Frank Riley is something of a legend in the US booking world. He started one of the first boutique booking agencies, High Road Touring, and built a reputation representing serious, respected artists, Wilco, Slowdive, Teenage Fanclub, Hüsker Dü, Violent Femmes, Patti Smith, the list goes on. I had no real business reaching out to him.
It was July 2010. Teenage Fanclub had some shows coming up, and I emailed Frank cold, asking if Elephant Stone could get a support slot. He wrote back and said he’d give it a spin. In the end, we got the Toronto date, opening for Teenage Fanclub (basically, my favorite band besides the Beatles) at the Horseshoe Tavern. That was it. Frank was in my world now, even if just barely.
From there I stayed loosely in touch. I saw Wilco was touring and reached out again, figured it couldn’t hurt since he’d been friendly the first time. At some point he asked if we had any dates lined up on the West Coast. I didn’t, not yet. But something in that question stuck with me. He told me to send him new music whenever I had it, that he’d be interested to hear what I was up to.
In 2011, we got invited to play Iceland Airwaves. I did some strange “Rishi math” and figured out that flying from Montreal to Iceland cost about the same as flying to LA, then San Francisco, then over to Iceland from there. So I booked us a small run of West Coast shows around that flight path, including one in San Francisco, arranged through a connection at the Makeout Room via Mark Eitzel of American Music Club. I told Frank about the date, October 11, 2011, and asked if he’d be able to make it. He said he couldn’t promise anything, and told me not to book a tour around him.
I booked the tour around him anyway.
It worked out. We played San Francisco, and Frank showed up with a handful of people from High Road Touring. They liked the show. We stayed in touch after that, and I could tell something had changed. He knew we were just getting started, and there was something about that, a respected agent simply believing in a band before there was much reason to, that felt like the beginning of something real.
Through 2012, things kept building. Our self-titled album started coming together. That same year I spent touring with the Black Angels, and around the same time we secured a proper record deal for Elephant Stone. During a stretch of Black Angels shows in the Bay Area on that Coachella and Horrors run, we played Bimbo’s in San Francisco, and Frank stopped by one afternoon. We talked for a while. I remember him saying something like, I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I believe in you. Let’s do this.
Frank came on board as our booking agent. In my mind, that was it. “We made it!” I finally had a real US agent behind me. What I didn’t understand yet was that having a great agent doesn’t automatically mean success follows.
The self titled record did get us real momentum. We had some great tours, including supporting the Black Angels through the US and Europe. That led to a BENELUX record deal with V2 Records, thanks to a connection through the Allah-Las, and European representation through Teun Heijmans, then at Belmont Bookings, now at Black Rice Bookings. Teun has been our agent ever since. Everything seemed to be pointing upward.
2014 was supposed to be the year it all clicked into place, the year we took things to the next level. I was pretty prolific back then, and we spent early 2014 putting together our next album, The Three Poisons. The plan was to quickly follow up our self-titled record with a new album a year later, and after that, the sky was the limit. As you've probably guessed, things didn't go as planned. The album never got released in Europe, despite having a full European tour already booked around it, and there was a lot of confusion behind the scenes that I didn't fully understand at the time. I was just trying to keep up.
That was around the time Frank told me something I still think about. “The people controlling your career have no idea what they’re doing.”
Not long after, he let us go. Not cruelly, not out of frustration with the music itself, just an honest recognition that things weren’t working the way they needed to. Looking back, The Three Poisons feels like the lost record in some ways, the one that was supposed to be a turning point and instead marked the unraveling of that whole chapter.
The last email I ever sent him was simple, “Hi Frank, just wanted to thank you for taking a chance on me. Your support and belief in me really meant a lot.”
He wrote back. “Thanks Rishi. We gave it a good swing. You have a really good band and you’re a persuasive, wonderful guy, but we just didn’t make any kind of progress. We have nothing to build on. Someone else may have better luck.”
I didn’t take it personally. I couldn’t. Here was someone with real stature in the industry who took a chance on a completely unknown band from Montreal, stuck with us through underwhelming Midwest tours playing to nobody, and was honest enough at the end to tell me plainly that it wasn’t about the music. Because of everything that happened during those years, I’ve since taken far more control over my own career. I still don’t fully know what I’m doing. But if I fail now, at least I’m failing on my own terms.