I still hear that B side when I read tales from the vinyl jungle of how the business of business overwhelms the joyfulness of music. And the title today is my homage, of sorts, to misheard lyrics (not always rock and roll by the way), known as mondegreens, of which the best known to me is also a pretty funny visual (again, your mileage may vary).
Though kidding aside, or attempting to, and coming back to my point about money and music, is this news item, very much underscoring as that fellow from Hibbing, Minnesota, once observed, 'money doesn't talk, it swears.'
The surviving Aleem brother, TaharQa, the plaintiff in this lawsuit, and his late brother, Tunde Ra, were part of rock and roll history as The Ghetto Fighters collaborating with Jimi Hendrix on material that was released as Cry of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and War Heroes. This is an interview from almost a decade ago with both brothers and it's a terrific read.
There are few rock and roll musicians who left a more disorganized legacy in terms of unreleased material than Hendrix and no one, and I've thought about this long and hard, more financially exploited than he was so I don't pretend to know where any of the money that anyone might sue anyone else is for, could be located at this point in time.
It's often preached that money fixes everything, but sometimes whatever repair it pays for is more of a cover-up than a correction and all we end up with are echoes of what could have been.
-bill kenny
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