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Martin Atkins, Punk Rock Veteran, Calls Bridgeport Home

By Casey Cora | August 18, 2014 7:04am
 Martin Atkins, hard-rocking drummer and music business entrepreneur, calls Bridgeport home.
Martin Atkins, hard-rocking drummer and music business entrepreneur, calls Bridgeport home.
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Martin Atkins

BRIDGEPORT — It's a heck of a long way from London's punk rock zenith in the 1970s to modern-day Bridgeport, but the latter is where drummer Martin Atkins finds himself now.

Atkins, 55, is a music industry impresario who used to run his Invisible Records label from a South Loop loft, not far from Bridgeport's shuttered Healthy Foods Lithuanian diner, a favorite among his musician pals.

"It was just fantastic. I just kind of kept being around this neighborhood and grew to like it, the last five or six years especially," said Atkins, who was recently named music department chairman at the Chicago branch of SAE, a school specializing in careers in audio engineering and the music business.

Casey Cora explains how a hard-core rocker transitions into education:

A career musician, Atkins pounded drums for hard-core punk and industrial groups like the Johnny Rotten-led Public Image Ltd., Ministry, Killing Joke and The Damage Manual — that's him hammering away in the "Head Like a Hole" Nine Inch Nails video.

After London, he bounced around to Manhattan (where he lived in Blondie's old loft) and California and London again. He'd blown through Chicago multiple times, but "the people and the attitude of the roll up the sleeves" kept him here for good.

Since moving to Bridgeport sometime around 2000, Atkins has been a staple on the business-of-music circuit, giving talks across the globe with a version of his bluntly titled lecture, "Welcome to the Music Business — You're F-----" and making keynotes at industry confabs like SXSW in Austin, Texas.

A few years later, after scouring Columbia College Chicago for interns to help launch an ambitious live music tour — "three buses, five bands, 52 cities," he said — the school asked him to teach a class on the business of touring.

Now, Atkins, a father of four boys, is working on a third book, a prequel to his debut effort "Tour: Smart and Break the Band" that offered hard-won insight from a veteran who's probably seen it all, from brawling on the floor with the Warped Tour's founder to pairing a scratch DJ with Tibetan singers during a documented tour of China.

The new gig with SAE, he said, allows him to give high school grads a real-life look at the rapidly changing industry, perhaps shattering some illusions along the way.

James Thomas, director of SAE's Chicago campus in River North, called Atkins a "revolutionary innovator who understands the mindset of today's student."

"Martin also possesses the expertise in both the music industry and the field of academia to engage, educate,and unleash the potential of our students through a relevant and entertaining approach," Thomas said.

The sharp-tongued Atkins might brush that off as too corporate.

"I've seen schools that have that these ads, like 'Hey, do you want to be a radio DJ?' Well, they don't have those guys anymore. That's not even a job.

"It's easy to tell a kid 'Yeah! The music biz! Do you like champagne and limousines? Have you been to Paris and Las Vegas?' But what I say to my students is that this isn't the easy alternative to any other degree that your parents might want you to get into."

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