Chris Garibaldi revives his Lotuspool Records

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I’m a few minutes late meeting Chris Garibaldi at Parkville’s Bentley Guitar Studios, on that river town’s idyllic Main Street. Garibaldi — lead singer, guitarist and occasional trombonist for the local rock band Suneaters — is perched on a bench inside the shop, teasing chords from an electric guitar. He isn’t one to wait idly.

We move into Bentley’s acoustic room to talk, and Garibaldi, 44, perches on the edge of the stage. His day job, he tells me, is as a technology consultant, and he looks the part: tall, with thick-framed glasses and mad-scientist curls. He crosses one khaki-clad leg over the other and places his hands atop his knees, like a professor satisfied that he knows the answers. What he could teach, though, isn’t offered in school: fronting a rock band and running a record label.

Garibaldi’s easy disposition is part of what has made Lotuspool Records, the label he co-founded in 1992, a survivor. It has outlasted early signees: locally beloved acts such as Bully Pulpit, the Weightmen, Panel Donor, Zoom.

“We started the label when we were very young, and the bands that were on it were very young, too,” he tells me. “Back then, you could put out an indie record and get a lot of attention and press. At that time, there was a lot of support for indie music — and then Nirvana hit, and that support was still there, but then all of a sudden a lot of other people started showing up. Major labels started making us offers, started making our bands offers, and people started to get a different perspective of what we were supposed to be doing.”

Around 2000, Lotuspool went on an unofficial hiatus. The label was never inactive, Garibaldi says, though by then he had amicably parted company with his co-founding friends, including Matt Hyde (who now owns the 715 restaurant in Lawrence). Garibaldi spent most of the early aughts living in Los Angeles.

“Lotuspool was always in my mind,” he says. “I just always figured that I’d get back to it when the dust sort of settled, and we could really make some decisions about how we could move forward.”

By 2011, a few years after Garibaldi relocated to Parkville, he and Scott Hartley — bassist in the recently formed Suneaters — had forged a fresh vision for Lotuspool. In 2012, as the label marked its 20th anniversary, the two had begun brainstorming a comeback.

“I was on the periphery when he [Garibaldi] started Lotuspool 22 years ago,” Hartley tells me. “I always admired how dedicated he was to putting out his friends’ music, and it wasn’t half-assed. He’s one of those guys who executes on it. So we started discussing how we wanted to resuscitate the label and get some new artists and push it forward. I’ve always been the guy that’s relentlessly — sometimes obnoxiously — forced new music on him, so I might be more discerning and adventurous in terms of the artists we sign.”

“We’ve really tried to find a mixture of what we consider good music, which is not music of one particular style and typically not music that is the current style of the day,” Garibaldi says. “We like stuff that challenges the listener.”

Sure enough, the present-day Lotuspool roster has the feel of something handpicked — by a stubbornly idiosyncratic hand. Besides, of course, Suneaters (whose debut, Suneaters I, was released in 2011), are singer-songwriter Chris Cardwell (also the drummer for Suneaters), electric-guitar duo Hollow Body, Chicago’s Bully Pulpit and Lawrence folk-pop songstress Heidi Lynne Gluck. There’s also a smattering of other obscure and relatively inactive bands, including Zoom — which last released an album with Tim Kerr Records in 1994 — and Krafty Lovelordz, a high school band from Garibaldi’s Chicago adolescence.

“A lot of the things that we do are counterintuitive to running a label, like signing bands that don’t tour,” Garibaldi admits with a laugh. “That’s not a good idea if you want to be a huge label. Signing bands that don’t usually stand up next to each other, bands that are uncommon, that’s not the way it’s done. But we haven’t made money in years, so we don’t really care.”

The point, Garibaldi insists throughout our conversation, is to support his artists and get their music into the world. And in Gluck, he and Hartley may at last have a defining figure for their label.

“The trick is that Heidi is very serious about having a career as a musician, and she deserves one,” Garibaldi says. “That’s one thing that’s really important for us: that we don’t underserve her or her talent. We want to make sure that Heidi Lynne Gluck has the musical career that she deserves because she’s so good, and we want to be tending to that like a good label should.”

In April, Lotuspool put out Gluck’s debut EP, The Only Girl in the Room, which is among the strongest local releases this year — one that sounds ready for a wider audience.

“It was clear really fast that it was artists first across-the-board with Chris,” Gluck tells me. “It wasn’t so that I could be like, ‘Oh, I’m on such and such a label.’ I just wanted help to get these songs out, and it really seemed like he would be able to do that without a bunch of runaround. And he did. I would love to be heard more, and I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t be the people who could help me achieve that.”

Garibaldi has developed what now feels like an almost old-school tool to develop his acts: an in-house multimedia production team (helmed by Kansas filmmaker W. David Keith). People still make music videos, after all, and some go viral. And Lotuspool has three more releases slated for this year (one each from Matt Hyde, Bully Pulpit and Suneaters) and four already on the books for 2016.

“One of the mistakes we made as kids running the label was that we made a lot of short-term decisions,” Garibaldi says. “We didn’t have foresight. We were too concerned about paychecks and debt. And now it’s like, ‘Let’s take the thing that we do well, which is to foster interesting music, and not worry about the little things.’ Let’s see if we might be able to figure out something that might make the music bigger. That’s the goal.”