www.metroland.net
CHRISTMAS
CAME A MONTH early for Joe Glickman.
At the tail end of November, an out-of-court
settlement provided a happy ending to an offbeat drama that’s been going on
for four years – a drama involving a famous pop group, a disreputable manager,
a gang of musical poseurs and Glickman, a devoted music fan who felt driven to
undo a decades-old injustice.
The story begins with the precocious, ebullient
Glickman, an Albany native who will turn 23 later this month. Home-schooled from
the ninth grade on, Glickman got his high-school degree early because he
didn’t want to waste any time getting started with his filmmaking career.
After getting his degree, he latched onto the idea of making a documentary about
the twilight world of oldies groups touring the nostalgia circuit. “I’ve
been fascinated with oldies as long as I can remember,” says Glickman who is
also an amateur musician. “I’ve never taken an interest in modern music.”
In 1996, the fledging filmmaker sent letters to
agents and managers representing classic pop groups, but few people took him or
his project seriously. Glickman recalls the ‘60s stalwart Mark Volman, of the
Turtles, called Glickman personally to fume that a “Where are they now?”
film was a bad idea. “That was probably my first taste of the bitterness a lot
of these guys feel,” Glickman says.
But while other avenues were dead ends, Glickman
found the members of the Classics IV – the jazz-tinged soft rockers known for
“Spooky” and “Traces” – receptive. The timing was fortuitous, because
the band’s original members were, in the late ‘90s, beginning a nasty legal
battle with another group calling themselves the Classics IV. Original lead
singer Dennis Yost, the only founder touring under the Classics name, was
particularly frustrated at competing for bookings with a bunch of ringers.
Yost’s frustration was exacerbated because he was suffering from clinical
depression around the time Glickman and he first made contact.
Glickman decided to focus his film solely on the
Classics IV, instead of several oldies groups, and quickly came to share
Yost’s disgust about the poseur band. “The whole thing is like coming home
and finding out that someone is living in your house – people think they’re
you,” he says. As Glickman became more familiar with the issue, he discovered
that competition from fake bands is a huge problem for oldies groups who
weren’t savvy enough to trademark their names before their names were worth
money.
In the case of Classics IV, a man named Paul
Cochran – who managed the band from 1966 to 1975 – trademarked the Classics
IV name without the band’s knowledge, then sold the trademark to a group of
musicians after the original Classics IV disbanded.
“That tells me, as a musician, I can look up
any famous name and trademark it, then go out and say I am that group,”
Glickman says. “You can get away with it with someone like the Classics IV,
because people don’t know what they look like. You couldn’t get away with it
with the Beatles.”
The filmmaker was touched by the pain the
trademark issue caused Yost. “I chose to become involved from the very
beginning,” Glickman says. “I took it very personally, and I still don’t
know why, when I saw what was happening to someone who was an idol of mine.”
So, concurrent with making his documentary about
the band’s history, Glickman researched trademark law and discovered that only
one band, the Box Tops, had ever successfully used legal action to recover their
name from a faux act. “These groups can’t afford to fight these fakes,” he
says, “and that’s why a lot of times they just give up.”
Because the original members of the Classics IV
are scattered across the country, Glickman spent a fair amount of time and money
gathering footage for his movie and developing a library of legal documents. He
estimates that he’s sunk $35,000 into the movie, which is scheduled for
completion next year; the money came from his savings, odd jobs, and his work as
a photographer. In addition to the documentary, Glickman last year shot a 30th-anniversary music video for "Traces"; the video combines
footage of Yost lip-synching with narrative material, which was filmed at the
Slingerlands house featured in the 1987 feature Ironweed.
What’s in a name? Joe Glickman (with camera) shooting
the
“Traces” video in Slingerlands.
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Glickman is the first to admit he became obsessed by the Classics IV and
their problems, although he sees his quest as a musical crusade. “I wanted to
set an example and pave the way for other groups who are having the same
problem,” he says.
After gathering a wealth of damning evidence,
Glickman finally got an on-camera interview with Cochran last year. The
filmmaker asked innocuous questions about the group’s career before going in
for the kill by asking what the manager expected to happen when, in the
mid-‘70s, he sold the Classics IV trademark to musicians who weren’t
involved in the creation of the Classics IV records.
“He goes, ‘I knew what they were gonna do
– I knew they were gonna start a bogus group and start touring as the Classics
IV,’” Glickman recalls. Cochran further acknowledged, on-camera, that he
made the deal because his troubles with alcohol had put him into dire financial
straits.
In February of this year, Glickman filed a
petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, on Yost’s behalf, seeking
to cancel the fake group’s trademark on the Classics IV name. The petition got
stuck in bureaucratic channels for several months, but eventually, an October
date was set for a trial. Glickman says that within a week of seeing the
evidence that was going to be presented at the trial, attorneys representing the
fake group called in mid-November to arrange a settlement.
“Dennis gets his name and everything back –
Dennis comes away with everything he wanted and deserves,” Glickman says with
a bright smile. “It’s really nice to hear Dennis happy.”
-Peter
Hanson