I’m On Stage (David Mead cat number)

ON STAGE WITH DAVID MEAD by Andrea D’Arcy Mead

It feels like a small miracle that you are reading this right now. My brother David Mead recorded I’m On Stage back in 1976. And his story was all too familiar to so many young, talented musicians back in the day — signed by record labels with the promise of brilliant futures in the music industry, only to come up well short of the promised land.

In David’s case, his label, Tiger Lily, was nothing more than a vehicle for money laundering.

Created by Morris Levy of Roulette Records, Tiger Lily was wholly unconcerned with the fate of its musicians. The label never even intended to make a profit. The trick was to acquire demo tapes from artists or studios and release them, often without the artist’s consent or even their knowledge. Some were bootlegs of already-extant albums released in the early 1970s. Very few records actually signed to Tiger Lily Records have been identified, but one of them was by David. Most of these contractual albums seem to have been recorded in 1976. But they were never going to be actually distributed to consumers, and the artists like David who signed deals eventually came to realize that they were nothing more than gears in a larger machine of tax avoidance…

Read the complete liner notes with download.