The Two Petes: Part Two

It was a normal day for Peter Christian Madsen. Little did he know that his doppelganger was laying in wait; looking for the chance to abscond with PCM’s rightful intellectual property. Perhaps I should back up a little and give you the facts. Yeah, just the facts. 

The Phone rang. It was Pete’s friend and sometimes bass player, Peter. “Hey, I heard your music on the television,” he said, excitedly. “Really!?” I inquired – as a well-trained rock musician, Peter had been known to spout hyperbole from time to time. “Yeah, ‘Desert Car Kings’ on the Discovery Channel. Check it out.” Click. I checked and heard nothing. Maybe Peter had heard something that sounded like my music.

         Months later I’m restringing a Stratocaster on the couch with the buzzing cacophony of the TV orchestrating my finely-honed snipping technique when I hear the unmistakable introductory bars of “Davey Jones Locker,” a little tune I had penned many years prior with my trio, Buzzy Frets. “Hey! What the &*$@!.” Peter was right.

         So I contact Human Factor, a company I had signed a licensing agreement with a few years earlier and asked them if they knew anything about it. They send me a list of cues to music that had been used in various tv shows; my music. None of the cues matched the show I had seen/heard and this was the first time I seen the list. Things were getting weird.

         The dame at Human Factor – I’ll call her “Paula” (actually her real name is Paula) – asked me to send her a clip, a recording of the show. I said, “sure” because I knew the show was going to be rebroadcast in a few days and I could easily record it. But then…the show disappeared.
         But then it came back again and I got the clip to Paula. Turns out the clip was legit. But where was my doe? My mula? My greenbacks, why wasn’t I being compensated for my efforts?

The company I had registered my music with, the ones who are responsible for dispensing royalties earned, BMI, had turned their back on me.
Then Paula hits me with it. “Wait a minute, there are two Peter Christian Madsens registered with BMI.” So that’s it. This other Peter Christian Madsen has the stuff, he’s gotten the credit, the notoriety, the tens of dollars owed to me, yes ME!!!
End of part two
Next week: part 3

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