THOUGHTS ON RECORDED MUSIC: PART 2
Who Owns the Music?
What would you prefer? 6% you get paid or 8% that you don’t get paid?
One of the axioms of music collecting I have learned, whether it be records, books, or musical instruments, is:
Never lend anyone anything.
It sounds a little misanthropic, but the reason is simple.
You never get it back.
The Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxa, Love’s Da Capo, Tim Buckley’s Greetings from LA, a Nick Drake box set, and Patti Smith’s Horses, all treasured and all vanished into the hands of people whose names I can barely remember, or at least, would like to forget. At least they shared my enthusiasm for the records.
I admit one was an ex-girlfriend who wanted to walk away from the relationship with at least something.
Even so, this isn’t entirely true. If you do get it back, it is inevitably broken, scratched, had a cup of coffee spilt over it, or simply destroyed in some other unimaginable way.
Another case in point: I had a copy of Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, a brilliant inside view of the soul music scene in Sixties America. The above subtitle is paraphrased from my memory of the book.
