Steve Hackett is getting crushed

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(I don’t know how I let this one slip by last month.  For those of you to whom this is old news – sorry)

Poor old Steve Hackett.  When he was in Genesis, he could never get enough of his ideas across to the other band members.  One day, he threatened to quit, they mixed him out of the record, and went on to become multi-gazillionaires.  Steve managed to maintain a lot of artistic integrity by keeping all his solo stuff in-house. in other words, no major labels were used to get his prodigious and extraordinary solo material to the streets.

And while said material is all pretty good (very good, in fact), old Steve has never gotten the kind of economic remuneration that has been showered on all four of his former bandmates Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford and Phil Collins, although it should be noted that Collins has three ex-wives.

And now, as Hackett approaches his 60th birthday, he’s being sued for everything he has by his ex-wife.  According to the TimesOnline, Kim Poor is making a play for EVERYTHING – including Hackett’s share of his royalties from old Genesis music.  Ouch!

Apparently things are so bad that Hackett is working on his new album in the living room of his flat.  Double ouch!!

But even with all this adversity, his new record will still be coming out on October 5, and I’ll bet it will be ten times more amazing than anything we’ve heard from Tony Banks in the past ten years!

Good news and bad news

The good news people are reading Blogerantz!  The bad news is that one of them is Dave Meros of Spock’s Beard.

Thanks for the nice words. Not so many thanks for offering our CD up for illegal downloading, though.

You P2P and Bittorent guys are killing us. .. literally.

Dave Meros / Spock’s Beard

Sorry about that, Dave.  I thought the title (Live at Whiskey and Near Fest) was unavailable through conventional means, but I have since confirmed that it can be purchased directly at Radiant Records on CDR.

I’m pleased to say that I did purchase this item back in the day, as opposed to getting it from bittrorrent or P2P.  My original vision with Blogerantz was to share music the way I did back in high school when I would copy Steve Hackett’s Defector for one friend and they would copy Tony Banks’ Curious Feeling for me.  Behavior like that generally did not lead to cease and desist letters, even though it was technically in violation of copyright laws.

But I understand Dave’s point and I am very sensitive about posting ‘official’ releases for artists who are young or independent.  Despite my deep and abiding love of Beardfish, I’m not posting any of their studio records at Blogerantz, no matter how much I want to spread the word.  Those guys really need the money.

‘No See’ – how about that organ solo?!?

The Axiom 25 strikes again on this latest incarnation of the evolving ‘No See’. At 2:20, it’s almost respectable, although there’s been a lot of copying and pasting. It seems like I’m trying to incorporate everything I like in open composition. In this latest version you’ll hear some dumbed down Tony Banks arpeggios and a mini organ solo that was inspired by listing to too much old Traffic. I need to do more with drums and that means figuring out Reason one day. This weekend I’ll try to get more going with the guitar.

Here’s what I have so far.