Partners Try to Keep Doctor Dream Alive

Doctor Dream Records, Orange County’s longest-running rock record label, is trying to survive the riptide stirred by Seagram Co.’s purging of its recently acquired holdings in the music business.

Mercury Records had bankrolled Doctor Dream since 1997 in a joint venture with four partners who bought the Huntington Beach independent label from its founder, David Hayes.

But with cutbacks at Mercury, Doctor Dream has lost its funding; one of the partners, Stirling McIlwaine, said Wednesday that the partnership is trying now to regain control of Doctor Dream, with the intention of finding a new funding source and keeping the 16-year-old label alive.

“We’re negotiating to buy the assets and move on down the road,” McIlwaine said. “We’ll talk to other majors [as possible financial partners] after we resolve this situation.”

Howard Benson, another partner, said Doctor Dream’s deal with Mercury gives the bigger company “the right to take [the label] from us if they want. We want to work it out so the artists still survive and the label still survives. Mercury is not going to just give it to us, but I hope all parties look at the artists’ [interests].”

Meanwhile, Doctor Dream’s six employees have been laid off, and finished or nearly completed albums by Los Infernos, Manic Hispanic and the Tiki Tones are being held up. Welt, the Huntington Cads and the Big Six are other acts signed to Doctor Dream and its subsidiary, Mai Tai.

Last month, Doctor Dream’s management expected to sign a new deal keeping the label tied to Mercury, but it fell through.

“Mercury decided against it,” McIlwaine said. “That’s just the nature of the PolyGram-Seagram merger. They’re trying to save costs, and we got stuck in the middle.”

McIlwaine said he, Benson and partners Christopher Sabec and Steve Ochs hope it will take only “the next couple of weeks” to disentangle Doctor Dream from Mercury and move forward with releasing and promoting records.

“We feel we have some radio-ready material, and we’re looking to get the music out there. [Doctor Dream] is one of the smaller issues for PolyGram and Seagram to wrap up. We’re just trying to get out of the way.”

Among the employees whose jobs ended last month are Josh Agle, the Tiki Tones and former Swamp Zombies guitarist who has been Doctor Dream’s art director since the late 1980s, and Maurice Torres, the Manic Hispanic guitarist who joined Doctor Dream in 1991 and served as label manager.

“I’ve been through a lot with this label. Maybe it’s time for me to move on,” Torres said. “They’ve expressed interest in me staying and running it [if the partners are successful in reacquiring Doctor Dream], but I have to have a clear vision of where it’s going to go.”

Benson, who makes his living primarily as a record producer, said the lesson the Doctor Dream partners learned is that there may not be a place for hybrid record companies that take a middle road between the low-cost, grass-roots independent approach of slowly bringing along a band over the long haul, and the big-bucks, shoot-the-moon ethic of a major label.

“We really do feel we’re going to survive,” Benson said. “If we get it back and run it ourselves, it’s either going to be a very stripped-down label run very independently or part of a major that’s run very aggressively. There’s not going to be any in-between.”

TRAMPS REVISITED: The Cadillac Tramps, trying to write a second chapter after disbanding four years ago, will start by taking a look back: Manager Chris Martin says the regrouped Tramps’ first release will be a live album of songs from the band’s three early-’90s albums, to be recorded in concert April 3 at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana.

The Tramps’ first comeback gambit was a success, Martin said, as the band did turn-away business with February gigs at Linda’s Doll Hut in Anaheim and two larger clubs, the Roxy in West Hollywood and the Casbah in San Diego.

“The main thing is to get a new record written. They’ve got a ton of material,” Martin said.

The plan is to put out the live album on an independent label, then seek a bigger deal for the Tramps’ studio comeback. Negotiations with Doctor Dream, which issued the Tramps’ previous albums, were derailed when Mercury discontinued the label’s funding.