I dare you to look at Swing House Studio’s client roster and not find at least one artist you absolutely love. Both the quality and quantity of acts that have rehearsed or recorded at Swing House over the course of the studio’s 16 year history is staggering, and one man has been there for it all: Swing House Studios President and CEO Phil Jaurigui. From humble beginnings as a one-room rehearsal space, Jaurigui and his business partner Warren Huart have grown Swing House into one of the go-to spaces for artists to create some of the most memorable recordings of the past two decades.

It’s hard to believe that his work with Swing House is just one of many impressive notches on Jaurigui’s belt: he’s also been instrumental in the creation and development of The Summer Strummer Music Festival in Santa Monica, The Sunset Strip Music Festival in Hollywood, and the Austin Rox Showcase at South by Southwest; has produced and managed several bands; and acts as a scout for D’Addario Strings/Evans Drum Heads, and Planet Waves Cables. Yet with all he has going on, Jaurigui was still able to find time to talk to LA Music Blog about his work within the industry, his advice for young bands, and the natural disaster that helped Swing House get its start.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you got your start in the industry?

Okay. Well, I started Swing House 16 years ago, and it was completely by accident. I was in a band, and we were from San Francisco. We moved out to LA to try and live the dream. I was working, and we would rehearse and recorded in a small studio on the corner of Santa Monica and Vine. This was around like ’93, ’94. We would rehearse and record there, so I kind of started interning there. I was helping out part time, cleaning up and turning the PA on and off and stuff like that. I started actually enjoying it and got to know all the LA bands that came through there.

Just as I was starting to get the hang of that and get into that world, the Northridge earthquake hit and the building that the studio was in got red tagged, which means that the building’s unsafe to stay in and they’re gonna either tear it down or have to repair it. When the building got red tagged, my boss said, “Hey, I’m gonna break the lease and get out of the business ’cause I’ve been doing this for so long and I want to move on.” I was like, “Oh man, I liked doing this. This was actually kind of fun. What am I gonna do now?” He’s like, “Well I don’t know, but I’m gonna sell all the equipment.”

Here I was, just a typical Hollywood band dude with no money and not really knowing what I wanted to do other than just be in a band. I got the idea that I’m going to max out the two credit cards that I had and buy his old 1970′s style, Neil Diamond PA system and his 16-track recording studio half-inch tape machine for $2,000 each. I said, “I’m gonna start my own studio. I’ll figure it out.” And that’s how I went. I bought the gear on my own, no business plan, no loans, no nothing other than the credit cards.

I searched everywhere around Hollywood for a couple months. Luckily for me that was after the earthquake and also after the riots, so LA was very desolate. It was like half as busy on the streets. There were empty buildings everywhere, and places were all out of business. I found this spot on Cahuenga that a woman owned, and I convinced her that I wanted to do a studio there. I said, “I’ll fix it up if you give me a year’s free rent,” and so she gave me a year free rent. I figured, “Okay, I’ve got a PA system. I’ve got a recording system. I have a room to do it in. Now I have one year to figure out how to make money.” And that’s how Swing House came to be.

I literally flew by the seat of my pants and decided I was gonna start a studio and put it in this one room, this one big room that kind of looked like a big like rumpus room. I started with just literally extension cords and some [gear] and a PA system, and I started bringing bands into it. Each month I would add air conditioning, or add some lighting, or I’d add extra electrical and more soundproofing. I just kept doing that until a year-and-a-half, two years in, it was actually turning into something somewhat popular.

I was still in a band at the same time, and after a while I was like, “You know, the band is not doing as well as the studio is doing. Maybe I should just concentrate on the studio.” I always wanted to play and I loved being in a band, but I was actually getting more creatively fulfilled by doing stuff in the studio. So I decided to just concentrate on the studio, and that’s when Swing House really started to take off.

That’s really cool to hear. Like you said, you definitely flew by the seat of your pants with it. You look at the industry today and it’s much less of that. Everything has to be planned and everything has to be calculated. I feel like there aren’t as many people willing to actually take a risk on something.

No, no, definitely you’re right. Entrepreneurship is the biggest risk you could take. I just didn’t know what I was gonna do, but it just kind of came together. As luck would have it, one of the first bands that rehearsed there was this band called Sugar Ray. They were totally unknown at the time, but they had a record deal with Atlantic Records. They couldn’t sell 10 records and they were bouncing their checks to me all the time, but they were really nice guys and I could tell that they were really working hard. I don’t think Atlantic even acknowledged them as a band until finally one day the drummer came up with that song “Fly,” and it seemed like within six months their whole world changed. They went from being a completely unknown band to being really popular all over the radio, all over MTV. They all got to buy new cars. I kind of saw their success sprout up in front of them and them being so happy and working so hard for it.

When they got big, they started using the studio to do a bunch of the recording, so the studio became well known to producers like David Kahne, who’s done Paul McCartney and Kelly Clarkson and all these other bands. Rick Rubin heard about it because a guy was walking by the studio one day. I don’t have any signs on my walls or anything like that, so no one knows where I am, but a guy came by and he knocked on the door. He’s like, “Hey, there’s a studio. I hear music.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s a studio.” He’s like, “Well, I’m friends with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they’re looking for a new place to rehearse and write all their new songs because John Frusciante has just rejoined the band and they want to have a private place to work.” So I said, “Sure. Bring ‘em over. I’ll show ‘em around.” So they came over and I showed ‘em around, and they ended up staying for five years. [LAUGHS]

They basically locked out my studio, the big room, for years. Rick Rubin came ’cause he was producing them, so he became a fan of the studio. He started bringing all his other bands to the studio. I was basically like, “Man, I’m so busy with the Chili Peppers that I don’t have room for any other bands.” I decided I needed to expand and have more rooms.

That’s when I went into a long couple years of trying to get a business loan and business partners and expanded the studio from one room to what is now, one, two, three, four, five. Five studio rooms, two recording studios, and a radio station, plus a whole unit of rentals and cartage, a whole unit that’s full of rental gear. So in 16 years I’ve gone from the one room and a rumpus room with some extension cords plugged in, to having Sugar Ray and the Chili Peppers in, to building it up to having pretty much every big band that did well in the ‘90s come through Swing House. And I expanded into this big facility that’s now 8,000 square feet.

That’s awesome. I was actually there not too long ago. There was a little band called Picture Me Broken that did a session there.

Yeah, that band’s great. Those kids are great. [Brooklyn’s] a really good singer. She has an amazing voice. The band was really tight, really nice kids. I thought they were really cool. I’m managing a young band now called Blowing Up The Moon who are like 15-year-olds as well.

Speaking about that, you’re also a manager. Can you tell us about the bands that you’re currently working with?

Yeah, it’s kind of a natural progression of owning a studio, because in this day and age, you really can’t make a living off of just owning a rehearsal studio or just owning a recording studio. You have to have your hand in lots of different pots of the entertainment industry ‘cause you have to do so many things just to try and make enough to make one living. A natural progression for me was to take an interest in some of the bands that rehearsed at Swing House, to record them and produce them and then eventually I became the manager of a couple of ‘em.

The first band that I started managing, which has been for about four years now, is a band called the Tender Box. They’re local guys from South Gate, Mexican Americans who were born and raised on Morrissey, the Smiths, the Cure, Depeche Mode, Blur, all those kind of Brit pop sounds of the ‘90s. That was their main love of music, and so these Mexican guys were totally influenced by all the English, UK bands, and my business partner here, who’s a producer as well, is English. It was kind of a perfect combination of him knowing the style that they loved and being able to help mold them into a really, really great band, so I’ve been working with those guys for four years now. They’ve done a bunch of commercials and a bunch of movie trailers and also wrote the theme song to the Spiderman cartoon that’s on the WB and Disney Channel. They’ve done some great tours. They did a sold-out UK tour opening for the Goo Goo Dolls, who are another one of our big clients. They’ve gone out with She Wants Revenge, who’s another one of our big clients.

I become friends and allies with so many of the bands that come through Swing House that it helps a lot as far as connecting a band that you manage and a band that you produce to a tour, to meeting another label, or all that kind of stuff. It’s a very good kind of work flow ’cause you can literally start your band here, rehearse in the small rehearsal room, make a demo in the recording studio, and you can do a showcase like Picture Me Broken did, get a record deal, go on tour, and do it all within the confines of Swing House. I try to encourage lots of growing from within, so I’m always looking for new bands that I could help develop or I could help be a part of, whether it be managing them or producing them or just sending them in the direction of the different industry people that I’ve become friends with over the years. I try to make it a very family-like atmosphere here where the bands that we work with are bands that we’re fans of and friends with also.

You also work with D’Addario as an artist rep, right?

That was another natural progression of owning Swing House. Probably about eight or nine years ago, I became friends with the D’Addario people through another A&R rep named John Ferrante who was a very, very, very well known guy around town with all the bands. He got Swing House endorsed by D’Addario and Planet Waves and Evans Drumheads, so I would always support their gear in the studio. We’d use it all the time, and I’d always encourage all the bands that came through here to use it.

Eventually when a spot opened up for an A&R guy, they came to me and said, “Phil, you’ve been endorsing our products for years now. Why don’t you just become the A&R guy since you’re around all the bands all the time anyways?” I was like, “Okay, that sounds perfect,” so it became a nice partnership where they’re very supportive of all the things I do in Swing House and the artists that I work with. They’re a very open-minded company as far as their marketing and expansion ideas, lots of grassroots marketing that helps bring in up-and-coming artists as well as the already great, established bands.

It’s been really nice because I’ve gotten to sign artists as extreme as Band of Horses and Robbie Robertson from The Band to a drummer named Longineu Parsons who was the drummer of Yellowcard and is now the drummer of Adam Lambert. I’ve been able to steadily meet great bands and develop relationships through Swing House, but also because that extra thing that I do with D’Addario and Evans really, really cements my validity to a lot of these up-and-coming bands that I’m a very good connection and a very legit guy to work with.

What other projects are you currently working on?

Well, like I said earlier, it’s so hard to make a really good living off just owning the studio because obviously everybody records in their houses now. Bands don’t have the budgets they used to have, so they really just can’t spend money for no reason in a recording studio unless they’re working on the perfect song, they have everything ready to go, and they do it really efficiently and fast. That doesn’t make it very easy, very profitable for us to make a lot of money in the recording and the rehearsal studios. Everybody’s on such tight budgets, you’re always giving people an extra good deal just to make sure they can get their project done, so I found that I really needed to expand and go in every direction.

One of the things that really is coming along good for us is the event production, so I’ve been producing a lot of events and Swing House has been producing a lot of events. When Indie 103 was around, we helped them produce a lot of their events, and then we did our own festival in Santa Monica called the Summer Strummer Festival for two years, which went really well. That kind of morphed into an idea of joining forces with the city of West Hollywood. We do a thing called the Sunset Strip Music Festival now. We produced that event last year. Ozzy was the headliner, and we had Korn, The Donnas, Pepper, Shiny Toy Guns, LMFAO, Shwayze…we had all these great LA bands play. It was totally diverse and totally wonderful. For the first time in the history of Sunset Strip, they actually closed the streets off to traffic and had basically a public street fair with two big stages on it. It was a really, really special event, and we’re doing it again this year on August 28th.

I’m taking that idea of doing outside productions, like putting on a street festival or a small corporate show, and trying to do that on a regular basis. We’re doing that all around. Not only all around town, but in different states. We’ve done a big event at South By Southwest the past couple years where we basically take over a venue and run the venue and sponsor the venue, and we bring all the bands that we’ve developed or worked with or are friends with. By always being in the public eye and always trying to expand on things that are musical, we try to make it so it’s just a never-ending branding of the Swing House company name. The way you can make money in music is so small that you have to really, really get your name in front of a lot of people to make sure the people know to call you, whether it be for a $50 rehearsal or a $50,000 festival. So that’s the kind of stuff we do. We do it all.

That’s awesome. We actually covered the Sunset Strip Music Festival last year. It was fantastic.

Oh, good. I’m glad you liked it. Everybody was very, very happy with it. It had such a nice vibe and such a great atmosphere. We’re looking to make it even bigger and better this year. We’re looking at some really, really good headliners that we’ll be announcing really soon, so it’ll be a real exciting year again

What advice do you have for young bands that are just trying to get into the industry?

In this day and age, it’s a blessing and it’s a curse to be in a band. The blessing side of it is that you could do whatever you want, however you want. You can come, you can make your own records, you can put out your own records, you can get them heard. People have access to hear you in a million different ways, which before it used to be you’re either on the radio or you’re not, and that’s it. After that it was you’re either on MTV or you’re not, and that’s it. Now you can be anywhere. You could build fans. You might not have millions of fans, but you gain hundreds and thousands of fans by just doing it yourself, and that’s the way that every great band starts, from Metallica to Motley Crue to R.E.M. to Fall Out Boy. They all started on their own. They all started small, and they all built up their reputations and their audiences one fan at a time.

If you’re a new band, just rehearse as much as you can, write and record as much as you can, and don’t look to anybody else to help you as far as building your sound and your audience. The only way you can do that is just by playing, playing, playing, playing relentlessly. The bands that survive—Wilco, AFI, Green Day, and a few others—they’re great bands, they’re valuable bands, and they’ll go on forever and forever because they never stopped touring and never stopped recording whether they had a record deal or not. That’s the way you gotta look at it, that it’s do it yourself. If you do it yourself long enough, you’ll eventually get good at it, and someone will notice it.