It was their nature to be accommodating, to serve
“All (of the record people) were amazed by the service that they got. They were casually greeted at the door by one of our ‘staff’ members, dressed in NASA-looking Space Opera jumpsuits. The people who served the ‘guests’ must have been girlfriends, but not reduced to servile wenches or anything. They really liked doing it. The ‘guests’ would be waited on and we would sit down and give them our pitch. And in all but one case, we said thank you very much, we’ll get back to you. (More than once), we decided not to go with a label because they were telling us we were not going to get a better deal in this business. You’re hooked up with a producer, boys. That’s the way the system works. We were among the first to change that.
“We learned early on from the music and the music, in a sense, became our children. If you look on our album, there’s a statement that says everything you see, hear and hold in your hand was written, produced, arranged and compiled entirely by Space Opera, right down to the artwork. That was not done at that time. You could not get a record deal that allowed you that much autonomy. You absolutely couldn’t. Well, we finally did, in spite of what Bobby Colomby and Paul Rothschild and the others told us.”
Everything we had was self-designed to fit Space Opera, including our stance of what we would and would not do concerning record companies
“(Our attitude) came partially from our association with T-Bone Burnett. Well, not so much attitude as position, I guess. At the time, you either took the deal they handed you or forgot about it. There was no Internet you could use. You couldn’t press anything on vinyl unless you went to Nashville or California. …