I think you are wrong. Reading his post via FOL, he clearly says that he found out about the 2005 contract after the band announced the hiatus. This discovery turned the hiatus into a break up.

This post has been edited by Costakoui: Dec 1 2009, 9:44 am

with regards to ed being concerned about merchandise and all the expensive shit he's selling (i fancy the pendant myself but really can't afford it) the fact is he has got a charity up and running has he not? Im not sure about the details and how much goes towards it percentage wise but perhaps he's concerned about the children...?

SOMEBODY has to be.

R.I.P. LIVE: 1988-2009?
November 30, 2009
by Bill Palmer

Well, crap. The more things change, the more they… change? In a season of rock band breakups that don’t feel permanent (does anyone really think we won’t see Aerosmith reunited eventually?), this one stings because it sounds more than a little bit real: the band LIVE, which has always been tricky to write about simply because the band’s name is LIVE, the band whose early hits like I Alone and Lightning Crashes still see frequent airplay on rock radio, officially called it quits today. And for a band that’s never been one to flaunt its dirty laundry over the last two decades, today’s announcement from guitarist Chad Taylor is disturbingly ugly if you’re a longtime fan like I am.

First off, you know it’s bad when a band announces its breakup and not every member is even involved in the announcement. I’d known that singer Ed Kowalczyk had been off doing his own thing all year, but that didn’t begin to hint at what was apparently going on behind the scenes. Communicating through attorneys, secret publishing contracts, and the band speaking openly about the possibility of continuing on without their singer. Or as Taylor summed it up in his blog:

“I can’t ever see myself working with Ed, let alone ever being in the same room with him. LIVE was always about the band, when Ed lost sight of that in favor of his own ambitions and goals, our considerable fans base began to sigh a collective yawn.”

Ouch. Not only do I have all seven of their albums (most fans didn’t find the band until their second album and bailed after the third or fourth), I’ve seen this band, uh, live, eight times over the years. The first time was at the old Miami Arena; I’m not even sure if it’s there anymore. The last time was an amphitheater that hadn’t been yet been built the first time I saw them. Ironically, the only time I ever passed on an opportunity to see them was at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles last year, simply because I was “too busy” – and, although I’d have to check the dates to be sure, that may have been their final U.S. show.

Never had the chance to interview any of these guys, never even met them (although I do have a used Chad Gracey drumstick laying around here somewhere), but I still hate to see one of my favorite bands go up in flames in such a malodorous manner. Calling it quits because they got bored would be one thing, as you could always hope that they’d get back together at some point when their collective juices started flowing again. But this is ugly enough, personal enough, that I’d guess the odds are less than fifty percent that we ever see the four of them on stage again. But hearing things like this from the band hints at even darker prospects:

“Ed will no longer be the vocalist for the band LIVE. At this point in time, we have made no official plans to replace him but it is clear that he is no friend of mine or the lifelong fans of LIVE.”

Ugh. Even the implication of LIVE without Ed Kowalczyk makes me wince a little at the thought. The band is their career, it’s the only one that any of them have ever had, so you can’t expect the rest of the band to go work in cubicles just because Ed’s not in the picture. Still, LIVE without Ed? No. Some bands can successfully pull off replacing their lead singer (Journey even made the cover of iProng Magazine after finally finding an inspired replacement for Steve Perry), but only a few ever pull it off – and you generally either have to reach legendary status before losing your singer (see Journey), or be so focused on the guitarist from the start (Santana, Van Halen) that the populace can forgive the change. Give me the hypothetical choice of seeing Ed performing LIVE songs with a new band, or LIVE performing LIVE songs without Ed, and I think I’d have to go with the former. That’s not to minimize the vitality of the other three band members one bit; it’s just that I can’t begin to imagine LIVE with another singer. The voice, the style, the persona are just too unique. Maybe someone with the presence of a Chris Daughtry could pull it off. But the last I checked, he’s busy at the moment. Not to mention selling a whole lot more albums than LIVE has at any point in this decade.

Which explains why even many people who consider themselves to be LIVE fans responded to today’s news with “I didn’t know they were still together.” Still, the music world has lost something today. At a time when you had to be from Seattle to be considered cool in the alt-rock world, they were from nowheresville, Pennsylvania, and never tried to hide that fact. Never afraid to be weird, never afraid to take chances, and never stopped being themselves. Well, musically, at least. As a fan of LIVE, today’s dirty laundry can be safely filed under “things you wish you never knew about the band.” The real bummer, of course, is that the nature of today’s news carries with it a whiff of finality. The thing is, I was absolutely sure that this was one of those bands that I was going to have the opportunity to continue to see in concert until I was old and grey.

Then again, anything is possible. Alice in Chains is back together; even death didn’t stop them. But the ugly, painful details coming out of the LIVE camp today suggest that when it comes to band reunions, some things might be even more difficult to overcome than death itself.
http://www.iprong.com/blog/r-i-p-live-1988-2009/

I am not saying anything right now as I respect all these guys... although my stomach is a little quesy...I hope I am in denial...I knew it was "over"...but I guess I really didnt want to know why...now what?

This post has been edited by zmanpga: Dec 1 2009, 10:24 am

how do you mean? You think Ed was/is in serious financial problems? Wouldnt he leave his expensive house first before selling all this property? Also, wouldnt the description by the video mention 'front-singer of Live', to make it more interesting? Dunno, just wondering....
Who was the uploader of the video anyway?

Wow, that article is a bummer. I feared this would happen years ago. Pisses me off too.

well, WE dont know. Maybe Chad knows. Ed hasn't given his side of the story... yeah, not in public. Maybe Chad knows more then us. And maybe he's just refferring to the fact that Ed avoids any talking about LIVE in recent interviews, and that he in that aspects statesm 'he's no fan of the lifelong fan'.

Fair enough.. btw, I meant to write "he's no friend of the lifelong fans". I was referencing CT's comment that reads, "At this point in time, we have made no official plans to replace him but it is clear that he is no friend of mine or the lifelong fans of LIVE".

I predict that there will be no response to all of this from Ed. Ed is too smart to address this with the potential of litigation hanging out there.

I don't know if I have reacted too quickly or over reacted to this. But I have had a creepy uncomfortable feeling about The EK for a while now. Does anyone else get a creepy feeling from Ed changing his identity to "The EK" and all of those video blogs with him waving his eybrows up and down and saying "hey this is the EK here" and saying "peace" with some sort of fake urban slang, and taking his shirt off, and using his cutesy funny urban slang voice in the acoustic shows and swooning over coffee and canolis and posting video of him singing into the camera and singing with a bunch of chicks playing the vioin backstage, and video of him signing his stick figures, and pimping his pendant and coffee in between LOLs and promoting his Christian beliefs and fixating on Zion and belief and water constantly, and selling Amazon.com merchandise through internet store links which provide him monetary kickbacks for the click-throughs, and selling his own downloads of recordings of him playing Live songs and The EK quoting the bible and religious leaders constantly?

Sorry, man. But that whole thing creeps me out. And it leaves me feeling dissallusioned.

I let myself look up to him as an inspiration, as if he was somehow better than me or farther along the spiritual path or more informed, because he seemed to devote his life and his art to those spiritual pursuits while I spend most of my time at a day job. So I followed along and gave consideration to his path, as if I let him do the heavy lifting with his time and effort and creative inspiration and I could learn from him. I looked into Krishnamurti and Big Mind and Ken Wilber and found it all interesting and I learned something from all of those sources. In the end, I think that the distillation of the message in Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper are the basic and simple truth about life. That was the beginning of Ed's path. The path that Ed was on was supposed to lead him to someplace more enlightened and awakened. And he ended up in belief-oriented Christianity, pimping "merch" and self-promoting into a computer camera and on Twitter for the almighty dollar.

The world has too many dissapointing public figures who turn out to be frauds. But Live and Ed had me convinced that they wouldn't end in a fashion that would be on the front page of a tabloid if the world and the commercial public cared more about them (like if they were U2 or something). Live was on to something so big early in their lifetimes. As a band they started as childhood friends from rural Pennsylvania who wrote Mental Jewelry, an album that was a masterpiece that belied the number of years they spent on this earth and went well way beyond their experience as musicians. They followed that up with an equally brilliant and over-achieving Throwing Copper. They pledged that they were undying personal friends. Bands like that shouldn't end like this. I took it for granted that they never would. I kind of expected that I would get the unparalleled joy of seeing them play on stage for many years to come. That makes it a bigger bummer than just some band whose music I liked having broken up.

You said it dude. Sucks.

Listen, it's as simple as going on two different paths:

Ed wanted to go his way and Chad, Chad and Pat wanted to go another way.

Creative differences alike, there is always underneath which solidifies and gives meaning to a split.

^^ Ed's always been like that. Remember the MJ era & the PLOTRS video.. and the weird TC videos. Ed's always been off.. and unpredictable. Back then, we just wrote it off as creative art.

Absolutely not. I am never one for airing dirty laundry in public. If anything, all they did was further fracture an already shrinking Live fanbase.

What is the point of Eddie K vs. The Gracious Few? Instead of having two projects for fans to feel excited for, The Gracious Few seems to want the fanbase to choose which one to support. It really sours the whole experience of "moving on" from Live.

I think people will go to whatever suits them, and that's fine.

Some will go to see Ed feeling himself up and the rest will go see TGF.

It's a free country, enjoy life while you can.

Dude he said that Ed has every right to perform Live songs at his gigs .. it wasn't like he was saying "Don't go to Ed's shows!".

I see a link between the timing that Jon P posted something that was pretty spot on and CT coming out a day later with his blog ... I get the feeling he may have feared that with something finally so close to the truth ending up online that rumours would run rampant and he wanted to finally set the record straight. I don't think it's a devide and conquer act at all.

I could argue that everyone Gracey has said is more damaging than what CT said ... calling Ed's shows lounge music and basically dissing him