The Great Bruce Springsteen may come across as open-armed to his fans, but one upstart rock & roller found out that when it comes to potential competition, the Boss isn’t always so giving.
“I was going through a period when I was trying to develop my stylistic range,” says Steven Ace of Riffin Spiders. “I developed this recording technique which I called ‘sing-along karaoke’ where you’re singing and recording a vocal duet.
“You know, in standard karaoke the original vocals are removed from the mix and so your siniging replaces theirs. But in sin-along karaoke you’re actually adding your vocals to what’s already there.
“I did sing-along karaoke to all sorts of music in this project. During six months in my spare time I must’ve recorded close to forty songs this way, and I did succeed in my primary objective--broadening my vocal stylings.”
But when he took it a step in another direction--releasing the music, Ace ran afoul of the Big Bad Boss.. “I had about a half dozen Bruce covers I’d recorded over the years with acoustic guitar--songs like Nebraska, No Surrender, Factory, and I thought they might sound good alongside sing-along karaoke of songs like Backstreets, Badlands and Candy’s Room.
I put some of the stuff, put it on a cd, and sent it off to Bruce’s management. Within a month came the reply from a paralegal at the law firm representing him: ‘our client has asked us to respectfully decline the request.’ So it goes…
“I wasn’t trying to make money off of him,” Ace adds, “I was prepared to offer all profits go to a charity of his choosing. But it never got that far.”
The story is a bit reminiscent of one the Boss tells about himself. While still relatively unknown, Bruce was doing a gig in Memphis and after the show tried crashing Graceland. He didn’t get in, and Elvis wasn’t even home.
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