Desperate Bicycles Discography Online

Derek Erdman is not responsible for the actions of people who are not Derek Erdman, except the hordes of slime-gods who reign in the center of the Earth, of whom he secretly has control.

You don't think I should be allowed to hear them, so up yours Mr. Selzer-Water.

Please then tell me why we have any copyright laws whatsoever?

You don't think I should be allowed to hear them, so up yours Mr. Selzer-Water.

Please, more people have heard of the Desperate Bicycles because of me, in some small part in addition to the likes of Johan Kugelberg, Chuck Warner, Richard Mason etc. I have spent the better part of the last 5 or 6 years making people aware of the Desperate Bicycles, I don't take kindly to the suggestion that I don't think people should be allowed to hear them.

Copying the music for someone you may know personally, and making it available to anyone who has access to google, I think are two different things. I never apologized for the hundreds of Desperate Bicycles CDs I made for people...untill I saw somebody selling them. I still make copies of the CD for friends and people I trust.

wait. you downloaded this? you are nothing but a common criminal

Didn't you admit that you should have sent Derek a copy but apparently forgot to, as well as kept the money that he sent for postage?

To me that's the worst kind of bootlegger. Unless of course it was a "handling charge".

I usually don't equate someone who is not a professional retailer of music that misplaced a blank cd case with 3 dollars in cash with "the worst kind of bootlegger". I apologized to Derek publically, and offered to send him something else. Not to beat another point to the ground, but I asked for a SASE, because it is very hard for me deal with the lines at local post office branch during my lunch break, and instead got cash. Had I received the requested SASE, I would've sent it out sooner, most likely.

The Bicycles are just ok as far as I'm concerned.

That "the artist's wishes" argument is just plain stupid. The same insanity that allowed Zappa to RUIN all of his early records by messing with the reissue tapes 'cause he thought he could make them "better" or something. If artists are deliberately withholding good music from the public, keeping it exclusively in the domain of collector scum and the trading elite (that means you), then they fucking deserve to be bootlegged and fileshared. Let's start with Organum... Anybody wanna make me a CDR of all those 1-sided singles?

"I think that bootlegs help keep the flame of music alive by keeping it out of not only the industry's conception of the artist, but also the artist's conception of the artist." -Lenny Kaye

And, obviously, at least one band member also wants the stuff released.

But I'm going to have to disagree with you and with Lenny Kaye on that one. There's other issues here and in most situations. If Patti Smith was working on remastering some never-before issued Radio Ethiopa outtakes and I got my hands on a crappy 3rd generation tape, it'd be cool for me to release it, to my profit?

It's one thing to defend filesharing, another thing alltogether to defend outright bootlegging. You write some music and see someone selling it for their profit, before you decided to put it out. Did you "fucking deserve" to be bootlegged?

And sorry if I sound like a record executive, but sometimes bootlegs making music easily accessible stop people from bothering to properly license it or make sure the artists actively get paid. It's happening a lot in dance music reissues these days, I think. While I sent out a lot of Desp Bikes CDs, I always figured it wasn't THAT many, and if someone put out a properly remastered version and promoted it well, that it would sell, but if someone put a Desp Bikes CD in the store and it sold a lot of copies, would the proper version stand as much a chance? What are the precedents of this? I never bought the legit Neu!, Cluster and Silver Apples CDs because I had owned the bootlegs for years.

And for the record, perhaps a lot of people like the Desperate Bicycles because they are obscure and hard to get a hold of. Personally, I love the music, and find myself singing their songs all the time.

yeah, fuck zappa. what on earth made him think that he was allowed to work on his own material?

While I don't know the Zappa stuff I certainly wish I could get a DVD of the original Star Wars as it was released, but we're not talking about artists who add drum machines and synthesizers, just having the choice to package their music the way they want.

If Martin Philips went back to the original tapes of The Chills LP Brave Words and released a new version with all the tracks sounding clearer, like the few songs he remixed for a Chills greatest hits package, because he has always hated the way the original LP sounded. I'd have no choice but to tell people to buy copies of the original CD if they like the way it sounds, which I do. It doesn't give me the right to bootleg and start selling copies of the original record.

We can be all utopian and punk-rock about the free sharing of music, but copyright laws exist for good reasons. I recently had a brief discussion about this with someone when I asked if he was still planning on putting out this comp CD he'd wanted to put together. He said he decided not to, that it would all get reissued eventually anyway. I couldn't argue with that logic. But it later occured to me that if enough of the core market for that music ended up just getting it online or especially on a bootleg, that someone may decide it's not worth reissuing, so the artists won't get paid, and without a legitimate and promoted reissue, it may not find a bigger audience. This sounds hypothetical, but I know people at record labels who've made these decisions. "I'd like to reissue that properly, but it's been bootlegged so much that it's just not worth it" is something I've heard more then once, and felt a few times myself.

You take some Desperate Bicycles music, make a bootleg CD, sell 1,000 copies. Then, if wonder of wonders, one of them emails me and says "we've selected you as the label to reissue our catalog", I may have to say that we simply couldn't afford to. And that would suck. Chances are a bigger label would do it anyway and could afford it, but not in every case.

regarding the Junior Boys...they did eventually get signed...because someone thought they'd sell records. And if that label person didn't think that, they might not even have the money to buy their damn drum machine, and I wonder, do they still have a day job? Music has been treated as a product for a hell of a long time, and while it is, artists deserve to quit their day jobs and get paid, even if buying the CD is the equivelent of hitting the tip jar. I download files, if I don't like them, I delete them, and if I do like them, and they're not David Bowie, I buy the CD.

but if we couldn't expect to make our money back, there'd be no Theoretical Girls CD. Not because anyone was holding it back, but because nobody would have bothered, nobody would have cared, hell, nobody would have known to check. The best music releases would all be charity. And while we think about money, and our end goal is to make millions putting out forgotten music, our main goal is to at least make our money back so we can do it again. And if we make even more money back, well we can then afford to put out better stuff, promote it to more people, better support the artists etc, such is capitalism.

regarding the zappa/lucas/apocalypse redux arguments, they really don't relate to what may or may not be happening with the Desperate Bicycles I don't think, or with my comment regarding Lenny Kaye/Patti Smith or The Chills. But even with that there's gray areas...regarding the basic assumption, and this has been discussed before, that any remastering is going to be better remastering, that's different then radically remixing something.

As far as your musical utopia, there's been many discussions in many places...what happens when the media no longer exists, there's no copy-protection and everyone had gigs of storage in their brains and their living rooms, will all artists only make money through live performance? I just don't feel like having that discussion and figure we'll cross that bridge when we get to it!

TV appearance? I'll be contacting you off-list!