Dancing in the Trenches
Story by Jim Sheeler
Photo by Steve Peterson
Boulder Planet
Ariel Hyatt walks to the door inside her townhouse, stepping past a pile of laundry belonging to the ten guys who spent last night on her floor.
She has spent the past few days traveling the state on a converted school bus, helping to ensure that where the bus stops, music starts. In the past two nights she’s been from Steamboat to Boulder to Fort Collins. Tonight it’s Denver.
There’s still plenty of work to do: writers to call, packages to mail, and a continuing job search to staff her New York office. One of the nation’s largest radio conventions is headed to town, and there will be hundreds of people to deal with.
This afternoon, it will all have to wait.
“The band wants to drive go-karts,” she says.
Hitting hard
On hole No. 3 at the mini-golf course at Gateway Park Fun Center in North Boulder, Hyatt stands among the members of Skavoovie and the Epitones, the Massachusetts-based 10-piece ska band that has traveled thousands of miles on their latest tour.
As the band’s publicist and booking agent, she is responsible not only for finding them places to play, but stirring
up a buzz in newspapers and magazines, convincing traditionally fickle music journalists why they should write about the band, and traditionally gruff music promoters why they should give the band a chance to play. It’s a job tied to the telephone, one of promises and problem-solving, of schmooze drenched in stress — a job that even landed her in the hospital at one point with a possible ulcer, at 25 years old.
Lately, she realized she was missing the music.
“I decided I should go on tour. I worked so hard for this,” she says at the golf course, before heading to the go-karts. “In the past I’d still be on the phone and they’d all be here. But when you have a baby company and you haven’t proven your reputation, you have to sacrifice. In the past, there were so many shows I didn’t go to because I had to write that next (press) release.”
After running the company for three and a half years, the 28 year-old has a rotating roster of 22 bands from across the nation, along with her role as publicity director for Boulder’s Fox Theatre. Most of the bands she represents are new. Some she has listened to since she was 13 years old.
Along with her sole full-time employee, Jen Northway, Hyatt has built the company to the point where she could recently open an office in New York City, where she plans on seeking out more music, while remaining tied to Boulder.
As Skavoovie’s drummer, Ben Herson, tries to avoid a fake tree stump on the mini-golf course, he says his band, like many others, had dealt with incompetent agents since its inception. When the group signed a new record contract, they included Ariel in the deal, ensuring they wouldn’t lose her.
“As soon as we signed on with her she gave us big packets with bios, photos, every single contract, everything. We didn’t realize that’s what booking agent/publicists did,” Herson says. “We thought they were just supposed to screw you over and leave you stranded in Omaha.”
In front of him, Hyatt swings her club and blasts the green golf ball too hard, out of bounds.
“My whole life’s been very synchronistic,” she says. “I don’t think there are too many coincidences.”
Backstage office
Walking into Ariel Hyatt Publicity — the basement of the townhouse she shares with a roommate — is like walking into a backstage dressing room. On the way down the stairs, a sign warns “Band members only. This means you.”
On her door, another warning, this one in French: “Attention: Chat Lunatique.”
A giant replica of the Clash’s “London Calling” album cover hangs in the corner, along with autographed photos of bands she’s represented and those she adores — throwbacks to Hyatt’s days growing up in Manhattan, watching pioneering punk and ska bands live as a teenager. Artwork from Andy Warhol adorns the walls, a nod to an obsession fostered by her father, a documentary filmmaker who once interviewed the pop artist. Her own pop art of sorts — a glass coffee table full of half naked Barbie dolls and a kitchen ceiling adorned with cartoon lunchboxes — populates the rest of the house.
Among it all, one of Hyatt’s biggest trophies — one rarely seen backstage.
“I wanted a Ms. Pac Man when I was little,” she says, pausing at the full-size arcade game at the foot of the stairs. “When I made my first money that was the first thing I bought.”
The half-finished basement is a paean to music. The file cabinets for the bands are high school lockers bought from a salvage yard in Denver, stickered with band names. Her bathroom is decorated with leftover green vinyl albums by the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies.
Hyatt began as an intern at What Are Records? in New York City, an independent label that moved to Boulder shortly thereafter and hired her full time. She also played a part in the now-defunct Small Axe Concerts before plugging her computer into the kitchen wall and starting out on her own.
Within three years, she had handed out tens of thousands of her bright orange business cards bearing a playful likeness of herself in boots and a mod skirt, and built her computerized database of contacts to more than 5,000.
“I’ve recently been meeting with Sony and Epic (Records), and they’ve never seen anything like us,” Hyatt says. “I give them a brochure and they don’t get it.”
The connections on the computer are as much listings with big magazines as they are one-person operations printed at Kinko’s.
“When you’re representing Celine Dion you don’t have to worry about the 15 year-old with the ska ‘zine in Wichita,” she says. “You have to worry about when you’re going to schedule your Rolling Stone cover.
“We’re doing this wacky under-the-radar thing. The big firms in New York and L.A. can’t get to these kids because they don’t have time for a little college paper. That’s the market we deal with. We can also hit the mainstream press with ease. But it’s more fun in the trenches.”
She says she can’t help but wonder what it would be like to have a $3 million marketing budget for an album. Then she’s reminded of the massive reorganization thrashing much of the music business.
“I was offered a job at a major label in New York. I thought long and hard about it, the salary was fabulous, the
offer was gorgeous,” she says. “Three months after I turned it down the person who got the job was laid off.”
In her office hang posters and compact discs of groundbreaking female artists such as Me’shell Ndegeocello and Ani DiFranco, and independent filmmaker Michael Moore.
“Yeah, Michael Moore,” she says. “I love him because he’s the underdog.”
Motherly advice, still relevant
As a young girl and only child, Hyatt grew up on tour. Book tour.
She watched her mother on Oprah, Donahue, Good Morning America. In the 1970s, Carole Hyatt wrote the New York Times best-selling book “The Women’s Selling Game: How to Sell Yourself and Anything Else” — one of the first books written for women entering the corporate workplace.
“It’s so odd, you spend your whole life saying, ‘I’m never going to be like my mother, and now I do business the way she does business,’ Hyatt says. “She’s brilliant.”
Despite the progress made in the industry by her mother and other female heroes on her walls, she says some things never change.
“It’s a boys’ club. It’s a boys’ club less in certain places. When I’m here in my office, on the phone, I can look like anything, I can be anything, and I get a lot of respect. However, when I hit the road and I come out and look like I look — with the long red hair — and they think I look like I’m someone’s girlfriend, that’s when I can sometimes run into trouble. But when I start talking and it’s obvious I know what I’m talking about, people usually are very cool.
“Once in a while you get an idiot club owner who makes a comment about your butt. But that’s what happens with women in this industry. I ask women at Epic how they’ve been there for 19 years, they say you have to be tough, you have to be strong.”
Hyatt quickly gained a reputation for both — along with the ability to deal with the business’ inevitably inflated egos. If someone hangs up on her, she’s been known to send flowers, or lollipops. It’s one way to reverse stereotypes, she says, while others remain.
“I love when I call and I’m booking shows and there’s a woman on the other end of the phone,” she says. “Immediately there’s a repoire. I’ve never ever been screwed over by a female promoter, and I can’t say the same for the men out there.”
Motherly advice, the soundtrack
From a stack of CDs, she grabs Skavoovie’s latest, called “The Growler.”
“I feel like a mother in many ways. These bands are like my children, especially Skavoovie,” she says. “The night they got signed we were at the record company and I started crying. I was so proud of them, so excited for them, and they were like, ‘What is wrong with you?’”
In the last year, ska has been on the decline as other trends surface then inevitably fade. Hyatt has cut back her emphasis on the stress-inducing tour booking to concentrate on publicity, but says she’s not worried.
“This company has been one serendipitous thing after the next, so I feel like pushing it or trying to grow too fast or do something that doesn’t feel right is not the way to go,” she says. “We’re doing well. We make money and have fun.”
She sits back in her chair, on the faux zebra-stripe rug that covers her office floor.
“Today, I got to go play mini-golf with one of my favorite bands. What’s better than that?” she says, and points to track number 13 on the CD — a song called “The Salad Days.”
“Every time they play it, no matter where they are,” she says quietly, “they dedicate it to me.”
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