BON JOVI Accused Of Ripping Off Boston Musician's Song; In-Depth Report Available
Originally published in Boston Magazine back in June, BostonMagazine.com correspondent
Chris Faraone has filed the following story on local musician
Bart Steele, who claims
BON JOVI frontman
Jon Bon Jovi ripped off one of his songs for the band's Lost Highway album. A portion of the article appears below:
The Ballad Of A Mad Fan
In late 2004, with friends and coworkers telling him how much they loved 'Man, I Really Love This Team', Steele says, he sent letters and e-mails to Red Sox management asking them to consider playing the song at home games. He also says he pitched it to Major League Baseball, touting it as being wholesome enough for any market. Though he no longer has a copy of the letter he sent, he says it urged MLB to use the song at ballparks nationwide by replacing the Sox-specific lyrics with references to Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium, and so on.
Steele was all-in now. He scaled back his sputtering real estate work, grew thick, messy sideburns, and enrolled in a two-year certificate program in production at Berklee College of Music, financing it by tending bar. In a music business class, he learned it would be wise to register the copyright for "Man, I Really Love This Team" with the Library of Congress; on June 30, 2006, he filed the paperwork. At that time, he also submitted the song to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), a membership association that registers performing rights. Finally, he says, he sent another round of letters to Major League Baseball and the Red Sox.
Steele graduated from Berklee in December 2006. The next fall his new band, the Chelsea City Council—named for its frontman's near-maniacal commitment to his adopted hometown—released its debut CD, Everything at Once. In advance of it, on August 14, the Boston Globe's Living/Arts section ran a front-page piece on Steele, quoting him saying, "I just love this town," beneath a Springsteen-esque portrait showing him sporting rolled-up sleeves and a tattoo. As the group caught further publicity, it began booking enough paying gigs to cover Steele's basic expenses.
The man had almost made it.
October 4, 2007, Steele's friend Chadbyrne Dickens, who lived in New York, was watching the Yankees on TBS when he saw an MLB advertisement featuring Bon Jovi. "I was like, ‘Holy fuck. It's Bart's song,'" says Dickens, a former executive at Paramount and Miramax. "Not like, ‘They stole it,' but like, ‘Bart's song is on TV. They must have bought it.'" Dickens found a clip of the Bon Jovi spot on YouTube and forwarded it to Steele. Two hours later Steele called him back, almost crying. Major League Baseball had licensed nothing, and to Steele the lyrical likeness seemed too blatant for coincidence. "I felt raped," Steele says.
His song goes "Have you heard the news that's goin' round?/Our hometown team is series-bound," while the Bon Jovi track goes "Let the world keep spinning 'round and 'round/This is where it all goes down/That's why I love this town." It didn't matter to Steele that Bon Jovi's track was country-pop glossy and his was hoedown gritty; it didn't matter that few of the lyrics were the same. "If somebody kidnapped my daughter and gave her a nose job and dyed her hair yellow and I saw her 20 years down the line, I'd know that was my baby," he says. "I knew this was my song."
It got worse. TBS, in a move that paralleled Steele's marketing concept, aired team-specific versions of the commercial in different cities. Furthermore, it appeared to Steele that the spot was edited not to fit Bon Jovi's song, but rather to line up with "Man, I Really Love This Team." At two minutes and 30 seconds, the original Bon Jovi promotion was nearly the exact length of Steele's recording. And despite the spot's putative purpose of advertising postseason coverage of National League and American League teams, Steele believes there was a disproportionate amount of Red Sox footage in the montage. He had a Berklee friend lay down "Man, I Really Love This Team" over Bon Jovi's video.
Go to
this location for the complete story.
Check out Steele's song 'Man I Really Love This Team'
here. Listen to Bon Jovi's 'I Love This Town' below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUF20y8o88w&eurl=http://www.bravewords.com/news/94723 
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