A Dave Carroll/ United Breaks Guitars Update: Song 3, March 2

We love Dave Carroll, the executive-embarrassing, guitar-grieving Canadian arts legend and social media stick-in-the-eye to United Airlines. Dave, in such a fun and good-natured way, has so far delivered 2 of 3 well-aimed rocks between the eyes of the past-its-prime corporate Goliath. His stones, of course, would be United Breaks Guitars Songs 1 and 2, which have together garnered almost 8 1/2 million views on youTube thus far. We haven’t caught up with Dave in a while, so an update is definitely in order.

See, here’s the thing about Dave: There is just so much witty irony swirling around every part of his fractured relationship with United Airlines. Ah, yes … witty irony! let’s start there:

•  In the online world, the guy who softened up United Airlines for Dave — Dr. Jeremy Cooperstock — is also a principled Canadian with over 10 years of telling the embarrassing truth about United in his own venue. (Apparently, when these guys are tooling around the northland on Air Canada, everything’s fine; but put them on a United flight and guitars get broken, fenders fall off the plane, stewardesses have geriatric seizures, etc.)
•  Delivery of Song 3 of the UBG trilogy is set for release on March 2. Even if it’s a few days late, his on-time performance is no worse than United’s for baggage arrival. Look for a bluegrass flavor in Song 3. (By the way, there was a lot of bluegrass in Gordon Lightfoot‘s Canadian Railroad Trilogy. Coincidence? I think not.)
•  Speaking of bags, United was not content to break Dave’s guitar. Last October, on a different flight, they lost all his bags.
•  Dave tweaked United so decisively that the only response the airline’s PR flaks could come up with was to say that the guitar-busting event “struck a chord with us,” which is a lazy bit of non-apologetic lameness that they have repeated ad nauseum since then in every public response.
•  Dave only ever wanted United to pay for fixing his guitar, that’s all — a small sum ($1200) that amounted to little more than cigarette money for John Tague. Now, with all of the resulting deals for concerts, albums, guitars, cases, t-shirts, iTunes, and media appearances, Dave and his employees (“Big Break Enterprises”) are all filthy RICH. Word is, he may still be a volunteer firefighter in Halifax, but he responds to scenes in a Taylor-designed, 12-string, bass-model Hummer. With spinners.

Finally, Dave appeared on ABC’s The View in January. Here’s the clip, in case you missed it: