Brian Ritchie a stand-up guy who plays the stand-up bass (sometimes, usually he plays a Mariachi style acoustic bass guitar), had unkind words for his bandmate Gordon Gano with reference to the use of some of their classic hits in commercials (something I've mentioned in the past).
"For the fans who rightfully are complaining about the Wendy's burger advertisement featuring Blister in the Sun, Gordon Gano is the publisher of the song and Warners is the record company. When they agree to use it there's nothing the rest of the band can do about it, because we don't own the song or the recording. That's showbiz. Therefore when you see dubious or in this case disgusting uses of our music you can thank the greed, insensitivity and poor taste of Gordon Gano, it is his karma that he lost his songwriting ability many years ago, probably due to his own lack of self-respect as his willingness to prostitute our songs demonstrates. Neither Gordon (vegetarian) nor me (gourmet) eat garbage like Wendy's burgers. I can't endorse them because I disagree with corporate food on culinary, political, health, economic and environmental grounds. However I see my life's work trivialized at the hands of my business partner over and over again, although I have raised my objections numerous times. As disgusted as you are I am more so."
Not only could I not have said it better, but I lack the standing he does with regards to this matter. Time to break out the anecdote where I regale you with the tale about the time I met him backstage at the Wiltern (or not, Brian did seem the most 'dude I'd like to hang out with' of the three).
1 comment:
I didn't address this, but as long as it's the artist who created the song selling it, I don't care. This gets a little iffy in a situation like this when the guy who wrote the song is part of a band...but I assume he's also keeping most of the royalties from the song instead of sharing them equally, so it's not surprising that he'd sell it off without their input.
Final score: I appreciate Brian's righteous outrage (though not his solo album--that blew self-righteous chunks), but will side with Gordon.
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