word. I used to argue with Walter about it because I didn't want to see him using a grammatically "incorrect" word. He didn't seem to care, but I'd basically argue that you can't turn a noun into an adjective by adding "able" to the end if that noun has a verb form. In other words, the "correct" way to say that, would be to use "excretable." A similar example using a different Quicksand word is "omission." If you wanted to say something could be done without, you would say "omittable," not "omissionable." From what I remembered he thought it was amusing that I cared about it, but he just liked the way it was.