Photo by Libby Gray
The Record Company
The Record Company
The Who may have sung the line “Rock is dead” back in 1972, but it’s clear The Record Company never got the memo. The early part of 2026 will see the L.A.-based power trio commemorating the 10th anniversary of the band’s 2016 Grammy nominated debut Give It Back to You with a 27-date tour. They will perform in Milwaukee on March 7 at Vivarium. During their tour, Chris Vos (guitar/vocals), Alex Stiff (bass) and Marc Cazoria (drums) will play the album in its entirety.
In looking back at this milestone, Vos is equally grateful and jazzed to undertake this particular tour and what it symbolizes about his life.
“What happened to us was a creative version of going, ‘I’d really love to play my music as a way of life, pay the bills, wake up in the morning, look at my job and say, ‘That’s my job’ to actually doing that,” Vos said. “There’s a beautiful transformation in that and for me, my experience is nothing like I pictured it.”
He added, “We’re going to play the record. There are some new songs we’re going to be playing through, and we’ll hit off the other records, of course. We’re going to touch on all four corners of our history and there are probably going to be some things on the set list that haven’t been there for a while along with some new stuff that’s never been there. It’s just a good rock and roll show.”
Building a Following
Before The Record Company’s debut dropped in 2016, the threesome had spent the prior six years building a following. The band’s origins date back to Vos placing an ad on Craig’s List in 2010 shortly after moving to Los Angeles from Milwaukee with his spouse.
“My wife said I should put my stuff on Craig’s List because I wasn’t finding people [to play with],” Vos recalled. “Then Valerie, who is an A&R executive, wrote what I call a lovingly fraudulent description of me where I sounded way cooler than I was. That attracted the attention of Alex, who saw my ad, hit me up and we had a conversation. It struck enough of a chord that he invited me over to his house so we could listen to some records. He’d just gotten a big pile of older records, and I started pulling things out like Muddy Waters’ Live at Newport 1960, Hooker ‘n Heat, The Stones and The Beastie Boys. We were listening to all this crazy stuff and jammed a little. You felt something in the room when we played I had never felt before. It started from there.”
Cazoria was Stiff’s next-door neighbor, and before long the three musicians were regularly playing together, eventually throwing their lot in with one another by October 2011. Fast forward to 2013 and The Record Company played their first concert in Stiff’s Los Feliz living room (a performance that is part of the previously unreleased content included on the Give It Back to You reissue).
Pulling in One Direction
With all three members pulling in the same direction, The Record Company’s opened for the likes of B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Blackberry Smoke and Social Distortion while releasing a couple of EPs. The band’s music proved popular enough to land placements in Coor’s Light ads along with shows like “CSI” and “Suits” despite not having a label deal. The creative drive was enough that when Concord Records came knocking, The Record Company already had what became Give It Back to You recorded and good to go.
“Some guys from the label came to see us open for Brian Setzer at the Fox Theatre in Detroit,” Vos recalled. “I announced from the stage we were selling CDs in the lobby, and it was a perfect fit. The line for our albums after the show between our set and Setzer’s set was roped off and it looked like a Disneyland line, which didn’t hurt. Once we got the paperwork handed in, we played a show in L.A. and the whole label came out and saw us. They wanted to know if we had anything recorded and we handed them the record. We may have forgotten to mention that we had recorded an album in a living room surrounded by seven or eight microphones produced by our bass player. They just signed us, put it out as-is and got it played on the radio.”
Wisconsin Roots
For Vos, who grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, it was a long way from sitting in a cab tractor at his father’s feet while Best of the Doobie Brothers and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. was blasted on a small cassette recorder. A sixth-grade transfer student wearing a Metallica shirt who played a Fender Stratocaster piqued the nascent music lover’s interest, and by the time he graduated grade school, Vos got his first axe. A healthy mix of Muddy Waters, the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Jimi Hendrix and ZZ Top made up the aspiring musician’s appetite. Receiving the 1991 Ray Charles compilation The Birth of Soul: The Complete Atlantic Rhythm and Blues Recordings as a gift was a major turning point for Vos.
When the Atlantic years box set was given to me on my 17th birthday, I listened to that so much,” Vos said. “While everybody else was listening to whatever, I just thought that was the greatest-sounding voice I ever heard and it just carried me away. I just wanted to be a singer.”
With 2023’s The Fourth Album as the most recent studio outing for The Record Company, Vos is looking forward to his band releasing new material in 2026. His enthusiasm is laced with a genuine feeling of gratitude and humility about his career trajectory.
“We’ve got music that’s being written and recorded right now,” he said with a laugh. “There’ll be a new record probably coming out by the end of the year with singles being released in the earlier part of 2026. I’m very excited about what’s come out so far. I’ve been in the same marital relationship for a while and there is a beauty in longevity. For us, there’s an intimacy that gets reinvented and rediscovered. I’m very excited to still be thrilled to have these two guys as my buddies in this and that we still make music that still excites each other.”
