‘Saw this video at youtube.com/nandel1959, via boingboing.net and it got me thinking…On Grammy night, as we celebrate the promotional efforts of the corporate overlords who’ve helped create the careers of the best-selling quarter of a percentile of musicians on the planet — or rather, in our hemisphere, which we sometimes mistake for the planet — herewith, a blast from the past, and it looks and sounds exactly like today in many ways. In this case, in a scenario that has played out infinitely more times than our collective pop culture memory and attention span seems to retain, we find Buddy Holly, despairing over the bad DECCA Records studio sessions for his future classic, “That’ll Be The Day”, calling DECCA Records to see if he can get back the rights to his songs, which have been shelved indefinitely, and which the label, per their contract, owns for five years. Of course, Holly isn’t a saint, and every musician should always read the fine print. But listen to this and decide for yourself if human nature isn’t the real beast here…because right now, the honest examination of human nature is a most worthy meditation as we enter THE NEW AGE OF MONOPOLIES, and do nothing about it for fear of losing our deals, our bylines, our access — it’s an aggregate fear that makes it easy to rationalize our complicity. Holly went on to record an alternate version of the classic, but for every story like this, there are countless others cases across all genres, of bad people simply getting away with everything they possibly could, and doing so with what passes for The Law on their side.
Paraphrased from recording:
Label Boss: “Anything you recorded for Decca you can’t release [on another label]”
Buddy Holly: “Well that’ll make me feel kinda bad”
Label Boss: “Why?”
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