The groovy guitar riff that opens the legendary album "Redheads" is burned into the minds of many music lovers who grew up in the nineties.
The only album from the unique lineup put together by Amir Zoraf and Tamir Albert was recently re-released as a record - without the musicians' knowledge or approval - and led to a large protest in which Albert told their devoted audience - do not buy the vinyl.
Albert's extensive post on Facebook led many fans to avoid purchasing the record, despite their great affection for the item.
Record stores also joined the protest and announced that they would not put the record on their shelves, and in record collectors' forums they emphatically announced that they would not lend a hand to the new printing.
"A great injustice has been done to us," says Tamir Albert in a conversation with him.
"We recorded the album and paid full price for its production, but the rights were fraudulently taken from us. They did us a great injustice. They printed a record with a new design and a new remaster, which is an intervention in the sound. This is actually a new work, without receiving any permission from us. You cannot print a record without transferring From a digital to an analog file. Frequency changes need to be made. I, as an artist, need to approve this thing."
The group Jinjiyot combined electronic music, rock guitar pieces and catchy hits, which have earned a place of honor in the history of music in Israel.
The two created the album after the disbandment of the hat-wearing band, during which Albert gained publicity.
"After the disbandment of the Hat Subjects, I wanted to do something else," he says, "as soon as we sat down to play together, we knew we had something good in hand, so we decided to invest everything in it. We invested NIS 30,000 in the production of the album, an amount that today is worth four times that. We did everything To keep it ours, and the mother who was trusted to keep our rights took it and expropriated it from us. You can say it's a classic rock story - but we tried to avoid it!, and only thirty years after it happened did we learn that this was the case."
At the time, the duo signed a commercial agreement with the DB Productions company managed by Ronan Ben Tal.
"We signed documents that we have 50% of the rights to the master. However, on the way we signed that we were transferring the rights to the DB company in order for them to close the distribution deal with the record company Ponocol. He suggested that we do it through him so that we could register with the Federation of Record Organizations - a vague body that was Record companies are members of it, when the goal was to collect funds from various parties to strengthen the record industry."
According to him, "It was a kind of exclusive club where you need ownership of 11 masters to join and pay a subscription fee of between one thousand and several thousand dollars each year. He told me: 'You won't be members of the federation, you don't have enough masters, and you won't pay any Change a few thousand dollars to be in the federation'. So we signed him. Except he didn't tell us that registration in the federation means ownership of the master."
Only in 2017, when the group went on tour after years of silence, they discovered what had been done without their knowledge.
"It was a deception. It turns out that the federation is a body that registers like a taboo, no one could discover it. There was no Internet, no one was registered with the federation and it was impossible to know."
The music market was very profitable in the nineties, and there are quite a few stories from this period about problems between promoters, production companies and musicians who are left with nothing.
Recently, a similar incident happened to Albert, when the legendary cassette of the Hat Bearers band was printed as a record without the knowledge of the band members.
There it ends with a happy ending.
"We stopped the printing of the vinyl, there was a lot of public pressure and we finally came to an agreement that the royalties would go directly to us. I don't think anyone can ignore when the artist asks music lovers not to buy the album because we have been wronged."
Ronan Ben Tal from the DB production company refused to comment on the article.
The Ponocol company stated that "Ponocol holds all the necessary rights to print the fancy vinyl edition of the masterpiece album 'Redheads'. Enjoy listening."
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