Founding members of Little River Band, through its music publisher, have stopped the current touring version of the band from licensing orchestral versions of its songs to perform with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on Nov. 26.
As a result, the orchestra bowed out of the concert with the band just days before the upcoming show.
The concert was originally a collaboration between Little River Band and the ASO. It will now just be the current touring version of the band without the orchestra.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances, the ASO is unable to perform at this show,” said William Strawn, director of marketing at Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday. “Little River Band will still go on as scheduled, but we are providing full refunds to patrons who would like their money back as a result of the show change.”
The concert set for Atlanta Symphony Hall on Tuesday with a capacity of about 1,762, still has several hundred tickets for sale, according to Ticketmaster, with prices starting at $59.50.
The U.S. version of the Little River Band has been touring for the past quarter century without any original members. The band plays all the Little River Band 1970s hits such as “Reminiscing,” “Help is on the Way,” “Cool Change” and “Lonesome Loser” and last performed in Atlanta at the Byers Theatre in 2022 in Sandy Springs. Before that, the band opened for Richard Marx at Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park in 2016.
The current lineup features one member from the early 1980s when the Little River Band continued to generate radio hits: Wayne Nelson, who joined the band in 1980 and was lead singer on the group’s 1981 top 10 pop song “The Night Owls” and shared lead vocals with original singer Glenn Shorrock on 1982’s “Take it Easy on Me,” which peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Stephen Housden became the band’s lead guitarist in 1981. By 2002, Housden had taken control of the band’s name and logo and sued three former original members to prevent them from advertising themselves with any reference to “Little River Band” as a separate band. Those band members settled the lawsuit with Housden, who has operated this U.S. touring band ever since. (He himself stopped touring with them in 2006.) The settlement prevents the original members from touring under the Little River Band name.
Nelson, in a statement provided to the AJC, notes that the original members “are allowed to tour and play their music anywhere they please ... they just can’t say they ARE Little River Band. Because there can’t be two Little River Bands,” citing “adjudicated settlement agreements in Australia and in the U.S.”
In an email to the AJC Friday, founding guitarist and songwriter Graeham Goble said the U.S. version “carefully present themselves so that most of the American public is deceived into believing that at least some of the original members are in the current lineup.”
“Little River Band has never misled anyone about who’s in the band,” Nelson said in his statement. “In the contract package that goes to every promoter and venue, we make a major effort to keep everyone from using any old footage or photos to promote our shows. We announce everyone’s name on stage at least 3 times during a show. And if anyone goes to our website, biographies are available on every band member explaining who they are.”
Goble said that the U.S. Little River Band has deleted images, links and bio of the original band from the LRB Spotify page and rerecorded versions of the band’s hits so they can generate revenue when people press the “remastered” version instead of the original version.
Nelson disputes the allegation that the U.S. Little River Band had things removed from Spotify. “ They’ve been locked out by Spotify as a result of their own actions.”
Since 2013, the U.S. version of the Little River Band has been performing shows with orchestras without obtaining the necessary license from the music publisher Warner Chappell Music, Goble said. He dubbed this “willful copyright infringement.”
When the original songwriters of Little River Band saw the ASO was planning to perform with this U.S. version, “our publisher Warner Chappell Music contacted the symphony (& the fakers) to explain that no license to use the orchestral arrangements would be issued,” Goble wrote.
The symphony last week withdrew its involvement with the Little River Band.
Nelson acknowledges that the band didn’t get the licenses, because “we were quite sure we would be denied those licenses anyway ... which we were, despite our lawyer’s best arguments that our orchestrations are not ‘derivative’ from our point of view. Symphonies in the past have agreed with that argument. ... We acknowledge that the ASO doesn’t agree. So be it. We will play our show without the orchestrations.”
In 2023, Housden and Nelson filed suit in Australia against Goble and his company Days On The Road Pty Ltd. for allegedly not paying them a proper share of royalties from Little River Band tracks released through two American-based record companies going back to 2016.
The behind-the-scenes legal wrangling aside, Nelson promises that fans will “leave the show happy with memories revitalized.”
