Quincy Jones and Quincy

Quincy Jones has passed away and will be remembered as one of the giants of popular music in the last and in this century. With his great musical talent, he was a massive influence on pop music of many forms and on jazz. He can genuinely be called a legend.

Having read about his death, I was reminded of an LP record I bought several years ago. Our local hospital radio station had decided to sell off some of its records, and, being a record collector at the time, I bought a few of them. They included a demo LP record, with a white blank cover, and no label on the centre of the record. No one could tell me what the record was. The only information was the record number etched near the centre of the vinyl, also indicating which was the A side. The number was CBS 84451.

I took the LP home and played it. It was a brilliant punk/new wave record, with fine vocals, fast driving rhythms, excellent guitar work and nice chord changes. It was not my kind of music, but it was clearly very good of its type. I played it often and no one knew what it was. I took it to specialist record shops, but they could not help. One of them thought it might be “the Jags”. I looked up the number on the Internet, but it did not show up on the CBS list of records.

More recently, search engines have become much more powerful, and we also have Wikipedia. A recent search showed that the record was by a band based in New Jersey called “Quincy”, an unwise name to choose. The band were active from 1976 to 1983. The LP was released in 1980 on the CBS label, which is the same label used by the much more famous Quincy Jones. It seems that he saw their name on the marquee at “Whisky a Go Go” in Los Angeles. His lawyers brought proceedings for breach of trade-mark. The matter was settled out of court, and the band had to change their name. They chose the rather weird name of “Lulu Temple”, maybe thinking that no one would have trade –marked that name. At some stage some members of the band reformed as “Smash Palace”. They may still exist; they were certainly active well into this century. They might well have outlived the great Quincy Jones.

It strikes me that CBS were unhelpful in allowing a young group of musicians to record with a name for which one of their established performers was entitled to a trade mark.

I still have the LP in my collection and it still sounds good. I do not know whether the patients in our local hospital liked it. Perhaps not: as the radio station decided to sell it off.

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