Between The Rock, The Telegram And A Response...

From The Telegram Newspaper in St. John's posted on November 21 2015...

A response to the following article...

YouTube user BetweenTheRock has posted a video of Alan Doyle and the Barenaked Ladies giving an onstage tribute to the late Ron Hynes.

The concert was at Peterborough Memorial Centre Friday night, the day after Hynes died.

"Sending the late, great Ron Hynes off with a song: Alan and fellow Newfoundlanders Cory Tetford & Paul Kinsman (the latter a longtime member of Ron's own band), along with the rest of Alan's Beautiful Gypsies, are joined by members of Barenaked Ladies to honour the memory of Newfoundland's own dearly loved and recently departed Poet Laureate with this heartfelt, moving rendition of the Master Songsmith's most famous song," wrote Between The Rock

"Cheers to Ron, and Godspeed."


More on this later…

This is not the original post I wrote. It was edited after sleeping on it. So here we go and as I have said before bugger the consequences. As a fan of anything I really don’t like the nagging feeling I am being conned. There are times on this journey where I have really felt like I have been conned as a fan into buying something that really isn’t genuine, honest and right up front. And today that feeling came back. It was a little thing really and not really important in the scheme of life I guess. Lynda Here on Twitter…

Lyndahere  1/2 Oddest convo at recent gig (well, odd…”oddest” sets a high bar). Gal next to me feels the need to show me every @alanthomasdoyle tweet… 20 November, 2015

Lyndahere 2/2…response she’s gotten, back to 2011. Saved ‘em all she has. Proof of how special she is to him, they are. Smile, nod, sip the drink. 20 November, 2015

Christina Townie to LyndaHere Were there a lot of them? :p 20 November, 2015

Lyndahere to Christine Townie There were a pile of them ! Granted, many were “Wicked” or “Cheers”, but it took some time to get through each & every one. 20 November, 2015 

Other fans and I have noticed Alan Doyle hasn’t responded to LyndaHere’s endless tweets on Twitter for over a year. Which I gather resulted in the above tweets describing her interactions with the fan above that is tweeted. Although after this post I suspect she will be acknowledged.

LyndaHere in the past has attacked fans on Twitter (under her real name which were later deleted and under I would like to allege fake accounts) for the way they use Twitter to interact with Alan Doyle. It is kind of sad really that two mature aged women like LyndaHere and Christina Townie (Christina Templeton a doctor and surgeon from St. John’s) who have more than most seem upset by a couple of tweets from Twitter.  It didn’t show a lot of respect for another fan and something that had made her really happy.

I believe that if we find something really dreadful then we don’t engage with it full stop. No ifs, buts or maybes. I gather Alan Doyle doesn’t like her constant in his face photographing and bootlegging regardless of the circumstances. I don’t like it either. Neither do other fans. However, he has on occasions shared on his official Twitter account and Facebook account over the past year her bootlegs and responded to fans who share them to him especially of material he doesn’t have copyright too. His friends share them on Twitter too. 

Again yesterday Alan and some of The Beautiful Gypsies shared on their official social media accounts a bootlegged video of Sonny’s Dream, a tribute bootlegged by LyndaHere loaded up on her YouTube account Between The Rock. The bootlegged video has attracted thousands of hits. Interestingly enough while acknowledging the greatness of the Newfoundland musician who wrote and played the original song LyndaHere did not share a bootlegged or pirated video or any article that was not her own. Sad and disappointing as Newfoundland music has been recorded and shared significantly on YouTube and in other places.

The tragic loss of a beloved creative artist will be felt by the community in which they lived and worked long after their death. While tributes in death are all well and good, perhaps the greatest honour a music fan can give a beloved singer and musician who has died under tragic circumstances is to let their music speak for themselves in the way they intended. Not someone’s interpretation or an interpretation shared through a bootlegged video of an interpretation. The singer and musician’s own interpretation of their music that will live on long after their death more than any interpretation.

Alan Doyle and The Beautiful Gypsies sharing bootlegs and pirated material via another person and not acknowledging the author LyndaHere sends mixed messages about criminal stalking, pirating and bootlegging to the fan community. Putting a different cover on a bad book doesn’t make a bad bootleg video look like a better video to watch. 

From reading the Great Big Sea Online Kitchen Party Facebook page there is a big section of the fan community who doesn’t like this behaviour and that of LyndaHere either. The likes on this Facebook page generally state that material both photographs and video recordings need to be collected under the right ethical and legal conditions for fans to watch it, like it and share it. Those fans should be proud of their actions and participation in the fandom. And while her bootlegs seem to attract thousands of hits via YouTube this is not generally reflected in the acknowledgement on the fan page.

I certainly understand the reasons why Alan does this and shares some of LyndaHere’s bootlegs even if he really doesn’t like it. He explains this in his book ‘Where I Belong’ about learning to work with tough guys and bullies from an early age. “It was a lesson I never forgot: don’t be afraid of tough guys. You need them and they need you” page 114. One of the aims of my blog recently has been to show there is enough professional and fan generated material around in that Alan doesn’t have to work with tough guys and bullies. 

Recently Alan Doyle retweeted on his official Twitter account one of LyndaHere’s illegally recorded pirated videos (from the television and recording facilities of her friend Christina Templeton in St. John’s) of him singing the Canadian anthem at a hockey game in St. John’s, Newfoundland just before the beginning of this tour with the Barenaked Ladies. The pirated video had a different tweet cover on it and was not the original sent by LyndaHere. I noticed after that incident then next time Alan sang the official anthem at a hockey game in Edmonton the telecast of the anthem was cut from the official broadcast for whatever reason. Perhaps this reason is that broadcasters of hockey games don’t like their material being pirated and distributed either. And LyndaHere told us she was not close enough to bootleg it.   

As readers of my blog know I find LyndaHere’s methods of bootlegging and illegal pirating totally immoral and unethical. She seems to have thousands of dollars at her disposal (for which there is no explanation of how she gets access to this money, whether it is legal and who exactly pays for it). This tour of Alan Doyle and BNL would have set her back and those paying for it thousands of dollars. And there seems to be very little output.  

However, she manages to attend nearly every performance of Alan Doyle and The Beautiful Gypsies no matter where in the world they are playing. There seems to be few fans interested in raising questions about the legal, ethical and moral obligations of this behaviour. It seems totally acceptable to criminally stalk someone everywhere they go publically and to take videos and photographs and share them on social media. And anyone who does raise issues is called a troll. There is no concept of asking permission or paying for a license as they are suppose to under the law.

As the readers of my blog know I don’t like the bootlegs distributed by LyndaHere because they are in my opinion not genuine concert bootlegged videos of genuine concerts goers but an amateur plant in the audience whose position has never been clearly explained. I don’t like the quality, the quantity and the way they are collected. But that is nothing new.

I also believe Alan Doyle doesn’t like them either, in particular those of material that is his own and copyrighted owned by others. However, under specific circumstances he does like and circulate bootlegged material he performs that is not his own copyrighted material including that of LyndaHere. Unfortunately. 

In 2012, I wrote on this blog “@lyndahere Music Marketing, Bootlegging and Hypocrisy (revised) published on 9 October 2012 where LyndaHere had bootlegged an entire charity event for Ron Hynes when he was diagnosed with cancer. She put up her videos in competition to an album that was going to be made to support the musician and his family during his recovery. This in my opinion was the lowest of the low. It just wasn’t one or two videos but the entire concert. I found them totally offensive that she would film at such events and without the permission for those who held the event and then peddle them to the artists involved. What got lost to her was that the concerts were for very sick people. Not one of the artists responded to her about the videos. She wants to get the video at all costs and to me if that is the case then it really isn’t good enough for me and for a lot of fans.