The Big Fish, On Fire: Rumblefish CEO Paul Anthony Turns Catastrophe Into Opportunity

It’s a pretty safe bet that Paul Anthony is the only chief executive in America who commutes to work in a fish, a three-wheeled single-seat electric car customized into a rolling corporate logo. And he’s probably the only CEO in Portland, Oregon, with a mohawk. Actually, it’s more of a fauxhawk, a tuft of brightly dyed red-orange atop his crown that, standing on end, frozen en mousse, suggests a tongue of flame. Which is ironic, given that Anthony’s business, Rumblefish—a “sonic branding” and music marketing company that has achieved national fame by licensing the work of Oregon musicians to Hollywood studios, video-game manufacturers, banks, shoe stores, beer companies and what have you—was gutted by fire one summer morning in 2004.

Weeks after the conflagration, the charred smell of his corporate headquarters still reeked like a freshly doused campfire, the charcoal smell overpowering, eye-watering and almost unbearable. In the middle of the recording studio (or rather, what was left of it), Anthony sat atop an electric organ—its fused plastic keys resembling chunks of melted mozzarella—considering a nearby stack of singed drums leaning as precipitously as the Tower of Pisa. “That was the first new drum set I bought since I was a kid,” said Anthony, then 27, dressed in a black motorcycle tee and jeans, and whose profile suggests a young Keifer Sutherland.

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