Headz-Up

The harried look on Belinda Simmons face is a more telling sign of her husbands success than the Mercedes with the vanity plates reading "Landry" parked in the drive. She wears a mask of strained patience as she hefts groceries unaided while her preoccupied spouse sits at the kitchen table beneath a framed map of the United States dotted with push pins. The most unlikely towns are skewered. Red Bluff, Iowa. Junction City, Kansas. To most, these hamlets are little more than rest stops, places to empty bladders and fill tanks, maybe cop a Big Gulp. To Landry Simmons, however, they're rap-craving cash cows ready to be rendered filets.

"My brother went to college in Winona, Minnesota, St. Marys College," Simmons says. "We're driving through [the Midwest] this is about a year-and-a-half ago I stop and get some gas, and kids are playing hip-hop. Everywhere I go, I'm hearing hip-hop, even in Iowa, and Im hearing old stuff. So I ask one of the kids, Wheres the new stuff at? Whats going on with the new stuff? All these people there dont even know whats going on. They're playing old stuff because none of these big labels are out there pushing anything. They don't care about that."

But Simmons does. As head of the fledgling Simmons Time Records, his plan is to serve what he labels "dry areas," broad swathes of the Midwest and Upper Plains from Iowa to Idaho that fall outside major-label marketing zones. Due to the spread-out populace of these regions, it's difficult for majors to market these locales, and ultimately not very cost-effective; thus, they largely get ignored. To Simmons, these regions are his bread and butter. He hits all the towns that no one else does.

"I don't care if theyre in the mountains of Utah, I'd like to be the first one there, like Christopher Columbus. I'm putting my mark right here and here and here," Simmons says, poking at the map. "It's going everywhere. I'm trying to find out whats hip-hop in South Dakota and North Dakota, because it's going there."

Three years ago, Simmons, a lifelong hip-hop fan, invested $300 to record an album by a trio of rappers the Hellish Made Clique that he heard rhyming in a friends living room. A deputy at the 1st District sheriffs office, Simmons initiated the project as little more than a hobby. Disappointed by the production of the album, he decided to put it on the Internet, hoping that would mask some of the sound flaws. A year after the debut from HMC was finished, Simmons unexpectedly got a check in the mail for $4,700. Then a pile more. The next thing he knew, the band was getting over 1,500 downloads a week, mostly from people in towns as unheard of as a correctly pronounced multi-syllable word from George Ws maw, places where the Internet was the kids only access to rap.

The fan mail mounted as did Belindas sighs as Landry would spend between five and eight hours a night sifting through letters, after putting in a full shift at the squadron. Soon, HMC was garnering enough hits to land at No. 6 on Rolling Stones MP3 charts earlier this year, above Eminem. All of a sudden, Simmons had sold 8,000 copies of a record at $10 apiece, and become more famous than Slim Shady in places like Clinton, South Carolina.

"The regular corporate structure is so impersonal, they don't get to know the artist. You can come to me, call me anytime. I'm more like a homey than an executive. I want to meet their mothers, their family, their kids it's going to be a family bond."

Last week, Simmons shipped 45,000 units of his second project, the debut from rapper Canis, with a firm belief that the album will sell over 100,000 copies based on initial feedback and demand, a potential $1 million windfall from a $3,000 investment. Returns like that would surely remove the slack from Charles Schwabs britches.