For 38 years, the Rosebud Agency has been booking and managing some of the best blues artists in the country. Earlier this year, the Blues Hall of Fame announced plans to induct Rosebud founder Mike Kappus, who launched the company in 1976.
We had a chance to talk with Mike about the business, how it came about, and what's going on this year as he winds down the business and sells the iconic blue building at 636 Shrader, which just hit the market.
The most remarkable thing about the Rosebud Agency is that nobody seems to know it's there. That's deliberate, Kappus told us. "We're intentionally under the radar."
The building on Shrader was formerly a garage and then, for a period, a workshop for North Beach Leather (a business which made custom leather for the likes of Elvis, Ike and Tina Turner, and many, many others). Now, it's office space for Kappus's music talent booking and management agency.
Kappus founded Rosebud when the Keystone Music Agency, formerly a branch of Keystone Korner in North Beach, ran out of money and went under. He said he went to work at Keystone one day and the phones had been disconnected.
That day, he went home and started making phone calls. Starting with Eddie Harris, John Hyatt and Michael Bloomfield, he took booking clients along with him and built his business from there. In the following years, Rosebud went on to book artists like Mose Allison, John Lee Hooker, Captain Beefheart, J.J. Cale, Mavis Staples, Loudon Wainwright, Bettye Lavette, Charlie Watts, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
Kappus said that the model for the business was always to stay small and offer great services to a limited number of artists. He said the business turned down as many as 2,000 new artists a year and only took on one or two.
After years of working 80-100 hour weeks, Kappus said, he's ready to slow the business down. Rosebud is seeing through the 500 events it booked for this year, and selling the building.
After that, Kappus is working on a couple of passion projects, such as a boxed set coming this September in celebration of Captain Beefheart, and a memorial project collecting odds and ends left by J.J. Cale, who died last year. He's also going to sift through the recordings, memorabilia and papers of the artists he's worked with over the past 38 years, and see that they're returned to the artists or documented for posterity.
And after that?
"I'm just going to breathe for a minute, hopefully," Kappus said, "and then see if anything catches my attention."
