Remember Crazy Foam for your bath in the 60s/70s? You’d empty the can with one bath and then get smacked for “wasting” soap. Man…
The 70s were chock full of “educational” TV shows so the networks could get away with playing 6 hours of cartoons on a Saturday morning crammed full of commercials for toys, cereals and even more toys. The good old days. But these shows were often filled with clumsy old geezers who were trying to show you how to build a nuclear reactor from two straws and some white glue. Every project required white glue. Most of the time these TV scientists had “youthful” assistants who would take the blows of the exploding test-tubes and stuff. “Wasn’t that fun, Timmy?” … “I can’t see!” And so why not have Bud do the same to his lovely and unsuspecting assistant?
I saw a video on YouTube quite by accident that inspired this comic. A geeky scientist gets his “lovely” assistant to drop some watered down yeast into soapy hydrogen peroxide in this HUGE beaker and it just explodes with green foam. Cool stuff. My Mom used hydrogen peroxide for everything around the house. If I’d known how to use it like I do now, I would not have survived the 60s.
I interned briefly at the recording studio in Pekin, Illinois just after Styx recorded “Man of Miracles” down there. It was a blast to be in a working studio for about 10 minutes then it got really boring. Interns were there to get donuts and coffee and clean toilets (with hydrogen peroxide!) so I quickly dumped that internship for one at the local cable TV news station, where I would end up directing the nightly news just one year later. I’m a quick study.
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N0m95PExHY
Discussion (50) ¬
man, its a sad, sad thing that saturday morning cartoons are pretty much gone now. i was really bummed to see that (almost 40 year) tradition die out. eff’d up.
Yes, the cost of producing cartoons in the “modern” age has killed Saturday morning cartoons. With cable channels like Cartoon Network, Nicktoons and Boomerang, I can still get my fill of cartoony madness on a Saturday morning. In my youth of the mid to late 60s, Saturday morning cartoons ruled all three networks. I had things from Jonny Quest to the Beatles to Bugs Bunny to Superman to fill my mornings along with Cap’n Crunch, Quisp or Quake cereals. It was good to be a kid back then… after 5 hours of non-stop cartoons, I was ready to tackle the world by hopping on my bike and torturing my neighbors with sugar filled screams of delight.
Most folks were glad to see us move after a year of that…
🙂
man, i don’t think its the cost of production at all. i think the reason saturday morning cartoons were killed was mainly due to lobbyist groups and the stupid “educational programming” mandate that pretty much ruled the changes to the saturday morning cartoon lineup for decades and the changes were more drastic every single time it happened. when fox was still airing a saturday morning lineup a year or two ago (one of the last gasps of smc lineups), half of it was filled with crappy live-action edu-tainment tripe that was absolutely gormless. they had a couple of ALMOST decent cartoons but for the most part it was all complete shit.
they shoulda just kept schoolhouse rock around… 🙂
don’t they still sell quisp? i coulda swore it was still available as recently as 5 years ago…
Being a Quake person myself, I don’t really look for Quisp, but I do know it has been released from time to time. Quake, not so much.
Well, all the major movie studios shut down their cartoon divisions because of costs and without those companies creating content, it fell to the likes of Hanna-Barbera and Filmation Studios to create the cartoons. “He Man” had like only 20% new footage in each episode as they recycled the same running scenes and transformation scenes over and over. It was same for the live action “Isis” as she managed to find the same damn closet or bush or whatever to make her switch into superhero mode.
So costs had something to do with it, but with mandates that a toy company couldn’t produce a cartoon to sell an existing product shot the hell out of G.I. Joe and Hot Wheels cartoons from being on the air as well.
🙂
Quake was sugary rocks, man. It cut my mouth when I ate it! Apparently, the character just didn’t jell with the kids either, because they changed him completely. (Even making a machine that he could jump into to create his new persona.) But the cereal still sucked.
Quake and Cap’n Crunch both destroyed the roof of your mouth as you ate it as a kid. As an adult who has eaten Cap’n Crunch for 57 years, my mouth has gotten used to it. Quake going from a miner to an Australian-type cowboy was surreal to say the least, even for us kids at the time.
i dunno man, i don’t really think that SMC died in the 80’s, i think it truly started its long and slow death in the mid-to-late 90’s…
hell, almost all smc’s were produced on a pretty tight budget and all of them skimped somewhere…and most of the 80’s cartoons that were produced were pretty low quality as well…but that all started in the 70’s i believe…and recycling scenes or actions was a pretty common practice from the 60’s thru to now. everyone from jay ward to hanna barberra to even warner brothers did that. i believe even the brothers fleischer did that back in the 20’s, but at least their recycled backgrounds were pretty long. 😉
then again, some actually had relatively decent and wild animation too … take bakshi’s version of “mighty mouse”, for example. wow. now there was an amazing little piece of werk. and of course, it didn’t hurt that john k. was behind a lot of it.
the whole “toy line as cartoon” thing fueled so many cartoons in the 80’s that it wasn’t even funny. some were total garbage; others were quite good for what they were, and at least they were a very entertaining 22 minute advertisement. 😀
by the by …
excellent use of the “FOOM!” sfx. that’s one of my favourite comic sfx and is rarely used. yay! 10 points. 😀
Saturday morning cartoons? Cartoons at *any* hour, apart from DangerMouse (preceded by a couple of stiff joints)? Dearie me, you Earthlings really *are* descended from chimpanzees 😛
Seriously, more than ever I’m glad I grew up without a telly. We had a power outage a couple of nights ago and for a few hours the only sound around the neighbourhood was the anguished wails and withdrawal-twitchings of all the people who’d suddenly been cut off from their plasma-screened soma feed. We OTOH had a romantic candlelit supper and then chatted in the garden whilst watching the fruitbats dance overhead 😀
we had a power outage here last summer for about 8 hours due to a massive lightning storm. knocked out a 4 square mile area…. it was AMAZING how quiet my neighborhood got. and me, being the night owl, i just sat and listened to how quiet it was all night long. its amazing how loud everything truly is. its like the buildings themselves just hum with all the electricity runnin’ thru ’em. it was so quiet i could practically hear people farting 3 blocks away.
at 4am, i went out and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood. it was amazing how many people i could hear snoring in the neighboring apartment complex (which is a HUGE complex btw). felt like a ninja sneaking around the neighborhood, just listening. spectacular. probably what it was like to hear a similar neighborhood 70 years ago.
it was a full moon that night too so everything was very nicely illuminated, and with no nearby light pollution you could actually bask in honest-to-pete moonlight.
i love my electricity (especially for amplification purposes) but sometimes the quiet is just what’cha need.
With you on the loving-electricity part, but yes, sometimes the quiet of Just Like Ago is soul-soothing. Except it *isn’t* ‘quiet as such – there’s the sound of the wind stirring the trees, the sound of small animals in the night, and if you live on a farm right beside the ocean (as I did for years until I went mad and emigrated to live in a city with a population equal to *all of* Ireland’s), the constant sound of the sea caressing the rocky beach at the bottom of the fields.
I like my music very loud and my quiet very quiet 😀
Ah, you’re both wet behind the ears when it comes to quiet and nature…
Go find yourself a 1000 acre corn farm, out in the middle of no-where (like downstate Illinois), walk (do not drive) out to a HUGE grassy field with no trees around you, lay down flat on your back and stare straight up at the Universe…
You don’t need any form of artificial stimulants to hear and *feel* space-time moving through you. There’s nothing closer to flying at Warp Speed then sitting there in absolute darkness (there ain’t a city light for dozens of miles) just taking in the millions and millions of stars. You’ll see satellites fly overhead and the occasional meteorite burn up in the atmosphere… the experience is truly moving and you *are* for that moment at one with nature as it was meant to be.
Give the ol’ redneck the points on this one. You guys have music down, but I’ve got Nature in my back pocket.
🙂
Been there, done that. Nyah, nyah 😛
See, this is one of the things about going with the roadies instead of flying with the rest of the band. Stuff like that can happen!
Yeah, but I lived it for a few years. Farming was a part of my youth and brings me some common sense a lot of “city” folks just don’t get.
You also have a different view on life helping your herd of sheep give birth at 2:00am on a frozen February morning when you’re only 10 years old. I experienced “child birth” long before I ever had kids. Raised one lamb myself as the ewe had triplets and can only handle two. So, this little lamb became my pet and even when we sold the herd to market, she would follow me off the truck and walk around with me. The guy buying the herd had never seen anything like it. Hey, I was a kid and who better to play with?
The cool thing is we can share that stuff here now.
🙂
Oooh! Pissing contest! PISSING CONTEST!!! Right, hands up everyone here who’s ever had to draw their own household water from a well. By hand. ~blows imaginary smoke from imaginary pistol~
😛 😛 😛 😛
Seriously though, it does rock that we can share this stuff here! And FYI I’ve done the helping-at-lambing-on-a-freezing-February-morning thing too, though not until I was in my early 30s (lived and worked on farms a number of times before that though). That’s how I broke my coccyx, as it happens. Breeched lamb…freezing pre-dawn morning…unseen iced-up slippery rock…OUCH.
Man, you are my hero!!! I spent my high school years hooked on Styx…until I saw the VH1 special Behind The Music. (I’ve always wondered, wasn’t one of the recording studios that Styx recorded at near Chicago Ridge Mall? Pumpkin Studios or something? I grew up in Evergreen Park and would drive 95th Street alot, and saw this building next door to a carpet store west of the mall…of course I could be totally, completely wrong about that…just wondering…)
Yes, in fact Styx did record there as well as other studios in the area, but for some odd reason they ended up in Pekin, Illinois for “Man of Miracles” at Golden Voice Studios. Probably since it was their last album with Wooden Nickel, and since that company was not in good financial shape, they went down there as it was cheaper.
The funny thing is, I lived in Pekin for one year during my 6th grade year in 1968/69. My Dad, being a teacher and a farmer, had given up farming all together in 1968 and we started moving from town to town until we ended up in Lombard, Illinois in 1969. Everything in my life back then was based on the “school year” so many things in my memory get screwed up to which year it really was until I can think of what *grade* I was in then I can place the year.
We lived down the road from a Hiram Walker Distillery in Peoria and on a good day you could smell the whiskey being made. Apparently it is not a pleasant smell (I have no sense of smell, so it was issue to me).
One last Pekin factoid… until 1980, the high school sports teams were called the Pekin Chinks. Being politically correct has messed up a lot of things.
Wow.. my parents are sure glad I didn’t know this trick when I was a kid…. I can picture it now “but mooooOOOOOooooM! it’s SCIEEEEENCE!”
Yes, I was doing all types of “experiments” in college in the name of science…
🙂
*laughter*
Around 1976, my family was visiting some friends. One of their kids had a chemistry set. You can probably see where this is going…
Billy told me about the vinegar-and-baking soda method of making tiny volcanoes. We set up two test tubes, with plastic tubing between them. Just as the concoction neared its explosive climax, my mom walked in. “What are you two doing?” she demanded. Just then, the fizzing compression of baking soda and vinegar reached maximum volume. The force of it blew the plastic tubing from the soda-holding test tube.
And, of course, my mom was standing right in the path of an impressive arc of chemical “lava.”
There ought to be something in the Parental Handbook for moments when two 11-year-old boys collapse in laughter as their chemistry experiment showers you with baking soda foam.
Lacking such instruction, Mom simply yelled at us for five minutes or so, then sent us both to bed… in separate rooms, of course.
Yes! I got my first chemistry set in 6th grade and got chewed out for staining some damn wall or something in our basement. Oddly enough, that chemistry set ended up in the garbage “by mistake” one day when I wasn’t looking. Wonder how that happened?
🙂
Ah, yes – the classic Styx Behind the Music episode. Until that point, I had assumed that Tommy Shaw had been responsible for the utter pussification of a band I had enjoyed until the travesty of Cornerstone (not to mention the abominations that followed). Watching that installment of Rock’s Greatest Train-wrecks, the truth was revealed. Tommy came off as a real trouper whose sense of humor must have been essential to the survival of Dennis deYoung. Watching the scene where a mortified Shaw tries to “act” amidst a shower of “BOO”s from the audience (climaxed by his wry observation, “I was self-medicating a lot at the time”), and seeing the utter contempt with which a clueless deYoung was regarded by his former bandmates (who refused to tour with him again), I saw where the true blame for Styx’s collapse belongs.
Having lived through all of the Styx years, and even having the ORIGINAL release of “Lady” from like 1973 or so, I knew all along it was DeYoung that screwed up the band. I pissed off all three members of his fan club late last year when I had the Devil instruct her sidekick goat to have DeYoung write “Babe”. Styx was a rock band and in its prime, I enjoyed DeYoung’s theatrics on stage. It livened up the show and I could tolerate “Lady” as it ended up rocking. But, when tripe like “Babe” was boiling out of the band instead of “Miss America” and other rockers, I knew the band’s time was short.
The “Kilroy” tour, which I refused to go see, ended it for me. What a pile of junk. Styx was a tight band and JY could play a mean guitar, but that was over-shadowed by DeYoung. DeYoung’s music got them noticed in the beginning, but it was also his stuff that ended the band years later. I’ve heard Dennis on Chicago radio a lot since the break-up and he’s still a great entertainer with a sharp sense of humor, but in the end, it’s not Styx in their prime.
My favorite album is “Equinox” just before Shaw entered the band. I saw Styx on that tour to support the release of the album as they opened for BTO in early 1976. Both bands were at their height and it was a damn good show. Had flaming cheese and wine at the greek restaurant “Diana’s Opaa” afterwards and it was a perfect night. Regardless of the fact that the guy who drove us and our dates to the concert not only locked his keys in the car, but lock them in the car with it *running* too. Nice one, Tom!
🙂
Bring back Dr. Julius Sumner!!!!!! Those were the best.
Holy crap! Searched YouTube for some clips and what a scary looking dude he was! If it’s the same guy. Classic old TV. I cut my teeth directing stuff like that at college. What a riot!
🙂
Great stuff Byron! I’ll definitely be trying the foam thing at home with my son! Where can I get 30% hydrogen peroxide? Haha!!
Oh, yeah, hydrogen peroxide and yeast on on the shopping list this weekend. If I get it to work, I’ll take pictures and/or video. It sounds like fun and a perfect mess for the wife to clean up…
Just kidding… I’ll have my kids clean it up.
🙂
Heheh, what you need is a Roomba for the cleanup. A supercharged Roomba. ~wonders if anyone’s tried to supercharge a Roomba yet~
i’m no chemist (just spent some time above it), but doesn’t that mixture become extremely flammable with that high a concentration of hydrogen peroxide and mixture with oxygen ?
As Science Bob states, it is an exothermic reaction at high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide, and the 30% stuff is not easily found.
Thus, “don’t try this at home” applies big time, but I’m going to do it anyway… I am a guy you know…
🙂
Yerss, I can tell you’re a man. Sheesh, *any* woman would know where to find 30% hydrogen peroxide… ~whistles and looks at the ceiling~
Well, I may know what you’re talking about as I grew up with four women in the house during the 60s… and if you’re referring to it’s use as a douche, then bonus points for me. If not, I just grossed out my entire readership.
But what I did *not* know was that hydrogen peroxide is naturally produced in the vagina to deal with bacteria. Go girls!
🙂
Whoops, you just grossed out your entire readership! 😛
Actually, I was referring to hair bleach (come on, you didn’t think all those blondes out there were natural, did’ja?), but I’ve since realised that the strongest available salon peroxide is probably only 20 per cent…back to the drawing board…
Blowing shit up is the only science I’m good at. 🙂 Well…that and biology. LOL.
Hmm. I’ve nothing much to contribute to this one – see my reply to Dee about cartoons; also, I have less than nothing to offer about ~shudders~ Styx – so I’ll take the opportunity now to say that I LOVE Lorraine’s Polaroids. Keep ’em coming!
I also know nada about the comparative merits of your tectonic-sounding breakfast cereals, but during my time out in Ahh Murka I discovered two awesome (non-tectonic) ones: Cream of Wheat and Grape Nuts. Grape Nuts were fabulous because one could douse them with milk, eat a few bites, go off and do odds and sods, come back an hour later and they were *still* crunchy. Cream of Wheat is my second favourite breakfast food (next to porridge); I used to buy it from a little USA imports shop in Muswell Hill, and then from USA Foods down here (scary place – never seen so many additives in my life!), but about five years ago someone changed the Cream of Wheat recipe – probably to make it ‘healthier’ – and now it has far too many wheat-germ flecks in it and just doesn’t taste right, sigh…
truth be told, i’m not that big on styx either…one of the chicago bands i’m not very fond of … cheap trick on the other hand… early cheap trick was great stuff.
yer right, cream of wheat is “different” now somehow … i always liked malt-o-meal a lot better than cream o’ wheat … then again, i always preferred grits to cream of wheat … that flavour never changes. 😉
grape rocks…man, i only liked that cereal when heated. otherwise, i always thought it was like eating wheat-flavoured granite.
gotta love american cereal names though. designed to sound ‘peppy’ or ‘zippy’ or like they’ll give you so much energy you’ll fire off yer chair and into the cosmos after eating a bowl…chocolate-frosted sugar bombs… they’ll blow ya mind! 😀
Ah yes, Cheap Trick were a seriously fun band (and that’s a fave oxymoron of mine, ‘seriously fun’). I won’t spend time dissing Styx here, as Byron loves them, but they played support to my band way back when and I thought they sucked major arse, both musically and attitude-wise.
IMTAO most of the USA’s great kickin’ rock bands came from much further south and east. Like, Georgia. And Florida 🙂
Mmm, wheat-flavoured granite…
I like sugar *on* cereals (though I normally eat my porridge plain – just oats and water, not even milk). Sugar *in* cereals, not so much. I also find sugar rush as much as a mystery as dope munchies: neither has ever happened to me. Too much sugar makes my gums feel like they’re shrivelling, and too much dope just made me feel like I was approaching the event horizon of a black hole, but that’s as far as it goes. Caffeine, though – I am truly scary on caffeine. And all it takes is one mug of espresso, or of rocket-fuel ‘ordinary’ coffee, to do it to me o_O
“Love” Styx? I love my Mom, I love my first bass, I *love” Bachman-Turner Overdrive, but I do *not* “love” Styx. You are confusing stuff I grew up with and have a fondness for with my loving the band. I own three Styx albums, by contrast I have every ABBA album from “Arrival” on as they were masters at creating pop music (I didn’t say great music) AND were absolute geniuses when it came to the music business and are so bleeding rich today they don’t give a rat’s ass about ABBA. But, being from Chicago, there was no freakin’ way you could get around hearing Styx music. If their songs weren’t on the radio (constantly) or they weren’t being interviewed by TV, radio or newspaper, then they were at your local high school playing a concert (up until about 1975 that is).
I am a child of 70s AM radio, that’s all we had. Luckily my Mom liked WLS 890 in Chicago as opposed to the talk stations or, ack, the country music stations. So, I grew up on Elvis, Beatles, Supremes, Neil Diamond, Carly Simon, Simon & Garfunkel… even Tony Orlando & Dawn. But, my roots are based heavily in rock… real rock. And, regardless of your opinions, Styx could, at times, play some good rock. You just had to pick those songs out of the rest of the trash.
Now, take on BTO and I’ll come at you like a Bull moose in heat… those Canadians had it right.
🙂
I have nothing against BTO, not least because I know very little about their recordings! I used to have something against them – about the stolen riff that made them famous – but eventually I accepted that it was an example of the Blackthorne Defence If Tom Petty can be magnanimous about the Chilis accidentally nicking some of his music, the least I can do is forgive BTO for nicking Peter T’s riff 😛
BTO just makes me happy. Their music is not to be taken seriously, but it just makes you feel good. It’s also fantastic really loud.
Stealing? Eh, seems to me rock and roll is full of stolen stuff. From George Harrison’s nip-tuck of “He’s So Fine” to BTO… they’ve all done it, accidentally or not. You know my personal slogan: “Professionals Steal, Amateurs Copy” and it’s true. Nothing is new, so take something and make it your own.
BTO was just not clever on making it their own sometimes.
🙂
Absolutely – but IMO the most important factor is respect. Composers wo obviously pay respect get my nod; gobshites like, say, the KLF, who made a point of deliberately stealing with *deliberate* disrespect, don’t.
And you know *my* slogan, I think: if you’re going to steal, do it from a rich person 😀
BTW my objections to (some) stealing are moral, not legal. I absolutely HATE the Robber Barons ‘R’ Us farce that copyright law has become.
It used to be that there were two things in music that were uncopyrightable: titles and riffs. Seems that at least the latter has changed recently, which sucks. Do you know the song Down Under, by Men at Work? – otherwise known as ‘the *other* other Australian national anthem’? Some sad greedy sucktard, tipped off by a mention on some Aussie pop-quiz programme, noted that the final notes of the iconic flute riff (from the song Down Under) were similar, in pitch and syncopation, to the – get this – opening notes of the *second line* of the verse of a piss-awful fake folk song called The Laughing Kookaburra. One very long court case later, the cloth-eared judge said that Men at Work had indeed committed copyright infringement. Whisky tango foxtrot?!?!?!?! At least said judge had the minimal decency to say that Men at Work don’t have to pay more than a token amount to those soulless gits – who were so offended by the lack of money-for-noting that they’re trying to get the case re-heard.
hey now … i love the klf … 😀
granted, yes, some of their stuff was outright theft and blatantly obvious theft at that — especially the abba bit that got them in trouble… and i STILL think its funny that they tried to open relations with abba to fix the issue by attempting to give them an award for “sales in excess of zero”, failed, ended up getting shot at by a swedish farmer in a field whilst burning the remaining copies of the offending record and having to have the iconic galaxie of theirs towed back to england — they ended up dumping the rest of the records into the north sea on a ferry on the way back…(man, there are probably MANY rare records sitting at the bottom of the north sea at this point thanks to all those pirate ships) but they paved the way for and pioneered the art of fair use, which i’m a big proponent of…and the mashup too, considering one of their biggest “hits” was a mashup of a gary glitter song and the doctor who theme…
not to mention some of their stuff is laugh out loud funny…
those guys are kinda heroes to me i suppose, just because a) they got away with a LOT more than they were persecuted for, b) they started lots of controversy, c) they pioneered fair use in/thru sampling and d) anyone who can rock sitars with marshall stacks, even in just a photo, deserves a nod. 😀
even if you don’t like ’em, you might still find their book “The Manual” really funny. its pretty dated nowadays, but i laughed my ass off at some of the things they said in it, mainly because it was “sad-but-true” in a spinal tap sort of way…
— Dee-o, Deeeee-o…
~ducks flying bananas~
I know that just about everyone has at least one ‘how *could* you?’ (viz Byron’s brain-boggling ABBA fixation), so fair enough. TBH though, imagine you’re a professional songwriter of legendary honour (known for, f’rinstance, giving part-credit away to a colleague on the grounds that that person was a key inspiration in the writing of a song, even though said colleague never wrote one note, chord or lyric for it), and imagine another musician hears a song you’re in the process of writing, steals the core of it, and proceeds to make millions (literally) from ‘their’ song without giving you so much as a nod of thanks…yeah, I don’t have much patience with the KLF’s philosophy. Not to mention that utterly despicable Burn a Million Quid stunt. IMTAO that was puerile arrogance of the highest (or should that be lowest?) order. Just think how many happy-hits of MDMA or even mere cannabis they could have spread around for that price…
They did one awesome, awesome, AWESOME song (Doctorin the TARDIS, of course, as you’ve noted), and then tried to distance themselves from it because they found it ‘shameful’. That alone would make me an enemy :-S
I’m a great proponent of mashups – been doing them live since waaaay before Drummond and co. got notorious – but there are a lot of truly lame mashups out there these days…though the great ones are MEGA, e.g. the Ackadacka/Eminem ‘My Name Is Back in Black’ 😀
i’m not sure i follow, or perhaps its just that i don’t agree that yer analogy applies to the KLF…especially not the KLF *as* the KLF…and possibly not the JAMS either…
i don’t think that sampling very small bits of a song, especially when used in a collage where there are MANY samples of songs, is akin to stealing a riff of a song w-i-p overheard in a studio. especially now in this day and age when the people who sample enough of a body of werk to view it as outright theft, since nowadays if that method is employed then they have to actually get clearance by paying a usually exorbitant (but rightfully so since potentially millions could be made) clearance fee and paying royalties for anything that isn’t obviously fair use (and many, MANY hip hop and rap-based pop songs spring to mind).
i think if it’s a short enough sample, and its not the main focus of a body of werk (ie bruce hornsby’s “the way it is” as the “musical” portion of the track, etc), then its a form of flattery since someone thought enough of it to use that snippet in their piece, which is probably, in the end, a huge collage made from a dozen sources or more. nowadays tho the border between fair use and “we want a piece of that” purely depends on how popular the record becomes or how much money the artist has to fight back in the name of ‘fair use’.
unless you were specifically referring to bill drummond and jimmy cauty and know something about them that i don’t, which is quite possible, i don’t think that the idea you present (ie the stealing of a riff overheard from a neighbouring studio) really applies to them, and especially not when they were going by the JAMS moniker, unless again, you know something i don’t and one of their ‘hits’ was a direct ripoff of something that they overheard whilst werking in the studio (again, entirely possible). their werk as the JAMS was very low-rent. they had literally no budget to do what they did when they sampled abba (and all the rest), and from what i know of their history (again, nothing inside their camp, just from what i’ve read), those records as the JAMS made virtually no money other than to put right back into the project to fund more pressings, etc. pretty far from millions, and probably also pretty far from 10’s of thousands. as the timelords, i’d bet that they still made virtually no money from it — probably the “we want a piece of that” bit set in by the two obvious copyright holders; no information has really been available there and i’ve always wanted to know if they “got away with it”, if they were the first to pay clearance royalties or if they simply just got away with obtaining a mechanical license for each song (which technically, for the day, was legit if they generated both pieces themselves, which partially sounds like they did)… i have no idea of the PRS allows that or not. i think the reason why the tried to distance themselves from that single was purely because no one was willing to promote it the way they wanted (ie car as pop star). i think they figured that with that single, the bird had left the nest and it was time to move on. those guys were always really big on shifting gears in the name of new ideas anyway, and i think by the time they deleted their catalog they figured that they could contribute nothing new to the house music set and the jig was up. either that or they figured that the machine gun stunt drummond pulled at the BRIT Awards was going to screw them or something.
as the KLF, i never heard anything they did that resounded of huge plagiarism, and it seems to me that they explored and broke ground in the very new territory of house music at that time. nothing earth-shattering, but i hear echoes and ghosts of “what time is love?” and “3am eternal” all over the spectrum of house music (and electronic music in general) even today.
one other thing that i really appreciated about them was that they took the outlaw thing to whole new heights and were pioneering something totally new and unexplored at the time. i really think that they were the punk rockers of their genre to be truthful, because they pushed the boundaries as far as they could both in their art, in their promotion, and the glaringly obvious but totally ambiguous boundary of good taste. the whole vandalization of billboards, for example. brilliant. “hey, that looks like our logo, if we just change one or two letters…” … ballsy. the stunts that they pulled in the name of promotion was nothing short of brilliant in most cases, since it often involved both of them actively promoting instead of just putting ads in the NME or MM or plastering flyers everywhere. they tried to push their promotion right to the edge (often too far) and in many instances, it werked. they believed that positive or negative press was all good and they were masterminds and werking the media imho.
i agree with the burning of a million pounds stunt. i think that was wasteful and of course am of the opinion that they should’ve kept being the thorn in the side of the music industry by funding projects and being active still. however, i think it was largely just another art project, and meant to be shocking, since most of their art stemmed from that simple ideal — be as shocking as possible. open peoples’ eyes. the burning of that large a sum of money is shocking and appalling, and i reckon that was the entire point of it. they wanted to stir the shit, like they always did. i would really love to hear why eactly that they did it, if only just to have an answer to that question. supposedly they will openly talk about it in 2017, so maybe then we’ll finally get an answer, if either one of them make it that far.
outright ripping off someone by way of purposely stealing the exact riff or chord progression that you heard them play to you or overheard in a studio situation as a new idea and beating them to the copyright punch (which yer example points the finger at) is bad and i agree with you there in the example that you cite. having known people that have had their shit stolen in that exact same manner, i understand that whole scenario and how sucky it is to be on the shitty end of that stick.
there is a grey area though, and it is simply one of artistic exploration and blind ignorance of the other songs’ existence, a’la the example you cite of the “men at work” case, where i think the persecution of that band is total bullshit. i know nothing of the situation, but i seriously doubt that men at work stole the song in question (maybe they did, but crikey, the song is almost 30 years old now!).
being that writing music is often as much blind exploration of chords and notes (ie stabbing in the dark) as it is hearing a chord progression in yer head and focusing on translating it from neurological firings to actual waveforms floating out from an instrument and into the air, i think that it is not impossible for two people to stumble on the same chord progression or riff on opposite ends of the world, given that the musical scale is definitely finite in nature. finite number of notes in the scale, finite (though VERY expansive) amount of chords available, finite possibilities. thankfully, synthesizers, odd instruments, effects, strange types of scales, modes, etc, make the possibilities seem infinite, and they are in a sense. but i don’t think its impossible for two (or more) people to stumble upon the same chord progressions or note structures. and given the larger general public’s lack of desire for extremely complicated pieces of music, it narrows the scope so much that composers of pop music HAVE to stick to simple music structures that get recycled over and over again. listen to any piece of top 40 gold and the golden rule of pop music has proven this. history is bound to repeat itself and has done so quite a bit over the last 70 years, especially in rock’n’roll.
take the case of satriani vs coldplay, for example. i do not think this was a case of coldplay ripping off satriani, i think it was a case of satriani needing money and saying “hey, look, these three chords are the same!”. again, it is not impossible for two people to stumble upon the same musical progression.
i personally think that external artistic influence when writing new material is quite ok, and happens all the time. the whole process of learning an instrument *always* involves emulation. if you like the way robert fripp plays guitar, you study how he plays, and attempt to make music in a similar vein, yer stuff is going to sound very similar to robert fripp. aping the style isn’t a bad thing, and every guitarist/keyboardist tends to ape a style that they glomm onto while learning how to play. but then taking that skill and, say, recording an entire version of “RED”, selling it and not paying licensing fees or royalties, is a bad thing. 😉
i think i hear dinner calling my name. 🙂
the “ie” in the “i think if it’s a short enough sample, and its not the main focus of a body of werk (ie bruce hornsby’s “the way it is” as the “musical” portion of the track, etc)” part of that paragraph was meant to essentially point the finger at that Tupac Shakur song, “changes”, which basically used that (imho insipid) bruce hornsby riff as the musical basis for the entire track, and meant to cite this as the polar opposite of the “employing a short fair use sample” type thing.
hunger, and having one of yer toes accidentally broken by some woman wearing a pair of 4″ stilettos at a club (which happened earlier tonight) really does a number on yer ability to focus. 😉
–dee!
a couple of thoughts occurred to me while i was (painfully) cooking my dinner, which is now cooling and awaiting me to devour it and i just thought i’d tag them down while i still had them fresh in my mind.
first off, i am NOT against people getting paid for their werk, especially in creative endeavours like making music, creating art, etc. the above may read like i am, or one could draw that conclusion and i’d just like to say that i am not against it. not in the slightest.
secondly …
i am largely against seeing creative werks (especially derivative ones) removed from public access just because a corporation has piles of money to throw at its removal / destruction. there have been many pieces of werk i’ve seen over the years get pulled/banned/removed simply because it was a derivative werk that sampled the original in some way.
that said … there’s one thing i’ve noticed over the years that, amazingly enough, the major label system in particular has absolutely FAILED to notice. and that is this:
litigation with intent to destroy a derivative werk usually only results in the derivative werk becoming immensely popular and sought after, and in spite, the original werk and the copyright holder of said original werk suffers greatly as far as attention being paid to it due to negative pr and, most importantly, lost sales. ie people seek out and buy the derivative werk in droves because of the attention it is getting by the negative press of the litigator. thus, attempting to sue a werk out of existence only causes people to seek it out and spread it in droves, having the unintentional effect of making it even more popular than the original werk.
if left alone, the derivative werk usually brings positive attention to the original by way of curiosity, thus selling as much of the original as the derivative. thus, people who are curious as to where the source material came from go out and obtain the original just to hear (or see, in some cases where the art is visual more than it is aural) how the derivative got from point a to point b. not EVERYONE who discovers the new derivative seeks out the old version, but …
so by leaving it alone, or putting a positive spin on the derivative werk, the derivative werk causes income to happen for the original in many cases…
as an example: i can’t imagine that “the grey album” didn’t cause people to go out and buy a copy of “The White Album” in droves just to see how Dangermouse sliced up the original to create the derivative.
i also think that in the future, people will use sampling as a form of discovery, just as they have since the widespread use of it. for example, i think that many hip hop fans have been turned onto james brown solely because of the amazing proliferation of the chunk taken and used ad nauseum in hip hop from “funky drummer”. or the beatles “tomorrow never knows” through the chemical brothers song “setting sun”. tho the chemical brothers did not sample the original, its blatantly obvious that that’s where the inspiration came from.
i think i’ll shut up now. 😉
also tafkan, i’d like to note that this isn’t an attack at you or on you, because i dig conversing with ya here. just my thoughts on the issue. and maybe, just a little, i’m trying to sway you a bit on yer opinion. 😉
mmmm…dinner…
Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE…
Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE…
Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE… Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE…
Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE! DEE! D-
Sorry, I was just taking the fifth 😛
First off, my sympathies to your toe! Just be thankful it was only a four-inch stiletto and not a six-inch one – the physics of stiletto heel damage potential are scary in any event, but they go up exponentially with the extra two inches…
Secondly, you’ve presented a fascinating and well-considered set of mini-essays here. I still don’t necessarily agree with you on most of it, but you’ve earned your QC’s wig and robes – or your Clarence Darrow bowtie – should you ever decide to change career paths 😉
I’ve copy-pasted this thread out for my own keepers, and will get back to you on the latest with reactions/counter-arguments/whatever (after all, this page ain’t going anywhere), but for now, I have go commit some journalism – ah, the tyranny of deadlines – and then drag me semiretired semi-crippled arse off to do some onsite work, so I’ll be back tomorrow. Even though we’ll probably have to yatter in the comments of the next 1977 strip by then 😀
~exits, playing her 1970s Sly Stone/Sam and Dave live mashup on her mePod~
I remember “Dinosaurs,” a Jim Henson produced sit com about a family of dinosaurs. The father, and the baby would bond over a television show similar to “Mr. Wizard,” where the scientist would devise some experiment for “Timmy” to do which would cause him to explode. The scientist would then look off stage and call out; “We’re going to need another Timmy!” It reached the point where the father and baby would start saying; “Say it!”
Best gag of the whole series!