CHRIS LONG: Biography

A lot of people move to Los Angeles to become a star or a mogul. I moved to Los Angeles in 1989 because I hated where I lived and had two friends who offered me a floor to crash on until I got settled.

I had always loved music, but had no idea a 19-year-old small-town transplant with a couple of really bad fake IDs could get into the music business. Then I was dared to write a review of a friend’s concert and submit it to one of the many fanzines that covered the then-incredible local music scene. Six months later, I had two full-page columns in that magazine every other week and was a regular at every local show in town. But I wanted to do more than just cover local bands.

Publicists told me that in order to get interviews with the big bands, I needed to have more people reading my stuff. So I sent my work to magazines in four other cities as their “Hollywood correspondent” and started getting those big interviews. In-person interviews with Ozzy Osbourne, Rush, Massive Attack, Primus, The Verve, Nirvana and others were now part of my weekly routine.

But the first year of writing, I made $25 and decided that, although all the free CDs and concert tickets were great that I needed to up my game. The people in the scene who were making the money were the concert promoters. So, at age 20, I started to promote shows in clubs that I was not even supposed to be in. I did give most of the money to the bands, but I made a lot more than $25 in 1990. 1989-1994 were the last great years of the Los Angeles rock scene, and I had rolled into town just in time to be a part of it.

As a promoter, I got a lot of attention for promoting a band called Kyuss- until they got signed by Chameleon/Elektra Records. After signing Kyuss- now called Queens of the Stone Age- the label heads noticed that almost every time they went out to see a showcase, I was the guy running the show. So, at age 21- two and a half years after I got to Los Angeles- I got hired to do A&R at a major record label.

During my days at Chameleon, I was an early advocate of Stone Temple Pilots. I was also the first person Ice-T came to to promote his metal band Body Count, and was a regular at events like SXSW while also getting to travel around the country to see bands in big cities and small towns.

I was responsible for the label being a close second in the race to sign Rage Against the Machine and helped shepherd local industrial rock legends Ethyl Meatplow to a deal. There were also a lot of other bands that I worked with at that time who went on to get deals, but they didn’t work out well enough to bear mentioning.

After the label closed in November 1993, I went back to promoting to find out that the advent of dance music and the Internet had killed the scene. Los Angeles became mostly a rave city with scattered rock shows from a shrinking talent pool.

That was when I met the folks at a new Independent A&R company called Taxi and became one of their first screeners- something I still enjoy doing 32 years later when called upon. I am a fixture at their yearly conventions, teaching classes and speaking on panels.

After Chameleon, I decided that I wanted to be a manager because that is where the BIG money was. I had A&R experience and knew that finding a band great enough to manage, then and now, is no easy feat. So I was not surprised that it took me over 6 years to find my first client, Crossfade, through a Taxi listing I ran while working in the marketing department of what is now called Sunset Blvd Records.

Crossfade took a lot of work to get signed, something that I know was possible only because band leader Ed Sloan was able to make radio-ready recordings in his basement- something that was very rare in the early 00’s.

The band’s local rock station picked up the song “Cold” and Columbia Records label head Don Ienner offered the band a deal at our New York showcase.

Columbia decided not to put Crossfade back in the studio but to just remix the original recordings Ed made under my guidance. That is kind of the norm now, but in 2004, that was very much not the norm.

Crossfade’s debut had 3 #1 singles at active rock radio and 3 Top 10 singles at Alternative Rock radio. Even though the first single Cold came out in April 2004, it was the most played song of the year in the country on two radio formats in 2005. Not that the Guinness book called, but Cold held the record for longest charting Top 20 rock single at 65 weeks until Awolnation’s “Sail” broke our record nearly a decade later.

Things didn’t work out so well with the second Crossfade record, but sometimes that is how things go in this business. I was still managing bands that did well on an indie level, including Portland-based Brit-pop influenced band Jonah, whom I co-managed with legendary attorney and label executive Alan Mintz.

In 2009, I thought my luck had changed when I met Christina Perri at a local restaurant and became her first manager.

While on a trip to New York to get a band called Weaving The Fate signed to Republic Records, I shopped Christina’s first demos to six labels. But because she did not have enough followers on MYSPACE …. Or that new “face thing” as someone called it- no one wanted to sign her. (Sounds familiar- right?) She got a new manager, and the rest is history. I am proud to say that we are still friends to this day.

During the 2010’s I spent a lot of time working for start-ups in the digital space. Sadly, these companies had great ideas but did not last. Vezt… Fuzz… Arena… and a couple more that barely got off the ground but were fun places to work. It is kind of cool that I can say I started working with music during the cassette days, and with Vezt I got to sign Grammy-nominated and Dove Award-winning Nashville act The Choir to a blockchain-based publishing admin deal.

Most recently, I was hired as an A&R consultant by CMG Records to help with their “Heart of Gold- the Songs of Neil Young” covers series. Volume 1 is out now and features Eddie Vedder, Fiona Apple, Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten, Brandi Carlile, Steve Earle, and more. The records were created to support Neil Young’s Bridge School. Two more volumes of the series are in the works.

I have also been busy helping musicians sign their songs to sync catalogs and other self-released artists fine-tune their songwriting, as well as come up with innovative ways to market their songs in the very crowded music marketplace that we all compete in today.

If you are writing to become an artist, a professional songwriter for other artists, or someone interested in working in sync, I have some valuable advice that I am able to share during our consulting sessions.

Please use the contact form if you have more questions, and I hope that we get to spend some time together talking about your music.