Grand Royal

» see grandroyal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Six issues of a magazine came out between 1993 and 1997, and one of them ran a six page feature on a haircut. That feature is the reason Grand Royal still turns up in reference books. The record label it belonged to lasted nine years and died in debt, which is the ordinary half of the story.

The Beastie Boys set the label up in 1992 as their own imprint at Capitol, with terms that let them release other people's records alongside their own. The first thing out of it was Luscious Jackson's In Search of Manny. What followed was a roster no other label assembled: At The Drive-In, Cibo Matto, Buffalo Daughter, Atari Teenage Riot, Ben Lee, Bran Van 3000, Sean Lennon, Scapegoat Wax, and Mike D's own BS 2000. It reads exactly like three people signing whatever they personally wanted to hear.

Issue two of the magazine was 140 pages with a Biz Markie flexi disc attached to the cover, a 24 page primer on Lee Scratch Perry, and an article titled Mulling Over The Mullet which offered Hockey Player Haircut and Soccer Rocker as alternative names for the cut. The band had already used the word in a 1994 song called Mullet Head. Anyone tracing how that word reached general English ends up at those two artifacts, which means a vanity imprint's in-house magazine did something most publications never do.

The Beastie Boys reached Turkey. Ill Communication was in the cassette racks and later went around the internet cafes on burned CDs with the artist name misspelled. The label did not reach Turkey, because imprints do not travel the way bands do. What crossed over was a name on a sleeve, not a magazine with a mail order catalog in Los Angeles. I learned there had been a magazine at all roughly twenty years after the last issue.

~ the chronicle ~

~ six issues ~

Each issue shipped with something stapled, folded or glued in. Issue one, 76 pages, Fall and Winter of 1993, cover line Bruce Lee Lives, with a Russell Simmons interview inside. Issue three came with an iron-on transfer and a 32 page section on synthesizers including Bob Moog. Issue four had a pullout poster titled Turntable, A Visual History. Issue five had a cardboard cutout of a Bass Jeep. Issue six, headlined Ignominious And Proud, came with a 1998 demolition derby calendar.

Total print run across all six was estimated at about 300,000 copies. Eric Gladstone, who edited it, later said the staff realized selling subscriptions was really a pain, and that stopping was entirely a creative decision rather than a financial one. The magazine then moved onto grandroyal.com as a section called Mag, where it kept running features until the month the label folded. The August 2001 batch included a barbecue guide and a watertoy buyers guide.

~ the day it died ~

Grand Royal closed on Friday 31 August 2001. The statement cited mounting debts, decreasing assets and exceedingly harsh industry conditions. Mike D's explanation was that the label had grown into an overhead and an infrastructure it could no longer carry, which is the honest version of what happens when a boutique imprint starts behaving like a company. On the roster that week were At The Drive-In, Ben Lee, Luscious Jackson and BS 2000.

The formal bankruptcy came in July 2002. What was left got sold through a Bid4Assets auction, with the Beastie Boys' own masters carved out of the sale. The last official release under the name was a sampler for Jet Set Radio Future, put together by the Latch Brothers.

~ where the domain went ~

Five weeks after the label was dead, its website had not noticed. The 8 October 2001 capture of grandroyal.com still says Grand Royal, Guaranteed Every Time in the title bar. Grand Royal Radio is streaming, with a line reading Now Playing: Luscious Jackson, Life Of Leisure, from the Grand Royal release In Search Of Manny. There are free MP3s on offer, new release links pointing at a Yahoo Store, an At The Drive-In t-shirt for sale, and the August magazine features still sitting on the front page.

By 22 January 2002 the entire domain was one line of HTML, a meta refresh to store.yahoo.com/grand-royal, the label reduced to a merch counter. By September 2002 the same address was serving BeastieBoys.com instead, and that capture arrived mid-error: the top of the page carries a PHP parse error printing the server path of a chat script, which is what the band's own site looked like on the day the crawler came by. Today grandroyal.com answers a two line frameset pointing at a domain parking service, a state the address has now held for longer than the label ran.

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