We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Reid Clow. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Reid below.
Reid, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the toughest things about progressing in your creative career is that there are almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?
When I was younger, people constantly told me not to pursue a life in the music industry. I didn’t listen to them, but, I’ve found myself giving the same advice over the years.
Life in the music business is unrelenting, it’s thankless, it’s thousands of hours of work that nobody sees, for an hour or two in the limelight.
One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard about this is, “They say you have to work your ass of every day to become an overnight success.”
Keep at it.
Reid, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Hey! My name is Reid Clow. I am an artist manager, concert promoter, social media manager, entrepreneur, and music archivist. Below I am going to give you a tale of work ethic, an in-depth story about the grind, and how it never ends.
If you don’t feel like reading my entire life story in the music & entertainment industry, I’ll leave a TL;DR conclusion at the bottom.
I spent a lot of time on the internet in my teens. I grew up in the era of the early internet and watched it become what it is today. I have had an affinity for social media handles and “rare” usernames since 2006. When I was 17, I told my older family friend that I was into the Fat Wreck Chords band Lagwagon, and he dumped a massive hard drive of ska and punk rock music that he had illegally torrented onto my laptop. That same summer, I had found a love for the band Sublime after hearing the contentiously named “Date Rape” on The World Famous KROQ, driving home from a friend’s house. I already had a bunch of Sublime on my computer from my friend’s hard drive dump, and went down the Sublime rabbit-hole of studio albums, live albums, and bootleg recordings; this was a rabbit-hole which I’ve never come out of. A band like Sublime deeply inspired me to pursue the music business because they did everything themselves from recording to touring, via their own label, Skunk Records, until it was time to sign to a major label.
I got my start promoting local concerts in 2010 with a high school friend of mine named Brandon Goldberg. We were 19 year-old community college students bored at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. We decided to throw several shows together with local bands we’d find on websites like Facebook, MySpace, and ReverbNation. From December of 2010 throughout 2011, we promoted shows at the now defunct Cobalt Cafe in Canoga Park, California, which was an all ages music venue with a stage, a bathroom, and space for a crowd.
In fall of 2011, I transferred to UC Santa Cruz for my junior year of college, where I stayed attending shows & booking events on campus as well as at a dive bar called Bocci’s Cellar. The summer of 2012 changed everything for me when I found myself an internship at Silverback Music, a music management company which represents Slightly Stoopid & Fishbone, and at the time, managed bands such as Rebelution & The Expendables. Co-founder of Silverback Music, Jon Phillips, managed Sublime in the mid-90s, and got them signed to MCA Records subsidiary Gasoline Alley in 1995, which was a big deal for me. My friends and I have been archiving and researching Sublime for, at the time of this writing, multiple decades. At Silverback Music’s internship program, I learned how to manage a street team for international artists, the true value of in-person networking, and the flagship saying, “no job too big or small,” which I find myself constantly saying to this day.
That same summer, my friends The Palmer Squares, Chicago hip-hop duo who found underground notoriety in the bubbling YouTube rap scene of the late aughts and early 2010s, who I was just a fan of at the time, announced via Twitter that they were coming to Los Angeles for the first time, had no contacts other than a couple of other rappers, and wanted to perform some shows. My friend frantically called me while I was working my job at a bagel shop to let me know they’d be in town in 10 days. We ended up booking The Palmer Squares on some ranch property between Los Angeles and Ventura, in Santa Rosa Valley, where we rented a single port-a-potty, let fans camp out, had a large bonfire, and partied all night. The Palmer Squares, as well as opening acts, performed on a makeshift stage that was crafted out of a wooden flatbed trailer hitch.
My senior year of college, I stayed helping Silverback Music promote remotely, including the Slightly Stoopid show at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz in January of 2013, and continued to learn the trade of independent artist management. It was in fall of 2012 that it was time to learn by doing. A younger buddy of mine informed me there was a reggae-rock band from his hometown of San Carlos, CA named Dewey and the Peoples, that one of their members was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, and I should speak with them. I went on to work with this band, further refining the art of independent artist management, and the pinnacle of their career as a band being their performance at California Roots Festival in Monterey, CA in May of 2014. We made shows happen in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Hollywood, San Diego, Oregon. The band was great, but disbanded sometime in 2015.
A year out of college, in 2014, I got hired as a marketing assistant & junior talent buyer at a venue in Hermosa Beach, California called Saint Rocke, which was the first full-time paid opportunity I had obtained in the music industry. I learned a lot working at Saint Rocke, because I was allowed to sit in on booking meetings, and add tools to my tool-belt. I learned how to market a show or concert from the venue side of things, the realities of venue capacity versus ticket price, and how various deals work when it comes to paying the bands.
In early 2015, The Palmer Squares reached back out to me after the success of the ranch event in 2012, and told me they wanted to come back to Southern California. I set up a small run of shows in Santa Barbara, Hermosa Beach, San Diego, and another friend at the time booked a warehouse party with Sahtyre in the hood of Los Angeles somewhere. Around this time, my friend, the same one who called me about The Palmer Squares tweet in 2012, told me it was time to come up with a name to brand my events under. We drank some beers and smoked a little bit of weed, and settled on the name Swear Jar. We liked it because it sounded pretty punk rock, but at the same time, it sounds like something a mother would love. Since 2015, I’ve been branding and promoting my shows, tours, and concert bookings under the name Swear Jar Presents, and have since been become known by my social media handle which I have on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr, which is @SwearJar. Some people call me Swear Jar. I’m fine with it.
In this same era, of 2014-15, I did a 6-month stint tour-managing The English Beat, where we worked pretty much seven days a week, and were at NRG Recording at the time. We shared space with Motörhead about nine months before Lemmy passed away. One of my favorite memories of working for The English Beat was being a fly on the wall while Lemmy and Dave Wakeling smoked a cigarette together and shared memories of London in the 1970s. Working for this band taught me a lot about valuing myself, knowing my worth, having a spine, and life on the road.
Moving onward into 2016, I worked with a band called LAW, which was fronted by Jakob Nowell, son of the late Bradley Nowell from Sublime. I booked them some of their first out of town shows, including Slightly Stoopid after-parties in Berkeley, CA (shoutout to The Happys), and Avila Beach (shoutout to BODEGAS, Chris Swanson Rest In Peace). We threw the most fun 4th of July party ever at “Papa” Jim Nowell’s house on the Long Beach Peninsula that year.
In 2017, I worked for an old-school hip-hop promoter for 6 months, and continued to learn how concert promotion works, this time, from the perspective of a third party promoter. This promoter has major stain in the rap promotion scene, booked Kendrick Lamar’s first ever show in Los Angeles, and also promoted Lil Peep’s show on the Come Over When You’re Sober Tour. We parted ways at the end of 2017.
I spent 2018 booking and promoting local concerts at dive bars throughout Hermosa Beach, and heavily researching instagram growth. At the end of 2018, I met an artist named GONER, who makes alternative, emotional, and rock-inspired hip-hop music. We still work together to this day. When I met GONER, he was 19 years old, had everything from the image, the sound, the instagram username @goner (at the time), and everything that I thought could get people’s heads turning toward him. We began our journey working together, brick by brick, at the end of 2018, and never stopped. On the last day of 2023, GONER’s biggest song “Know Me” reached 1 million plays on Spotify.
In December of 2018, I met a social media entrepreneur and eCommerce professional who I ended up interning for, and then becoming his executive assistant. I learned how to build Shopify stores, network with meme pages and influencers, and I got to be part of executing an “Esskeetit” chain deal with Lil Pump. It was at this office in West Hollywood where we took meetings with the likes of Jake Paul, Jay Alvarrez, and DJ Khaled’s manager. Daddy Long Neck happened to be in town one week, summer of 2019, and he needed somewhere to go for the weekend. I took Daddy Long Neck in, and he ended up living with me for a month in 2019, and returned around Christmas time. He proceeded to stay with me in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. In early we took his TikTok account from 0 to 100,000 followers in a week, from 100,000 followers to 1,000,000 followers in a matter of weeks, and to 5,000,000 followers within that year. Working with Daddy Long Neck taught me a lot about the ins and outs of influencer management, growing instagram pages with real followers, the new age of content creation,
In 2021, I received a phone call that Full Send was looking for a talent manager for Brian Lally, and his character “Gramps.” As it turned out, Jesse’s warehouse was in Torrance, and I live in Redondo Beach, so the commute was easy. While this experience was short lived, I made life-long connections at the company, and a viral video I recorded has been seen hundreds of millions of times, including on Snoop Dogg’s instagram in 2023.
At the end of 2021, I found myself working in NFTs and cryptocurrency, which has had its ups and downs, though I strengthened my community management abilities, managing Discord communities of over 100,000 users, speaking publicly on Twitter (X) Spaces, spending more time learning Twitter (X) management, and continuing to network within a new space. For the last two years, this has been my focus, outside of my life’s passion, which is music management, working with GONER, and a select few other artists.
My conclusion:
The last 13+ years in this business has taught me that unless you are born into the business, no one is going to hand you an opportunity. Everything must be fought for, worked for. Every skill must be carefully learned, and there is no end to the learning. One day you might think you know it all, and you’ll look back and realize, the more you think you know, the less you actually do. I try to remain humble, be grateful for my experiences, and understand that every single experience, good or bad, can teach you a lesson or a skill you might not have yet realized.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I’ve spent the last 5+ years taking instagram growth seriously. There is no silver bullet to growth, especially in 2024. These days, it’s about having great content that cuts through the clutter, and provides some sort of value, whether that’s news, information, laughs, and is meaningful in some way.
I’ve often had people DM me and say, “I want to be a content creator,” or “I’ve thought about making content.”
And my response, 10 out of 10 times, is “Start today.” Fewer people than you’d think have actually taken this advice.
Anyone looking to grow their social presence should do any and all research they can online, on YouTube, and elsewhere, without spending any money. Most “gurus” will try to sell you a PDF. What I did was research all the free information gurus would provide to me for free ways to grow without spending ad dollars, and compile them into my own guide for growth. It’s slow and takes time, but if you do the work every single day for at least an hour, you will notice a steady climb over time of people willing to engage with you.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
One of my best friends once said to me, “I believe the meaning of life is to spread love, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to spread good music.” I try to live by that statement, and I tend to agree with it. Sharing music that I connect with, and that I think others may connect with, is a good mission toward living an authentic life in the music business, and a great way to stay grounded in a wild industry.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: http://instagram..com/swearjar
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/swearjarpresents
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/swearjar
Image Credits
Photo of. me with the microphone singing is by Sean McCracken