“Forbes” And “Ad Age”: Rock Imagery, Dead Or Alive

Halloween is creeping up, so it’s time for Forbes to publish its list of the highest-earning dead celebrities of the past year. The winner, once again, is Elvis Presley, whose dulcet tones, handsome visage, and rotting carcass pulled in $52 million, nearly $20 million ahead of No. 2, Charles M. Schulz. The other musicians near the top are John Lennon (seventh, $9 million) and Marvin Gaye (13th, $2 million), with ancillaries such as Velvet Underground manager Andy Warhol (eighth, $9 million) and presidential serenader Marilyn Monroe (ninth, $6.5 million) figuring in as well. What’s most noteworthy, though, are two other pieces–one in Forbes, the other in Ad Age–that explains the nature of this list and call parts of it, indirectly, into question.

The explanation comes from writer Neil Steinberg, who walks us through the process by which a celeb blooms post-mortem (no, not that way), arguing that you’ve got to be pretty huge in life before you can eclipse yourself in death. I was ready to claim otherwise: Nick Drake is far better-known in now than when he was alive. But Drake isn’t pulling down anywhere near the bucks of the folks on the big list, which is really Steinberg’s point, so I’ll concede. He also gets into some nuts-and-bolts stuff about how posthumous celebrity images have been utilized:

But image management used to stop with death. After a star died, every T-shirt factory, souvenir stand and coffee cup company from Hollywood to Shanghai was free to swoop in and start profiting from their fame without consideration for good taste or long-term damage to a celebrity’s image.

That began to change in 1979, when the son of Dracula star Bela Lugosi sued Universal Pictures over its sales of vampire-themed products. The court ruled against Lugosi, but a paragraph in its ruling caught the eye of Richman, a Los Angeles-based lawyer then in his mid-20s.

The paragraph said that had Lugosi sold his image in his lifetime, he would then have a common law trademark that could be passed on to his heirs. Suddenly, fame could be inherited. Lugosi hadn’t sold his image, but plenty of stars had, and Richman started looking through old magazines and contacting the heirs of every star who had ever endorsed a product, starting with W.C. Fields. A short time later, when Fields appeared on a stamp, the U.S. Postal Service was pressed first to seek permission, and it did.

Related to this is Ad Age‘s Charlie Moran, who asks his readers what they think of ad agencies licensing the music of known felons and miscreants. Obviously Elvis, with his multiple addictions and habit of shooting out televisions, might qualify here, but Moran has something more specific in mind: the recent British commercial for HP, which uses Joan Jett’s version of “Do You Wanna Touch Me,” written by Gary Glitter, an all-too-well-known sex offender:

In the midst of the presidential race, when associations-upon-associations and surface appearances can be more powerful than anything else, this situation has a ring of familiarity. So this is the question: Should HP (or any marketer) be vetting the personal lives and reputations of musicians whose songs they license? If songwriters are just as relevant as performers, how many rungs down the creative chain are relevant? Are producers relevant too, and would that make all the works of, say, Phil Spector off-limits?

Glitter presents one of the thorniest conundrums of its kind. “Do You Wanna Touch Me” and the stadium standby “Rock and Roll, Pt. II” are among the biggest, most obvious dumb-rock-chants ever. (It’s easy to forget that Glitter wrote the former, since Jett’s version is definitive, though Glitter was a star in England, so the association is undoubtedly fresher there.) But the real point is that while plenty of stars are innocent-till-found-guilty, like Spector, Glitter was indeed found guilty. And if HP should think twice about using his music, what about all those sports arenas using “Rock and Roll Pt. II”?

Top Earning Dead Celebrities + Death, Career Move [Forbes] Should We License Songs From Musicians With Questionable Personal Lives? [Ad Age]