Excerpts from eMusic:
Imagine a single that sampled U2, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana and a bunch of others — without permission — and then hit #3 on the Billboard charts, selling more than a million copies. That's right, you're imagining the mother of all lawsuits. You're also imagining something that pretty much already happened — in 1956.
That was when 21-year-old Dickie Goodman, along with partner Bill Buchanan, recorded "The Flying Saucer," parts 1 and 2, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, parodying Orson Welles' infamous War of the Worlds broadcast with a frenetic, freewheeling skit about an alien invasion, brazenly incorporating snippets of hits by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley and about two dozen other musical giants. ...
No one had ever done this before. It would be five years before electronic music pioneer James Tenney cut up Elvis Presley's version of "Blue Suede Shoes" on the musique concrete classic, "Collage #1 (Blue Suede)." No doubt about it, Dickie Goodman saw far beyond the curve. He was basically sampling and mashing up hits of the day to concoct manic melanges of sound years before the members of Public Enemy were even born. In the process, he pioneered the fine art of sonic copyright infringement.
Some 17 record labels sued Buchanan and Goodman for poaching their music, but being the wise-ass punks they were, the duo responded with yet another of what they called a "break-in record": "Buchanan and Goodman on Trial," which bit Nat King Cole, Little Richard, Elvis, the Dragnet theme and a bunch of Martians. They got slapped with an injunction, but New York State Supreme Court Judge Henry Clay Greenberg deemed the work a parody and therefore subject to fair use laws; Buchanan and Goodman, the judge opined, "had created a new work."
Comments