Here come the lawyers?

Like about a million other people, I thought that the Sons of Maxwell’s You Tube video, “United Breaks Guitars,” was pretty neat and struck a chord with me (a G Major). Most of us have had similar customer service nightmares. As someone who provides customer service, I know the other side, too: Customers who, no matter how hard you try to accommodate them, seem bent on rejecting the help you’re offering and instead trying to play “Gotcha” and make you look bad. (In the mental health field, we used to call these people “passive-aggressive” but now we say more diplomatically that they tend to make use of a “help-rejecting complaining” style of defense mechanism). In the call center we just call it the “customer service death spiral.” So I’m wary about that here, and always willing to believe that there are two sides to a story.

But when I was talking about the video and the story with my son Christian, he commented that Carroll will need to watch out for United’s lawyers and start setting up a legal defense fund, because Christian’s guess is that once the popularity dies down, United will gets its lawyers on the case and consider a slander lawsuit. And with United’s deep pockets, Dave Carroll could very well find himself in the same boat that Uzi Nissan did a while back, when Nissan Motors pretty much ruined his life for registering his own name as a Web domain for his computer business and trying to resist their strong-arm tactics to make him give it up.

That got me wondering if an artist ever got sued for a song that makes fun of poor service from a corporation. Sure enough, in the 1980’s Tom Paxton wrote and sang a song called “Thank You, Republic Airlines” after they broke the neck of his guitar in transit. It had some memorable lines, including the final one:

“There could no satisfaction greater than if
you should be the next to go the way of Braniff/”

And while Republic didn’t go into bankruptcy the way Braniff had, they were swallowed up by Northwest a year or two later. I can’t find any evidence in quick Google searches that Republic ever actually sued Paxton (whose album containing the song was appropriately titled “One Million Lawyers and Other Disasters”). It could be one of those plausible-sounding legends that gains credibility as it circulates.

Loudon Wainwright III also had a song with a similar theme, called “Fly the Unfriendly Skies.” The guitar that he sings about was a Martin., and was “Stoved in” rather than just having the neck broken like Carroll’s and Paxton’s. I don’t think he mentions the name of the airline in the song (I could be wrong, since it’s sometimes hard to hear Loudon as he swings his head back and forth like a bear getting ready to charge while he sings), but the title is certainly a parody of United’s tag line.

So we’ll see what plays out. I personally doubt that United would want to risk the bad publicity that a lawsuit would cause, even after the furor has died down, because things are much more viral now than they were in Paxton’s day (or even Uzi Nissan’s time, when the World Wide Web was still sort of a confusing concept to most people). But you never know.

Speaking of good topical protest songs in the tradition of Tom Paxton, check out Roy Zimmerman. He doesn’t have as much choice material to work with now that Bush is out and Obama is in (about the meanest he gets is “Barack Obama Has a Funny Name”). But he still gets in some choice digs, primarily aimed at war, greed, and right wing windbags, -- as they should be.