Category Archives: My Stories

Derivative Works, Music, My Stories

The Record Vault – Britny Fox

I purchased this 7 inch single with loose change, before the record labels decided to drop the high production costs of vinyl for the low production costs of CD’s and triple the selling price in the process.

And vocally, I wasn’t sure if I was listening to Tom Keifer, however it was “Dizzy” Dean Davidson who would go on to state many years later how he hated the Britny Fox material because he was controlled by management and the label to write songs like other popular songs.

Case in point, “Girlschool”.

Musically, it is so generic, it’s actually addictive and I like the way the music rolls and the vocal melody ties it all together.

But at this point in time circa 1988/89, I was over listening to songs that had uninspired rhymes, like rules/ school, school/cool, boys/toys and day/play/hallway.

And the B-side song “Don’t Hide” didn’t connect, so my Britny Fox purchases are down to just one single purchase and a bass tab book I picked up for 1 dollar which has the bass playing an open string for most of the songs.  

And the self-titled Britny Fox album went Gold, like many other generic albums around the same time due to the power of MTV and a film clip doing the rounds.

Then Dizzy left and someone else came in on vocals and that was it for all of em.

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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Influenced, movies, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

The Record Vault – Bonfire

From Germany.

My older brothers had a friend called Greeny. He had funds and he liked metal and rock music. It was from his car stereo I heard bands like Cinderella, Great White, Leatherwolf and Bonfire for the first time. 

I really got into this band. I thought they would be the next big thing. But they didn’t get there. Not for a lack of trying.

And it pisses me off that these two albums are not on Spotify Australia.

Fireworks

Released in 1987.

There isn’t a bad track on this album. Maybe when it came to the charts and the hearts and minds of consumers, its many years too late in sound and style, as the public by 1987 was hooked on Jovi, Van Halen, U2, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, GNR and soon, Metallica.

And then you get the Bonfire sound, which is rooted in melodic heavy metal circa 1982 to 1985.

The album tracks are written by vocalist Claus Lessmann, guitarists Hans Ziller and Horst Maier and bassist Jörg Deisinger.

“Ready 4 Reaction” is the opening track and it blasts out of the speakers. “Never Mind” continues the melodic rock. “Sleeping All Alone” is an attempt to hit the charts as Jack Ponti and Joe Lynn Turner have a co-write. It didn’t chart, however it’s a good song.

“Sweet Obsession” also has Joe Lynn Turner and Jack Ponti as co-writers. I got the single and then I couldn’t find the album for years. So I dubbed it.The current version of the band doing the rounds these days always reference this album in the live arena and they totally ignore the follow up.

Point Blank

Released in 1989.

A big shift in personnel happened on this album with founder Hans Ziller being fired even though the album features his music. And before Ziller was fired, guitarist Horst Maier-Thorn was also let go.

Desmond Child was brought in. Bob Halligan Jnr was brought in and Jack Ponti was brought back. Desmond Child even recovered the song “The Price Of Loving You” for his own solo album, that’s how high he held it.

Even Michael Wagener was hired to produce. It was an all assault to get the music buying public into the band.

And the album did nothing.

There was no promo in Australia for it and a little paragraph in the Metal Edge magazine many months after it was released tipped me off.

Like the debut, the album sound was out of date by a few years. By 1989, the tastes and sounds morphed even more. This album would have done great if it was released in 1987.

Acoustic/Unplugged was becoming a thing and the Blues had come back into the sounds of rock and metal with bands going back to their roots.

Of course, Motley Crue released a thunderous sounding album dripping with groove and GNR was still riding the wave of their punk boogie oriented debut album, furnished with an EP of acoustic songs.

And somewhere in between Bonfire sat, without one of its founding members.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity

Gaming The System

If there is demand for an artists music then why aren’t the artists servicing the demand.

Because there are people putting up bootleg and demo recordings of popular artists on digital services and making money from it in the process. In some cases they even uploading fake recordings which somehow manage to get onto the artists homepage.

Actually that homepage part crap needs to be sorted by Apple and Spotify quickly because how the fuck can you fuck that up. Too much reliance on algorithms and not enough human eyes and ears.

I got a song in my Spotify Release Radar from Tommy Lee and instead of seeing the aged, white tattooed T-Bone, I see a young black rapper. Same deal with names like Dio, Ratt, Rush, Badlands, UFO, Keel, Vandenberg, Cinderella, Icon, KISS and Journey.

The process to game the system is simply.

You just set up an account with a digital distribution company and start releasing music.

Now these distribution companies are set up for independent artists to release music. But we have bullshit artists using it to game the system and fuck it up for legitimate independent artists.

And the digital distribution companies do have fraud prevention methods but people who are gaming the system are just getting smarter than the algorithms coded by people who are not as smart as the con artists.

One fraudulent leaker earned $60K in royalties by putting unreleased tracks from a popular artist on their Spotify and Apple Music accounts.

What the fuck were the artists record labels reps doing?

Didn’t they see these unreleased songs go up.

I guess not because, they were too busy fighting stream ripping sits, pirate sites, website blocking and anything else that involves censorship of the Net instead of developing artists and taking care of their artists and paying them on time and fairly.

The way the payments work for is that Spotify or Apple or Pandora will pay the digital distributor royalties for the artists. This normally happens three months after. So for royalties earned in January, the payments to the distributor happen in March/April.

And then the distributor will hold these payments as they “clear” the royalties from being free of any copyright claims. This takes another three months.

So for a fraudulent uploader to earn $60K, it means many people were asleep at the wheel.

And legitimate independent artists get punished even further as they wait over six months for a royalty payment. All because people want to game the system and the system has too many people asleep at the wheel.

Read this article over at Pitchfork.

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A to Z of Making It, Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, My Stories

Help

My kids had one of my Beatles guitar books out and it was opened to “Help”. And once upon a time I was learning The Beatles songs because they sounded good. I never really paid attention to the lyrics, especially to their mid 60s output. But today, the lyrics of “Help” grabbed me instantly, so I had to call it up on Spotify.

When I was younger, so much younger than today
I never needed anybody’s help in any way

I felt invincible when I was younger. Although I hung out with people, I didn’t think at all that I would need to ask them for help or seek help from them. Especially any help that involved manual labour. Actually there was no way I was wasting my time/days on manual labour when there was metal music to be listened to or waves to be caught.

But now these days are gone, I’m not so self-assured

Man, these words are from 1965. So much truth.

Getting older means greater analysis and every decision needs our attention and I remember reading somewhere how exhausting attention is.

And we can handle this in a few ways.

We can ignore making decisions and seek help from self-improvement books or we can spend time on a website and even move further away from making decisions.

Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors

If my mind feels fear, I act differently. If I feel like it’s been overloaded with life’s challenges, I act differently. If I am curious or connected, I acted differently. If I feel inspired, I act differently. I feel like the mind is so powerful and it dictates how my day will go.

Do I want that small lizard part of the brain controlling my day or the whole part of the brain?

Help me get my feet back on the ground

There is a saying that our existence is defined by what we struggle for. And these days, are people willing to struggle for anything.

No one wants to have their feet off the ground. There needs to be a safety net in everything.

If you want to make an impact, you need to be a lifer. This means being a lifer in the game you want to play and a lifer in learning.

Remember, a University/College degree will put you on the path to earning a living, but things you learn that are not taught at school (like smoking in the boys room), your own self-education will put you on the path to making a difference. But there is no safety net on this path.

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways
My independence seems to vanish in the haze

When you are a member of the biggest rock band and part of a cultural craze, your independence is limited. It’s a choice.

So many people want the fame and stardom, but then complain when people hound them for a photograph or a selfie. Its part of the territory. These days, not so much. A rock star could be walking the streets and no one would notice.

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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

The More Things Change – Cinderella

Turned on my radio to the same old song
Some big mouth talking trying to tell us where the world went wrong

You can replace the radio with Twitter or Facebook or any other platform which gives people a voice. Remember the Fyre Festival. It was the big mouths (social influencers) via social media who spread the word and suddenly people are getting ripped off to the tune of $50K for 4 tickets.

And if it’s not social influencers, it’s other powerful people. Or people who had some popular appeal and want the attention back again.

But all this talk of peace and love
It’s only for the news
Cause every time you trust someone
You end up getting screwed

You live long enough you get to see that the world is not very nice. Nature alone wants to have balance in its ecosystems and unleashes destructive forces to keep it that way. As humans, we are fighting to stay alive from our first breath against nature and then against the evils of the world created by humans.

We get to experience school and all the things that come with it. Friends become enemies and enemies become friends. And we experience sports, holidays with families and when you get older, even our brothers or sisters betray us on some days. But we still hope, we still trust and we move on, to another day, to a better day. But some don’t move on to another day.

The more things change
The more they stay the same
Everyone’s your brother till you turn the other way

People get jealous towards each other. They feel like someone is stealing their thunder or their just dragging them down. Friendships go bad and relationships go sour. People in a romantic relationship couldn’t keep their hands off each other once upon a time and then over the course of time, they can’t stand to be around each other.

What changed?

The more things change
The more they stay the same
All we need’s a miracle to take us all away from the pain

Its why self-help books, improvement books, behavioural science books have become a billion dollar industry. And if those kind of things don’t do it for you, then religion is there to fill in the gap. Or if any of those things don’t do it for you, there is exercise, opioids, narcotics, cigarettes and various other addictions like social media.

Either way, there is some miracle there waiting to take away the pain. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Music, My Stories

Invest In I

We are all looking for a life which is not rooted in mediocrity. And we want this life to fall into our laps. Well I did expect that to happen, because hey, why shouldn’t it.

It wasn’t until I got older that I realised that constant learning is the key. And as soon as I started evolving and increasing my skillset, I got distracted by this little thing called social media, which to me is the enemy of learning.

I was a MySpace and Facebook user in the early days. I shut down my Facebook account in November 2010 and haven’t been back since. I felt like I was wasting so much time on these sites that I wasn’t doing anything creative.

And it’s easy to get lost because entertainment is so important in our lives and with streaming and social media so relevant in our lives, it seems like we are putting entertainment in front of our goals and dreams.

If you don’t believe me, ask yourself how much money have you spent on phones/phone bills, TV’s, tablets, computers and streaming accounts?

Then compare that to the money you have spent on your self-education. If you see a massive miss-match, it means you are pretty distracted as well, especially if your time is spent using those tools to watch content instead of creating content.

Because we can get anything we want these days. The history of music is at our fingertips, either by licensed services or unlicensed sites. Same deal with movies and literature. And we double down into what we know. We listen to music we have already listened to. Or we just press shuffle.

We don’t want to waste time on something that won’t satisfy us but we waste a lot of time on our devices. Get a read out on your usage from the phone settings apps.

And we got lost in this world, forgetting that we need to self-improve.

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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

The Record Vault – Bonham

“The Disregard Of Timekeeping” was released in 1989. People expected big things from the son of John Bonham.

I remember seeing a few video clips of Bonham and thinking the songs are pretty cool, but with funds being limited, thought nothing more of it at that time, but when i saw the album at a heavily reduced price of $1 in a second hand record shop, i thought why not.

“Wait For You” has this Faith No More intro (like “Epic”) before it morphs into a Led Zep like verse and chorus.

“Guilty” for such a clichéd title, sounds massive. And that Chorus deserved a top 10 placement on the Billboard charts.

The funny thing is that Winger played a similar brand of rock music to Bonham. Both bands had serious musicians who paid their dues in other bands. But Winger had greater commercial success than Bonham.

“Holding On Forever” to me captures the Bonham sound. It doesn’t sound like a Led Zeppelin cut (but it has Led Zep influences), nor does it sound like a song chasing some commercial dream (although it has some elements) and it has a solo section/chorus that reminds me of the LA scene. It’s these kind of songs which didn’t get released as a single by the label that define a band’s sound.

The label marketed “Guilty” and “Wait For You” as the singles.

And by 1989, the music buying public had burned out on Led Zep Clones. So if you didn’t have the album, you wouldn’t be able to get in deep and find songs like these.

Then they released “Madhatter”.

I didn’t buy it, nor did I find a copy of it via the record fairs or second hand record shops many years later.

But I did find a CD single of “Change Of A Season”.

You get one album track and three non-album tracks.

And “Change Of A Season” is a great track. A track good enough to promote the album. And I called it up on Spotify today.

My favorite tracks are “Change Of A Seasons”, “The Storm”, “Ride On A Dream” and “Chimera”. All of em are a bit more experimental than the standard verse and chorus fair.

The band was building their style and it’s a shame they didn’t get a chance at a few more albums.

And for those record label suits today who still reckon a sale equals a fan.

The album I have was purchased by a music consumer, who then heard it and traded it in to a second hand record and book store. I guess this official fan didn’t like it.

And then when I purchased it, I guess I don’t count because my purchase is off the books. But I played it once and put in away for many years until I pulled it out recently to hear.

And the single was never meant to be sold as its stamped promotional copy. But it got sold and purchased unofficially.

So how would the record label suits account for these?

By saying the band is in debt.

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Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

The Record Vault – Blind Guardian

I couldn’t recall how a track sounded from the “Battalions Of Fear” album when I pulled this off the shelf.

I have some of their later albums dubbed on cassette which are a lot better.

My cousin Mega is into them, and I dubbed like a best off from him. So when I saw this album in one of my many ventures to second hand record shops and record fairs, I purchased it.

Calling it up on Spotify, and pressing play on the first track “Majesty”, I remembered my thoughts about the drumming. It’s so frantic and fast and thinking back now, I don’t know if in 1984 there was a drummer on a record who played this fast. And the double kick drum just doesn’t stop.

Overall, the album is fast, raw and unrefined speed metal whereas the later albums would have different dynamics to go with their Tolkien inspired lyrics and are a lot better.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

YouTube Manual Claims

If it’s not Spotify, it’s YouTube.

If it’s not YouTube, it’s Pandora.

If it’s not Pandora, it’s streaming.

If it’s not streaming, it’s free streaming.

If it’s not free streaming, it’s stream ripping.

If it’s not stream ripping it’s torrents.

There is always something or someone which is in the sights of the record labels and their association, the RIAA.

YouTube was criticized for not doing enough to control unlicensed uploads of movies and music. YouTube then provided the entertainment industries with ContentId, a way to claim videos as theirs that other people have uploaded. And by doing so, they could claim any monies paid on the video.

But with any automated system, it’s open to abuse and the labels did a great job abusing it. Legitimate content that had a few seconds of music (which is fair use) to illustrate their story or point in the video got taken down or claimed.

A birthday party video which parents shared that had music in the background got taken down or claimed.

And the uploader had no real rights to fight back. So the labels kept on abusing this process. They even took down their own legal content on occasions.

But after years of complaints, YouTube is finally doing something about it. Or is it.

The story of YouTube changing its policies has been getting publicity as YouTube being this evil monolith against creators but their changes only relate to the manual claims tool available to Copyright Owners. Most big artists are part of major labels and they use ContentID.

And the problematic and automatic ContentID is still the same and still open to the same abuse.

However YouTube has seen a new greedy trend emerge in manually claiming videos. These people claim a small snippet of a video uploaded to YouTube and by default transfer all monies from the YouTube video creator to the Copyright Claimant.

By changing the rules, YouTube is not stopping people from claiming these videos but they are asking for evidence and timestamps which somehow is pissing off the claimants.

And the claimants can still block the video.

To me, it’s much ado about nothing, it’s still the same old world and nothing much has changed. But it still doesn’t stop artists from Tweeting how YouTube is ripping artists off.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

Keep Your Eye On The Copyright

I haven’t done a copyright post for a few weeks, but the Google Alerts each day come up with some of the most WTF moments.

First up, is Eminem’s music publisher is suing Spotify because somehow Spotify is playing songs on its service without the proper permissions from one of the biggest artists.

Is Eight Mike serious?

I guess they are. Read the article here.

Eminem is streamed a lot on Spotify and somehow, Eight Mile (which is basically Eminem) reckons Spotify doesn’t have a license to have his songs on the service.

One of his songs” ‘Till I Collapse” has 702 million streams, so I wonder when or at what stage in those hundreds of million streams did the music publisher realise that Spotify didn’t have a license.

And there is so much talk about Eminem’s most popular track “Lose Yourself”, which to me is a rip off from “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin. The Am to F transition over a droning pedal tone is not original or unique at all.

What seems to have happened here is that Eminem has seen how other artists have made their own special deals with Spotify and he’s thinking, “I want a piece of that pie”, so let’s drum up some BS rubbish to get Spotify to pay me more.

And while I am on the topic of payments, here is a win for the artist. Ennio Morricone, who composed some massive soundtracks back in the 70s won back the right to some of his songs from the label. But he had to go to court and to appeal to get his songs back.

Morricone gave up his Copyrights for a large upfront payment and low royalties in the late seventies, however his music became very popular from the 90’s onwards.

Metallica kept using his music as an intro to all of their concerts and suddenly the movies from the 70’s in which he composed music for, had a new lease of life in the 90’s with DVD releases and what not, but the composer got nothing.

The labels of course argued these are works for hire and that the artist is not entitled to his works.

And that large upfront payment the label would have made in the late 70’s would have been recouped tenfold over the last 30 years, while the artist would have had that just one payment.

And finally, we have the US Government siding with an artist on a copyright suit.

As people are aware, Plant and Page were accused and then cleared of copyright infringement in June 2016 over the opening bars of “Stairway To Heaven” and the song “Taurus” from the band Spirit.

The decision was appealed by the heirs and the judge agreed so it’s going back to court.

So should the Government pick a side here, especially when the whole mess of copyrights is because previous Governments kept on changing and extending the terms of Copyright to suit their back pockets.

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