If anyone here has an agenda, you do. You transfer your manifest distaste for the indie business into a personal attack on Rusk. He helped put out a shitload of great music on as fair of terms as one could expect in the business, and he deserves recognition for that. Your attempt to poke holes in the post by arguing he wasn’t an angel is beside the point.

I love how you only pull out the race/gender card at the end after people call bullshit on your incoherent arguments. That is perhaps the most retarded attempt to gain moral high ground that I have seen in some time.

Idolator is not exactly indie rock town, man. Did you see that Ne-Yo was our #1 entry on the 80 ’08 list?

And, one more time, SST did not pay back royalties. They owed SY money. Touch and Go kept the Buthole Surfers’ stuff in print, paying for P&D. The cases are not similar.

Great diss in the last line there. Was this an event? Did you invite people over? If that is one of the best moments in your life…sheesh. Hyperbole much? You really got Albini good!

Steve Albini, and your reputation for being a nice guy when you meet him in person and then ruthless and cut throat yourself is well known in the indie rock world. One second sharing beers with a band, the next second trashing them in some interview somewhere. Or better yet instinctively trashing any Chicago indie band that doesn’t conform to some bizarre set of arbitrary rules you-and only you-ever knows or even understands.

“They basically sued for the right to get a worse deal elsewhere.”
Great! It’s their choice. Who cares? And why does it bother you and others so much that they dared to be truly independent and sever ties? Do you trash talk Sonic Youth for suing SST?

‘It bothers me when people characterize Touch and Go as “just a business, like any other business.”‘
It bothers you because you are personally connected with them and have a vested interest in working with them and you are as far from a neutral party in any discussion on “Touhc and Go” and you know it.

But I will say I love the fact you-if this is indeed the Steve Albini-pop up to slam this discussion with your presence.

It pretty much fits into my equation that indie rock is a free and open world where you can do/say anything you want… Except say anything bad about indie rock at all…

Here’s my issue with indie rock mythos and hand-wringing ala this original post. Indie rock is mainly (1) white (2) male dominated and (3) based in punk. Nothing else. You don’t hear these discussions when it comes to local hip hop or even R&B/soul labels. Far from it.

So Steve, I’m sure you got some fun posting here. But I think your time is better served schmoozing with Chicago Reader and WBEZ staff so you can have a decent army of non-questioning followers in the press who just post what you say as gospel.

Shouldn’t someone like you who has gotten rich off of work you did for Nirvana and others have better things to do with your time? Or are you really this much of an OCD indie rock bully?

Tossing my Shellac 7″s was one of the best moments of my life.

And, in the Reader piece, they are arguing about splits, so I don’t understand.

Touch and Go paid for the making of the Butthole Surfers records and paid the Butthole Surfers 50 percent of the net profits of the titles, and this arrangement was understood to be permanent. This is an extraordinarily generous deal by industry standards, and there was never any suggestion that T&G had failed to pay anything the Butthole Surfers were owed, or that there were any accounting problems.

The Butthole Surfers unilaterally decided that they wanted more money from the label than they had agreed to, and Touch and Go said no. Touch and Go never asserted that they alone could make and sell these records — the Butthole Surfers could legally have had the same titles issued elsewhere from another label if that label was more to their liking — only that having paid to make the recordings, Touch and Go should be able to continue to sell them, having never done anything wrong.

The Butthole Surfers sued for exclusive ownership of those recordings and (in a case that disagrees with rulings in other circuit courts) were granted ownership, the only effect of which was that Touch and Go were required to stop making and selling Butthole Surfer records.

They basically sued for the right to get a worse deal elsewhere.

Anyone familiar with the Butthole Surfers’ band history will recognize a pattern of greed and belligerence that they will ultimately leave as their legacy. While I admired some of their thing early on, they were always ruthless and cut throat, both within the band and in their interactions with the rest of the community. I wrote them off years before this lawsuit bullshit.

It bothers me when people characterize Touch and Go as “just a business, like any other business.” I have dealt with thousands of labels and distributors, and for most of them that statement would be true, but not Touch and Go. Anybody suggesting as much is speaking from ignorance.

Rusk offered the 70%, I think, when it became clear he was going to lose the case if some compromise wasn’t reached, but as acknowledged, it was too late.

I guess we disagree, but really I don’t think a band asserting ownership of their back catalog, some ten years after their initial release, is that horrible. The way they went about it WAS horrible, a lawsuit, but if Rusk wasn’t budging on the idea of licensing, then perhaps it was inevitable.

As far as Rusk being “out of pocket” for P&D, by all accounts Rusk is a shrew businessman. Touch and Go was making 30% off the top (their standard P&D cut) off every Arcade Fire and Spoon record sold there for a while. I think when Merge left the fold, that’s when the distribution arm began to buckle.

I do have great admiration for Ian MacKaye (Dischord) and Calvin Johnson (K Records). But I think there are a few of the folks who are genuine in what they do and honest about how they do it.

The Butthole Surfers situation is fascinating to me because it doesn’t show Touch and Go as the magical equitable label some would paint it to be.

And personally my deal is I’ve dealt with indie bands/labels for over two decades, and my ultimate conclusion is indies are not too much better than majors when the big picture is taken into account. Digital distribution truly evens out the playing field far more and eliminates these factional “cults of personality” that have formed around indie idols.

If you are truly into the music than CD sales should not mean anything. Would it be ideal if you could live off your music? Maybe. But there is a sense of entitlement that comes from indie rock that truly gets me-and others-ill nowadays.

Enjoy!

I never really understood why the band was raked over the coals for this. Sonic Youth sued SST so they could rerelease their records on Geffen, and nobody in the indie community blinks. The Butthole Surfers rerelease their music on their own label and they are shellac-ed (ha) for doing so. Obviously Touch and Go were a lot more sympathetic label than SST was.

(switching back to the main story) I’m very sorry to see T&G’s distribution go. I’m guessing they never fully recovered when Merge bypassed Touch and Go to deal with ADA directly. It’s a shame. Probably in the 90s and 00s their greater contribution to music was mostly behind the scenes, by P&Ding so many labels.

I’m a little bit confused about this discussion of the Walthall v. Rusk case, because my recollection is that the issue (at least on appeal) was the enforceability (or specifically the term) of an oral/handshake license. I represent labels, and I always trump this one out to my label clients as a cautionary tale – but many established indies still like to do business on a handshake, which is very trusting and ultimately adventageous to the artist under the 7th Circuit ruling. I think a lot of it has to do with the culture of mutual trust in indie that originated with – among others – Touch and Go. It’s a sticky issue, but I’ve never felt T&G was greedy for trying to enforce an oral contract. Perhaps I don’t know the whole story?

“Listen, digital distro is fine and dandy, but I think that a lot of these companies are trying to offer richer consumer experiences than that.”

True enough. But digital distro won’t go away. And most people don’t care anymore like it or not. There’s a reason local record store are folding.

How about this. You can technically download a lot for free, but sometimes it’s a pain in the ass. If I’m given the choice between hunting for “free” or paying for getting a digital download, I’ll pay. So will others.

“Listen, Corey Rusk and Touch and Go failed at this distribution thing. Is that what you want to hear?”

Basically, yes. But the attitude you have here is tons of people are blown away by this happening. Reality Check: Most folks out there could care less about indie labels in any way. So to paint Corey Rusk and Touch and Go as some massively sad story is to ignore two things: 1) the writing has been on the wall for years as far as distro models go and 2) there actually is something liberating about the cult of personality surrounding labels not being as strong as it once was.

And as far as people truly caring about this? I’d look at the comments attached to this entry as a solid example of how in the big picture the world has changed and people don’t look at indie distro as something that needs to be mourned.

“And there are two sides to the Butthole Surfers story. You seem to side with them (and that’s quite an unpopular position)…”

It’s an unpopular public discussion. But taken to it’s basics, Touch and Go simply looks greedy in that example. As I said before, if the back-catalog was so non-lucrative, then why fight to keep it?

I’d also question the Chicago Reader article’s objectivity as well. Chicago Reader has always had folks on staff who were in bands that Touch and Go dealt with.