No Cause for Concern? Issue #3 | June 1982 | Page 9 | Open Letter to T.S.O.L.

The following letter is basically self explanatory regarding the rip-off after the T.S.O.L. concert May 27th. Letters like this one explaining the incident have been sent to bands and individuals involved in the business across North America warning them of these underhanded business practices.

DEAR T.S.O.L.

We are deeply hurt by your manager's and Jam Productions' treatment of our door supervisor at your Ottawa gig.

Our group, Youth Culture Promotions, is a co-operative, NON-profit, underground community effort. We support bands whose music and lyrics are great. It was a pleasure to promote your concert with a seven-day notice, five-day space confirmation at no-profit, our costs only -- keeping a low fixed overhead.

But your manager and his wife, with Jamil's compliance put our 15-year-old door supervisor, Melanie Kaye, over the grill: grabbing money out of her hand, calling her a liar, verbally threatening her and laying out an unbelievable amount of negative energy. They accused us of cheating you deliberately and pressured Melanie into giving them the total door and ticket sales.

Youth Culture Promotions was formed in the spirit of other community groups like New Youth in San Francisco, Jim Carter and his friends in Dayton, Toronto R.A.R., and M.A.M.A. in D.C. We are very idealistic, democratically run, have an open membership, share individual resources and always work for free. We wanted you to play Ottawa because we feel you are inspired by the same ideals we are. We work with bands as friends, offering promotion-after-the-event, home billeting, personal support and other stuff like that.

Your promotion people treated us with distrust, as if we were run-of-the-mill ripoff promoters or bar entrepreneurs. Even "road hazards' like high travelling costs and band blood suckers can't justify the slap in the face we received through Melanie's treatment. Big-time business tactics have clouded the perception of your tour management team so they can't tell real honest supporters from profiteers, and they're willing to pressure and take advantage of young people thereby earning the disrespect of a large group of people. Ken Lester did us 10 times better.

We have written Mike and his wife to tell them that although we'll continue to support your performance in the Detroit-Montreal-Rochester triangle, we will no longer be involved in business dealing with them and we're passing the word concerning our feeling to our friends in N.A. and elsewhere.

All these nasty things being said and done, our respect for your musical group is not altered, Microwave and Steve were kind to us and you guys did great despite the small turnout. Hope to see you again.

- No Pigs/Youth Culture Promotions

some stuff I like and support:

logo of Ottawa Rock Camp for Girlslogo of PunkOttawa.comlogo for Capital Rehearsal Studios logo for Dave's Drum ShopNCFC facebook logologo for Birdman Soundlogo of Spectrasonic

ncfc logo