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How do you leave a band gracefully?


tim_7string

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Also firing a musician just for being a drug addict is stupid and its discrimination too.

 

 

Wait until you have to depend on one. If you have a brain, you'll change your opinion real quick. That is, if you don't get busted with him, get your band rig full of gear impounded because he's carrying enough drugs to be charged with intent to distribute (happened to a friend) , have him carted off to jail on break in the middle of a gig on a packed house Saturday night (this actually happened to three members of a band I knew back in the 90s), have him sell or pawn some of your gear to score (this happened to me), and so on. Parting company with practicing addicts isn't discrimination, it's good sense.

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Wait until you have to depend on one. If you have a brain, you'll change your opinion real quick. That is, if you don't get busted with him, get your band rig full of gear impounded because he's carrying enough drugs to be charged with intent to distribute (happened to a friend) , have him carted off to jail on break in the middle of a gig on a packed house Saturday night (this actually happened to three members of a band I knew back in the 90s), have him sell or pawn some of your gear to score (this happened to me), and so on. Parting company with practicing addicts isn't discrimination, it's good sense.

 

 

This is true but firing someone because they have a disease (I don't want to open that can of worms-but I guess I just did) is against the law in America isn't it?

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This is true but firing someone because they have a disease (I don't want to open that can of worms-but I guess I just did) is against the law in America isn't it?

 

 

Better not to hire "them" in the first place.

 

I was conned out of week's wages.

 

"I'll pay you back, man . . . "

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A lot of drug addicts can't handle their {censored} in a band. I barely ever even drink but I will jam with whoever plays the best regardless of whether or not they are drug addicts. There are tons of people who completely loose their {censored} just drinking alcohol but you rarely run into anybody who refuses to have anything to do with anybody who drinks. But a lot of people won't have anything to do with anybody who does drugs. It seems like a double standard to me.

 

I mean a drunk who can't handle his {censored} will get you just as busted and {censored} everything up as bad as any drug addict and they are more likely to kill somebody too. I have known people, well one I totally have in mind when I say this, who were bigtime drug addicts but caused the band less problems than anybody else ever did. Before I saw that I would have agreed with you. I judge bandmembers by their talent, reliability and the amount of problems they cause us. Those and use of drugs, I have found are not directly proportional.

 

 

Those back catalog sales happened while Sammy was in the band is what I was saying. So Sammy sold the current catalog quite well and also got people interested in the back catalog: he kept the band going.

 

 

The reason I won't dispute that is because it would not be a challenge.

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The bottom line is Sammy made VH a ton of money.

 

 

http://www.rockradio.co.uk/rock-news/hagar-made-van-halen-rich/h8cm9ffb/

 

The bassist tells Attention Deficit Delirium: "I don't remember if it was when we were working on 1984, but I remember Warner Brothers chairman Mo Austin came to the studio and we played a bunch of our rough stuff. I remember him saying, 'Sounds like money to me'.


"We weren't making a lot of money until Sammy joined the band. But we didn't know any better because we were getting to live and do whatever the hell we wanted.


"We didn't have a really good contract until Sammy came in. He came in with his manager and he said, 'What the f'k? Let's redo your contract'. Then all of a sudden it was really poppin'. We'd beel looking around and a lot of the guys at Warners had heir summer houses and nice vacations. I guess we were paying for that."


The debt owed by Van Halen to Hagar is just one reason why Anthony is happy to be seen to have sided with his singer in the notorious fall-out between them and brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen.

 

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"Journey to the Center of the Mind" disagrees with the above sentiment...

 

 

Well, I don't think listing one album in a 40+ year career really does much to disagree with that sentiment.

 

But hey. If you're a big Nugent fan, I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. Just sayin' that, in the larger scheme of things, when Ted Nugent's obituary is written, "master songwriter" PROBABLY isn't going to be one of the things mentioned....

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This is true but firing someone because they have a disease (I don't want to open that can of worms-but I guess I just did) is against the law in America isn't it?

 

 

In a nutshell, the overly simplified answer to what you're asking is...no: firing someone for their drug problem is not illegal.

 

Companies in the US have had the right to fire employees for illegal drug use for decades. It is also incredibly common (and more common every year) for companies to make mandatory drug testing compliance part of the terms of continued employment, and in many cases, required before being hired in the first place.

 

As long as it's spelled out in advance that drug abuse/illegal drug use is not tolerated, you can be canned for it legally. Majority of jobs in the country are 'at will' situations in any case, which means your employer has the right to change the game on you at any point, and if you disagree, you're fired.

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Well, I don't think listing one album in a 40+ year career really does much to disagree with that sentiment.


But hey. If you're a big Nugent fan, I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. Just sayin' that, in the larger scheme of things, when Ted Nugent's obituary is written, "master songwriter" PROBABLY isn't going to be one of the things mentioned....

 

 

No, not saying that at all.

MASTER songwriter? Of course not.

 

Never a fan myself really, either (not my preferred style of music or generation's music), but I worked a Nugent show in late '99 where he did a start-to-finish-hits revue basically, and I heard a couple hours straight of rocking songs and I somehow was familiar with the overwhelming majority of it.

 

Dismissing the guy as only Cat Scratch Fever/Wang-Dang-Sweet-Poontang/Stranglehold is more than a little disingenious is all I'm saying.

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Dismissing the guy as only Cat Scratch Fever/Wang-Dang-Sweet-Poontang/Stranglehold is more than a little disingenious is all I'm saying.

 

 

Didn't dismiss him as that. In fact, I gave him credit for having a long, successful career doing what-ever-it-takes. Just saying that it hasn't been his SONGWRITING that has been what he's been known for, or what has kept his career going. If you had to make a list of all his accomplishments, SONGWRITING would be much closer to the bottom than the top. That's all I'm saying.

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