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Liars: Are they liars? Photo courtesy of Marian Picches.
I don’t think so. This tradition of babying recording artists is a huge mistake and it’s gone on long enough. Most of them don’t deserve to clean up my hotel room, much less make 1,000 times my salary per song. Are labels so evil? Why then, are most of them going bankrupt trying to accommodate their “artists”?
The first step in debunking the babying of musicians is to address the misconception that they are sacrificial lambs before the evil ogre of business (especially record labels). Oh no, you want to pay for me to go into the studio, then market my stupid face all over the place and try to make me famous? Boo-hoo.
Here, then, are our favorite stories of indie bands fucking over the labels who thought they were friends. We left out a few of the ones you’ve already heard a million times, like Happy Mondays vs. Factory Records’ Tony Wilson, and The Stone Roses taking the better part of a decade to make the world’s shittiest record, but there’s still way more...
MY BLOODY VALENTINE VS. CREATION RECORDSBetween 1989 and 1991, a typical conversation between label head Alan McGee and MBV’s Kevin Shields went something like this:
McGee: “I’ve given you $300,000 to make this record and I’ve only heard four seconds of music. I’m betting my life on you.”
Kevin Shields: “Fuck off, cunt.”
Luckily for McGee, the album that Shields delivered was a revolutionary classic, Loveless. Unluckily for McGee, the money he’d paid Shields to delay the album for three years almost killed him and he had to sell out to Sony.
Kevin Shields went on to get a couple more million out of Island Records and, to this day, the only music he’s given them is a cover of some Louis Armstrong song. A couple of years ago, VICE asked Kevin why he hadn’t released new MBV stuff for years. Was it fear of failure?
“I get paid thousands every time somebody asks me to do a remix,” he chirped. “Every so often I get a nice royalty cheque. I’ve got enough money.”
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ROYAL TRUX VS. MATADORTogether, Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty were more famous for being wretched junkies than for their occasionally brilliant, often tedious music. In fact, they were so busy being pin-eyed that they probably didn’t even know how badly they were fucking over indie-label good guys Matador Records. A label employee anonymously told us, “Those guys pretty much admitted, I think in the zine Bananafish, that they threw the Matador advance money up their arms.”
Hagerty, speaking from a relatively sober place today, counters (confirms): “We spent some of [the money] on recording, but also some on other things, and never finished the recording thereby. At the time there were probably hard feelings somewhere but it turned out okay.” Sure, who would have a problem paying for someone else’s smack habit?
TEENAGE FANCLUB VS. MATADORWhen these mediocre popsters jumped from Fire to Creation in the UK and wanted to jump to Geffen from Matador in the U.S., they still owed Matador one more album. They hastily recorded the detestable The King. Creation released it and deleted it on the same day. Matador said, “Uh, no,” and never released it for even one second.
Our Matador mole (who would be sooo fired if they find out who it is) attests: “The King was just a stoned-out jam record with a couple of covers and instrumentals. We weren’t even sure if all or any of the band actually played on it. I think it was some of them and maybe a few friends screwing around in the studio during the recording of Bandwagonesque.”
Which, in case you didn’t know, was the only good record the Fanclub ever made. So they had their winner record ready to go, sat on it so the majors could release it, and sent their original trusted indies a pile of puke. The Matadorian says: “It really killed us that we got a bootleg DAT copy of Bandwagonesque at the same time as The King. Boy, were we pissed. We were the first label to sign those guys, even before anyone in the UK, and in the end we got screwed. Geffen wrote us a very small check that barely covered the legal bill.”
JAMES LAVELLE VS. ISLAND VS. XL RECORDINGSJust like Diplomats rule 2003 Harlem, James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax label ruled mid-90s Covent Garden, London. Remember those overpriced stores that sold $500 gold-plated Air Max? How about Planet Of The Apes chic, the girlfriends with foot tattoos, and the hordes of Japanese tourists with more money at the age of 19 than you’ll ever have in your whole life? Ring any bells? James Lavelle invented all that.
Sadly for the CD collections of trendy rich kids everywhere, James’ entrepreneurial bent far outshadowed his artistic abilities and 99 percent of the records released on his Mo’ Wax label were boring, badly conceived, and completely un-whistle-able.
A disgruntled ex-employee whispered to VICE: “James sold his label once to Island and made hundreds of thousands [we estimate the figure at $760,000]. When they never made a penny back, he sold the second incarnation of Mo’ Wax to XL Records for shitloads more money. He sold his label twice!” gasps our Mo’ Wax mole.
BUTTHOLE SURFERS VS. ALTERNATIVE TENTACLES VS. TOUCH AND GOGibby Haynes wasn’t an LSD punk genius, okay? He was more like a lying, drug-addicted douchebag with zero talent who relied on guitarist Paul Leary to do anything that his overrated band ever recorded. Maybe it was pretty funny when, back in 1983, he accepted $5,000 from that other overrated “legend” Jello Biafra to record an album for his Alternative Tentacles label, knowing full well that he was going to spend $4,500 on acid, cocaine, heroin, and booze and only $500 on recording the Buttholes’ totally unlistenable “Brown Reason to Live” EP.
But fucking with Touch and Go founder Corey Rusk was absolutely unforgivable. Not only was Rusk the drummer in Necros, he also signed fucking Negative Approach! He deserves the Punk Congressional Medal of Honor, not a knife in the back from a bunch of Texan turncoats. So imagine how poor Corey felt when, after releasing the Butthole’s only decent records (from mid-80s to 90s), the pricks cashed in their grunge chips, signed to Sony and demanded that Rusk hand over their entire back catalogue for free. Way to go, handshake deal.
An ex-Touch and Go employee told VICE: “Even though Corey’d been putting them out for years, he signed them back in the times when punk rock bands and labels did things on the strength of a handshake. If they crashed the rental he’d go find them and give them his car. Then they’d crash that. It was a pretty nasty ending. Mind you, everything they released after they left Touch and Go was absolutely shit.”
LIARS VS GERN BLANDSTEN RECORDSThe jury is still out on this one, but have we all learned the Ultimate Lesson of indie rock yet? No fucking handshake deals! I don’t care if it’s a band comprised of your brother, your grandma, and your AA sponsor. Get it in writing.
That being noted, each side of this dispute says such drastically different things that Christ only knows who is for real. Charles, the head of excellent uber-indie label Gern Blandsten, says: “I thought that paperwork and lawyers were a waste of money, energy, and time. This might sound stupid and naïve, but up until Liars, I had ten years of doing my own label, and I had never been screwed.” It is his claim that, after putting 6 months and $16,000 into these guys, they abruptly said “Adios” after a phone call from major label Mute. He says that it was a financial disaster but the real damage was inside. “Emotionally, there is no calculating the immense toll it took on my life,” he recalls. “The fact that one second they were saying that we were like family, making plans with me and my wife for dinner, telling us how honored they were to be on Gern, and 24 hours later I was being called by their new label and then their lawyer, and being told that they wanted nothing to do with us, and that we were not to contact them again. I felt humiliated.” Liars, an excellent band of avant-punk groundbreaking-ness, sees it quite differently. “In order to move to Mute, we had to ‘buy’ our first record back from Gern Blandsten. Of the $30,000 Mute was willing to pay for it, Charles was demanding 75 percent,” says the band via email. “In the end his request came down to $12,000, which he got, plus any profits on the as-yet-undisclosed amount of records he sold.” Ugly piece of business, this. We’ll let you know when we decide who’s the asshole in this one.
JERRY MCPHEERSON AND JACK STEEL
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