music4lover

A songwriter and music producer who claims he helped launch pop star Lady Gaga says she squeezed him out of her lucrative career after he co-wrote some of her songs, came up with her stage name and helped get her record deal.

Rob Fusari filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against the Grammy Award-winning performer, saying his protege and former girlfriend ditched him as her career soared.

“All business is personal,” said the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a Manhattan state court.

Lady Gaga’s spokesman, Dave Tomberlin, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail sent Thursday by The Associated Press.

Fusari had credits on such hits as Will Smith’s “Wild, Wild West” and Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” when a friend steered the piano-playing singer — then known by her real name, Stefani Germanotta — to him in March 2006, according to his lawsuit.

Though he initially dismissed her, he realized she had star potential after hearing her play in his Parsippany, New Jersey, studio, the suit said. He spent the next several months working with her every day and “radically reshaping her approach,” persuading her to drop rock riffs for dance beats, it said.

As they co-wrote songs such as “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” which would appear on her debut album, “The Fame,” he transformed Germanotta into Lady Gaga, a name adapted from Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga,” the lawsuit said.

In a 2009 interview with the AP, Lady Gaga said her “realization of Gaga was five years ago, but Gaga’s always been who I am.”

“I was Gaga from the time that I was 19 through my first record deal,” the 23-year-old said of her over-the-top, avant-garde style, which has captured the imaginations of millions of fans. “I always dressed like that before people knew me as Lady Gaga. I was always that way … I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

According to the lawsuit, Lady Gaga and Fusari’s relationship turned romantic and then became a business partnership in May 2006, when they created a joint venture called Team Love Child LLC to promote her career. Fusari’s share was 20 percent, it said.

Fusari — whose account of his role in the multiplatinum-selling artist’s early career has been told in interviews — says he introduced Lady Gaga to a record executive who ultimately shepherded her to Universal Music Group’s Interscope Records, which released “The Fame” in 2008. The album has sold more than 3 million copies in the United States; Fusari has a producing credit.

But the lawsuit says their personal and business relationship had soured by then and he has been denied a 20 percent share of song royalties, 15 percent of merchandising revenue and other money he’s owed. He acknowledges getting checks for about $611,000 but says that isn’t his full share.

Lady Gaga won two Grammys in January: best dance recording, for “Poker Face,” and best electronic/dance album, for “The Fame.”

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AP Music Writer Nekesa Moody and AP Writer Mesfin Fekadu in New York contributed to this report.

Herewith Mark Cooper’s MOJO review of the Man in Black’s seminal first American Recordings album…–Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock’s Backpages

Sometime in the late ’80s, Columbia Records unceremoniously dropped Johnny Cash.

No matter that Cash had been one of Sun’s Million Dollar Quaret, alongside Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, that he’d gone on to build Columbia’s Nashville Division virtually single-handed, that he’d topped the pop charts in 1969 with his extraordinary Johnny Cash At San Quentin live album, and that he’d then hosted a TV show that had brought everyone from Bob Dylan to The Who to Nashville… Columbia had looked at the bottom line and decided that the Man In Black was history.

Dwight Yoakam complained vociferously about the injustice of it all, Cash himself signed to Mercury and cut a series of country albums whose varying excellence and poor sales did nothing to give Columbia’s cold-blooded accountants sleepless nights. The great man had a major operation on his jaw, and settled in to his sixties touring the world like he always has, playing to his now middle-aged fans who whispered along with the same hits he’d played the last time he was in town.

Johnny Cash was momentarily becalmed but he wasn’t about to go gently into that good night. This, after all, was the man who’d written of shooting a man in Reno “just to watch him die”, who knew that love can turn into a “ring of fire”, a white man who’d made millions but who’d never forgotten his poor childhood in the Arkansas delta and who’d always stood up for America’s dispossessed–the Native Americans, the lifers, even the victims of AIDS.

He still had a voice that sounds like the black gold that comes up from under the earth, he’d survived even the crassest novelty songs with his dignity intact and yes, god damn it, he was still the very soul of Americans cool–the only man in whom the contrary demands of Bible, gun and constitution are met with equal long-haired Rick Rubin snatched him up to be the talisman and legend of American Recordings, Rubin’s grown-up version of his two previous labels, Def Jam and Def American.

The album that Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash have made together probably won’t please Cash’s old-time country fans and it will probably be admired more than loved by those who come to the Cash via such young admirers as Nick Cave. If it’s cool, it’s because it manages both to be truthful and confessional, while also making Cash look and sound as big as a monument.

There’s nothing commercial about American Recordings unless it’s a ruthless determination to strip himself bare. Yet that self is a complex thing in Cash’s case, a tangle of pride and humility that give will give ground to no man but know its own weakness in the eyes of the Lord. Cash has always embodied a kind of granite American masculinity yet he’s also always made it abundantly clear that he’s anything but a hard man.

D.H. Lawrence once wrote that the soul of the American white man is the soul of a killer; Cash instinctively understands this and there’s plenty of killing on American Recordings. But Cash is ultimately no John Wayne–unless it’s the Wayne of The Searchers, the Wayne who learns the power of mercy and the meaning of redemption.

The Johnny Cash of American Recordings predates even the boom-chikka-boom of Sun days. There’s no bass, no beat and even no harmonica; this is Cash alone with his guitar and that brooding, wavering voice, back among the folk songs, the cowboy laments and the gospel tunes of his Delta childhood.

That, at least, is the mood, even if Cash originals and the odd folk ballad are surrounded by songs that come from such diverse contemporary sources as Nick Lowe, Kris Kristofferson, Loudon Wainwright, Tom Waits, Glenn Danzig and Leonard Cohen. Yet the songs are so skillfully chosen that each of them sheds light on Cash himself, and fleshes out the overall portrait of a man coming to terms with his life in the face of oncoming death.

This is Cash taking stock, making his last reckonings and weighing his soul with Old Testament gravitas. He’s a woman killer in the droll “Delia’s Gone,” a Vietnam vet in “Drive On,” a bad seed in Danzig’s “Thirteen” and sometimes a monster in Lowe’s “The Beast In Me.” Yet he’s also a sinner in search of redemption, a man taking stock in Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire,” Wait’s “Down There By The Train” or his own “Let The Train Blow The Whistle”–a man looking back on his life struggles and coming clean.

The result is a breathtaking blend of the confessional and the self-mythologizing that makes Cash seem all the larger for his admissions of weakness. American Recordings finds an American hero having the courage, wit, and strength to stare long and hard in to the mirror of his life and then look back at us without blinking. He’s Johnny Cash and everything he’s done is written on his face and engrained in his voice.

I’d like to say “We are not worthy…,” but every tremor in his voice tells me he’d disagree. Let’s just say, “Welcome back, Mister Cash” and leave it at that.

From Sting to Pat Boone, Jimi Hendrix has had his fans amongst musicians. Stands to reason. Many covers exist. These are among the weirder ones for the most part and would probably interest Jimi since he always seemed to be looking for new sounds and approaches.

Then again, how do I know? Maybe Jimi would’ve gotten cranky as he got older and hated everything on principle. You can’t ask him and neither can I, so we just have to make things up as we go along. Facts are for sissies.

10) Rickie Lee Jones–”Up From The Skies”: From her album Pop Pop, Rickie Lee Jones somehow turns “Up From The Skies” into a jazz number. There’s a good chance you could hear this and not even realize what is going on. Sometimes, we’re all Mr. Jones.

9) Red Hot Chili Peppers–”Fire”: Well, this might not be great, more like a warning to bands attempting to cover Jimi. This sounds more like a band racing through the supermarket while trying to win one of the contests where you shove as much expensive crap as you can into the cart. They might even “win.”

Roy Buchanan–”If Six Was Nine”: Buchanan is one of the few guitar players who could play in Hendrix’s league. He could’ve used better producers. But so could many great musicians. As the album this cover is from–A Street Called Straight–features an all-star cast and then Arif Mardin behind the board, which is a bit like finding a million dollars and then burning it.

7) Richard Lloyd–”I Don’t Live Today”: With his album The Jamie Neverts Story, Television guitarist Richard Lloyd pays tribute to his musical hero and to a friend who once received guitar lessons from Mr. Experienced. Any number of tunes from this album could make this slot, but “I Don’t Live Today” is one I haven’t gotten to pump yet and it deserves a mention here. I’m all product placement these days. Contact me for more details.

6) Emmylou Harris–”May This Be Love”: Daniel Lanois produces an album of covers and Harris swerves all over the place, picking up this grand Hendrix tune and making it sound exactly like you might imagine what would happen if you put Lanois and Harris in a recording studio together. She sings like an angel on helium and he produces it within a layer of its life.

5) P.M. Dawn–”You Got Me Floatin’”: In the mid-’90s there was a Hendrix tribute album called Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix that included a number of interesting covers of his material along with some others that merely showed how much they liked the original records. These gents took this tune to their own personal hiding spot.

4) Chris Whitley–”Drifting”: Whitley was one of those suffering guitar players who could sing the blues because he lived with them nearly every damn day of his tortured life. His records are almost all more amazing than the standard bluesman. “Drifting” is one of Hendrix’s finest ballads and while Whitley can’t match Hendrix’s layers of guitars, he sings it from the heart. What was left of it.

3) Devo–”R U Experienced?”: Plenty of Hendrix fans hated this “deconstruction” of his classic, which is all the more reason to enjoy it. What is music if you can’t have fun with it and poke it with a stick or a synthesizer once in awhile?

2) Stevie Ray Vaughan–”Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”: There was never any doubt who influenced Stevie Ray. This tribute to one of his heroes is one of those amazing feats that served notice that SRV was technically in the same league. He’d use his own tunes to shore up evidence for those who wanted more. But at one time covering Hendrix could help your career.

1) The Cure–”Purple Haze”: The Cure also covered “Foxey Lady” and with their monstrous studio sounds turned this radio standard into a trip into Dante’s Inferno. Which level is unclear. But Robert Smith always loves to sound like he’s a having an orgasm in reverse.

The music world was shaken this week as news spread that Alex Chilton has died at the age of 59. Chilton had a string of hits as a member of the Box Tops in the late 1960s when he was just a teenager. Today, most people would recognize hits like “The Letter” within the first few notes. But among musicians and fans Chilton is more known for his work with Big Star, a band that I would label as one of the most influential bands that “regular folk” are not familiar with. Big Star is also widely considered to be one of the most important developers of the power pop genre. If you’re not familiar with the music and influence of Alex Chilton do yourself a favor and listen to this playlist that traces his career with the Box Tops, Big Star and as a solo artist and ends with the Replacements song “Alex Chilton”.

Rest in peace Alex and thanks for the music.

A Tribute To Alex Chilton

1. The Letter – The Box Tops

2. Cry Like A Baby – The Box Tops

3. Soul Deep – The Box Tops

4. Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March – The Box Tops

5. September Gurls – Big Star

6. I’m In Love With A Girl – Big Star

7. The Ballad Of El Goodo – Big Star

8. Thirteen – Big Star

9. In The Street – Big Star

10. Lonely Weekends – Alex Chilton

11. You’re Lookin’ Good – Alex Chilton

12. My baby just cares for me – Alex Chilton

13. Ah Ti Ta Ti Ta Ta – Alex Chilton

14. Hey! Little Child -Alex Chilton

15. Every Day As We Grow Closer – Alex Chilton

16. Alex Chilton -The Replacements

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Yeah, ok, every guitarist who came after Jimi Hendrix was influenced by him, just as every punk band on Earth owes a debt to Iggy Pop and the Ramones. But I wanted to narrow it down to people who often see the name Jimi Hendrix pop up in reviews of their own work. Or who simply play in his spirit.

10) Lenny Kravitz: Well, I didn’t say this list was going to be pretty. Lenny Kravitz isn’t in league with Jimi, but he’s done plenty of guitar-shaking and wah-wah making to give you the impression that he’d love to be held in the same company.

9) Eddie Van Halen: Eddie is one of those guitar players who learned how to take Hendrix’s influence to his own personal level. Listen to his guitar work on Women And Children First and Fair Warning and tell me that isn’t some avant-garde blues and funk going on behind what is supposed to be an arena rock band. It’s what Congress calls the Nuclear Option.

John Frusciante: I could easily list a bunch of guitar player’s guitar players like Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Yngwie Malmsteen and call it a day, but I wanted to pick guitar players who managed to fire up a great band liked by people who don’t know (Bo) diddley about the guitar. Frusciante powered the Red Hot Chili Peppers and has an incredibly collection of solo albums that find Crazy John turning over the Earth in searching of a lost chord and finding blisters on his fingers.

7) Richard Lloyd: Television’s Richard Lloyd is one of the only people to have ever received guitar lessons from a guy who received guitar lessons from Jimi Hendrix. To commemorate this once-removed fact of immortality, Lloyd released the album The Jamie Neverts Story, which features Richard crawling all over his favorite Hendrix tunes.

6) Prince: As a gifted multi-instrumentalist who can play the guitar the way his Darling Nikki pleasures herself in a hotel lobby with magazines, Prince has suffered from making too much music and being too much of an egocentric creep (in a field jammed with egocentric creeps). But if you find yourself a solid Prince fan, he or she can pick out what you need to hear and you should be on your way. Just pay Prince for it or else he gets testy.

5) Robin Trower: Whenever I would conduct interviews with modern day guitar whiz for various guitar magazines, the one name that constantly came up was Robin “Twice Removed From Yesterday” Trower. Trower never had Hendrix’s appetite for innovation, but he loved Jimi’s deep, heavy blues-canyon tone and he took it over Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge to his own Bridge Of Sighs. Pictures of Trower from this period make it look as if he wouldn’t make it a much longer career than Jimi’s. Yet he has survived.

4) Frank Marino: At the beginning of his career with his Canadian band Mahogany Rush, Frank Marino was considered to be an amazing guitarist who sounded an awful lot like Jimi Hendrix. To add the weirdness, Marino was said to have received a visitation from Jimi Hendrix in conjunction with a bad acid trip, a story that Marino now insists is not true. For some reason, we believe him.

3) Stevie Ray Vaughan: One of the smartest things Stevie Ray Vaughan did in his too-short career was cover Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” By doing so, Vaughan hit people over the head with the fact that he was a talented guitar player that deserved attention. Simply recording your own music didn’t cut it in the 1980s. Radio needed a reason to take note and so did much of the audience and being able to go fret-to-fret with Jimi Hendrix is one reason to take note. Another is to act like a jerk. British rock stars are better at that.

2) Leigh Stephens (Blue Cheer): Well, he couldn’t play like Jimi Hendrix but he could make it sound like it was raining bombs like Hendrix, since he loved his fuzzboxes and wah-wah pedals without restraint. What were the punk bands that followed but bands filled with guitar players who wanted to sound like Jimi Hendrix but didn’t have a chance in hell? So they stacked their Marshalls accordingly.

1) Eddie Hazel (Funkadelic): Just one listen to “Maggot Brain” should tell you what you need to know. Hazel was one intense guitar player and one of Plainfield, New Jersey’s finest exports (that’s considered North Jersey as opposed to Springsteen’s South Jersey, which is really all “central” if you want to get technical.)