Third Eye Blind was so cool in the late ’90s that even their record label sounds cool: “Elektra.” Not only does it sound like the name of a porn star, but it also doubles as a term applied to speed, per some theories, as would in such a case be documented by the Everclear song of the same epoch “Electra Me Blind” (please allow, obviously, for a slight spelling permutation). And then, of course, in probably the coolest album cover art of all time going away, we’ve got the photo of that girl snorting on the 3EB self-titled debut. The whole thing had quite a spirit, I thought.
And really, even in light of this Stephan Jenkins fiasco, Elektra remains like the “cool” uncle who is supposed to be babysitting you but is sitting in the other room quietly while you smoke weed, drink and play poker with your friends as an adolescent.
I mean, the whole thing begs the question: what kind of label would let a band member embezzle all of the band’s funding with such conspicuous adamancy and execution? So Jenkins sets up this separate corporation called Third Eye Blind, Inc… all of that is done through banks. That initiative has nothing to do with the label or the contract and either the contract has to have been vague enough as to not denote equal band member payments, or just incomplete to the point of absolute malleability and pushover leverage.
But at some point, anyhow, there has to have been something written into Third Eye Blind’s contract which would dictate that this phantom Third Eye Blind, Inc., be the beneficiary of all revenue due the men in the band. And I’ve never heard of any sort of precedent to this — a corporation paying another corporation in the instance of band payments, least of all in the case of a band so fledgling and new-to-the-game as Third Eye Blind was. It seems mystifying that Elektra wouldn’t have better supervised these young men in their pecuniary pursuits and even more mystifying that, legally, this type of shit can even happen, at all. And, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), record labels are treated like the plague by the press and the book industry — I couldn’t find a single book on music publishing companies on Amazon that didn’t seemed steeped in corny, patriotic optimism and sugar-coating. A memoir by Billy Corgan, a figure who’s been outspoken about the corrupt and shallow functionalities of the industry around this time, would have been useful, but, oddly, he’s never written a memoir, although he does have a book of poetry out, if memory serves correctly.
Elektra made out checks to “Third Eye Blind, Inc.,” though, which is certainly stupefying. And this, to me, is bizarre. What must have happened is that Jenkins worked a wrinkle into the contract naming this corp. as the beneficiary, all the while falsely letting on to his label that the funding would be distributed equally or that each member had equal shareholdings therein. The New York Times article “The POP Life; A Part of a Band As the Whole Band” cites that, as of the publication date in 2002, which was two years after his firing, original guitarist Kevin Cadogan “has not been paid a penny in royalties.” It certainly seems to the onlooker like an instance of negligence on Elektra’s part, is my point, and for them to have avoided lawsuit from 3EB as a whole for all of these years certainly strikes me as a divine stroke of luck.
Artists are employees of the record company, but, it seems, when the collective objective is simply making money by way of general entertainment, all moral structure and scruples may go out the window. Gary Marmorstein in his book The Label: The Story of Columbia Records relates the following pertinent tidbit: “When (George Washington) Johnson was indicted in 1899 for beating his common-law wife to death in the basement of her apartment on West 41st Street in Manhattan, Columbia paid for his legal representation.” This sort of infiltrating the artist’s personal livelihood is clearly an initiative to promote their continued output of entertainment material and almost in no wise could have any firm moral groundwork, or represent a modicum of what the benefactor believed to be right, in other words. They often say “When the cats away, the mice will play,” but it seems that in the cases of record companies’ business practices and their level of conscious fund allocation, it seems, the cat is often a mouse in disguise, in the first place.
One key difference, anyway, between the two cases mentioned above, is that in 100 years, anybody will know who the Hell Third Eye Blind is, to take nothing away from this enigmatic George Washington Johnson character mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Is Third Eye Blind the best band ever? Anybody who immediately says no, I guarantee, has at some point been stricken with a bout of jealousy, over Third Eye Blind’s success, over the band’s artistic appeal, over Stephan Jenkins having dating Charlize Theron, over how cool Kevin Cadogan looked playing that immortal riff to “How’s it Going to Be”; over whatever out of a laundry list of items. Is “Semi-Charmed Life” the greatest song of all time? These are questions validated by my present discussion and perhaps even further potentiated by the very irony of the unscrupulous business tactics accompanying them. And if the “Third Eye Blind Theory” applicable to all of this discussion is actually a legitimate sector of universal law informing human behavior, which I’m sort of arguing half-seriously in this book, then it would stand to reason that the band’s work, even within these shaky semantic grounds, can act as an artistic model for other rock bands to come. This, as well, is something with which I would concur, and which I will argue to be true in the chapters to come.