Rock With Nova Scotia in 2010

“My God! They’re throwing guitars out there!”

- a passenger on a United Airlines flight seeing baggage handlers tossing guitars out of the plane’s cargo bay

Baggage handlers rarely handle baggage – they heave them: suitcases, travel bags and almost everything else that comes down the chute.

Why? Well, mainly because they have people up in the front office running interference for them against disgruntled passengers so damage claims so few complaints seem to get through the system.

Dave Carroll, a guitarist with the popular Nova Scotia band, Son’s of Maxwell has become a lot more popular these days when he turned an awful experience into a YouTube sensation. In fact his video on his plight has ranked only second to Michael Jackson’s funeral in popularity over the past few days.

It all started on an United Airlines flight from Halifax to Nebraska through O’Hare Airport in Chicago when Carroll heard a woman’s horrified voice announcing that baggage handlers were literally throwing guitar cases through the air and onto the ground. Them to his dismay Carroll found out that his expensive, hand-made Taylor guitar had been badly damaged.

The next bad part was when the Halifax musician tried to tell a United Airline’s representative what happened.  She basically told him that was not her department and sent him to another person. This person would not help, and so on, and so on, and so on . . . This went on for the better part of a year and a $1400 bill for repairing his guitar, which he paid for.

Having absolutely no sympathy, let alone compensation, from the airline giant Carroll decided to use his musical prowess to fight back. He wrote a song called United Breaks Guitars and made a humorous music video. Needless to say, the video has struck gold. Carroll was on Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN, Oprah’s people called and his music career went from “moderately known” to  “YouTube Celebrity.”

A United Airlines spokesman has finally responded saying that Carroll’s story has “Struck a chord with us.” Ugh! What a bad pun! Anyway, I guess they plan on using Carroll’s video for a training film. He said it was ” an anomaly and not the nor” but I beg to differ. for a laugh go into your closet and check out your luggage. See the cuts, nicks and missing latches? I wonder how that happened?

As for Halifax’s Dave Carroll, he has written two more songs but wants to hold of on releasing the last one to see if the story will be “a love story or a tragedy.”

Finally, someone has shaken the inner workings of the baggage department and its secret society. And he has advanced his career in the process.