tonyballz wrote:I remember that. Everyone got all excited and then nothing happened. I bought the CD, which is missing the Phil Ochs cover (more licensing?) but the albums never materialized.
There's plenty of other Homestead LPs worth reissuing too. What a hassle from a label that's been defunct for almost 25 years. Does Cosloy own that shit? If not, who does? I'm not real versed in copyright law.
Was never clear to me if the Ochs cover was indeed nixed b/c of copyright reasons or for aesthetic reasons. It certainly would have fit on the CD, I think, so it probably wasn't for lack of space. Those two LPs are fairly short, right?
The problem is w/Homestead's parent company, the distributor and operator of several other labels Dutch East India. Or what's left of it. Barry Tenenbaum is the guy who supposedly owns all that stuff. He was a shady, Long Island-based schmuck who got his start importing Beatles records. Gerard was just the second in a line of label heads, but Tenenbaum owned the operation and is mostly responsible for proposing lousy contracts, owning the masters forever, and coming out of hiding to threaten legal action against reissues--or at least against reissues that didn't buy him out. (Such problems persisted long after Gerard left the label to work for Matador.) To be fair, some bands were smart enough to renegotiate and only license their material to Homestead for a fixed period of time; I also remember that some of the very early contracts weren't quite as hostile towards the artist (although I could be wrong there). What Tenenbaum did was basically take advantage of the bands who'd sign just about anything or who merely felt lucky just to have someone pay to put their record out.
That said, Tenenbaum has been beyond-quiet for many, many years and rumor has it that he's not in the best of health. He was certainly older than the people he hired to work at his company.