How an advert derailed Canned Heat: “Haunt us for the rest of our lives”
It’s difficult to think of anything with less rock and roll credibility than commercial advertisements, turning the grassroots rebellion of an entire movement into a means of shilling more people out of their hard-earned brass. Yet, some of the most iconic and influential outfits of all time – including hippie heroes Canned Heat – have cropped up on adverts on more than a few occasions.
“You do a commercial, and you are off the artistic roll call for life,” Bill Hicks once declared, and that is a sentiment which is certainly shared among the more principled corners of the songwriting realm, but that hasn’t stopped everybody from Jack White to the late Nick Drake from having their work featured on television advertisements over the years. Even The Clash, who captured the political defiance of punk better than most, saw their work featured in an advert for Levi’s jeans back in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, the fact that Canned Heat’s classic 1968 anthem ‘Going Up the Country’, one of the definitive anthems of hippiedom, started cropping up in ads for car insurance of all things, still feels utterly bizarre. Seemingly, though, the band itself were as shocked as anybody else by the decision.
Not only were Canned Heat initially unaware of the famous Geico ads, which ran circa 2018, powered by their music, but they received no royalties for the song’s use, either. Apparently, that total lack of creative control over their own work stems all the way back to 1967, and revolves around a rather suspicious drug bust.
The story goes that, during a trip to play a show in Denver, an old friend of Bob Hite came to visit the band in their hotel room, and he took a couple of joints off their hands in the process. Shortly thereafter, the local police force stormed the hotel room, found the weed that this mysterious old friend had suspiciously left behind, and promptly carted Canned Heat off to jail.
In a rather tight spot and unable to scrape together the funds for bail, the band sold off their half of the band’s publishing rights to Al Bennett, president of Liberty Records, to the tune of $10,000. Then, a few years later, when the group came to leave Liberty, they agreed to forfeit all future royalties in an effort to pay off the incredible debt that they had worked up with the label. Essentially, then, Canned Heat sold off the entire ‘golden age’ of their catalogue.
“This agreement was based on the sale of LPs and cassettes,” drummer Adolfo de la Parra later explained, per Ultimate Classic Rock. “No one knew that the CD would come along in a couple of years or that the entire Canned Heat catalogue would be reissued, sell like mad, and be used in commercials and movies 50 years down the road, as is now the case.”
Seemingly, then, the prevailing issue with those Geico ads is not that they betray the cultural revolution of Canned Heat’s heyday, but that they do so without even benefiting the band’s surviving members. “The problem is that we have not received a penny from it, and that’s what really bothers me whenever I see the commercial,” the drummer shared.
“These are the type of mistakes that will haunt us for the rest of our lives,” de la Parra declared. “And many other bands have similar stories as ours.”
So, if there is one lesson to be learned from the Canned Heat debacle, it is that artists should never waive off their own publishing rights because you never know whether your work will eventually be used to sell insurance.
