The Fervor Records team hosting the new “From the Archives” podcast, launching Nov. 3, include (L-R) Jeff Freundlich, David Hilker and Keagan Stromberg (submitted photo).
It began in 1989 built around a simple idea: great music deserves to be heard. A group of musicians wanted to give back to their local community and under the umbrella of the nonprofit Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS), Fervor Records produced the label’s first release, “Southwest Holiday.” The multi-genre Christmas compilation was issued on cassette and sold more than 4,000 copies in just six weeks. David Hilker, founder and CEO of Fervor Records took us back to the company’s founding.
“I’ve played music my whole life – it’s all I’ve ever done. I played in lots of bands in the 80s and 90s, and there were four of us in the local scene and none of us had record deals,” he laughed. “We were just a bunch of long-haired road musicians, and we said, ‘How does this whole label thing work and what can we do with no money?’ And we thought, why don’t we try to do something positive for the community.”
So, they found a charity who would take them seriously and then set out to unite the local musicians around their cause. With that, Fervor Records was born.
“Everything was donated,” Hilker recalled, “from office space to cassettes – 100 percent went back to CASS. We donated all of our time just to get things going and get a better idea of how a record label worked. We did another project with St. Mary’s Food Bank in the early 90s and the label has just grown from there.”
The label has always been eclectic, Hilker said, they don’t focus on one genre of music. That original release featured everything from the Phoenix Boys Choir to country artist J. David Sloan. As their catalog has grown over the years, they have produced blues compilations and obtained music across broad genres from 1950s Arizona and beyond, “Fervor literally has music from around the world in virtually every genre,” Hilker said. But they stay rooted locally and represent almost 250 Arizona artists.
The company works with new artists to record their music at their Sunnyslope studios, and they have a deep catalog of heritage tracks that they have acquired or otherwise represent (you may have heard that music pop up in films and TV shows).
“If you get a track in a [popular TV show] that’s going to reach millions of people. Trying to achieve that same amount of exposure with just selling records or spending the money it costs to get on the radio, we found it more effective and lucrative for the artist.”
A lot of their archives began with Floyd Ramsey, who owned Audio Recorders of Arizona in the 1950s, “they were responsible for the first gold record that came out of Phoenix in the 50s with Sanford Clark, called ‘The Fool’” Hilker said. “Floyd bequeathed his archives to John Dixon [known to many as Johnny D], and he came to us with that. And we just started acquiring more music from around town.
“These weren’t hit songs, but we thought it was great music. And we thought it was relevant and we wanted to get that working for people, rather than sitting in a drawer somewhere.”
Now, nearly 40 years later, drawing on their expansive catalog (housed in a bomb shelter at their Sunnyslope studio), and following their ethos of getting that great music heard, the team is launching “From the Archives,” on Nov. 3. The new video podcast invites music fans to hear the stories beyond the crates as the team unearths the master tapes from their archives.
The weekly video podcast will be hosted on the Fervor Records YouTube channel where the team will dive into the stories behind these artists. The roughly 45-minute episodes are hosted by Hilker, along with Fervor Records’ COO Jeff Freundlich and produced by Keagan Stromberg, one of the label’s signed artists who has joined the business side of the company.
The first season digs deep into Fervor’s archives for the stories behind rare soul recorded from the 1960s through the 1980s in Chicago, Boston, New York City and Shreveport, along with two episodes focused on music rooted in Phoenix.
“Preserving the music isn’t enough,” Hilker said. “Music was made to be heard, and these artists deserve to have their stories told.
“Most artists don’t ‘make it big.’ It’s the one percent of the one percent where the music, the business and the moment all line up to catch lightning in a bottle. They get dropped from the label, their album gets shelved or the band breaks up. So, the songs go unheard, buried in a closet or filed in a desk drawer. Their stories can involve addiction, tragedy and heartbreak, but so many times, redemption too. Sometimes it takes decades for the culture to catch up.
“We hope people find their journeys as fascinating as we do and come away understanding that the history of American music is much bigger than the hits everyone already knows.”
Visit www.fervor-records.com to check out the Fervor catalog and tune into the “From the Archives” podcast.
