Kinky Friedman, Charles Manson and Fruit of the Tune Records Are Dead (Chris King, July 1, 2024, Common Reader)
This is an obituary, not of Kinky Friedman, but of the record label that he and we shared with Charles Manson.
Fruit of the Tune Records is not robustly documented for posterity. I am assured I did not dream up the matter by two citations on the discography of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys: Old Testaments and New Revelations (Fruit of the Tune, 1992) and From One Good American to Another (Fruit of the Tune, 1995). Those release dates align with the release date of the Enormous Richard record that Fruit of the Tune distributed, Warm Milk on the Porch, which was 1992. Obituaries tend to begin with the ending, and the end of Fruit of the Tune goes some way toward explaining why the label has left few traces for music historians.
I got a call one day from Bello, one of the two men (the other was Mango) who ran Fruit of the Tune in Montclair, New Jersey. Bello was calling with bad news—perhaps the worst news you can get from your record label. We no longer had a record label. It had ceased to exist. Bello, of the charming smartass type ubiquitous in the indie rock business, explained how after Nirvana exploded with Nevermind in the last quarter of 1991, every label like Fruit of the Tune snapped up a bunch of sketchy bands like Enormous Richard, thinking there was now major money in what had been classified as indie music. The market had since spoken in the form of an historic flood of returns— returns are records returned, unsold, to distributors and labels that had optimistically accounted them as sold. The unprecedented volume of returned product was driving indie distributors and labels out of business, and Fruit of the Tune had sunk in that torrent.
Bello explained to me that our records would be auctioned off at some point along with all of the label’s inventory left from their bankruptcy proceedings. An outlaw for real, Bello had broken into their now former warehouse and stolen some of our CDs—he felt sorry for us—that he said he would mail to us. As for himself, he had chosen the route of tax exile. He named a certain island and said that if I ever wanted to see him, I should go to that island, ask around for the biggest waves, and find a fish taco stand on the beach near the best surf. If he was not riding a wave, he would sell me a fish taco. For Bello was a surfer—yes, a surfer in New Jersey like the young Bruce Springsteen, though the young Bello had surfed in southern California with Dick Dale, when Dale was more or less singlehandedly creating the genre of surf rock.