New Alliance Records

New Alliance Records was the record label founded by The Minutemen's D. Boon and Mike Watt and longtime friend and associate Martin Tamburovich after the example of Black Flag's SST Records. The existence of SST led Watt to understand, according to a 1987 interview he gave to Musician magazine, how easy it was to get a record made: "All you had to do was pay the record plant man."
Amongst the first releases on New Alliance were Hüsker Dü's first album Land Speed Record and the Minutemen's second-ever release, the seven-inch EP Joy. Eventually the label grew to nurture the early career of the Descendents, issue various-artist compilation albums (such as Mighty Feeble), and release other recordings by The Minutemen (The Politics Of Time) and Hüsker Dü (the In A Free Land EP). The label showcased a number of post-punk bands from the South Bay area of southern California, notably Slovenly, Phantom Opera, and Invisiblechains.
After D. Boon's car-accident death in 1985 and the increasingly busier schedule of Watt's post-Minutemen band fIREHOSE, Watt and Tamburovich sold New Alliance to SST in 1987. Greg Ginn, SST's owner and Black Flag's guitarist, proceeded to transfer all of The Minutemen and Descendents releases from New Alliance and Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record to SST, and turned New Alliance into a subsidiary label of SST that concentrated on more adventurous and non-mainstream records, including jazz, instrumental, poetry, and spoken-word releases.
New Alliance has been inactive since the mid-1990s. Its back-catalog (other than releases Ginn ported to SST proper) has been deleted, its releases are no longer available through SST Records, and there is no mention of the label or its artists on SST's website.
Label co-founder Tamburovich died of a bacterial infection in 2003.
== External links ==
* Discogs.com (half the releases)