Ayo, just wanted to give you guys a quick update on the situation here at BAL. Well first off, its winter, which sucks balls since we clearly prefer to cover outdoor shows, especially the free kind. Second off, we’re all pretty busy with our own lives right now, we like to go to shows when we can but don’t always have the time. The brick ass weather does not help much either.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up on the site. Actually, we’ve been sitting on a lot of stuff that we haven’t gotten around to releasing, mainly because we simply don’t have the time to work on it. For example, we have some great video of Kurt Vile, probably the best stuff anywhere, which we just haven’t had the time to mix. We also know you guys have been bitching about the rest of the Animal Collective show. I may or may not have good footage left from this show, but more importantly, the audio was some of the most challenging stuff we’ve ever encountered. It’s going to take hours and hours of work to mix it correctly, and right now we just don’t have the time to do it. Hopefully, we’ll get around to all this stuff and more in the coming weeks and months. Thanks to everyone who has left us supportive comments, we really appreciate the feedback and in the end, it really motivates us to get things moving again. Thanks and keep checking back!

BTW – if any of you happen to be audio mixers or engineers, and want to give BAL a hand, send us an e-mail with some of the work you’ve done and we’ll take it from there. You’d be doing us and everyone else who comes to this site a huge favor by taking some of the load off our backs.

You might have noticed that soon after our big Grizzly Bear post, all our content was suddenly and mysteriously pulled from the interwebs. This was no accident. We would have love to keep this up for you guys, but we couldn’t. So what the fuck happened? Let’s take it from the beginning.

We made sure to get to this show bright and early, and made it a point to get the best possible vantage point to capture the mood of the day. We toughed it out for hours in the balls ass heat and sat through two underwhelming sets and hours of shitty DJ sets blasting through our eardrums. For this day, we assembled the whole crew together, and worked our asses off to bring you this content the very next day. We pulled a true all-nighter to edit the video and mix the audio, and the results were some of the best stuff we had ever done. Going into Monday, we were feelin’ good – this was gonna be some good shit.

Then the trolls came out and ruined it for everyone. We made a comment about Dan that people took the wrong way, and the whole situation began to spiral out of control. Listen – we’re jokesters at heart, which you can tell from the rest of our posts. Unfortunately some people on the web took it upon themselves to blow the whole thing out of proportion, which attracted the attention of the band. So what did we say that was so offensive? Judge for yourself: “Props to a seemingly deliciously dosed Daniel Rossen whose delirious smile and drugged giggles to drummer Chris Bear are well worth analyzing. Skip to 2:06 in the video below and judge for yourself if our JFK, “back-and-to-the-left” style analysis bears fruit.” Seems pretty innocuous right? Not according to some people.

Soon after, we were contacted by band’s legal counsel, who informed us that we were slandering her client, spreading malicious rumors, distributing copyright content, etc. On one hand, we wish we had never made the comments in the first place. It was totally unnecessary and drew a lot of controversy and bad publicity on us. On the other hand, the comments were clearly made in jest and did not constitute slander in any legal sense of the word. We made an observation and tried to make a joke about it. It didn’t work. We wish we didn’t do it. Either way, we took the comments down right away, since we loved this band – we bumped them hard and repped them out to all our friends. Which is what makes the whole situation so unfortunate not only for you guys, but for us as well. This was our favorite band at the time. Nowadays, we can’t even mention their name without bringing up hard feelings. Going forward, we cannot in good conscience cover them in any fashion, even if it is to report news of a new tour, or reviewing a new album. We’re in a position now where we can’t possibly be impartial insofar as our feelings toward the band go. 

As far as distributing copyright material goes, it gets a little hairy. This show, as well as the rest of the Pool Parties shows, took place in a public space (a NYC Park), and the organizer took no steps to post any terms and conditions upon entering (although please correct me if I am wrong about this). Does this entitle us to distribute privately shot video? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. There are two similar cases that preceded ours that seem to support us here. The first is HBO’s takedown of privately shot video from the Obama inauguration. The second is Prince's takedown of privately shot video of him covering Radiohead’s “Creep”. In both cases, the plaintiff’s cases rest of shaky grounds, and in the case of the former, HBO was forced to retract the takedowns. In the latter, legal experts universally condemned Prince's action as being illegal. Either way, given the abundant legal resources available to the band, we backed down right away, very apologetically, and took our posts down.

In the end, we believe the real reason for the takedown is that Dan took personal offense to our comments and strong-armed us into submission. Our reasoning is pretty simple. A search on Youtube for “Grizzly Bear Pool Parties” produces 45 results, most of which are poor quality, but some that are rather good as well. If the band and their management are so concerned with removing unauthorized footage, then why would they allow these other videos to stay up? If they are taking a hard line against copyright, why are they allowing others to produce and post awesome quality bootlegs of their shows at venues that strictly prohibited them? It seems to us that they are picking and choosing their fights rather capriciously, which frankly is their every right to do, but we still think its unfair to single us out. We clearly had the best quality stuff out there, and this was good for everyone – us, the band, and you guys, who the real losers in this situation.

We did this show – as we do everything on this site – for your benefit, not ours. To run this site involves significant resources in terms of time, money, and investment in equipment. We take in no money from this site, not a single penny. This site runs only on supportive comments from you guys, our readers. So when something like this happens that is beyond our control, we can’t help but to feel extremely saddened and let down. I mean, it really sucks to have your favorite band threaten you with legal action, and to not accept your most sincerest of apologies. To this day, we still haven’t heard from the band directly, only through their lawyers and management. Look, we understand you’re a big band making big moves and such, but you went out of your way to send us a cease and desist, yet you don’t have the courtesy to respond to our apology? In my book, this isn’t right, it’s not how you treat people that support you and are trying to help you out. So instead we have deaded these guys, and in the future, there will be no more coverage of this band beyond this post. Sorry everyone, we hate to say it, but we let you down this time. Hope you keep visiting the site and continue supporting us.

Don’t let the lack of updates get you down. We’re busy at working getting together a ton of material together. Here’s some of the stuff in the pipeline:

Animal Collective @ Prospect Park

Straight up one of the trippiest shows BAL has ever gone to. We blasted through mad rows of youngsters to get you awesome footage of the show, including videos of “Grace”, “My Girls”, “What Would I Want Sky” and more, and as you come to expect from BAL, the quality of picture and sound is unparalleled. Expect an update either tomorrow or Thursday, with more being added throughout the week.

Screencap from "Fireworks"Screencap from "Grace"

Dinosaur Jr. and The Walkmen @ Summerstage

On this muggy afternoon we trooped it out to Central Park to grab you more unauthorized footage of your favorite old school alt-rockers, Dinosaur Jr. At least three videos and tons of photos from this show were taken under the sketchiest of circumstances. Videos to come shortly after the Animal Collective update.

Kurt Vile @ Cake Shop

We staggered into Kurt’s late night set on Friday night for a very special solo acoustic session at Cake Shop in the LES. Absolutely stunning photos and videos were taken and we are really excited to get these out. Coming soon more towards the end of the week.

So yeah, we got a lot of work to do, but hopefully we can start getting these out to you soon, so keep checking back during Big Ass Update Week.