Milwaukee can be tough on childhood. The city itself is mostly red brick and the citizens a dark shade of angry. As a kid in the ‘80s, Jeff Castelaz spent his time in his parents’ basement bunker with the stereo turned up to DEAF to avoid the warring of a dysfunctional family in a city pissed that it’s not Chicago. He listened to Black Sabbath.
Jeff’s brother, Scott, staged a music intervention by turning him onto Joy Division and New Order. Both ends of those spectrums taught Jeff two things: there was a hell of a lot of music out there, and, it can save your soul. But he wasn’t born with god given musical talent, so at 18, he started managing bands.
The first band out of the gate was a group called Wild Kingdom, which begat Citizen King, which begat the song “Better Days,” which went to No. 3 on the charts in 1999. The band got a label and Jeff got some street cred.
Jeff defined his role as that of helping artists achieve their dreams, almost as payback for saving his soul. And when your soul has been saved, there’s only one place to park it: Los Angeles.
By the time Jeff landed in L.A., the business was getting wobbly. Music was coursing through the pipes of the Internet and leaving skid marks on the spreadsheets of the big record companies. They stuck to the established bands that could sell tickets and T’s to compensate for the death of the CD. But they weren’t building bands anymore. Jeff views the label business as micro-venture capitalists. “Are labels still important? Yeah, they are,” he says, “We turn the music into a business.” But the establishment was bleeding money with the bad habits that easy money brings.
Then Jeff met Peter Walker. Peter is a musician. Jeff is a manager. They turned a mutual respect of music into a decision to control their destinies by joining forces, and so, ladies and gentlemen: Dangerbird Records. Jeff says, “We’re like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, where chocolate meets peanut butter and abracadabra! A whole new taste sensation!”
“They must be crazy!” was a common howl they heard in regards to starting an indie label. But that didn’t faze them: In 2004, they opened offices in Jeff’s bedroom in Silver Lake, an enclave for the indie-alt music scene.
Jeff and Peter agreed that the Dangerbird family would be one of the new management models, one that puts purpose over profits. They both had to like a band’s sound and players to take them on, and their handpicked staff has to feel the love too in order to turn the music into a business. Jeff says, “Signing a band is like getting married. There has to be love.”
2009: It was the best of times and the worst of times. One of Dangerbird’s bands, Silversun Pickups, had built a passionate fan base and the group’s second album, “Swoon,” landed on Billboard’s Top Independent Album chart and copped a Grammy nomination, putting Dangerbird and Silversun more than twenty Google pages deep. Then, Jeff and his wife Jo Ann discovered that their sweet little six-year-old boy had cancer. His name was Pablo. He was mostly made of laughter.
Pablo had a rare form of children’s cancer called Wilms’ tumor. Jeff and Jo Ann spent 2009 lodged at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles where compassionate doctors focused on saving this boy’s life. Worry and fear went to joy and hope and then right back again to despair as Pablo’s case proved incurable.
On June 27, 2009, Pablo’s fight with cancer ended. His parents’ pain didn’t and Jeff’s would have to be served.
He created the Pablove Foundation to raise money for children’s cancer, then took the show on the road: A 3000-mile bicycle tour to keep the spirit of his son alive. Along the way, he discovered how much people gave a shit. Video blogs went out and money poured in. One man, who also lost a son to cancer, drove 11 hours just to meet Jeff and borrow some of his energy.
“You think being an adult makes you tougher. Pablo would go through hours of chemo, then just get up and want to play. He was as tough as they get,” Jeff says as he stares at a photo of Pablo perched on his shoulders. “The point is to give a shit. I care about my people, the bands, my family, and every kid and parent out there who is going through what we did.”
Jeff is now back full speed at Dangerbird, working to make his bands’ music into a business. And at Pablove, he’s working to keep Pablo’s spirit alive. – Bruce Dundore
Find out more about the Pablove Foundation here: www.pablove.org & here