"In retrospect, there are a million reasons why I shouldn't have done it." We're having a beer at the 5 o'clock bar on a Tuesday evening in July and it's about to storm. Tokyo Rosenthal, whose career is setting the world on fire is explaining when he had to take matters into his own hands once at a gig. "I was a boxer but I'd never hit anybody out of the ring. We were closing out the evening with Janis Joplin's 'Piece of My Heart.' That cover always seems to start something in the audience. I get to the first chorus and this guy comes over, pushes me away from the mic, takes it and starts singing! Me and [bassist] Alex look at each other and we go on playing. The second chorus comes, and the guy does it again, but this time, he spills beer on my guitar. Now I'm starting to do a small burn. I can't wait for the set to be over so I can get in the guy's face and talk to him. I didn't have to wait. He came over a third time. This time he came over and I decked him."
While having to teach audience members a lesson is not Tokyo's calling card, getting his point across is, and he's doing a very good job of letting the world know right now that he's well on his way to becoming the next household name of Americana and folk rock. Inspired by The Byrds, The Indigo Girls, Bonnie Raitt, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Buffalo Springfield and Joni Mitchell, Tokyo's sound is earthy, reminiscent, gritty and soulful.
An artist to the world, Tokyo is and has always been a master marketer. "There are a lot of talented musicians out there that don't know how to market themselves. Today it's even tougher than in my first go 'round in the business. Back then there was only one way to make it--a record label signed you. There was no Internet, no indy labels. In college, we'd play all year, go into a studio, cut a demo and walk around New York dropping it off at all the record labels. Then we'd sit at home waiting for rejection letters. We'd hang the letters on our dorm walls and it looked very cool because we had gotten rejected from Capital Records, rejected from RCA, rejected from Columbia. But that was how it went down. Today you have to know how you're going to market yourself. Are you just going to throw your songs on a website and expect people to find you and hire you or buy your CD? They're not going to do that. You have to figure out what the spin is going to be. You and I wouldn't be sitting here talking today if we didn't come up with a spin on 'Edmonton.' It's why I'm here today."
"Edmonton," often referred to as Tokyo's musical renaissance, was embraced so heavily by the Canadian city in which it was penned, was his first song to air on radio and even led to Tokyo being presented the key to the city by the mayor. "We came up with the idea to send 'Edmonton' to all of the radio stations up there and it got the radio play. If we hadn't have come up with the spin on how to market Edmonton, nothing would have ever happened. I would not be playing music full time, or even at all."
Tokyo goes on to explain that musicians have to be aggressive about letting people know that they are out there. "Everybody knows the story of how so-and-so walked into the bar, heard you play and signed you. That doesn't happen anymore because the labels don't even have the freedom to sign people like they used to in the old days. You've got to figure out what to do to get attention. When I wrote 'St. Patrick's Day,' my promotions guy said, 'Let's not release it until St. Patrick's Day.' We knew that on St. Patrick's Day the stations would play a song like that. It broke on 58 stations and even in the UK. On the new album I wrote a song about gay marriage, dedicated to my kid brother who died 20 years ago from AIDS. I thought it was really cool that gay people can now get married. I wrote a song called Love Won Out. So we're going to market that song to the gay community. I'm not going to market it to the straight community, maybe they don't give a shit."
"There's not a book that you can read on this like 'Get Publicity for your CD 101,' but you look at what you have and what the possible angles could be. At the very least you want to get it reviewed, stay on top of people, and that's where the day job part gets really tough. I play at night, but spend my days marketing. I'm sending emails, calling places, setting up tours and getting people to write. If you don't have that ability but you're going into the studio to record, then you should have the money in your budget for a publicist. If you don't, then you're spinning your wheels. That's the key thing--how are you going to get people to your MySpace page? How do people know that you're there?
There may be a lot of artists that think it's not righteous to do things that way, but the hype is part of it. I exploited Edmonton as far as I could possibly take it and it changed my life. I mean, my life has totally changed." Tokyo goes on tour in Japan in August, Europe in October, New York in November. Catch him while you can at Sadlack's in Raleigh on September 7th.
Photos taken at Five O'Clock Bar