KEN COOPER | A Profile Record exec did time in school of hard rock

The former Sin-O-Matic singer, a Columbiana native, is moving to Music City.
By GUY D'ASTOLFO
VINDICATOR ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
CLEVELAND -- Ken Cooper is showing a reporter around the future offices of his record label.
He's dressed in a black T-shirt, black sweat pants and flip-flops, and sports a day's growth of facial hair.
Rust Records, which the 34-year-old Columbiana native founded, is housed on an upper floor of a converted factory in an edgy west-side neighborhood that sits between urban chic and industrial scuzziness.
Light pours through giant factory windows with hundreds of panes. Exposed pipes snake down the raw brick walls. The concrete ceilings are 20 feet high; the wooden floors are well-worn.
Cooper pauses for a moment in front of the entrance, motioning with his arms. "Right here, we are going to mount some rusted ship metal that was salvaged from the bottom of Lake Erie," he says. "Below it will be a plaque that says Rust Records."
When Cooper and his 22 employees move into their new digs later this summer, they won't have to go far. The company's current suite is on the same floor.
But the short move will represent another leap for the record label that Cooper and his old bandmate Brian Patrick founded on a shoestring six years ago.
After the office tour, Cooper takes the reporter into his personal office, settles in behind his desk, and talks about how it all started.
The beginning
These days, Cooper is president of the record label, while Patrick, a Hubbard native, is executive producer and president of Jungle Recording Studio, which is located in the Rust suite.
But back in 2000, Cooper, who attended Youngstown State University, was working as a stockbroker. He also owned the Crandall Coffee House, a hippie-type hangout on the North Side of Youngstown that usually had a singer-songwriter strumming in a corner.
It was at the Crandall that Cooper met Patrick, a fellow musician who had also been in a number of rock groups.
The band Vertigogo was born shortly after that meeting, and the first hill-climb of a six-year roller-coaster ride of success, failure and success began for Cooper.
Now that Cooper and Patrick had a band, they needed a label. And with the help of some phone gadgetry that made callers think they were calling corporate offices -- "It was really just me and Brian in his dining room," said Cooper -- they started their own. The name Rust Records was Cooper's idea: "It fit in with Youngstown, and the Rust Belt."
Rust was formed to release Vertigogo's music, of course, but the affable and entrepreneurial Cooper wasn't limiting his options to just his own band.
"I was Ken Cooper when I performed," he said, "but by day, I was Ken Lyle." He used the alias because "no one wants to do business with a record executive who is also in a band."
Rapid ascent
Vertigogo quickly rose, packing regional rock clubs. When Atlantic, the nation's largest record company, offered a contract, they signed.
The band changed its name to Sin-O-Matic and released its debut album in 2001. With Atlantic's big-money backing, the group went on national tour, opening for the likes of AC/DC, Buckcherry, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, Kid Rock and Creed.
"We lived the dream -- or at least got a taste of it," said Cooper.
But as is often the case in the mercurial world of rock, the streaking ride came to a stunningly quick stop. Sin-O-Matic's record sold only a few thousand copies, and Atlantic dropped them.
With his dream a bust, Cooper returned to Youngstown and slumped into a dark period of his life, marked by excessive partying -- a holdover from the rock 'n' roll lifestyle he had been living, exacerbated by anger and confusion over his sudden fall to earth.
With the help of his wife and close friends, he pulled out of the tailspin.
"It took a lot of soul searching, finding God, and completely redirecting my life to stay clean and sober; but it has been the best thing I have ever done and it is the one thing I am most proud of today," said Cooper.
"My past is a tough pill to swallow. Sometimes, I think about all the relationships I had destroyed and the pain and suffering my family and friends went through, and sometimes it's hard to believe that was me doing those things."
Starting over
By 2003, Cooper had decided to stay in the music business, but not as a musician. That's when he breathed new life into his dormant Rust Records.
The roller coaster picked up speed that same year when Rust signed a band known as Cherry Monroe.
The high-gloss glam-pop band, whose members hail from Youngstown, Austintown, Ellwood City, Pa., and the Pittsburgh area, gave Rust the push it needed, and the label was soon brought into the Universal Records family. It switched to the Sony umbrella earlier this year.
Cherry Monroe released its Rust/Universal debut in 2005, but like Sin-O-Matic, didn't come close to meeting sales expectations. The band parted ways with Rust in June but plans to release an album next year under a different label.
Going country
Meanwhile, Rust was trying its hand with country music. Cooper started a Nashville division in 2005, peopled it with Music Row veterans, and instantly became a player.
With acts such as Aaron Tippin, Blackhawk and Shane Owens, the Nashville division got off to a promising start. Then, in January, Rust signed the PovertyNeck Hillbilllies.
The Pittsburgh-area sextet's debut album, which was released in June, landed at No. 31 on the country Billboard chart. It was the first time that a Rust-released record charted, and it pushed the label to a new level of credibility.
With sales of the PNH album at 40,000 and climbing, Cooper is repositioning himself to stay atop the wave.
Even though the move to the new offices was still not quite complete, Cooper announced two weeks ago that he is moving Rust's corporate headquarters to Nashville, the country music capital.
"I can get more done in a day there than I can get done in a week in Cleveland," he said.
Cooper, who is married to Austintown native Melissa Stefanick, will buy a house in Nashville but also maintain his family home in Cleveland's West Edge neighborhood. He will split his time between the two cities.
Rust Records will still maintain its office and recording studios in Cleveland to oversee the rock bands in its stable. But the label's fortunes now rest mainly on the back of its Nashville division.
Does the shift to country feel strange to a rocker like Cooper? "Not at all," he said. "Good music is good music. It all comes down to the song. Whether it's country or rock or anything else just depends on how you produce it."
Rock, Cooper explained, has become a much harder sell because it has splintered into so many subgenres. "There's punk, emo, gothic, metal, alternative ... The days of the huge-selling rock act are over, for now," he said. "Country fans are easier to reach. There's only one [country music] radio format."
Putting it all together
While the country path may be simpler, it also has its share of perils.
As Cooper prepares to take a lunch break, a frantic phone call from one of his country acts pulls him back into his office. It seems the singer's ex-manager is playing hardball. He won't release the rights to the singer's first record unless he gets a huge sum of money.
Cooper eases his star's fear of abandonment ("We believe in you and we're sticking with you," he tells the singer), and quickly formulates a plan to end the crisis.
The phone call is short, but it speaks volumes about Cooper.
It shows that the former Sin-O-Matic front man has learned a thing or two from his own band's rise and fall -- including empathy for his artists.
And it reveals an older but wiser executive who isn't about to get sidetracked again.