I first met Billy Siérra-Lenhart in 2001, when I was in high school and he was a drummer for Corpus Christi punk band Numbskull. Below, he discusses his experiences with Rusted Nail Recordings, a DIY record label he started in 1996.

What is Rusted Nail?

When Numbskull was playing with a lot of bigger bands we were getting paid serious cash to open up for them. Instead of giving this semi-hard earned cash back to the rest of the band I pocketed it and used it to release other bands’ music; producing the albums, making the artwork, burning the CD’s. There was a vacuum in the scene, TFC Records was the only other local label at the time and it was mostly a tight circle of friends. I wanted to create something that included every group in the scene, though I am still unsure if at first I did that correctly.

The rest of Numbskull didn’t know at the time I was scamming them but it never really mattered, no one in the band truly cared about getting paid, and after some time it started to work up until the end of 2000. I had released something like twelve albums from seven different bands in two years. Around fall 2001 I returned to Corpus from a brief living stint in Austin and tried to get a venue called ‘Reds’ going and get Rusted Nail going again and everything just went to shit. After that I only used Rusted Nail to release my own music like the ‘Laslow’ album and my last band’s, Come and Take It, demo.

Now that I am fully settled in Austin and have the resources my friend Justin and I are reshaping it to run as a non-profit South Texas youth oriented record label. Like Warhol’s ‘Factory’ but without the capitalist sheik. It’s really not that fancy though. We are just putting up the cash to release a single from a band we like. The recoup of the cost of that goes to the next record. All of the shit in between (production, artwork, support, and PR) we do ourselves in our free time. We just signed this band from McAllen called Ennui Jolt. They are the first in this streamlining of cultural imprinting and archiving.

Why was it necessary to create this label?

South Texas possesses a very unique position in America’s fabric and the music of the youth has always best represented the climate and oral history of the present.  South Texas though... it’s like a scoop of imperialism, geographically and culturally. It’s not that it is an enclave of a Mexican-American majority. Houston and Dallas with some time will have that. It’s that there are literally thousands of families that have lived in the area before the first Texas revolution (and Republic) of 1812. Real Texas natives are from here and are born here. I feel this kind of attachment to the land has brewed a cohesive collective view of the world and a special kind of sincerity and intensity with music and the arts. You don’t have to be a native to pick up on the vibe either. Everyone plays hard regardless of the style of music.

I’ve seen people cut themselves on stage, at least three full-scale riots complete with cops, a murder, some drug deals gone bad, venues vandalized and attempted arson, a venue owner stabbed by a band member, indie record stores looted and trashed, a couple of drive-bys, been in a few fights, got my ass kicked once, apologized for jumping someone, and my experiences were not unique. It seems all silly especially now that I am older but for some time the place really felt like a war zone. The whole hardcore and metal scene has become notorious in other parts of the States. It has calmed down some, but I think the whole nation right now is in a state of bewilderment and it’s felt here. All of this energy has made the South Texas scene an incredibly polarized place however, which is incredibly evident with styles and the cliques they pertain to. I’ve always tried to view the scene as a whole with a very objective eye, I didn’t purposefully try to find underdog bands that no one knows, just ones that seem to get left behind by all this insanity.

You announced last month that the label was releasing Ennui Jolt’s latest release. Why the renewed interest in it?

They are amazing kids, I met them playing a show in McAllen and it just seemed right. Justin wanted to start a studio and I wanted to help the community and this is pretty much the only thing I know how to do. I just wanted to do my part.

Can you talk about Rusted Nail’s DIY approach?

When I first started recording I had absolutely no idea what to do. I figured out that if you plugged a RCA to 1/8 converter you could hook up a PA board to your sound card. My whole approach has just kind of evolved from that realization. Some of the early stuff is so terrible, it’s sad really ‘cause there are some fucking great songs that suffer.

I also never really had real equipment in the beginning. We used stolen mics or ones that got left behind at a show. We “borrowed” houses (and once an apartment) to record in. Once I got some cash together after I turned eighteen I began using actual condenser mics and the occasional rack pre-amp but nothing major. When I moved to Austin I took more time to learn the mechanics of engineering and having an ear. The other guy in Rusted Nail, Justin, is a poor man’s pro engineer and kinda refined my theories on mic’ing things and placing them in the mix. The Come and Take It demo was recorded in a tin shack and it came out remarkably well. With Ennui Jolt we are planning to chronicle the whole process, from step one to a thousand, to make a kind of ‘record making checklist’ that we will release on the website and maybe in print for others to observe or duplicate. We want to make the whole process as streamlined and efficient as possible.

In your experience, what works and what doesn’t work?

The only thing in entertainment that works is money. The only thing that works in art is urgency. Everything else just leads up to those two things.

Does Rusted Nail have any plans for the future?

After Ennui Jolt my buddy Jarrod is in this really amazing band called Stringer. We want to release these two singles and take them as far as we can until the end of the year. This essentially is a trial run of the business model we are following. If it busts we will just cut our losses and the bands will have some badass vinyl in their discography. We hope however that the model will deliver and we can continue the process of releasing music from South Texas indefinitely. This can be a really huge or really dumb thing, but I think most things in life that are wonderful are.

Visit Rusted Nail on the web:

www.rustednailrecordings.org

DC Tedrow is a writer living in Corpus Christi, Texas. He is a founding member of both Turning the Tide and CHR Media Collective. Billy Sierra-Lenhart is a native South Texas musician and artist in exile in Austin, Texas. Born and raised in the Corpus Christi punk rock scene, he has been performing and producing independent music for a decade.