By Ralph Greco, Jr.
By all accounts, it’s a hot and heavy game trying to keep a rock band together, let alone make a living from playing and recording music. Between record company infiltration, a producer’s vision trying to surf above an artist’s, overstaying one’s patience for the road while trying to make enough money to afford a mortgage on a house one hardly ever sees, fights with exes, and the drama of the obligatory “artistic differences,” so much can break up a band. It can sometimes turned childhood friends into bitter enemies, set musical siblings at each other’s throats, and musicians fighting court battles against corporations and each other. Here then are, in no particular order, 10 Rock & Roll Legal Battles That Don’t Involve The Beatles (or Lars Ulrich):
1) Who Is Paying For This Journey?
WHere is one of the more recent bands squabbling as of this writing. It seems that Journey’s keyboardist Jonathan Cain and guitarist (sole founding member) Neal Schon finally reached a legal solution in their court battles over the (ab)use of the group’s credit card. Two years ago, Schon sued Cain, claiming Cain refused to give Schon access to Journey’s Amex card. Cain accused Schon at that time of racking up huge personal charges from what he called Schon’s “careless spending.” As a trial loomed with the band on their 50th Anniversary Freedom Tour, a Delaware Chancery Court judge appointed a “Custodian” to oversee the matter. For now, things are quiet, and we don’t have to stop believing.
2) Prince vs Warner Brothers
A battle of deep royal purple occurred in 1992 when Prince disengaged himself from a $100 million contract with Warner Bros. Records. WB was exerting pressure on the diminutive musical genius to as much adhere to the usual album promotion cycle of the time, as they were making intimations that they felt they should own Prince’s master tapes. Not one to follow any vision save his own, Prince began to appear just about everywhere with the word “SLAVE” written on his cheek. Then he stopped recognizing “Prince” altogether, took a mash-up symbol of male and female as his moniker, called himself “The Artist: (as in ‘the artist formerly known as he who can’t be named’), and instead of releasing new material he fulfilled the remaining terms of his WB contract with songs culled from the deep well of his unreleased stuff; Prince being Prince, he had a lot of unreleased stuff. When I saw Prince in New York City during this time, he assaulted a club-sized crowd with a funky two hours of stuff the audience had mostly never heard, playing wah-wah bass as his only instrument and singing fronting an equally funky ensemble. At the start of his encore, a mash-up of some Prince tunes, he announced, “This is by somebody who is dead.” The brouhaha between Prince and WB lasted two years. In 1994, Prince restored his name, delivered two albums for WB then left the label releasing Emancipation through EMI-Capitol under a historical precedent-setting contract that changed music history, in favor of the artist, for good.
3) Get Out Of My Centerfield
John Fogerty wrote, sang, and produced the hits for Creedence Clearwater Revival. But the head of the label that released CCR’s albums, Fantasy Records, Saul Zaentz came to own the copyrights to the tunes, when Fogerty turned over his CCR royalties to Zaentz to get free of his contract with Fantasy. Not a great way to engender a relationship and for years Fogerty refused to play classic Creedence, as those tunes had made, and continued to make, Zaentz rich. When Fogerty released his solo album, Centerfield Zaentz had the temerity to sue Fogerty for essentially plagiarizing…Fogerty. He claimed the album’s lead-off single, “The Old Man Down the Road” was an illegal remake of Creedence’s “Run Through the Jungle,” (yes, which Fogerty had written in the first place!) The case ran through the jungle of lower courts to the Supreme Court, where Fogerty not only won the case, but his countersuit granted him reimbursement of his legal fees. Later still, after Zaentz sold Fantasy Records to the Concord Music Group at the start of the millennium, Concord restored royalties to Fogerty who eventually won a majority of interest in CCR’s global publishing from Concord. Sal Zaentz died in 2014.
4) 1. It’s My Wall And You Can’t Play On It
Roger Waters, vocalist, bassist, and songwriter of Pink Floyd sued the rest of the Pinks in the late 80s, when his ex-partner, the band’s guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist, and suddenly its leader, David Gilmour carried on the band with drummer Nick Mason, releasing their A Momentary Lapse of Reason album and touring on same (and more). Waters did not want his ex-bandmates touring under the Pink Floyd name, and well as not use certain tour props like the infamous airplane that fans saw sailing over their heads at Floyd shows and the equally infamous inflatable pink pig. But Waters lost in court. Gilmour and Waters, plus keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason did reunite at Live 8 in 2005, and Gilmour, with Mason have shown up at Water’s solo gigs as well have played with one another, over time. Bad feelings though still seem to linger, with plenty of jabs taken from one man to the other, especially in light of Water’s most recent divisive political statements caused rifts anew, although the remaining band could agree enough to have just recently sold some of their music rights to Sony.
5) Will The Real Neil Young Please Stand Up
At just a tickle into the 80s, Neil Young was served with papers from his then-label, Geffen Records. David Geffen, head of the label that bore his name, was suing Young, claiming that the musician’s recent recordings were “unrepresentative” and “uncharacteristic;” Geffen claimed that Neil Young no longer sounded like, well…Neil Young. Disappointed in the electronic sounds of Young’s Trans album (which did make it to No. 19 on the Billboard 200 chart), and rejecting Young’s country album already recorded, Geffen demanded a rock n’ roll album. Young recorded and released the rockabilly Everybody’s Rockin’ but Geffen, still not pleased, sued Young. Young countersued, claiming his contract with his new label allowed him complete artistic freedom. The suit eventually settled, Geffen apologized and released that previously recorded Old Ways country album, plus two more Young albums, but Young returned to Reprise Records where he continues releasing albums on the label to this day.
6) No More Guessing
The Guess Who’s founding singer Burton Cummings and guitarist Randy Bachman just settled a lawsuit as of this writing with fellow original members of their ex-Canadian-based classic band, Jim Kale and Garry Peterson. Cummings and Bachman have now acquired the trademark to The Guess Who name.
7) The Black Crowes vs. Steve Gorman
Notorious for their brotherly fights, very much like Ray and Davies of The Kinks, Chris and Rich Robinson actually had an outside enemy they had to confront in their trials and tribulations. Here, we see the band’s original drummer, Steve Gorman, suing the Crowes boys for what he claimed was faulty accounting that saw the drummer missing out on royalties he was owed from the band’s back catalog of albums. The settlement is still in the works.
8) Freezing or Not It Was Hell For Felder
Reconvening in full force for their Hell Freezes Over album, tour, and MTV special in 1994, The Eagles tried their best to fly above the fray of their historic interpersonal squabbles. But even a long lucrative stream of shows during this reunion did not quell guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist Don Felder’s feelings against his bandmates Don Henley and Glenn Frey. What pricked Felder on the reunion was the split of revenue the players were taking in, most notably how Frey and Henley were getting more of the concert take than any other member. Back in their 70s heyday, The Eagles split the money equally, but Felder took offense when Henley and Frey insisted on a higher percentage of the live show bucks, and both did not like Felder quibbling about it; the pair would fire Felder from the Eagles at the start of February 2001.
9) A Fight Still Raging
Off the success of their Ten and Vs albums, Pearl Jam was surely riding high in 1994. With this clout and popularity, the band decided it was time to take a stand against Ticketmaster for the fees the big company was gorging fans with, and also their exclusive deals with major arenas. An antitrust complaint sprang up when Pearl Jam, looking to charge $18.50 for a ticket, plus a 1.8% service fee saw Ticketmaster wanting to bleed another 20 cents from each transaction…a small sum per ticket but when added up to how many tickets Pearl Jam could potentially sell on a tour, would add up to quite the healthy profit margin for Ticketmaster. PJ aborted a summer tour to avoid dealing with Ticketmaster but sadly, they lost the case. They did, however, still manage to take home some kind of a win with the public relations nightmare they inflicted on Ticketmaster – not a bad consolation prize. Federal squabbles with Ticketmaster, and Live Nation in fact, still rages on.
10) Really, who are you gonna call?
Ray Parker Jr. sang and wrote the theme for the movie, Ghostbusters. Right after the movie was released, none other than Huey Lewis sued Parker for plagiarism. Claiming that Parker copied primarily the bassline from Lewis’s 1983 song “I Want a New Drug,” the case was settled out of court in 1985. The settlement sum was an undisclosed amount with a confidentiality agreement leveled at both parties prohibiting them from discussing the case. But not giving up the ghost exactly, Parker would come to sue Lewis in 2001 for breaching the confidentiality agreement. He claimed that in one of that year’s episode of the popular VH1 series Behind the Music, Huey spoke about Parker stealing the contested Ghostbuster hit. Three years later, the Ghostbusters filmmakers as much admitted to using the song “I Want a New Drug” as a temporary backing track in some of the movie scenes. The filmmakers also claimed that they had indeed offered the writing of the theme song to Huey Lewis and the News but the band had declined.
