Celebrating 40 Years of Independent Music at Get Hip Recordings
The Origins of Get Hip
The year was 1986 and three musicians from Pittsburgh—Gregg Kostelich, Michael Kastelic, and Bill von Hagen—had found themselves in a bit of a jam between their jam sessions.
Their garage revival band The Cynics had been working on what would become their first album, Blue Train Station, for quite awhile. They’d been playing gigs around Pittsburgh and other areas and to their delight, they starting to garner some fans and some buzz, both locally and nationally.
And with that buzz started to come offers. Unfortunately, none of those offers felt like a good fit for them or the direction they wanted to go with their music. None of those offers would have allowed them the freedom to release their albums on their own terms.
So they did what garage punks do best: they did it themselves.
And thus Get Hip Recordings was born. The success of their first release—Blue Train Station by The Cynics, naturally—laid the groundwork for future projects, releases, and big dreams.
And not just their own, either. It didn’t take long for Get Hip Recordings to expand into a full-fledged record label, releasing records for local, national, and eventually even international acts.
Get Hip or Get Lost!
Today, Get Hip is more than just an independent record label born of a labor of love. Under the leadership of Gregg Kostelich and his wife Barbara Garcia-Bernando, Get Hip has also expanded to become a record shop and a distributor of over 20,000 of the finest titles in independent music.
A rarity in this modern world of colossal media conglomerates, Get Hip remains a champion of our fellow small independent businesses, supplying the coolest record stores and small distributors with the best titles in garage, punk, soul, pop, doo-wop and good old rock n’ roll.
In addition to the incredible Get Hip roster of rockers releasing records on four continents for the past forty years, Get Hip also created the Get Hip Archive Series dedicated exclusively to reissue classic bands from the 1950s and 1960s, these titles are essential to any true rock ’n’ roll collector. And more recently we launched Get Hip Folk Series, an offshoot of the main label dedicated to singer-songwriter roots music.
The Part Where We Say Thank You and Mention the Sale
Through it all, Get Hip has never lost sight of what really matters: the music. Listening to it, making it, and getting it in the hands of those who love and appreciate that raw rock ‘n’ roll (or whatever your favorite is) as much as we do.
Get Hip remains as passionate, dedicated, and fiercely independent today as we were back in 1986 when three Pittsburgh garage rockers looked at each other and said, “Screw that, we’ll do it ourselves.”
To say thank you to everyone who helped keep this dream alive for the past 40 years, Get Hip webstore customers can take 40% off of EVERYTHING from the Get Hip Label for the entire month of October (plus today, September 30, for Gregg’s birthday!) with code GETHIP40 at checkout. That includes not just the vast catalog from our main label, but titles from the Get Hip Archive Series and Get Hip Folk Series as well. Keep an eye out for more special offers and exciting label spotlights later this year.
Once again, thank you for everything. Thank you for calling in orders and offering label trades, thank you for swinging by the shop and the warehouse to say hello or pick up more tunes, thank you for making our independent shop (whether physical or online) your destination when you’re inspired to expand your music collection. We appreciate it all more than we can say.
Keep on rockin’—we know we will. 🎸