Season 1, Episode 1: Jodie Regan

Welcome to The Cockatoo!

In this inaugural episode of The Cockatoo, host Adam Burke chats with Australian artist manager and Fremantle legend, Jodie Regan (Spinning Top Management).
Best known for her work as manager of artists including Tame Impala, POND, Haiku Hands and Automatic, Jodie walks us through what it was like to move to the bright lights of Los Angeles, and the lessons she learned along the way.

Interview Transcript

Interviewer: Welcome to the Cockatoo, your source for all things Australian music in the USA. We're coming at you from Los Angeles, California. This is the interview part of our newsletter where we talk about musical journeys to the United States. Today, for our inaugural edition, I am very excited to be speaking to Jodie Regan of Spinning Top Management. If you don't know Jodie, you will certainly know her clients who include bands and artists such as Pond, Tame Impala, Automatic, Gum, Haiku Hands, and more. Welcome, Jodie.

Jodie: Thank you. Hi. Thanks for having me.

Interviewer: It's an absolute pleasure to have you on. I'm so happy that you agreed to be our first guest because I can't think of a journey that speaks more to what's happening in Australian music across the Pacific than yours. It's going to be really fantastic to hear what you have to say, and learn more about how you've ended up on this incredible journey. Let's just start it off with a little chronology. When did you move to the USA?

Jodie: I moved here in March 2014.

Interviewer: All right. Now, with a lot of people, we think there's this sort of one magic day like March in 2014. Tell me about when you first started, like how long before that time did you start coming out here exploring? When did you sort of start your journey in bits and pieces, shall we say?

Jodie: The first time I came to the USA was with Tame Impala in 2010. We were supporting MGMT, who became our very dear friends. We always credit them with so much in bringing us to the US because they took us as a support. We were very unknown here. we had had the first EP out. I think Innerspeaker came out either like on the day we landed here, or like very close to around that date, like within the week or something, which is Tame Impala's first album, for anyone who doesn't know. We hit the ground, then started driving around.

We drove around the country in a van following a bus tour, which was, if anyone's ever done that, is really not that fun, because the buses get to drive through the night, and everyone goes to sleep. Whereas like in your van, you're all driving, taking turns through the night to get places. It was a lot of driving, but it was awesome. Seeing the country like that was amazing. Yes, we started then, and we just kept coming back, the album started doing well. We kept coming back. We were just going around the world. We went around the world a lot.

Then in around 2013, it was after our second album had come out, Lonerism. I remember we were at Austin City Limits Festival in Austin, and it's over two weekends. I decided to get an Airbnb and stay for the week in Austin because I love Austin. The band went off and did all of these little radio performances, and this and that, little things at different radio sessions. I feel just some things went down that I just didn't quite understand, like I just realized I didn't know enough about how things would-- like, seriously, you know how there's like a hundred million triple J's here? In Australia, you have triple J.

In America, you have 10 of them in every city. I didn't know that, that's difficult to grasp. During that week, some stuff was going on, and I was like, "Man, what is going on? I don't get it." It was then specifically that week, I was like, "I got to move here. I've got to understand this. This is becoming Tame Impala's biggest market. I've got to understand it so that I can make it work for us.

Interviewer: The first Time Impala album Innerspeaker comes out in 2010. By October, 2013, you've made the decision. You got to go actually plant your shoes here in the United States. Where are you living? Where is your legal residence? Probably living on a plane and in buses, but where's your legal residence between 2010 and 2013?

Jodie: In Fremantle, Western Australia.

It was funny because I decided on LA. I didn't want to live in New York. It was a bit too, I needed the blue skies and palm trees for me. Maybe it's that Freo thing. I'm not scared of a big city. I lived in Japan for six years in the '90s, but I was just like at that time in my life, I needed the blue skies. I had a friend who-- an American friend who was living in New Orleans and she said, "Okay, I'll come and live in LA too." Because her parents were here, and they really wanted her to move. We started looking for a place. I think it was really trying to find the right neighborhood was a big thing. You know how it is in LA, you can't just get across town. We were just talking about it.

Interviewer: No, I had an old client of mine, many years, Jimmy Nederlander, who's now passed, but he used to say, it's not a city. It's a series of villages.

Jodie: Absolutely. I wanted to try and find the right village. We settled on Silver Lake, but funnily enough, it was like, Tame Impala had been nominated for a Grammy on Lonerism, and the Grammy awards were in January, 2014. I used that, I came over and I went to the Grammys with this same friend, because the band were on tour still. I used that point. In January, 2014, came to the Grammys. It was so fun.

Interviewer: It's 2014. You've got a band with multiple hit albums. You're at the Grammys, and you're rooming up with your mate from New Orleans in Silver Lake.

Jodie: Yes. Because I was still broke.

Interviewer: Right. Exactly. It doesn't get more successful than that, but it also shows how hard the challenge is, right?

Jodie: It is. Yes,

Interviewer: you're still rooming with someone. Everyone will be looking at it going, "Well, Jodie's living in a mansion in the hills or something," and you're-

Jodie: Absolutely not.

Interviewer: Yes, absolutely not. Right. What did you do in that period in terms of visas and access? How did all that go down?

Jodie: I was on an O2 visa. Kevin had the O1, and then the rest of us had O2s off him. That's a three-year visa, if my memory serves me correctly. They were quite easy for us to get at that point. I was here on an O1, and O1s require you to be working for the band that you're on, or the artist, the individual that you're on the O1 with, which was really the majority of. Obviously, Kevin took up a lot of my workspace. It was easy to prove that I was working for him, and his record label was here.

Interviewer: It sure is. It sure is. Okay. 2014, March, you're living in Silver Lake. You've got here. Tame Impala is doing great. You're at the Grammys. Tell us about the next six months to a year. I think everyone has a different period as to when they feel like they are an Angelina or a New Yorker or a Chicago, wherever you land. Tell us about your first 6 to 12 months living in Silver Lake, and becoming a resident of Los Angeles.

Jodie: It was great, because I think that there was a lot going on here for Tame. I was obviously still also working on Pond. I think Pond toured here that year, because I sort of seemed to have my little Aussie pals coming through. You know what LA is like too. This is one of the reasons I chose LA too. It's like such a thoroughfare. People from all over the world come through. I didn't feel sort of as lonely and isolated as I thought I might being in another country, and not really having any friends outside of the people I worked with at different labels or publicists or whatever. They were the only people I knew here. I didn't have a friend group or anything like that.

I was just going to say, I thought that it was a bit scary coming here, and leaving my family and friends and stuff. The fact that all of those bands are my best friends too, it was great, because I got to get them, like they did tours and I was there, and it was really fun. Cam, who plays bass in Tame Impala, he was here as well. He had sort of decided that he wanted to spend more time, and he was hanging around LA. That was fun. He was hanging around. We went halves in a $2,000 RAV4 because neither of us could afford a car each. That was funny.

I made friends, like I was working from the living room in the house that we were renting. At about three o'clock every day, I'd have to take myself for a walk around the neighborhood because the Aussie shift would have to be about to start. You do your mornings with your UK and America, and then you turn into your Aussie and work all night.

Interviewer: Yes. I know the routine. You basically got three hours, four days a week of actual working where the two business hours coincide, and the rest is your time being given up for. How did you guys feel working professionally in Los Angeles versus in Australia? How did you feel the difference in not just opportunity, but approach and sort of business culture?

Jodie: Initially, I know speaking for myself, I was pretty intimidated. I felt like everybody knew more than I did because it's America. It's like there's 50 Sydney's here. You know what I mean.

Interviewer: I do.

Jodie: Everyone who's coming up through labels or whatever, they all know each other, and they throw names around like you should know who they're talking about. I was like, "Who are you talking about? I don't know who you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about." I was never fearful though. I always knew that I'm a smart person, and I could work it out, but it felt, even though it was such a huge industry, it still felt really clicky, and a bit hard to break through, especially for us. I felt like we were really outsiders, and that really worked in the whole mystique of Tame Impala and Pond as performers.

Because I think everyone was completely blown away by the skills of those guys, and how free, and just incredible that they were, which was great. Then I think maybe I was a little bit confusing because I didn't come from a history of, I didn't start in the music industry young. I came into it later in my life. A lot of people start when they're 20, and by the time they're 30, they know everyone, and they're, you know what I mean. It's like, they've all moved around, but I didn't come into it until I was 30 something. I felt like it was just, it was interesting. Yes. It felt very clicky, and it felt like, there's just a lot going on too.

Interviewer: It's a huge industry, and so just quickly going back to that change when you came into the music industry at 30, what was that moment in time? What happened there?

Jodie: Everyone knows this story, well people close to me are so sick of hearing this story, but when I was 22, late 22, I went to Japan to be-- like, everyone was going there, the Japanese income bubble and all of that, and everyone was going there to be teachers and hostesses and get paid all this money, and it was supposed to be a three-month thing, my sister was there, people from high school were there, everyone was there doing this stuff, and I went over there and I didn't come back for six years, and so from like late 22 to 28, so I came back in '99, at 28, came back to Australia, came back to Frio, was just like, "What is going on?" It was a bigger culture shock coming back to Frio than it was going to Japan in the first place, it was very strange.

Interviewer: Interesting.

Jodie: Yes, it was really interesting and weird, and then I started working at this pub, because I was always in hospitality before that, started working at this pub, and it was run by a friend of mine who had also been in Japan, Meredith, shout out to Meredith, who is still a very close friend of mine, she gave me that job where she was just like, "I know that you can do this, we need someone, blah, blah, blah."

Interviewer: Is this at the Norfolk?

Jodie: At the Norfolk Hotel.

We ended up building it to a point where amazing bands came through, like the presets came through. It was like literally 200 cap, maybe 180 cap, and like I remember the presets being so loud, because I was always there at sound checks and stuff, it's amazing, I can still hear, to be honest.

Jodie: Then I was just in this really, like the world to me was the local music scene in Freo, Perth.

Interviewer: Amazing. Who doesn't love a rock and roll basement?

Jodie: Yes. Exactly. It unfortunately has gone. It's gone now.

Interviewer: Oh, that's a shame.

Jodie: I think it became part of the pub, the whole thing. But, no, it doesn't exist anymore. It hung on for a while, but I ended up leaving in 2009. Oh, well, yes, that's how I obviously came across Mink Muscle Creek, Tame Impala Pond, all of those guys, that family of incredible artists that just blew my mind.

Interviewer: For our listeners, Mink Muscle Creek was a Freo band, suburb of Perth, if you're not familiar with this part of Australia, or another city, really, part of Perth metropolitan area. Mink Muscle Creek play at the Norfolk Basement, and that band includes Kevin Parker, Nick Albrook and Joe Ryan. Kevin Parker goes on to become Tame Impala, and Nick and Joe go on to become Pond, correct?

Jodie: Including with Jay Watson, drummer from Tame Impala was a founding member of Pond also.

Interviewer: Ah, Jay Watson as well. Okay, there we go. They're the characters that are a big part of the story.

Jodie: They're the characters. The only inconsistency in that story is I actually initially saw that initial gang of people at Mojo's

Interviewer: Tell us a little bit about that process of how you start to sort of go from a Perth management company up to signing some really amazing American bands.

Jodie: Okay. That's definitely very COVID-related, I've got to say.

Interviewer: Okay. Well, if it's a positive COVID story, yes, bring it.

Jodie: COVID-19 hits. I've got to cancel like 45 dates of a Tame Impala world tour three shows in, because, we'd released the Slow Rush like a month before COVID hit. It was a crazy time. Anyway, obviously, none of us knew what was going on, but I tell you what, I have never felt more distant from Perth, more isolated from Australia. I really felt like, it was terrifying, this whole bands not being able to travel, not being able to tour, when you come from the most isolated city in the world.

Interviewer: Yes, absolutely.

Jodie: It was like, "Oh, this is not a great business model, Jodie." When times like this happen, it couldn't be more impossible to keep the business afloat. I thought essentially, it would be really fun to have a couple bands in countries that when they-- and I also noticed actually each country really focusing on their own artists, because, of course, they were in their face. UK was really focusing on local artists, and I felt like Australia did the same thing, and America really did the same thing. I was like, "Well, maybe it would be really good to open up and branch out a little bit so that like if things like this happen again, you can sort of have these little micro communities elsewhere, and it's not going to actually like make my business completely fail."

Because, like Australia was open up to Australia, to itself, on-- [crosstalk]

Interviewer: To some extent.

Jodie: There was, to some extent. There were lockdowns and all of that sort of thing, and it was a bit of a nightmare. In WA, you could go around and round. People, they could still do those things. It's just like they couldn't get out. An important thing too is that one of my-- an amazing woman who joined my company, Spinning Top, is called Anna Benefield, and she and I co-manage. She's from Mississippi, and she's lived in LA. She was a booking agent, and she started working for Spinning Top during COVID as well, because, of course, booking agents got furloughed or laid off, the first ones to go. She started really helping me out during that time.

Interviewer: Yes, that's the next step, isn't it? You make it out here, you find your way out, and then you start to find the people that you connect with in the US, either personally or professionally, and then you build from there. That's when you really start to move, because you're in, and you're a local. Yes, well, it's an incredible story. It's just great to hear, and the roots of it are just very inspirational. If you could go back to, well, around about 2013, I guess, when you were making the decision to move out to the US, what would you tell yourself that you didn't know at the time? What advice would you give yourself?

Jodie: That it was all going to be okay. [laughter] It was scary. It was big, and I had to make a lot of big decisions. I think I was like, "Am I doing the right thing?" There was a lot of stress involved with if it was going to work or not. I'd probably just tell myself that it was just all going to be okay, and it was going to work out. It's going to be really hard work, but that I probably didn't have to stress as much as I did.

Interviewer: Just, thank you very much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and we really appreciate it. This is the audio conversation segment of the Cockatoo. It's the Australian Music Alive.

Jodie: Great name, by the way.

Interviewer: Thank you very much. It's a noisy bird, but we love it.

Jodie: I've been called that many times.

Interviewer: We all have a bit of cockatoo in us.

Jodie: Yes.

Interviewer: So thanks to everyone listening. We are a 501C3, so you are more than welcome. If you like the work we do and you want to support us, you're more than welcome to donate. More than anything, we appreciate you listening to the stories, and we look forward to catching you on the next edition. Cheers.