Fun Stuff > BAND
Where to start?
tricia kidd:
--- Quote from: Ptommydski on 16 Feb 2010, 13:20 ---Or here.
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punk rock label disputes are hardly anything new. who founded SST? oh right, that guy from Black Flag:
"SST's reputation was damaged severely when sound collage group Negativland fought a long legal battle with SST in the wake of its sampling lawsuit over their notorious "cover" of U2's hit "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", on the 1991 U2 single. The case was settled when Ginn and SST agreed to fully release most of Negativland's masters (mainly their Over The Edge series of cassettes) in exchange for completing work on a live album that had been planned long before their legal battles began, as well as keeping Negativland's three SST releases on the label for a short period (the copyright in those has since reverted to Negativland). This entire battle was later the basis for Negativland's 1995 book/CD, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2."
E. Spaceman:
but they were originally recorded before Damaged and without Rollins. You can find these versions on Everything Went Black.
I do wonder which versions specifically tommy means though. IIRC that record has versions with vocals from Dez, Morris and Chavo.
eeeedit: SST and T&G are vastly different cases though. SST had a lot of problems because Greg Ginn was not a very good businessman and the label often had money issues and in many cases did not pay the artists. Touch & Go was run efficiently, it provided greater artistic freedom to its artists and more money to boot.
In these particular cases the following can be gleaned:
SST was a dick to Negativland and they got screwed.
The Butthole Surfers were dicks to T&G and T&G got screwed, then they signed to a major and got screwed.
tricia kidd:
i don't really see how the Butthole Surfers were being particularly dickish. the idea of punk rock is owning your own material, isn't it? why is it so bad that they wanted ownership over their albums, many years after the fact? it seems like if either party were being dicks, it was both. Rusk, as a punk rock record owner, should have not held on to the notion that he can indefinitely "own" the work of a band. that goes against the principles of punk rock.
Ptommydski:
--- Quote from: Jeans on 16 Feb 2010, 13:47 ---(Police Story and Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie are both featured on Damaged)
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The original versions are on Everything Went Black.
--- Quote from: tricia kidd on 16 Feb 2010, 14:04 ---punk rock label disputes are hardly anything new. who founded SST? oh right, that guy from Black Flag:
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SST is and was near enough the worst label in the history of the world in terms of actually paying their artists etc. I'd like to see somebody dispute that. Sub Pop came pretty close though.
However, T&G were and are nothing like either of the above. They were the independent label who did it all right, providing a fair service to their bands and genuinely heroic support. Corey Rusk has always been straight as an arrow in terms of their business and the BH Surfers exploited his kindness in a way which was utterly vile. They deliberately made a point of financially punishing a record label which stood testament to everything great about independent music and a friend who had bankrolled their recorded output when they first started.
--- Quote from: tricia kidd ---the idea of punk rock is owning your own material, isn't it?
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Corey Rusk paid for these records to be made entirely. He paid for absolutely everything from recording studio fees, manufacturing and distribution. He remained true to his end of the deal (50/50 split, literally the best one going). The BH Surfers were even free to print up their own version of these records and cut T&G from the deal. Instead they sought financial compensation from a record label which had essentially made them.
--- Quote from: tricia kidd ---that goes against the principles of punk rock.
--- End quote ---
Yeah right. Show me where that is written. Ripping off the best independent label in the world for the fuck of it. Punk rock!
a pack of wolves:
SST might have had their problems but they aren't even in the same league as a label like Victory, which went beyond dodgy business practices (which were worse than SST's) into out-and-out racism for cash.
I don't see how The Butthole Surfers ripped T&G off exactly. T&G will definitely have made their money back on those records (if they hadn't, I'm sure they would have mentioned that they still needed to recoup costs). Frankly, T&G seems to have acted incredibly stupidly by ignoring the requests by the band's manager to renegotiate the contract. If he really thought the manager was acting without the band's knowledge and trying to find a way to get a cut of their back catalogue money then he was screwing the band over by not calling them up and telling them, instead he appears to have ignored the situation and hoped it would go away. And why shouldn't they be able to change the agreement? Remember, this is after T&G has recouped its costs on the records so by moving away from T&G they aren't costing them money. A handshake deal is done on the basis of trust, but if a band decides they don't trust a label to do the right thing anymore do they just have to live with a label that they feel isn't acting in their interests anymore?
Having said that, I don't think T&G were entirely in the wrong. The band should have made more of an effort to sort things out without lawyers, but I think characterising this as the evil money-grubbing Butthole Surfers robbing poor innocent T&G for no reason is going way too far.
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