Egy regi level, amit anno Dexter irt az elso nem hivatalos offspring levlistara 96-ban vmikor... erdekes es tanulsagos...
Hey,
A lot of people have asked me what the deal is with us leaving Epitaph, so I
thought I would post it here... seems like a good place.
We've gotten a lot of flack about leaving Epitaph, and a lot of that's
because we tried to keep our mouths shut so this wouldn't turn into a press
war. Unfortunately, Epitaph didn't do the same, so the only side anyone
heard was theirs. Well, I'd like you guys to get our side of the story.
Brett Gurewitz owns Epitaph. He's made our leaving the label very public and
very nasty, and that's why we decided to defend ourselves, and that's why I'm
writing now. We all really like the people at Epitaph and the bands on
Epitaph, but we couldn't deal with Brett anymore. Brett's more concerned
about making his label big than he is about helping his bands. That's
basically what it's about, and why we left.
We tried to renegotiate with Brett to do more records on Epitaph starting
last March, because we wanted to stay on the label. We had been trying to
stay on Epitaph all along, actually. When Smash first started getting big in
May of '94, Brett approached us and said he wanted to sell the record to a major
label in return for a royalty override on it. We convinced him not to do it.
In July of '94, when the record started taking off in Europe, he approached
us again about selling the record to a major label in Europe. Again, we had
to beg him not to. We wanted to stay on Epitaph because they gave us our
start, and we like to keep the same people. We have the same booking agent,
the same crew, etc.
So we didn't meet with any major labels - not one. Meanwhile, Brett met with
all of them. Geffen, Capitol, Sony, you name it, and he met with them. They
wanted to buy Epitaph, and he was listening. He told people that he wanted
to be the next Richard Branson. Oh yeah, he met with Richard Branson too.
It's important to a lot of the Epitaph bands to be on a label not associated
with a major. When we confronted him about selling, he denied it. Finally
though, last December, he admitted that he wanted to sell part of the company
to 'raise capital.'
We were concerned about Brett selling part of the company, but there were
other things that bothered us too. Like, we had decided early on to try to
keep a low profile. We didn't do things like 120 Minutes, or David
Letterman, or Saturday Night Live, although we could have. But when we would
turn down an interview request, Brett would step in and do it himself,
pumping his company. He even did interviews with Forbes magazine and
Newsweek. We were trying to avoid being poster boys for punk rock, and Brett
wasn't helping - we felt that if we turned something down, he shouldn't do it
in our place.
We negotiated for about a year, but couldn't get everything ironed out. It's
true that he offered us a great advance and a great royalty rate. But the
last contract he sent had some big problems for us. It said we couldn't do
cover songs. It said Ron couldn't play in his other band. It said he could
use our music on as many compilations as he wanted to. One version of the
contract had a clause in it that allowed Brett to take out a life insurance
policy on me, so that if I died, he would profit. That's when we realized
that this was just about money for him.
He refused to negotiate any more last January, and a week later, he decided
to pull the whole offer. To keep it short, he eventually sold our contract
to Columbia.
We believed in sticking up for the indie label, and we shouldn't have. We
stayed true to Epitaph while Brett met with every major label. Brett says
publicly that major labels are bad but, of course, he was in Bad Religion
when they signed to Atlantic. He wrote a lot of the songs on Stranger than
Fiction that came out on Atlantic. Also, Brett sued us. And, he tried to
force us to stay on his label. There was no indie spirit there anymore.
We took less money to sign with Columbia. We had to sign for more records to
go with Columbia. Our signing with Columbia was not to try and make more
money. We did it because we won't record for someone who thinks he can force
us to. We won't record for a guy who's worse than a major label. We're
gonna do whatever the fuck we want to.
Well, there it is. You heard it first...
Dexter.
| |
|
|
