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My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him
- donatj 8y agoI have trouble feeling bad for the guy. He was paid what he had agreed to.
- mirimir 8y agoYes, with no contract, it was work for hire. And it's understandable that he feels bad about it. So I do feel bad for him. We've all made mistakes. Given the headline, I had expected more than grief about no royalties. I mean, that is a disturbing old man.
- tjr225 8y agoI feel bad for the guy. The album was pretty successful...
- scrumption 8y agoYou're the type of guy that looks for loopholes in board game rules and then acts all whiny when people call you an asshole for it. You're the type of the guy to start arguing semantics in the middle of a friendly debate at the pub and just keep going when everyone else stopped caring thirty minutes ago. You are, undoubtedly, a Reaganomics apologist. C'mon, dude.
- ssambros 8y agoI agree. On the other hand you have artists being paid in company stock which they decide not to sell[1]. Hindsight is 20/20. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Choe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Choe
- Dylan16807 8y agoThere are certain revenue expectations in mind for any project. Any time something is wildly successful beyond that, I think everyone that made it deserves to split at least a few percent of the income.
- simonh 8y agoThat’s not a sustainable way to run an industry though. Who decides what constitutes wildly successful? Who decides how many percent and who gets what share of it? Whoever went on and did the work to make the project so successful would have had other costs in doing so, they must have budgeted it out, they might even sell on the rights to the project at some point as happened in this case. Is it fair to then hit the new owners with extra costs out of the blue when they already paid for full rights and appear to be fully legally entitled to them?
- Dylan16807 8y ago> That’s not a sustainable way to run an industry though. Sure it is. Just because nitpicking is possible doesn't make the basic idea impossible. For example, of course the new owners would know what they were buying. > Who decides what constitutes wildly successful? Who decides how many percent Just as an example, it could be "more than 4x the expected revenue cited when doing the original negotiations", and 5%. (Or if "wildly successful" is too likely to get cheated, make it unconditional.) > and who gets what share of it? Plenty of ways to do it, just pick one.
- simonh 8y agoHow about everyone writes a contract laying out their rights, and we have default contractual arrangements if they don’t? Aside from some occasional entitled, envious whining it seems to work out ok so far.
- Dylan16807 8y agoProbably okay, as long as the default contract has a little bit of royalties. The article is about someone who used the default contract, but the default at the time sucked. Let's make the default better. The risk of course is that there becomes a boilerplate that strips out such things, and it gets used so much that it becomes the new "default".
- 13of40 8y ago"consummating the deal with nothing more than a handshake" Seriously, just a handshake. So fleeting. So trivial. It's just a gesture, after all.
- jancsika 8y agoThis artist created something that got widely recognized, and the genesis of it (he alleges) was widely misrepresented by both Ellis and Anderson. Also, he got paid squat compared to what the album generated in sales. Unless you are Spock from Star Trek, you are going to have some feelings of frustration, indignation, and envy from that experience.
- lopmotr 8y agoIf that frustrates you, then all of life is going to be endless pain. Why didn't you buy shares on company X (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) back when it was cheap? Why didn't you make every decision in your life the lucky way by correctly guessing the future? It's impossible not to constantly miss opportunities that involve guessing the future. If he had negotiated for a royalty, they might have refused. Perhaps he regrets not trying to negotiate. If he had tried and still got the same deal, I can't imagine any way he could regret it.
- Dylan16807 8y agoLife doesn't become 'endless pain' just because you think that some amount of royalties should be the default. Imagine if it was just there, without being negotiated. Not a large enough amount to meaningfully affect the budget, just enough for huge successes to give a payout.
- tvmalsv 8y agoDoesn't matter to me what he got paid. If he wanted royalties, too, he should have negotiated that into the agreement, and he probably would have been paid even less of an upfront amount. He's not the one exposing himself to the risk involved with creating the project. By taking the fixed rate, he had a guaranteed return on his investment and didn't have to worry about the success or failure of the album.
- jancsika 8y ago@donatj I could swear I was responding to a comment that read, "I have trouble having empathy for..." But now I look back and I read, "I have trouble feeling bad for..." Did you silently edit your comment, or did I accidentally misread it? I meant to respond to the topic of someone failing to empathize with another human being, which is a completely different conversation than someone failing to feel pity for another human being.
- wpietri 8y agoEasy thing to say. But imagine Zuckerberg had hired you to code the first version of his site, paid you a few thousand bucks, and then he went on to be one of the richest men in America? We here in SV have evolved a culture and a set of business practices that do a much better job of compensating us fairly. We make good cash money, and we tend to get a share of the success when things get big. It's not like we as individuals were clever enough to negotiate all of the details; it's a system mostly other people worked out over time. But we're very lucky in that people with our talents and skills are still much rarer than business types would like. That's not true with artists, and the music industry's default practices, especially then, were generally shitty. There's no reason this guy shouldn't get as fair a shake as we do. (And before anybody has a personal story of not getting a fair shake: yes, that sucks, which is exactly why you should want to see systemic changes that minimize that happening to others.)
- soperj 8y agoIsn't this exactly what happened with Dos & Microsoft?
- rangibaby 8y agoI’m not going to miss a chance to suggest watching the (excellent) movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”!
- backpropaganda 8y ago> But imagine Zuckerberg had hired you to code the first version of his site, paid you a few thousand bucks, and then he went on to be one of the richest men in America? So? I agreed to be paid a few thousand bucks for a few hours of work. Why does he owe me anything other than what we agreed on?
- rangibaby 8y agoCounterpoint: the Nike logo was designed by an art student for $35. Phil Knight recognized her work’s role in the success of his company and later paid her a lot of money.
- bmpafa 8y agokey part: "[A lawyer specializing in this sort of law] explained that when dad and Chrysalis came to a handshake agreement, as long as the paintings were originally considered “works made for hire,” the copyright for the paintings always belonged to Chrysalis, thanks to the 1909 Copyright Act. Copyright laws were amended in 1978, making it more difficult for commissioned works to qualify as “works made for hire,” especially in instances where a contract was less-than-specific. Unfortunately, the courts have heavily favored publishers for cases that dated prior to 1978, which means dad missed the cutoff by a scant seven years."
- crystaln 8y agoAnd after that the copyright transfer was inserted into contracts.
- shub 8y agoNot necessarily. At least for writing gigs my wife has done, often they involve assigning all rights but not ownership to the client. This is spelled out in the contract, I imagine to avoid controversy over whether there was "work for hire" or not. On the other hand, every dev job I've taken has had me sign a thing saying that the work I do is work for hire and the employer owns the copyright. Seems fair, they're giving me a paycheck after all.
- pasquinelli 8y agounless it can be inserted into a handshake agreement, that's not really relevant to this case.
- paulsutter 8y agoHe should have leveraged the success of the album to get high paid work. Jim Carrey was offered $350K for Dumb and Dumber, which he turned down (he wanted $400K). Then when Ace Ventura became a surprise hit, the offer for Dumb and Dumber was raised to $7,000,000, which he took. He made only $350K for Ace Ventura, but that opened the door to a bigger payday. Based on the success of Dumb and Dumber, he was the first actor ever to be paid $20M, for Cable Guy, a flop at the box office. You get paid for /previous/ success, and that's what the author's dad should have learned. Edit: removed mistaken reference to Liar Liar, thanks
- batbomb 8y agoI'm not quite sure there's any metric you could use to declare Liar Liar a "total flop", but sure.
- joshschreuder 8y agoYeah, 302M box office vs. 45M budget hardly seems like a flop
- bshepard 8y agoDo markets for art work in the same way as markets for talent in film? To what extent does success in mass media illustration correspond to success in selling singular art objects?
- toast0 8y agoIt doesn't need to, if success in mass media illustration leads to success in attaining mass media illustration contracts. I recall hearing that such and such cover was done by the same person who did some other cover.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoThey live in an UWS brownstone. Can't have had too much of a struggle through life.
- crystaln 8y agoThe nature of employment is that we produce works for hire. I don't see any exploitation here. Do album cover artists ever get windfalls from successful? Unlikely I think, unless of course they were well known artists who insisted on royalties. The album would have been similarly successful with any cover or no cover.
- soperj 8y agoWould they still be selling t-shirts and posters of any cover or no cover and pocketing that money?
- crystaln 8y agoNobody can say for sure. However the music is why the album sold, and I think why people want to associate themselves by buying t-shirts and posters.
- soperj 8y agoBullshit. I've seen people wearing motorhead shirts for instance that have never heard motorhead, and didn't even realize it was a band.
- mm4 8y agonever seen it before, never heard it before. I'm pretty sure that their case is as solid as the cult status they claim this pice has.
- RoiDuSilence 8y agoThat's really just your own lack of culture. You should give it a listen, it's pretty good.
- mm4 8y agoyes since the only real culture is the Anglo sphere culture
- olavk 8y agoThis probably says a lot more about you than about the record in question, which is generally regarded a classic in the genre.
- legitster 8y agoI couldn't imagine getting so caught up in one piece of work. I'd like to imagine I would have just immediately turned around and told everyone I was the guy who made the cover for Aqualung and focus my energy on the next project. Also, it's very presumptive to assume I deserve a cut of your project just because it is successful. Not only do I claim my artwork had something to do with it (I doubt many people cared much about the album cover), but I can't give you one price and then extort you later because you actually have money now.
- mrleinad 8y agoThat's the point: Artists at that time weren't protected enough to retain copyright over their work. They are now. It's not whether "you actually have money now", it's that "you're making money with something I created and I deserve a piece of that too"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- talltimtom 8y agoSo If you make a lot of money On Uber with your Tesla, they “deserve” a piece of that too? A deal is a deal, he sold the art up front without any royalty, that is in him and he was in no way cheated, had he done the same deal with 20 other covers of bands that disn’t make it big he would not be complaining.
- toyg 8y agoThe difference is that you cannot sell litographical copies of a Tesla with your autograph, as Ian Anderson is doing with that image now. The "copy" part of copyright exists precisely because these works are not simple manufactured goods, they can be easily copied.
- pvaldes 8y agoImage based in the photos taken previously from the wife of Ian Anderson, it seems. What the artist could have done is paint as many new versions of the image as he wants and sell them.
- DrScump 8y agoRaphael Ravenscroft, who played the famous saxophone parts on Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street.", was paid only 27 pounds... and that cheque allegedly bounced. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/8241031/I-was-paid-27-for-Baker-Street-sax-solo.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures...
- cromulent 8y agoClare Torry was paid £30 for her vocals on Pink Floyds The Great Gig in the Sky but 30 years later she was given a settlement for vocal composition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gig_in_the_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gig_in_the_Sky
- shirajg 8y agoWhy is this even a submission on hacker news? Seems like the artist should have negotiated for a piece of the residuals but now regrets that...
- cwyers 8y agoThe whole article seems to vastly overstate how important the cover art was to the financial success of the album. People rarely buy t-shirts of an album cover because they really like the artwork in isolation; it's very often because it reminds them of the songs on the album.
- rangibaby 8y agoMetal album cover or band logo t-shirts were a huge fad in Japan amongst young people, even those who didn’t like or know about the music. A metal head friend of mine said that he finally understood cultural appropriation!
- bostik 8y agoThere is a self-enforcing cycle. A good album sells merchandise, which quite often is using imagery from the album front. T-shirts, posters, ... you name it. Yes, the merchandise is bought as a reminder of a good experience but once it's out in the open, it becomes a form of brand advertising. Familiarity breeds interest (as well as contempt), and interest generates sales. NB. Unrelated to the other part of your comment - I would happily buy a shirt with The Division Bell's cover even if I didn't like the album. There are limits, though. I'm NOT paying £75 for a cycling jacket with that image - such a thing was available in the V&A exhibition.
- tyng 8y agoI work in the realm of public art projects and thus have collaborated with a lot of artists, mostly painters and sculpters. I must say the success of any piece of artwork - especially the ones created with the public in mind - is not the work of a single man or woman, but the result of the collaboration of a team of professionals - designers, marketers, financiers, metal bashers, crane operators, all the way down to the assistant who helped review the contracts. So a deal is a deal, if one agrees to the terms of a deal (oral or written), it must be honoured, otherwise there will be no collaboration. Imagine the marketer who helped putting the project on every headline turns around to ask for an extra cut of the success? Not possible, but he/she can certainly charge a higher fee for the next project. Nowadays artists are much more educated about the value of copyright and we as art consultants/project coordinators help intermediate how deals are structured, so the value of the artist's work is properly recognised and rewarded. As others have commented, success builds upon success, one must be able to see the bigger picture to be successful in any career pursued.
- romwell 8y ago>So a deal is a deal, if one agrees to the terms of a deal (oral or written), it must be honoured Sure thing. The deal was for an album cover. Perhaps $1500 in 1970s money is a fair sum for that, even for an iconic album. Did the deal also include T-shirts, posters, and exclusive prints of the said cover signed by the band's front man? That's where the contention is. Some people would say yes - work for hire is work for hire. Some people would say no. Pre-1978 copyright law is one side, later versions - on the other. A deal must be honored - so it was, and then it was not.
- tyng 8y agoGood point. I'm not familiar with the American copyright law, but you're right, nowadays in most countries even if a piece of art is sold to another person, the artist still holds the copyright (the right to make copies) unless copyright transfer is specified in the contract. But another way to look at this is, if the artwork is commissioned by the company for commercial purpose - much like if someone is commissioned to create a logo for a company - then the copyright is generally transferred to the company. In the absence of a written contract, one can argue both ways, which I think is why the lawyers didn't think there was a strong case.
- bencollier49 8y agoWhat a strange article. He was paid a flat fee for some work and appears to have got greedy and bitter when the album was successful.
- zwischenzug 8y agoYeah, I don't get it: In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork, consummating the deal with nothing more than a handshake. It's not even in dispute. There was a contract, so what if it was not written down? Give me $1500 and you can do whatever you want with my three paintings. Handshake. Does the typesetter deserve royalties too?
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoThis happened to an ex of mine. While we were together she was asked to do the album artwork for a top international-name stadium-filling band. I persuaded her to charge £10k, which was around what she earned a year. She was going to charge much less. Neither of us considered future revenue from licensing or merchandise, so it was signed as a one-off work-for-hire deal. The manager still grumbled about how pushy she was being. The imagery has appeared on countless merch items since. It’s hard to estimate the economic value, but it was surely a lot more than £10k. She bought herself a new mattress and took a couple of weeks off. Unlike OP’s artist, she never expected more. Creatively, it was a bit of a side project. But the truth is the band could have paid £5k or £10k a year in licensing fees without even noticing, so there’s something rather sad about it all.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> The imagery has appeared on countless merch items since. It’s hard to estimate the economic value, but it was surely a lot more than £10k. You get paid based on the cost of replacing your work with someone else's work, not on the value of your work product. But even if you want to argue for paying people based on value produced, your ex didn't produce that value. It came from the band. People buy band merch because they like the band, not because they like the art. The aqualung cover image would be basically worthless right now if the artist had kept it while some other image went on the cover of aqualung.
- chrischen 8y agoI think the article artist didn't expect more at the time. The "haunting" implies that in hindsight they believed they should have charged more, but that's not really how things work.
- Spooky23 8y agoMy guess is that Ian Anderson’s making up a new backstory is probably what fueled the obsession.
- sklivvz1971 8y agoNot surprised, the stories of artists signing for X and getting never properly compensated (either for X or X-extended-to-anything-else) are countless. And there's little you can do, unless you can nail down the exact culprit to a specific court. For example: Apple is selling my music, without my consent or without paying due royalties. If I go to them they say "we pay royalties to the distributor", the distributor says "we only deal with labels" and my label has gone bust. Another label now has the rights. They don't know me. They don't have a contract with me. They have a contract with a deceased label that sold them rights they never acquired. So... yeah, it's never going to be fixed.
- toyg 8y ago> They have a contract with a deceased label that sold them rights they never acquired Surely, if that can somehow be proven in court, those rights would become void and you should get your music back. I know this might not be practical (the court system is not cheap, in most countries), but it's not a principle set in stone that "people get screwed".
- jacquesm 8y agoThis is a case of 'contract regret'. If there was a legal case then for sure it would have been litigated and he might have won but as it is all that you could say is that it is really sorry that he got very much hung up on that one painting when instead he could have used its success to significantly raise his prices for other commissioned works with hopefully better contracts. On another note: whoever made Jethro Tull's cover for that particular album could have felt that way because it was their music that people were buying, not the album cover.
- jimnotgym 8y agoIt's funny that the record industry trots out the line that 'artists deserve to be paid for their work', while trying to stop teenagers downloading...
- chrischen 8y ago> the two men hammered out the contours of a handshake deal: For $1,500 (approximately $10,130 in 2018 dollars) dad would deliver three paintings. > In Ellis’ Midtown office, the last painting was delivered. Ellis cut him a check and said something to the effect of, "Oh thanks very much, these are great,” dad recalls. Am I missing something here? Seems obvious why lawyers won't take on this guy since 1) there was no contract and 2) the no-contract agreement was not broken.
- pjc50 8y agoThere's definitely a contract, just a verbal one with no record. The lack of a written copyright assignment allowing reproduction sounds like a problem to me, but the law has undoubtedly changed over the years. The thing that annoys me about cases like this is the music industry's vampiric determination to get every last dollar out of someone copying MP3s, while being blasé about actually getting money to the right creatives. Royalty issues can destroy bands. Often the litigation can consume more money than the royalties are worth, because people are hung up on what they "deserve".
- pjc50 8y agoDoes anyone know of a case where the album cover artist or photographer was given an ongoing cut of royalties?
- ada1981 8y agoThis is such an odd story. The guy sold a painting knowing it was going to be used by a rock band for an album and took a one time payment. Then he spends the next several decades complaining about it, so much so that his son tries to extract some sort of narrative about the whole process to support his fathers position. In some ways I can actually relate, so perhaps I’m projecting my own hurt from lack of Justice... but in this case the guy was paid and it was only after it was successful did he start wishing he got more money.
- rocannon 8y ago> In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork It is too bad he didn't negotiate a royalty agreement, but then they might not have given him the work, either. FWIW if he had invested $1000 in the S&P 500 on January 1 of 1972, that investment would be worth about $100K today, according to some online calculators that I tried. Granted, investing is a lot easier, now that online brokerages exist. It was probably not something that many artists did back in the '70s.
- jaclaz 8y agoI don't really know the specifics on this artist's success/income, but investing has the pre-requisite of being able to save the money first. Generally speaking, and of course with all due exceptions, most painters, even many of those that were later acclaimed as masters, tend to have the need to sell their artwork in order to barely survive, so, besides the missing online brokerage, there would be the issue about the possibility of saving and investing. Anyway, to provide another easy comparison, the Average Hourly Wage[1] in US in 1970 was around 3.50 US$, while now it is around 22.50 US$, assuming that buying power is correspondent, the US$ 1,500 in 1970 represent something like US$ 10,000, IMHO not that bad for three paintings. [1] Series Id: CES0500000008 here: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000008 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000008
- coldtea 8y ago>But dad’s earnings had a hard cap. In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork, consummating the deal with nothing more than a handshake. No written contractual agreement was drawn up, and, much to his eventual dismay, nor was any determination made about future use. Well, if he got his $1500 he shook hands on (and which seem a good amount for the time, heck even today an artist can be paid less for an album cover), then he doesn't exactly has any legs to stand on.
- jasonkostempski 8y agoThat animated section divider nearly made me drop my phone, thought it was a bug.
- jimmydddd 8y agohttp://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2018/05/on-behalf-of-the-buyout.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2018/05/on-behalf-of... "Is it ever okay to sell the rights to your work? Milton Glaser was paid about $2,000 in expenses to create the I Love NY logo, one of the iconic marketing images of its decade. He later said, "I was very happy to do it. I was very happy about the consequences.” Carolyn Davidson originally made $35 for designing the swoosh that Nike made famous."
- mdekkers 8y agoAlternative title: "Man at end of his career realises value of lawyers"
- darepublic 8y agoI like the artist and the cover art but nothing illegal or particularly unethical took place here. The attitude of those stating otherwise is reflective of our time... break the law to impose some arbitrary and often misinformed notion of justice on the world
- 8bitsrule 8y agoLots of famous songwriters failed to work publishing rights into their (paper) contracts too. Life is a beach for those who don't know their options.