by Lewis Shiner
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“He’s been calling you at home all day and he finally gave up and called me instead.”
Something in Jim’s voice alerted her and she swallowed the cynical remark that had been sitting on the end of her tongue. Her heart, which had slowed after the initial shock of the ringing phone, began to race again. “Why?” she repeated. Her voice came out thin and reedy.
“Because,” he said, “General Records wants to offer us a contract.”
THE TOUR
The first time
Music magazines don’t like first person. I hate the clunking contrivances they insist on instead: “this reporter” or “when asked about…”
I can’t talk about Of the Same Name without talking about who I was when I first heard it, and who I am when I listen to it now. Life is not a hypothetical question, and when the tree falls in the forest, it doesn’t sound the same to the raccoon it falls on as it does to the logger that cut it down.
I first heard Laurie Moss on Stanford’s KZSU in early August of 1995. I was driving into San Francisco on the Junipero Serra and “Neither Are We,” with its jazzy-but-distorted chords and Laurie’s hurt and weary vocals, simply blindsided me. I turned up the radio and tried to fix the details of the song in my mind, afraid the DJ wouldn’t back-announce and this music would pass out of my life without my ever knowing what it was.
One reason it hit me so powerfully was the refrain—”My heart and my mind/They’re not talking to each other/But then again/Neither are we.” My wife Barbara and I were not, at that time, talking to each other. The only thing holding us together was Tom, then three years old and starting to spend mornings in day care.
After Tom, the thing that most defined the marriage for me was the fact that Barb was chair of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at Stanford, pulling down a six figure salary, and I was a writer and house-husband whose income ran to a couple of very significant figures less. Barb has sworn to me that she never once held that difference over my head. From where I stood, there was little that didn’t remind me of it.
Barb has five siblings (her preferred term), all but one of whom are driving fast track careers: her oldest brother is a broker on Wall Street, her little sister is a hospital administrator in Houston. The one exception is her next-to-oldest brother, who dropped out of college, worked for two years in a used bookstore, then hanged himself. The not speaking comes from her side of the family—on any given day you need a score card to know whether or not it’s safe to pick up a ringing phone.
When Bobbi D’Angelo or Brad from the Duck talks about damaged people, they don’t have to draw me a picture. Barb is on Prozac, with Ritalin to ease a tendency toward compulsive behavior and Xanax to smooth out the peaks. The easy answer is to say that her father, an obsessive small-town real-estate czar, pushed all of his children relentlessly toward success, and I’ve used that answer more than once. Another is to say that her genes have prepared her to function perfectly in some kind of bizarre high-stress environment that doesn’t happen to exist in the real world just now.
Barb’s first reaction to anything is anger, shading occasionally to rage. Mine, though we’re not talking about me at the moment, is to feel sorry for myself, and it turns out the two don’t mix well. Before Tom was born, we swore we would never fight in front of him, and of all the betrayals and broken promises, I hate that one the most.
I ended up calling KZSU to ask about the song, and they told me it was self-released and that Laurie had left the CD at the station when the band had been through town the week before. I finally tracked down a copy at Neurotic Records in the city and didn’t take it out of my stereo for a month.
I won’t pretend that it was the music alone. There’s a special feeling of possession that comes from discovering a brand-new artist on your own, a bond you just can’t form with an established act in the top ten. The CD folder included photos of the band and I spent much too long studying Laurie’s picture for the signs and portents she always talks about. I liked the obvious intelligence in her eyes and the challenge in the angle of her head, but it was her mouth that fascinated me: sensual lips that were amused and vulnerable at the same time. I read life histories, entire worlds into that mouth. I was prickly from lack of physical affection, I was worried about a career that was subsiding without ever having reached a peak, and I was at least two-thirds in love with Laurie Moss.
General Records
Meanwhile Laurie was preparing herself for her first meeting with General Records, scheduled for Monday, August 14. Expectation management was an ongoing battle that she and Jim fought together over the phone.
“We’re going to get there,” Laurie said, “and they’ll have never heard of Ardrey.”
“No,” Jim said, “Ardrey will be bigger there than we’d ever dreamed, only he won’t have told anybody else about us. And he’s going to get run over by a truck tonight.”
“Too dramatic. This will all turn out to be a stunt that Ardrey pulled in hopes of rallying support for us at the label. We’ll get in there and Ardrey’s boss will have to apologize to us.”
“No, no, they’ll all know about us, only they won’t be able to look us in the eyes. There’ll be some smothered laughter. Then it will come out they’re only hiring us to do backing tracks for a posthumous Liberace album.”
A week before the meeting Jim told her that Skip would not be attending. “There’s a small matter of an advance that Warner paid him in the seventies. He never turned in an album and never gave them back the money. General goes through the Warner accounting department.”
“What if they won’t sign us without Skip?”
“I happen to know Melinda already told you about this. She told you General had offered you a solo contract and it was you who said it had to be for the whole band. Thank you, by the way.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes, you did. The point is, General only cares about you.”
“But the contract is for the band.”
“With a clause that says any of the original members, excepting you, can be replaced on terms acceptable to the remaining original members.”
“I swear to you, if Skip screws this up…”
“I talked to him, and at least on this one I think he’s right. There’s a better chance of him screwing things up by being there than if he stays home.”
“It also keeps him from being committed to anything.”
“What difference does it make? Since there’s going to be a virus in their computers that’s going to wipe out any trace of our existence anyway?”
“You’re right, of course,” she admitted. “What was I thinking?”
They’d agreed to a $40,000 advance—chump change by superstar standards, yet a lot of money compared to the independents. At least it seemed that way at first. Once Melinda’s fifteen percent came off the top, and they repaid Grandpa Bill for what they’d already spent to press the CDs and tapes, and reimbursed Jim for his recording expenses, Laurie estimated she would make $7,800. Out of that at least a thousand had to go toward her back rent and God knew how much she’d have to put into the LBD to get her long-overdue California plates and inspection sticker.
She bought a new outfit with her VISA card anyway.
“I only tried cocaine once,” she wrote me in email. “It was in high school, and I felt like I’d had way too much coffee and something great was just about to happen to me. As opposed to feeling cozy and sleepy, tucked into bed after something good has already happened, which is how I’d prefer to feel. At any rate, I felt the same way walking into the General Records offices as I did on cocaine.”
General Records was scattered across one wing of the Warner building in Burbank, a two-story, earth-toned, heavily-landscaped island in a sea of concrete. They rode there together in Dennis’s van and met Melinda in the parking lot.
“Did you talk to them about the album?” Laurie asked her. The band had decided they weren’t
ready to go back into the studio yet, and that they wanted General to release Of the Same Name.
“Not yet,” Melinda said. “This could be a hard sell. I want to wait for the right time, which is almost certainly not today.” She looked Laurie up and down. “ ’Kay?”
“I guess,” Laurie said.
“Cheer up. This is a pack of cruel, heartless bastards who are guaranteed to be nice to you at least until you’ve signed the contract. Which also isn’t going to happen today.”
Once past the Warner reception area, it seemed to Laurie that there were twice as many people as the building had room for—those at the bottom of the food chain had their desks in hallways and closets and cul-de-sacs, with memos and artwork taped to virtually every inch of every wall. Laurie had expected steel and leather and glass and instead found wood, threadbare carpets, and chaos.
After a quick tour, the receptionist left them in a conference room where a magnum of champagne sat photogenically in a bucket of ice. At five places at the table sat black folders with the General Records logo stamped in gold. Laurie opened one of them and saw a thick sheaf of paper headed “Exclusive Recording Agreement.” It ran to over forty pages, with subheads like “Engagement and Term” and “Lender’s Master Delivery Obligations.” She felt like a fairy-tale princess, about to sign away her firstborn for the privilege of having her straw spun into someone else’s gold.
Ardrey came in five minutes later to put the lie to at least half the scenarios she and Jim had agonized over. Jim looked at her and mouthed the word, “Unbelievable.” Laurie giggled and Ardrey turned on her.
“What?” he said. If he was a little paranoid, Laurie thought, he was overall happier than she had ever seen him. She wondered how long it had been since he’d actually signed anyone. “Do I have toilet paper stuck to my shoe?”
“You’re perfect,” Laurie said. “We’re glad you’re here.”
There were two men with him, one in his fifties and wearing a pin-striped gray suit, introduced by Ardrey as Ross Claybeck, a senior vice-president at General. He had thick white hair, combed straight back from his forehead, and manicured fingernails. The other, a publicist named Dave Rosen, was young and dressed in a Lakers sweatshirt and a Dallas Cowboys cap.
Eventually they settled at the table. Claybeck adjusted his left cuff and said, “We don’t have any special agenda today. This is just to feel each other out about what directions we might want to take, what we can do for each other, that kind of thing. Dave is looking for handles he can use to promote the group. I’m basically interested in getting to know you.”
She imagined the band sprawled on Claybeck’s tasteful living room furniture, feet propped on his glass-topped coffee table, drinking his imported beer, watching an Angels game on a big screen TV that had appeared in the teak-paneled wall by remote control. No, she thought, you don’t want to know us.
“There’s copies of our standard contract for each of you,” Claybeck went on, “so you can take them home and look them over, and we can answer the hard questions next time.”
Melinda said, “I’ve already looked, and this is the same boilerplate I’ve seen before. You already know what I think of it.” Claybeck opened his mouth and Melinda waved the entire topic away. “We’ll go over all that later.”
“Of course,” he said, and Laurie felt herself losing her grip on consequence. She’d worked for ten years to get into this room, and now the whole thing—General Records, the contract, the very idea of a music business—suddenly seemed irrelevant and unreal to her. Irreal.
“Now, I understand you just put out an album yourselves. What kind of backlog of material do you have? How soon would you be ready to go into the studio again?”
“Well,” Laurie said. She looked at Melinda, who raised one shoulder in the slightest of shrugs. “I don’t understand why you guys can’t release the record we just made.”
Claybeck smiled at her like she was slightly retarded. “Well, for one thing, the difference in sound quality between a garage recording and the work of a professional studio is enormous.”
“With all due respect,” Jim said, “it was recorded at a professional studio.” Echoing Melinda, he held up his right hand. “We could argue about it, which is not what I meant to do, or we could listen to the CD together. If there’s anything on there that’s not up to General’s sonic standards, you can tell me.”
“This is very unusual,” Claybeck said.
“Not really,” Melinda said. “It’s getting to be pretty common practice in the rest of the non-General universe.”
“It’s not our practice to release home demo tapes,” Claybeck said.
“It’s not a demo,” Laurie said. “It’s a fully finished album. It’s the reason you signed us in the first place.” She wondered masochistically if Claybeck could name a single song from the record. Fighting to hang on to her good mood, she looked at Ardrey, who reluctantly cleared his throat.
“She’s got a point, Ross. It’s not like we still had our own studios and producers and all that. They’ve got a finished album that’s already paid for, which means that much less to recoup. There’s a good business case for it.”
Claybeck shifted only his eyes in Ardrey’s direction while the rest of his body remained rigid. He did not convey warmth. Laurie realized that Claybeck was simply too old for this business, that he was tired of younger dogs nipping at him. She also saw that his accumulated money and power would let him take the company down with him if he chose.
Claybeck changed the subject, conceding the point without having to agree to it. Eventually Dave Rosen opened the champagne and they all stood up for a toast, and then everyone was moving around the room and clumping into individual conversations.
Laurie turned and almost ran into Ardrey. “Thanks,” she said. “For sticking up for us.”
“Hey,” he said. “I know what people say about me behind my back. They say old Ardrey’s on the way out, old Ardrey’s got no clout, old Ardrey’s never on to anything till it’s over. But who came through for you?”
“You did, Mark.” She couldn’t help flinching.
“Look,” he said, “you guys earned this contract, it’s not like it was a favor I did you. I don’t expect you to fall in love with me for it. But is there some reason you couldn’t at least like me a little?”
“Think about it,” she said. “Would you have said what you just did, about me falling in love with you, if I was a guy?”
“Maybe,” Ardrey said, grinning. “You never know what I might say. You think you know me, and you don’t know me at all.”
If he’d said it with Skip’s dramatic self-pity she would probably have walked away. Instead she offered him a raised eyebrow.
“I’ve got kind of a goofy history,” he said. “I try not to make a big deal about it, about the way I dress and everything, but people always think I’m weird anyway. See, my parents are Friends.”
She pretended to misunderstand as a way of keeping her distance. “That’s more than I can say. Mine can’t stand each other.”
“As in Society Of. You know, Quakers? They founded Whittier, where your band practices. Named for John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet?”
“Okay,” Laurie said. “So you guys are against war and everything, right?”
“First of all, I’m not a Quaker. I grew up with them, and some of it rubbed off. I like plain clothes, I don’t like violence. Which makes it a little hard to sign bands in LA, as you might imagine.”
“I just seem to have this immunity to organized religion. Everyone around me can have it and I never seem to come down with it.”
“Not to quibble again, but the Friends aren’t organized. A lot of meetings don’t even have anybody in charge. They believe in the ‘inner light,’ which I always kind of liked. I mean, there’s a few gray areas, but most of the time it’s not that hard to know what to do. Share what you’ve got. Don’t have sex with children or rob people at gunpoint. Pick up after yours
elf.” He gave her a sidelong look. “Admit it. You’re warming to me.”
“I’m thawing a bit. It’s true.”
Melinda and Claybeck appeared at Ardrey’s side. “Where have you been?” Claybeck said to him. “Melinda is breaking my kneecaps, here. Help me.”
“I’m on their side,” Ardrey said. “Artists and repertoire. It’s my job.”
“I only want one more thing,” Melinda said. “We need to put this band on the road, and I want some money to make that happen.”
“Not out of the advance, I assume?”
“That would be correct. Now Jim talked to a booking agent who thinks he can get them into some clubs in Arizona and New Mexico starting in three weeks. With any luck he can keep them on the road for at least six months after that. But not without tour support.”
They’d talked about a tour in the abstract but these were the first dates Laurie had heard. Three weeks? Six months? It meant getting out of her lease, quitting her job, doing something with her car and the rest of her possessions. Could she handle six months on the road with Skip? Could she talk him into going in the first place?
“Which agent?” Ardrey asked.
Melinda wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Sid Modesto.”
“Sid the Shark?” Ardrey said. “Well, he’s got a few character problems, but if anybody can put a tour together that fast it’s Sid.”
“Character problems?” Melinda said. “The man is pond scum. But I don’t have his contacts.”
Claybeck said, “We can’t possibly fit an album by a baby band into our schedule for six months, maybe longer. There’s no point in touring before there’s product. You don’t want to go roaring up to the intersection just to sit and wait for the light to change.”
“I’m betting you can get the record out in three months, maybe two,” Melinda said.
“Either way,” Laurie said, choosing to ignore for the moment that nobody had told her about the consultation with Sid the Shark, “we need the tour.”
