Butthole Surfers Question

http://www.southern.net/southern/label/TCH/chicagoreader/butthole.html

i side with rusk/t&g, who doesnt, but still there's some points on the side of the artist i hadn't thought of.
my hunch is if the butts didn't suck so bad now, people would respect them more as artists and respect their argument to artistic control of their work.

so yeah, steal/download away!

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm 100% in favor of the masters' ownership reverting back to the artist at some point in time.

me too. tho i don't understand why the buttholes thot they could do a better job of selling their back catalog, or why they think there was no "work" associated with keeping it in print!

Same goes for a lot of the SST stuff that's been reissued elsewhere, but that's a whole other can of worms.

Yah, yah, when the band became fairly huge, they suddenly received less money for the pre-MTV albums on T&G. Hm, what happened to the money? You'd think they'd be getting more of it since obviously more people are buying their records, but the checks just stopped coming.

where does it say that in the article? the buttholes wanted a bigger share!

work keeping "catalog" records in print & in stores < work actively promoting, pressing and distributing "new" records

well, again, no shit. but if someone else is doing it for you and only taking 50% net, that's not a bad deal! maybe better than doing it yourself, maybe not, i dunno.

Move from NYC to Mendocino County, CA. I fucking dare you.

actually Mendocino and Kentucky at least have pot growing in common.

Was there any mumbo jumbo at T&G after Corey's accident?

hahaha.
I get 75% my records from mailorder now that I live up here. The point was if these indie labels expect everyone to just do that when the band themselves can and have done a better job getting the CDs into oddball territories... well, that sucks.

no actually i was joking about that upthread. t&g pretty much ran the same as it always did, tho i think there for a time they didn't sign anybody.

Was the suit against T&G because of the lack of a signed agreement, or because they became unsatisfied with the agreement they originally made?

the latter.

Dude! I met Trevor Malcolm when we were both at the University of Windsor radio station. He cooked up an amusingly ncoherent "version" of "Iron Man", arranged for beer-bottle-slide acoustic guitar, voice, and extremely drunk singer/player, but only played the recording on-air once before withdrawing it forever. Possibly the biggest rock star I ever met, and definitely the funniest.

(xpost: is Trevor the guy who was called "the most hated man in America" in that Spin article 1,000 years ago?)

it's more reasonable that what anyone could expect from a major.

Yeah, but it wasn't that NIRVANA MONEY that a lot of indie bands thought they were gonna get when they signed to a major.
Bleach became Sub-Pop's best selling record by far, I'd guess that's the kind of thing they were thinking.

corey:buttholes::steinbrenner:giambi's agent

When were you looking for them? According to the article, the motion to reclaim the masters was in Dec. 1995, the lawsuit settled in early-1999; this means when the catalogue had it's highest value (the summer of 1996 when "Pepper" was a hit, and the next few years), the albums weren't available at all, meaning the band themselves severely hurt their chances of making a killing on the back catalogue. And then had to pay all the costs of re-pressing them, changing artwork, etc. on their own when they no longer had any real value.

Touch and Go still has Urge Overkill in print, by the way.
Though I don't know if UO tried to get the rights to their records when they "looked" like they were set to hit the bigtime.

From the article linked above: "Rusk has had multirecord deals with only a few bands, including Urge Overkill and Girls Against Boys. In the immediate post-Nirvana era, Rusk says, those groups wanted to put more money into promotion than he was comfortable spending on just one record. But when those bands left, Rusk did not profit by selling off the remainder of their contracts."

then it makes no sense that they didn't appeal it to the Supreme Court. So I'm not sure if that's entirely the case.

The state issue would seem suspect considering the first few BH/T&G records were released/"licensed" when the label was based in Detroit.

I kinda defer to the Butts' chapter in Our Band Could Be Your Life here.. (...) But it is sickening that their relationship with Touch & Go had to end on such a sour note thanks to a not-so-tactful meddling manager in the middle... and the band didn't have to let it end that way.

At the end of that chapter, though, there's a shot at T&G from Jeff Pinkus, circa 1991 (who actually released a Daddy Longhead album on T&G that year, and wasn't in the band for this lawsuit), so I don't know how good the relationship had been for years prior to any managerial involvement.