Who Owns the Sound?
On custodianship, control, and identity
In a guitar shop last week I saw a 1970s Fender Mustang Bass that had been Olympic White and was now the brown of an aged cheese rind. Nitrocellulose ambers, ultraviolet does its work, and forty years in bars adds a layer of literal tar. But the interesting part of such an instrument is never the surface. It's what's underneath the pickguard, where the plastic's shadow has kept a patch of the original color. The bass has been quietly maintaining a control sample of itself in the one place nothing could touch.
That's a useful figure for a question that recorded music keeps posing and never answers cleanly. When we ask who owns a sound, we are usually running together three different claims that happen to share a word.
The first is title: who holds the master, the license, the publishing, the paper. The second is custody: who keeps the tapes, who decides what stays in print, who is in the room when someone proposes an improvement. The third is authorship — whose hands actually made the noise. In the tidy case these coincide. In practice they come apart constantly, and they come apart in a direction that is not random.
The direction of the drift
Two cases, roughly contemporaneous, illustrate the two ways it goes wrong.
In 1987, at the dawn of the CD era, ZZ Top's first six albums were remixed for a box set called The Six Pack, with new drums and sequencers added to make records from 1971 through 1976 resemble Eliminator. Terry Manning, the engineer who built the Eliminator sound in the first place, later confirmed flatly that except on Eliminator itself, none of the drum sounds on those digitally remixed releases are the originals. The remixes then became the standalone CDs. For roughly a quarter century, the commercially available version of a Texas shuffle was a machine. The original mixes weren't fully restored until 2013.
Nobody has ever claimed the decision. The credited producer is Bill Ham, who was also the manager, the image-maker, and the owner of the publishing — an unusual concentration of authority even for the era — and the one account close to the room credits him with the idea. Billy Gibbons, who will happily walk an interviewer through a pitch shifter he found via a Phil Donahue episode, has never defended it or apologized for it. It is a hole in an otherwise garrulous record.
In 2002 the erasure was not aesthetic but punitive. After Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake sued over unpaid performance royalties, their bass and drums were stripped from Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman and re-recorded by Ozzy Osbourne's then-current rhythm section. Sharon Osbourne's press release said that because of the pair's "abusive and unjust behaviour," Ozzy wanted them removed from the recordings. Delete the performance, delete the performance royalty. The originals were restored in 2011.
The cases differ in almost every respect — one is misjudgment, one is strategy — and share the thing that matters. In both, the guitar was untouched. Randy Rhoads was sacred; Gibbons was the brand. What got replaced was the rhythm section, in both cases, because the layer doing the least legible work is the layer everyone assumes is generic. Somebody decided drums are drums.
That is the drift. Title accumulates upward toward whoever can afford lawyers; authorship stays with whoever was in the room; and custody follows title rather than authorship, because custody is exercised through paper. Mike Bordin's account of the session is the whole thing in one image: he says hearing the original guitar, bass and drum tracks in his headphones while he played was one of the most insane experiences he will ever have. Playing over a man while listening to him.
The case for the paper
It would be easy to end there, and it would be false. Ownership is also the only reason anything survives.
Chris Strachwitz took a bus to Houston in 1959 to record Lightnin' Hopkins, went back in 1960 and found he'd gone to California, so Mack McCormick drove him to Navasota instead and they recorded Mance Lipscomb. That accident became Arhoolie 1001. Sixty years later Smithsonian Folkways acquired the whole catalog — masters included — on a commitment to keep it in print. The out-of-print CDs of the early 2000s are now permanently available. That happened because somebody held title and used it well.
Control in the right hands is also the only defense against the drift. Michael Gira owns Young God and has reissued nearly everything Swans ever did except The Burning World, the one major-label record, which he has kept out of print for thirty-five years. Fugazi and Dischord decline to license, full stop, which forecloses a great deal of interesting work and also guarantees that no one will ever hear "Waiting Room" underneath a truck commercial. Peter Missing runs his own Bandcamp and can simply be asked.
So the argument isn't that title is illegitimate. It's that title is a blunt instrument that answers a question nobody was asking. It establishes who may decide. It says nothing about who should.
What survives, and why
There's a second filter operating underneath the legal one, and it's crueler because nobody administers it.
Missing Foundation's upside-down martini glass — three lines and the words "The Party's Over" — traveled from the Lower East Side to a recycling bin in a converted rail-yard district in Portland, arriving decades later in the finished version of the thing it was warning about. Their actual music, made of forty people and burning oil drums, traveled nowhere. Reproducibility is the tarnishing agent. What can be copied gets copied until it means nothing; what can't be copied is simply lost. Neither of those is preservation.
This is why the credits are the most political document in the package. Live Skull were Sonic Youth's labelmates and are barely a name now, for no reason but that no reissue campaign came. Carolyn Master founded Of Cabbages and Kings, wrote it, produced it, played it, and sits in a credits list beside men with encyclopedia entries. Whatever the murk contained, its erasure wasn't random.
The pickguard
Which returns us to the bass.
The original color survives in exactly one place: where nothing could reach it. That is not a comforting conclusion, but it is an accurate one. Identity in recorded music is a claim about a particular hour in a particular room, stored on a physical object that will almost certainly end up owned by someone who wasn't there.
Custodianship, properly understood, is the discipline of holding title while behaving as though authorship were binding. It has no legal existence. It is a voluntary constraint, honored by Strachwitz and by Gira and by the students who ran a fifty-thousand-watt transmitter for twenty years without being told they were building an asset — and unavailable to Frank Beard, who could not stop his own drumming from being replaced on his own records.
The record eventually got corrected. Both of them did, within two years of each other, once the catalog industry worked out that authenticity was the more profitable product. That's the honest ending: not that the truth wins, but that it becomes commercially convenient, and someone finally goes looking for the tapes.