Juvenile Art Rock Legally Unleashed

by Steven Garrity in

The Creative Commons organization gives artists the tools they need to release their work into the public domain with limitations.

As a nod of support to the organization, my old band, Horton’s Choice, has released our recordings under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Basically that means that you can use our music for non-commercial use, but you must attribute to work to Horton’s Choice, and any derivative work must also be released under the same type of open licence.

A few things they’ve done well:

I pretend that I think Horton’s Choice was a crappy garage band, but I’m really only using humour to mask my feeling that this was the greatest artistic achievement of my life.

 

17 thoughts on “Juvenile Art Rock Legally Unleashed”

  1. Nice – both the license stuff and the music. BTW, have you got the Shores and The Cave tracks the wrong way round? The MP3 tag info seems to think so.

  2. Actually, can I just revise my last “Nice” statement. This is really, really good. *Really* good. And, frankly, the recording quality is superb for such little time in the studio (comparing to other stuff I’ve heard).

    Any chance of a reunion? 🙂

  4. Thanks Mal! You’ve warmed the hardened hearts of a few wannabe rock stars (unless you are my mom, in which case: mom!).

    I’ve fixed the ID3 tags – thanks.

    Unfortunately, a reunion is unlikely. However, the two primary songwriters from Horton’s Choice are still very much alive, and as bad-ass as ever. Hopefully some mad child of HC come around some day (could be a while, my work and this site are fulfilling my creative urges quite well these days – though I do miss having my pants moved by a monster guitar).

    There is another track that went with these, but it was a cover (all of the tracks available now are originals). We’ve lost contact with the original author of the song and are unable to secure permission to release it.

    Ironically, this is what the Creative Commons project is intended to prevent.

    Speaking of the Creative Commons, there is a great flash/audio presentation about the concept of the Creative Commons (it’s 1.1Mb and maybe two minutes long). Any video that successfully animates something as ephemeral as a “haze of legal doubt” is cool as far as IÂ’m concerned.

  6. I stumbled across your site a few weeks ago. What got my attention more then anything was the post on XP. Been a Mac user since 1988, but couldnÂ’t justify the price difference and bought a HP a few weeks ago. Although I have used Windows machines at work for about the same length of time, I have been Mac only since 2000. I was impressed with the functionality of XP, but as I spent too many hours setting up my system to be user friendly I couldnÂ’t help but wonder who or how many of the icons were allowed to pass into production.

    The visual elements of XP are nice and terrible at the same time. Is that possible?

    But I digress Â…

    The music files are really tight. IÂ’ll be burning a CD for personal use later today. With all the carp that passes for music today it must a strange experience trying to make money as a band. I wish Creative Commons all the luck in the world. All my friends love live music in small venues. We go as often as possible and buy the bands CDs. In our opinion someone has to support local bands or in the not to distant future there wonÂ’t be many to chose from.

    Again, nice work. You should be proud!

  7. Yeah, HC was cool and all, but what the world really wants to know is if there are any BUDDY recordings in the vault? Bootlegs? Live stuff?? Poor quality vhs?? 😉

  9. I think I have recordings of Buddy on old cassettes from practices. Should I sell it on Ebay? Any bidders?

  10. UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!!!!!! Listening to Buddy practice now……. we should have been famous for our humor alone.

  12. For those of you who have become confused, Buddy was the band that became Horton’s Choice – but before we learned how to play our instruments (literally).

  13. Ahhhh Horton’s Choice..

    Been a while since i heard you any songs by you guys. The last i can remember is Sydney, 1999 i think. Cant remember the Gig but do remember the “A&W song” very nice.. Every one loved that one.

    Jamie

  14. Mushroom Cut really isn’t the right term as it had nothing to do with cutting and everything to do with growing.

  15. First of all, Horton’s Choice confirmed my belief that there were small-time garage bands out there that were twice as good as anything I heard on the radio.

    I remember the only time I heard HC play was at a coffee house thing Jevon & my brother set up. Not a lot of people showed up as I recall, and the Choice played for quite a while. It was awesome.

    Dan, I really want another Spacepop tape ’cause I lost my other one! Call me man!

  16. yeah, we organized that one well. But kinda forgot to advertise.. 😉

    And yes, they still played like there were hundreds there. And they hadn’t played together in quite some time, IIRC.

  17. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Horton’s Choice has made it onto CBC’s website “New Music Canada”. You can find.. yourselves I guess, here

Comments are closed.