The Guess Who

[SteveSly]

Their last four shows have been cancelled. And all cancellations happened day before or day of the show. It appears that the venues are presented with legal proceedings shortly before each show.

Interesting.

[Sturgeon's Lawyer]

I'm going to guess that this might be intentional? After so many of these in a row, the current Guess Who guys might have to make a decision about carrying on and keep paying for a bus, fuel, crew etc. Thats just my speculation, but not sure how many cancelled shows a tour can absorb.

That's an interesting question, and has a lot to do with the nature of the show.

In '77, the ELP Works 1 tour had to stop carrying an orchestra with them because of Led Zeppelin, sort of. Zep cancelled the last few dates of their tour due to the death of Plant's son; and the last-minute, day-of-show notice in New Orleans (the band were already there when Plant got word) gave rise to something near riots.

One of the side effects of this was that other big ticket shows (note, the GA tickets for Zep were $10 for that show...) that went on sale in the days afterward sold poorly (in NOLA). The ELP show, in particular, sold very poorly, meaning that the band was going to lose big money on that show. They bit the bullet and sent the orchestra home, quickly redoing the set list so that they could perform at least some of the Works material without an orchestra...

I saw that tour in August, in Oakland. It was a mostly-great show, but it seemed to lack a certain zip, which I guess came from the band's frustration at the situation. (The opening act, by the way, was Journey, introducing their new vocalist Robert Fleischman ... who sucked, in the opinion of myself and my concert-going buddy...)

[Dan Roth]

And Rolling Stone weighs in on this “nuclear option”

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...-ZQ1uJ0tGHBsYY

“I’m willing to do anything to stop the fake band; they’re taking [Bachman and my] life story and pretending it’s theirs,” Cummings tells Rolling Stone. “They’re not the people who made these records and they shouldn’t act like they did. This doesn’t stop this cover band from playing their shows, it just stops them from playing the songs I wrote. If the songs are performed by the fake Guess Who, they will be sued for every occurrence.”

[Jerjo]

If this succeeds we might see some other legacy acts with no original members getting in hot water as well. This is going to be really interesting.