Geffen Records v Neil Young was a court case where Geffen Records, then a new project by David Geffen, who was already a veteran of the music business sued Neil Young. Neil Young, after recording a number of popular songs in the 1970s, on albums such as Harvest and After the Gold Rush, made a number of albums that were uncharacteristic of his previous folk rock/country rock sound, including the "electronic music" Trans and the rockabilly "Everybody's Rockin'". Geffen Records sued Neil Young for making "uncharacteristic music".
That is the story that I had heard for years, and a quick search on the internet will show this story repeated many times, often in listicles of the 8 biggest record label feuds in rock, etc. I was curious and decided to go looking for a primary source about this court case. And what I discovered is: this court case never happened, as far as I can tell. Or at least, it never went to trial. Copyright issues with precedent tend to be very closely followed, and if the claims of the suit---that Neil Young was making "uncharacteristic music", or the countersuit by Neil Young (that he had been given full artistic freedom) had been confirmed or denied by a trial judge or jury, there would be many discussions of it by law schools and the like. And indeed, a similar lawsuit of the time, where John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival was sued by his record company for plagiarizing himself (the opposite of the charge against Neil Young, ironically), has many pages of documentation, both about the original case, and about the following Supreme Court case about the technical matter of legal fees. But I digress: the main point is that the fabled David and Goliath battle between Geffen Records and Neil Young was never actually a court case, but mostly a series of really nasty letters written by attorneys for a year or so in the early 1980s.
And if the case had ever gone to trial, it might have set up interesting legal precedents. Because while we might root for scrappy Neil Young against the soulless monolith of a record company, we might be less enthused if our wedding caterer brings pans of grits to a wedding and announces she is going through a rockabilly phase. But that is all a theoretical question, because as far as I can tell, the question of whether Neil Young was in breach of contract by recording a weird assortment of techno and country albums never made it to court.
If anyone can find any documentation that this ever went to court, or was even filed as a trial, please let me know.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/664/1345/1504901/
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/510/517/
Negative evidence of a sort--these two cases show the rich documentation that the lawsuit between Fogerty and his record company, all the way to the supreme court.
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/neil-p-young And on the contrary, there is lots of legal documentations of Neil Young's career: in the way of his numerous patents for
model railroads.