united breaks guitars

I've been personally boycotting United Airlines since the summer of 2000, when a labor slowdown cancelled a lot of flights, causing me to miss my own birthday party with family in Michigan.

Well, Dave Carroll and his band flew United last spring, with their usual disastrous consquences.

Here's the story, from Dave's You Tube Site:

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged.

They didn't deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss.

So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.

United has demonstrated they know how to keep their airline in the forefront of their customer's minds and I wanted this project to expand upon that satirically. I've been done "being angry" for quite some time and, if anything, I should thank United. They've given me a creative outlet that has brought people together from around the world. We had a pile of laughs making the recording and the video while the images are spinning on how to make "United: Song 2" even better than the first. So, thanks United! If my guitar had to be smashed due to extreme negligence I'm glad it was you that did it. Now sit back and enjoy the show.

Dave Carroll



So far the first song has gone viral with almost half a million hits. Type "united beraks guitars" into google and you'll find 1,710,000 hits as of this morning.

And there are two more songs coming. Follow him on twitter.

But Ms. Irlweg can proudly boast that she saved the airline $1200, the cost of repairing the Taylor guitar.

Maybe she got employee of the month for that.