Sunday, February 01, 2009

VOODOO RHYTHM IN TROUBLE

One of my favorite reecord companies in the world, Switzerland's Voodoo Rhythm, is in a real bind.

Here's a message from Beat-Man that was posted in The GaragePunk Hideout:


APPEAL FOR FUNDS

Hello, this might be a bit of a strange E-Mail. I have treated bands very fairly since I've started Voodoo Rhythm and have given them their records for cost price so that they could make a solid profit when selling their records on tour (we all know payouts are lousy nowadays). I did approach the SUISA (Copyright Company, musicians' union) and informed them of the nature of my agreement with the bands. Unfortunately I never put it in writing.

Now that is exactly the problem: The SUISA demands payback of a total of 42.500 Swiss Franks (roughly 38.000 US $). Basically they want money for productions that had long been settled. The bitter irony is that bands of course prefer free copies of their album, yet the Suisa is oblivious to this fact and demand the money within 30 days.

If we cannot meet their demands we might have to shut down business, since it is completely impossible to for us to raise that kind of money.

Therefore we kindly ask for your support. Even if we can pay we will not be able to offer the bands the same deal as before, in spite of the fact that they would much rather get free copies from us as opposed to Suisa money (especially American bands since they don't get any Suisa money at all).

We hope you can help us. We don't want to quit, we want to resume or work and our journey. Plea se transfer funds to the following account and forward this message.

Sincerely,
Reverend Beat-Man

So there you have it.

Voodoo Rhythm in the past few years has provided some of the craziest sounds in pyschobilly, punk blues, garage music and even alt county. You've heard a lot of Voodoo Rhythm acts on my radio shows -- Hipbone Slim & The Knee-Tremblers, Stinky Lou & The Goon Mat, Wau y Los Arrrghs!!, The Dead Brothers, Zeno Tornado, Mama Rosin, John Schooley, The Monsters, King Automatic, Roy & The Devil's Motorcycle, The Watrzloves, The Juke Joint Pimps ... and of course Rev. Beat-Man, aka Lightning Beat-Man aka Jerry J. Nixon ("The Gentleman of Rock 'n' Roll" from, so the story goes, Santa Fe, N.M.)

Help them if you can. At least buy some Voodoo Rhythm CDs. You can get 'em directly from the Web site. Plus. for eMusic members, there's 25 Voodoo Rhythm albums, including King Khan & His Shrine's Three Hairs and You're Mine you can find HERE.




My review of the documentary Voodoo Rhythm: The Gospel of Primitive Rock ’n’ Roll is HERE.

The true shocking story of Jerry J. Nixon -- how I became acquainted with Voodoo Rhythm -- is HERE.

UPDATE: What the heck, here's a trailer from that documentary:

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