Pop Artists Re-Recording Their Old Material-Revisionist History? Or Just Desserts?

Music purists may be troubled by a recent trend in which artists from the 60’s and 70’s are going back into the studio to re-record spanking new versions of their classic tunes.
The list appears to be growing by the day, from the “new” Squeeze album “Spot The Difference”, to Ray Davies’s choral collection from last year being followed up by a “duets” album of sorts in the upcoming “See My Friends”.

Do a little more digging and you’ll find that The Sex Pistols recently reunited in the studio to record a fresh version of “Anarchy In The UK” for the video game, “Guitar Hero III”. The list continues with everyone from Kiss to Uriah Heep jumping into the game.

Almost 40 years ago, Ray Davies wrote a song called “The Money-Go-Round” in which he wrote, “Do they all deserve money from a song that they’ve never heard? They don’t know the tune and they don’t know the words but they don’t give a damn…” Herein lies the purpose behind this trend. Music publishing over the years has been bought and sold and sold again. It’s been broken into pieces via corporate takeovers and piecemealed out to other companies and may have even been won in a high stakes poker game for all we know.

The demand for this music is as high as it’s ever been. From video games to the ending credits on TV shows and movies, the thirst for classic rock is insatiable towards all things commercial. Many times though, the effort it takes to gain publishing rights to use the music is either just too expensive, or just too complicated because there are too many entities that own portions and percentages of the tune. So, by the time you round up all these approvals and signatures, your product has either already missed it’s deadline to hit the market place, or less expensive options get utilized.

Those less expensive options are where these new recordings come in. By providing a new performance of the song, the artist has effectively cut out all these middlemen and created a cash flow that goes directly to them. In that same aforementioned song Davies also lamented, “But if I ever get my money, I’ll be too old and grey to spend it”.. If that was the lay of the land some 40 years ago, can you imagine how bad it must be now?

So before we criticize our rock heroes for performing revisionist history on their back catalog instead of coming up with new ideas, remember that they need to put peanut butter on the table just like the rest of us. And before we take the directors and producers of movies and TV to task for not using the original recordings of songs, try to understand how difficult the environment is for them to get the rights to these songs in order to complete their artistic vision.

Copy and paste this link into your browser to read Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze explain why his band decided to do this.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/oct/25/squeeze-back-catalogue-up-junction