First off, I spent most of my childhood being creative because I was raised by a single orphan who always told me I could do anything I put my mind to. We had little family, money, or any real reason to believe that, but she did, and she always let me play. I know anything I've dreamed and accomplished comes from how deeply she rooted that in my being.
Then my mother married my best friend's father and life changed. I began Rippley Records in 1995, slightly after I turned fifteen years old, five years before Stephen Speaks existed. The primary goal of the company wasn’t, and still isn’t for my own success as an artist. On the contrary, my own music project, Stephen Speaks, was simply a way to show people I knew how to make music so they would want to work with my label.
I initially started the recording studio with a small car fund my family had saved, with the promise I would pay it back. It started in my bedroom and I slept on the floor for years (not enough room for a bed and equipment). I started out recording everyone from the high school band to an all-black quartet from a gospel church. When I was seventeen I proposed building a shed in our yard for my step-father’s stuff and turning my parents two car garage into a studio. After a detailed business plan, which included raising the value of my parents house, they approved I and took over the garage for the next ten years (1997-2007). The pictures below are in it's prime toward the end, after many years of collecting cool stuff.
Rippley Records Startup Studio (Tulsa, OK)
I realized very well, even as a teen, success in the music industry was unlikely, but from what I could tell, success in any industry was unlikely... that's why they call it success. I was a very emotional teen and music seemed to be the one thing that soothed my emotions, so I knew at a young age I wanted to be involved in it for the rest of my life.
My last few years in high school began what would turn into Stephen Speaks. Without much reason for anyone to believe I was capable of running a record label, and finding it difficult for anyone to take a seventeen year old seriously, I recruited every talented person I could convince and put together a team to make my own record to gain some respect as a producer. In 1999, just before I graduated high school, I printed my first Stephen Speaks record (although I didn’t settle on the Stephen Speaks name until later). The record swept the state and turned into everything I had hoped it would be, as well as landing me a sweet job in college.
After high school I spent a year at Abilene Christian University and moved my studio into a large office for a major Hollywood-based media company, MediaChase, who let me record my own stuff after-hours, and paid me very well to web design. While I enjoyed studying Bible in college, I spent much more time in the studio and designing than I did studying. After a full-time job offer from MediaChase didn't even sound appealing to me, I realized my label was the only true passion of mine, and didn’t return my sophomore year.
After returning to the garage studio in Tulsa, I teamed up with life-long friend Ryan Tedder, who you now know as the front man for OneRepublic. He not only does that, but he has written so many number one singles you’re bound to have had one stuck in your head today. Shortly after my return from Abilene, Tedder won a big competition on MTV (the reality show that inspired American Idol) in 2000 and called me to record some songs for him. That went on for a few years, recording through the night and running to FedEx to mail CD's to Lance Bass ('N Sync), until he hit it off with Timbaland, who was and still may be the highest paid producer in the world, and moved to Lost Angeles to work with him. Tedder performed on both our first two records and gave me quite a bit of advice in the industry, and I still look at him as somewhat of a big brother figure during my early years in this business.
In 2001 I recorded my first album under Rippley Records Inc. for a friend Bennett Mosier, who is a guitarist I still use to this day, although he gave up his solo career to play guitar full time in the now defunct band Upside, shortly after his solo record was made.
Around the time Tedder and I began working together in the studio, I made my first business partner with a man named Steve Ball. Steve was the VP of a fortune 500 company who had graduated at the top of his class with a masters in business from Harvard, and he taught me everything I know about business. Steve and I hit it off within moments of meeting. Hewrote me a check to get some equipment to make a record right when I met him, and for years I spent a good majority of my time with him making business plans. Steve funded the equipment I used to create Stephen Speaks’ and Ryan Tedder’s early material, but passed away before he could enjoy the success it brought to us. I still play his Gibson 12-string from his childhood, which he gave to me to pursue the dreams he said he 'gave up on' when he went to Harvard. The name Stephen Speaks will always stand in his memory.
In 2001 I moved the studio to Nashville via some phone advice from Ryan Tedder, who lived there at the time, although he quickly up and left due to an opportunity in New York, and rarely returned. With him being my only real connection in Nashville and an overpopulation of recording studios, I struggled as an up-start studio. Another seeming death-blow was my best friend, who I had incessantly tried to convince to be lead-singer of Stephen Speaks, didn’t want to be in a band, but rather solo. I was working sixty hours a week to make bills, and weighed 138 lbs (at 6’ 5”) due to lack of food money… when I was about a month away from being evicted and moving home, I got my first big break.
In Over My Head
In 2002 I was focusing on developing Stephen Speaks’ online presence and it consumed every spare moment I wasn’t folding clothes at Abercrombie. The idea was to develop a grassroots following across the country. I sold Stephen Speaks CD's online through an online store run by Aware Records (the guys behind John Mayer). Through that store, where we remained in the top ten sellers for years duing the store's existence, I gained a fan at the University Of San Diego who was a foreign exchange student from the Philippines. Upon returning to Manila, his brother became a fan and began playing it on the radio station where he was a DJ, Magic 89.9 FM. As soon as I was notified I began communicating with the station, and using their message board to get fans to request it more. The moment we had enough requests to gain us the number one spot on the daily countdown, I began promoting that we were number one in the Philippines. I contacted labels, booking agents, and told them the story, which the radio station got wind of and began talking about. I locked in a distribution deal with Warner Music Philippines, who had fronted us a small amount of money with a lot of room to gain if we were successful (Although after our tour, they stopped sending me royalty statements, and illegally license our songs in the Philippines to this day, and though I’ve tried to take legal action, apparently Southeast Asia doesn’t respect copyright laws, everyone knows, and no one does or can do anything about it… I guess I should have known from the plethora of fake purses which are made in the Philippines as well).
At the time I was negotiating my deal with Warner, I had grown close to the Hanson family, who’s videographer/go-to-guy Ashley Greyson who helped me film a video for Passenger Seat, which I edited myself. That video became #1 on MYX and MTV, as did the song on nearly every radio station across many platforms, making it one of the biggest singles in Philippines history. It remained #1 on Magic for 10 consecutive weeks, until we released Out Of My League as a second single, which finally knocked Passenger Seat out, and remained number one itself for another month (I still remember the moment I saw Stephen Speaks at #1 and #2 right above Christina Aguilerra and Eminem at #3 and #4). I had managed to become the most popular guy in one of the largest cities in the world but hadn't yet learned how not to let powerful people take all the money. I still feel passionaly that artists by nature are underapreciated and taken advantage of, which is somewhat the basis of my passion for Rippley Records Inc.
While I was setting up the whole ordeal in the Philippines, my brother Dain, who was a student at OU at the time, took a break from college to help me, since time was of the essence and my record label staff of me wasn’t cutting it. We worked around the clock for three months reading law books, developing our web-page, communicating with fans, doing interviews, and setting up a tour in the Philippines (while getting millions of downloads from our Web-site). Warner wanted a band, but I didn’t have a band, so I quickly recruited some people, took pictures, and faked it. I worried we had missed the buzz, but when Warner finally got our album in stores (and it was in front of every major store), it went platinum in ten days, which was good news to Warner who had struggling to keep up with Sony, who had the top two selling artists prior to us, John Mayer and Eminem. Here is a screenshot I snapped of the Magic 89.9 FM year end countdown (Passenger Seat would have easily been #1 but this calendar only cought one month of it's three month stent due to a Nov-Jan split, so the Black Eyed Peas beat it out).
I convinced a reluctant agency to set up a college promotional tour and cover expenses prior to album release. They agreed to four shows, a thousand tickets a show, at five dollars a ticket, of which my cut was six thousand dollars, which I split six ways with my faux band (Yes, now I realize that was not a good decision). When the tour sold out in days, they changed the venues to bigger venues, and sold a total of twenty thousand tickets at sixteen dollars a piece, which I didn’t find out until we were in the Philippines, so what was supposed to originally be a small college tour that would make a maximum of $20,000 in revenue turned into something much much bigger. I fought until I was blue in the face, as show capacity was clearly a breach of contract, but never received another penny. Shorty after our stay the director retired, and being my main contact, contact with the label ceased. Legal action from the United States meant nothing with their government which was nearly overthrown in front of our eyes in a mall we had an autograph session in, with the world watching on CNN (article here). It was a military coup in which military extremists placed bombs all over the aforementioned mall. Don't worry, the US made us sign papers before they would grant our visa that said we enter the Philippines at our own risk. We didn't care.
On Top
With Rippley Records Inc now in conjunction with Warner Music Philippines, I began to negotiate deals with other branches of Warner, including other parts of Asia, and even met face to face with the director of Warner Australia, who wanted to attempt to reproduce the success we had in the Philippines. Just four months after I was poor and starving in Nashville, I was standing on the 42nd floor of the Wynsom Building in Manila Philippines, in the office of the director of Warner Music Philippines. Original negotiations involved a return tour where we would play at every hard rock in Asia, and we were to headline a show in summer of 2003 with Daniel Beddingfield and Jason Mraz at Araneta Coliseum, the largest venue in the Philippines. All expenses would be paid, Rippley Records Inc retained all rights in partnership with Warner Music, including masters and publishing (getting them to pay royalties is another beast), and we were to be paid over a hundred thousand dollars for the trip, up front... that was more money than I had ever fathomed having.
Much to my dismay, my partner/friend who I had wanted to be lead singer informed the agent I had been working with that he was taking a solo management deal in Nashville and Stephen Speaks would not be coming. Before I was aware of it, all deals had been called off. I tried to reason with the other members to just play with the band until I could find a replacement, but with a lot of strong pull from Nashville, I simply couldn’t persuade them to stay the course.
Back To Artist Development... Again
I nearly gave up on the whole Stephen Speaks project until a new years eve party at the Hanson’s house, where Taylor Hanson gave me a good long speech about how far I’d come and how much he believed I should stay the course alone. When someone like Taylor says something like that, it's a good idea to listen. With the new Stephen Speaks record half finished, I pulled together all my resources and with great help from my musician friends, and released One More Day within two months. Isaac Hanson even came over and coached me vocally in the studio, as I certainly needed help with my singing at the time. In fact, over the years I’ve offered the position of lead singer of Stephen Speaks to four peopl; TJ McCloud, Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic), David Leonard (Jackson Waters), and Jay Lashley (Western Heritage). Everyone seemed to think I needed to be singer, so I am to this day.
In summer of 2003, I myself flew out to Nashville and met with one of the biggest managers in the industry, and spoke of signing a management deal with interest from Sony Nashville. After days of meetings and discussions, we ultimately had fundamental disagreements on how the record industry should be run. I discussed the option of signing a the deal with many successful friends, as well as even the manager wanting to sign me, and everyone agreed, if I had it in me, staying the course with Rippley Records Inc. was the way to go. That decision probably saved me from the disastrous end so many of my fellow musicians who quickly signed deals have faced.
In 2004 I found a band called Jackson Waters who blew me away live and approached them about producing a record for them, and later tried to sign them to Rippley Records Inc. They declined after the album we made got them a record deal with the biggest Christian label in the world, and I lost yet another artist to Nashville (although I feel their label really stifled their talent, and after struggling a few years they are very sadly no longer together either).
Another artist I wanted to work with, and one of my favorite bands to this day, had a similar fate; The Hero Factor. They lasted quite a while and had a stent in Tulsa where they were the hottest band in the area, and swept the Tulsa Spot awards for three years. Their first record was a recording I did at the CD release concert for Stephen Speaks’ sophomore album, One More Day. Their performance was flawless and I proposed to them that we polish it up in my studio and release it, so we did. A year later in conjunction with Ed Rose in Kansas, and Don Shaffer (Waterdeep) back at my studio, we recorded their first studio release, Interactions, which won album of the year at the Spot Awards, and has one of my favorite mixes I’ve ever done on a track called Breathe. You can get it on iTunes (and should). We recorded one more live album a year later, Suede Live. Shortly after that the band broke up during the recording of their next album, although I still work with many of the members for various projects.
On The Right Track
Around that time, a guy sought me out - Jay Lashley, the man behind Western Heritage. Although he did not officially team up with Rippley Records until years later, we were working on each other’s music from day one. I was especially drawn to his ability to consistently create very clever lyrics combined with extremely hooky melodies, but was also relevant and significant in message. I hadn’t met a hit writer like that since Ryan Tedder. There were quite a few people pulling Jay in their direction, including some big names in New York, and Jay spent a couple years after our initial recordings to explore other options. He eventually came back and told me the ‘magic we have in the studio’ was irreplaceable. Within three months of his return to Oklahoma in 2009, we finished his first release, Native America, which I feel is one of the strongest independent debut EP’s ever. I would challenge anyone to give it a go, read the lyrics, and hold me to that.
I’m not the only one who thinks so, because Western Heritage won the first international songwriting competition they entered within months of the album’s release, and won not only a cash prize, but an all-expense paid trip to London for a songwriting event with some pretty big names, which took place in January 2010. Jay has also contributed to my newest efforts with Stephen Speaks, a Christmas album made with all acoustic guitars and vocals, and co wrote/produced the newest single, "I Found Love". Jay is soon moving to London to work with the people he met during that trip.
My current focus is arranging the first major studio album for Stephen Speaks in which I will record in a profesional studio rather than mine or my friends'. I have a list of contacts I’ve made over the last fifteen years and I’ve spent many years assembling a team to record and market a major Stephen Speaks release. Keep posted for what happens next.
Rockwell Ryan Ripperger
CEO / Rippley Records
Founder / Stephen Speaks |
