The other was kind of a bad boy guitar player. Then time moved on and on and in the 80′s I (now married and with a daughter) moved into a house in a nice neighborhood. When I met my new neighbors, one of them was that bad boy DePatie.

He told me the darndest story. His father was aparently the DePatie of DePatie/Freleng animations (which explained his familys wealth – they lived in a nice large house, high in the foothills and had a swimming pool).

When they were doing the Pink Panther saturday morning cartoon show, elder DePatie turned to his bad boy son and asked him to come up with something for background music. His son thought that was a great idea and he made up some cool-sounding bass riffs and recorded them himself. And they did indeed use in the show.

The problems were, 1) because of their contracts they should have used union composers/musicians, 2) they never compensated the bad boy or even talked about doing so.

Many years later that bad boy son, who had been working as a musician, had a ‘hey wait a minute’ moment. He had some fights with his dad over it. Dad still thought that his son’s work was worth nothing.

So son got a lawyer and won a goodly award plus damages.

“In the late 1980s, the Romantics discovered that their managers had been misappropriating the profits earned by the band from its hit records and live performances. Additionally, the Romantics’ best known song (the aforementioned “What I Like About You”) had been licensed for use in television commercials without the band’s knowledge or approval. Consequently, the Romantics filed a lawsuit against their management in 1987, and the legalities involved prevented the band from recording new music until the mid-1990s.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romantics

Yeah, the kids can play, but they don’t know much about business.

Business as usual. It’s why we need lawyers, and why we need unions. The suits carry crime in their blood, like syphillis.

They can’t play, and they can’t sing, but they seem to be born knowing how to steal.