RTH Mailbag: The Eagle Has Landed!

It’s been a while since we shared selections from the RTH Mailbag. As you know, sometimes we receive mail that readers deem unworthy of our Comments section but important nonetheless! We agree. In fact, sometimes these comments are extremely instructive and worthy of a public airing. At Rock Town Hall, there’s always room to learn and grow. So, let’s get down to business!

Regarding what we thought was a rare ZZ Top performance found on YouTube that was posted a while back, a reader informs us:

“you idiot, this isn’t ZZ top, that’s actually Seger. you suck”

Wow! We’re all about the right to Pince Nez a fellow Townsperson, but that’s harsh. In trying to spur discussion on ZZ Top, we may have cast our net too far. As Moderator, I take full responsibility for not catching my fellow Townsperson’s oversight. Clearly, some of us do not know enough about ZZ Top. We’ll consider this an opportunity for Socratic Wisdom. Thanks for setting us straight, and please continue to help The Eagle do his job.

In a recent post on the choice of rugby shirt worn by a John Cale imitator, a fellow blogger scolded us for failure to credit his Website for an image we lifted. We’re all about properly crediting the works of fellow bloggers at RTH, so I want to make sure you witness our first steps toward rectifying a typical series of oversights we’ve made regarding images we lift from other sources on the Web. First, though, here’s what our fellow blogger wrote:

Would have been nice if you named the website where you found the Cale pic, don’t you agree?

Awful cover BTW.

A Fellow Blogger
http://www.xs4all.nl/~werksman/cale/pics/pics_70_4.html

OK, as a group of music lovers doing this as an avocation, we often fail to credit images we pick up from elsewhere. Unlike our fellow blogger, who on his site correctly credited the photographer of the David Byrne/John Cale shot we used in our little piece, we did not credit the photographer, Lisa J. Kral (not our fellow blogger, by the way). Mad props, Lisa! We wish we’d been there to see this show for ourselves.

Where our fellow blogger assumes incorrectly is his charge that we failed to credit his fine John Cale site – and I’m not joking, I’ve visited this site maybe a dozen times over the past couple of years. In fact, in a piece published elsewhere, I once linked to our friend’s blog. If you’re a fan of Cale and a fan of well-done websites, I highly recommend checking out our fellow blogger’s site! Fact of the matter is, though, I lifted the image from this Talking Heads site! Perhaps it’s with the person behind this site with whom our fellow blogger should be bugged! Perhaps Ms. Kral should be bugged with both this site as well as our site! I’ll go one further, perhaps the person behind this Talking Heads site should be writing Rock Town Hall the grumpy note!

To review our stance at Rock Town Hall – and what we’ve learned:

• We’ve been guilty of not crediting photographers whose images grace the Web, even when they’re credited on the site from which I’ve lifted them. For that, I apologize to all previously credited photographers and pledge that Rock Town Hall will do a better job of giving credit where credit’s due.
• We have not made a practice of crediting each and every image picked up from another Website. Let us know if copyright laws are as stringent on these areas regarding the sharing of fun images for amusement purposes. It’s not like anyone should be coming to Rock Town Hall for actual news. We don’t have our own photography team to shoot upskirt shots of a young Linda Rondstadt, for instance. We’re here to have fun and share fun, sometimes interesting thoughts. When an image of substance and great originality that is integral to the thread at hand does make it to Rock Town Hall, we’ll try to credit the site from which it originated. We’ve done this with text picked up from other sources. Sounds reasonable, don’t you think? In the case of this image of John Cale in a rugby shirt, the image is found elsewhere, including a series of better shots of Cale in a rugby shirt on some person’s Flickr site.

The more I think about it, it’s open to debate whether Rock Town Hall should be credited for shining light on the connection between this YouTube dude’s choice of rugby shirt and this brief period when Cale performed in such shirts.

To all involved in this unintended oversight and series of incorrect assumptions, what do you say we call each of us even and thank the Internet for bringing together all these Cale lovers under one ULR? Thanks.