Behind The Label: The Ins and Outs of Indie Book Publishing with Amber Mundinger and Tamara Deike for ‘Bring Music Home’
We sat down and had a lovely chat delving into the ins and outs of the journey of how to take a coffee table book from idea to reality with Amber Mundinger and Tamara Deike for their project “Bring Music Home.”
“Bring Music Home” (BMH) was co-founded as an independent project by Amber Mundinger, Tamara Deike, and Kevin W Condon with the support and collaboration of colleagues across music and entertainment. The project has captured iconic music venues and the personalities behind them in more than 30+ cities. We wanted to showcase the beauty, adventure, and life of music by having a q+a with the book’s creators to bring you a behind the scenes peek into why this coffee table book deserves a spot in your collection.
PPLA:You open the book with Austin and it’s such a famed music scene. How was it possible to pick which venues to showcase and did you have a favorite?
TD: Austin has an incredibly rich music history spanning so many genres. We tried our best to include as many venues as we could, both iconic and new and emerging. Part of the challenge was that all of these spaces were of course closed because we were in the midst of the pandemic. To us, every venue is special because it creates a space for gathering. So many memories are held inside the walls of these physical locations. For me personally, getting to sit down at Threadgill’s with owner Eddie Wilson was pretty special…he’s got the best stories as one of the purveyors of the hippie x redneck movement in Austin, and as the previous owner of the Armadillo World Headquarters. We were also fortunate enough to speak to him just weeks before Threadgill’s, sadly, officially closed.
PPLA: Miami was another favorite, did you find each city gave you a different essence? How was that and did you find yourself having a favorite city to feature as you wove through the story of music across the United States?
TD: Every city absolutely has its own musical essence, despite the genre. It’s the people, the climate, the food, the history, and layers of what came before, musically. The venues in Miami are no different. They’re shaped by the Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage, the beach, the heat, the sex appeal, and the flashy cars. The venues we featured in Miami specifically, are home to House Music, Merengue, Hip-Hop, Afro-Beat, you name it. I don’t have a favorite city, for me it’s about the feeling you get when you walk into a room. It’s hard to explain but it’s an energy you feel in a space where so many raw, rare moments in music have taken shape on the stage.
It’s just something you feel. The first time I went to the Fillmore in San Francisco I felt it. A tingling on your skin. So many greats have owned that stage—Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, and Otis Redding. I felt the same way when I walked into Pappy and Harriets for the first time in Pioneertown, CA. It’s a little echo you can feel from layers and layers of times that came before. Not just the music but the people who felt something for that lil’ moment in time.
PPLA: What inspired the final Other Cities section? How did you go about selecting who made that bonus cut of other music venues for readers to discover?
TD: We knew we couldn’t cover every city across the U.S. and we most definitely knew not all venues lie directly inside the city limits…so it was essential that we thought about some of the other out-of-bounds places where important stages live and bands will travel to perform because they have a vibe and pull a crowd.
PPLA: What do you hope readers of Bring The Music Home will take away after enjoying the stories?
TD: I hope that readers will recognize the importance of music venues as a part of our communities and see them as essential to our culture. We don’t have culture without music, without art! This book only scratches the surface, there are so many other badass spots out there that have created their own community of music fans and offer a place for new and emerging talent to be seen and experienced. This book is a roadmap to discovering live music across the U.S., but it’s also a timestamp of a historical moment in time when we quite literally didn’t have live music to experience. It’s a reminder of how important these spaces are to our communities, and to us, as humans who need connection, and of course, to dance 😉
PPLA: What surprised you along the way?
TD: I think I was most surprised by the sheer tenacity of the people I met. Their will to keep doing what they love—whether they were a venue owner, a bar staffer, a sound technician, or a musician themselves. This inability to perform, to see music, to gather together—wasn’t something that any of us could have anticipated and everyone was doing their damnedest to navigate the uncertainty as best they could. I was surprised by the generosity, empathy, and vulnerability I saw in the folks we met along the way, and their support in our taking on the enormity of this storytelling process. We were united by our love of music, and that’s a powerful thing.
PPLA: Charlotte (NC) has such stunning cover art for its introduction, who did that print? And how did you land on it for Charlotte’s cover page before we head into its venues.
AM: Dave Haire designed the Charlotte cover art. He is both a designer and a musician. Dave was connected to us through our collaborators in Charlotte and we gave him total freedom to creatively express what he thought would artistically showcase the city and its music through his art. Each of the pieces of art per city were designed specifically for Bring Music Home by a different, wonderful artist and we did a poster campaign with the art before the book released to raise immediate emergency relief funds for NIVA – they sold out quickly!! And as we began laying out the book it felt like the most natural way to open each city section was to highlight the art created by each of these individuals that speaks to that particular city in such a unique and beautiful way.
PPLA: Being a New Yorker I couldn’t help but be a little biased at how great the city was showcased. Being in New York yourself do you have a favorite hometown spot that is featured? Do you have a side story of it you can share with us?
AM: Totally! It was very hard for me to limit the number of music spots in nyc! Each one holds a special place in my heart – and many more that we didn’t get to include in the book.. It’s really hard to choose a favorite because I have so many but one would be Forest Hills – it’s the most unique, intimate stadium environment to see a show at a former tennis stadium for the US Open with such history of the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and more playing there. What Mike and his team created and renovated there is so special. This year Forest Hills Stadium celebrates 100 years of the stadium and 10 years of renovation!! Plus all the hidden hangout spots in that venue are epic – it’s a treasure hunt in many ways wandering through there.
A side story of Forest Hills – one of the hidden speakeasies they built had an entrance that was a porta potty. I can’t remember if it still exists at this point, but once people heard about it they started just opening random porta potties around the stadium to see if they could get access to this intimate little bar hang. Most of the time they were literally just opening up a door to find a toilet lol.
PPLA: How did the concept of this book first come about? How long was it from concept to delivery?
AM: The book concept started with a conversation I had with our friend Kevin Condon about documenting live venues in New York and showcasing the people behind them. NYC had just shut down and we were at my husband’s shop in the west village having a little pow wow about what was going on and thinking about the effects on our industry. Then Tamara and I were talking further and she was in Austin, SXSW was cancelling, and we talked about covering that city. It quickly evolved to us creating a brief and reaching out to multiple colleagues across the country – ultimately close to 100 people collaborated with us to get everything pulled together. We really wanted to show the humanity behind our industry and that these places are cultural institutions and also these people see these jobs as a lifestyle they live and breathe and care about. We started the concept in March 2020, were editing the book in October and then delivering the book to consumers by February 2021. So less than a year which is unheard of in publishing.
PPLA: What was the indie publishing experience like?
AM: It was very unique. We had a large publisher who was interested and said it would take two years. For us that felt like eternity given we wanted the book to help support NIVA as soon as possible. So we decided not to wait and found our printer directly through our book designer, Bonnie Briant, and then basically went to various brands that supported music and asked them to support the cause and tell these stories. Both YETI and Tito’s Vodka did that and gave us the runway funding we needed to print the book and make it all happen. We then got a global distribution deal after our first print run was already out direct to consumers which helped us with broader placement in independent bookstores, B&N etc. But we went a completely non traditional publishing route by doing this and effectively became an indie publisher.
You can purchase ‘Bring The Music Home,’ here.
