▼ Music Eric Zukowski (right) is a musician and lawyer who won a lawsuit that distributed $45 million for session musicians. Chris Fritchie Working Class Action Two Dallas lawyers teamed up to get session musicians $45 million in unpaid royalties. BY CHRISTIAN MCPHATE C peaked at 46 on the Billboard country charts. But bad management, Chaz Marie says, hastity “Chaz” Marie was fresh out of high school when she and her sister Stephanie got hired as background singers on country superstar LeAnn Rimes’ album Sittin’ on Top of the World. The Texans were living in Nashville as songwrit- ers in the late ‘90s and were known as the singing duo the Marie Sisters. Their sound was then considered contemporary country music. Like Rimes, Chaz Marie had been born in another state, Mississippi, but quickly found herself in Texas at an early age. She’d come from a musical family. Her mother sang for a band called The Singing Pages and opened for Hank Williams, and her father was a preacher. The Marie girls sang in church ev- ery Sunday and grew up with Rimes on the Texas opry circuits. After their background singing experi- ence with Rimes, the Marie Sisters would go on to sign with Universal/Republic Records in early 2002. In June of that year, they re- leased their self-titled debut, which received positive reviews; their song “Red Bad Blood” led to them breaking up. Her sister went into the medical field while Chaz continued singing with her own band. She’d go on to work in the studio and on tour with artists such as Kenny Rogers, Wynonna Judd, Richard Marx and the Tejas Brothers. A sea- soned studio professional, Marie didn’t think much about earning money off the LeAnn Rimes recording. At the time, she and her sister had been paid a small amount for their studio time. “We didn’t know anything about royalties and had never been a union member [with the American Federation of Musicians],” she says. “I don’t see the point. [Texas is] a nonunion state.” Twenty years later, Marie was doing a private gig with her friend, Texan singer- songwriter Jon Christopher Davis, at the Sheraton Hotel in McKinney, when he pulled her aside and asked whether she’d spoken with Eric Zukoski, a musician who daylights as a Dallas-based attorney focused on intellectual property. He frequently rep- resented financial institutions but has also been known to do work for musicians. Marie had known Zukoski for a long time. He’d been her attorney and played bass for her in the past. She learned from Davis that he’d gotten another musician friend a substantial amount of money that he’d been owed by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Associa- tion (SAG-AFTRA) Intellectual Property Rights Fund, which the American Federa- tion of Musicians (AFM) had created in 1998 to pay royalties for musicians and singers. The fund, according to a February 2018 law- suit, had been set up to fulfill two purposes: to receive the royalties from SoundEx- change, the sole entity assigned to distribute the money for featured and non-featured performers, and to collect royalties from any other entity that collects and pays those roy- alties and remuneration to eligible perform- ers and non-featured artists. The royalties were based upon three laws: the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digi- tal Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. The latter two amended the original law to guar- antee non-featured musicians will receive a small percentage of royalties from a digital media or recording. “Absence of this right was the reason you would see legendary Motown artists would be penniless if they didn’t write the song,” Zukoski says. “... I kept plugging away and just never met anyone who got the royalty or even knew about it.” Chaz was one of these people, as were Jon Blondell, Paul Harrington, Timothy Johnson and Clayton Pritchard, all of whom were owed thousands of dollars in royalties and planned to join Zukoski’s class-action lawsuit, which he filed with the help of Roger Mandel, a Dallas-based attorney who specializes in class-action lawsuits. They filed a class action against AFM President Ray Hair, who had been serving for 10 years and was also a trustee, and five other trustees who were in charge of making sure that they distributed money to union and nonunion members alike. Instead of dis- tributie the money, the lawsuit claimed, they were “sitting on” about $45 million that hadn’t been distributed. “We sued to change the procedures, fix their practices and distribute what they had on hand, what had been built up for 10 years,” Zukoski says. >> p18 117 dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUT |ZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 AUGUST 25–31, 2022
