By RACHEL ESKENAZI
Big Shout Magazine, March 1996

“Wanna see something scary?” a guy named Rufus asks as he plants his combat boots in the door of Creep Records. Before anyone can answer, he pulls off a knit hat to reveal a fuzzy crew cut. Rufus, it seems, got sick of having hair in his mouth all the time, so he cut it off.

Creep Records owners Steve Blazewicz and Arik Victor can relate. These guys know what it’s like to get sick of the same old thing, for it’s one of the reasons that led to them starting their own label in the first place. Located in Downingtown, PA, Creep is a punk label that has recorded the likes of Plow United, The Crash, and Wally. Creep has also attracted the attention of previously-signed bands like New Brunswick, NJ’s Bouncing Souls, who have recorded a split seven-inch with Creep, as well as Bad Brain’s Chuck Treece, who has recorded with Creep band Brody. Treece’s own latest side project, Supergrub, is also set to release a full-length album which they recorded at Creep. All in all, approximately 20 bands have recorded with the label, and the number is still growing.

Located in an upper-middle class suburb, Creep is run out of a yellow two-story house with brown shutters and three chimneys. It’s where Steve and Arik live, the recording studio, the mail-order center, and a hostel of sorts for bands who come from out of town to record.

“Anybody can crash here, which is pretty cool,” Steve says. “It’s nice to be able to record and actually hang out in a house instead of a big, sterile studio atmosphere.”

Hanging out one Saturday are guests Steve doesn’t know, including one guy sacked out on the living room couch. In the same room, a skull hangs over the fireplace mantle, which is covered in hardened dripping red wax. The house pet, a small black cat named Guinness, races around too scared to approach the numerous combat-boot clad guests, and it paws at Steve’s wallet chain while he digs through a box of Creep music. Near the kitchen, old skateboards hang on the wall, and from the first floor, the screams from the band recording in the basement studio can be heard. “I make sure the band plays the same way here that they would play in their basement,” says Arik, who runs most of the recording end of things and sports a Bouncing Souls T-shirt and thick, black hipster glasses.

Initially, Arik intended the house, which he and Steve moved into after graduating high school in 1993, to be only a full-time recording studio. He hadn’t planned on establishing a record label. However, after a bad experience with a distributor and their own band Reject in 1993, and after a year of recording bands on other labels, Steve and Arik launched Creep Records in the summer of 1994.

Their first releases included a compilation, who git’s da deer?, that kick started the label. Featuring Brody, The Crash, Buglite, and others, Arik arranged for each band on the album to by and sell 100 copies. Three hundred other copies were shipped for sale to New York, and thus Creep had the beginnings of a budget.

Starting the label, however, meant challenging the traditional high-school-to-college route. Arik actually used his college money to buy the equipment for the recording studio, and when he attended recording school in late ’94, he found his instructors wouldn’t give him time away from class to record a CD for Buglite at his own studio.

“If I go to school,” Arik told his counselor, “I’m not gonna really be recording. I’m gonna be sitting around listening to you guys telling me what to do.” Given an ultimatum to come to school or get kicked out, Arik simply left.

Steve, with his shorn, black hair, silver septum hoop and Alice Donut T-shirt, attended flight school at Florida’s Emory-Riddle Aeronautical University from ’93 to ’94 but found the rigid atmosphere and “right-wing Republican youth” too much to bear. He transferred to business school in PA but found it wasn’t helping much in the way of running a label, so he left school again to work full time at Creep.

So far, Arik and Steve haven’t regretted their decisions to quit school. By making Creep a full-time venture, they have procured national distribution for their music and are currently setting up a deal for European distribution as well. For bands on the label, says The Crash‘s drummer Jamie Horning, widespread distribution is one of the biggest advantages to being on Creep. The Crash’s new CD Groovin Hard, for example, is now sold in Boston. “There’s no way we could have driven up there just to drop off CDs,” says Horning, a senior at Salesianum High School. Additionally, Creep shows give bands the chance to tour outside their hometown.

Besides numerous shows at the Barn Door, The Crash have had the chance to play shows in Lehigh Valley and in New York.

A true hands-on operation, Creep tries to personally respond to everyone who writes. First time mail customers get a note of thanks, free posters, and free stickers. Likewise, it’s not unusual for mail orderers to even send in bonus bucks.

“Some people actually say, ‘here’s some extra money, thanks for being cool,'” says Steve. They too, get bonus Creep merchandise — the label doesn’t just pocket the money.

Whether the whole punk rock rebirth sticks around for a while is not a concern for Arik and Steve, who were digging punk long before Rancid appeared, and who from the start, had little interest in conforming to the mainstream.

“Two years from now, when people aren’t really thinking what we’re doing is as cool… we’re still gonna be making the same records,” says Arik. “Whether we’re charting or whatever, it doesn’t really matter.”