by Louise Voss
My heart leapt as I approached the flashing red light of the machine. Toby? Maybe he’d tracked down my number after he realized I’d been discharged.
I pressed Play, but the voice I heard was that of a whiny American woman. “Oh, hi there, Helena, here’s a blast from the past! It’s your old buddy Margie, here in England. I called your mom a few weeks ago and she told me you’d be happy to have me to stay when I was over—I’m here in Man-chester for a conference that finishes on Wednesday. So if that’s still okay with you, I’ll see you then, around six, yeah? I’m, like, so looking forward to catching up with your totally exciting life!”
I flopped into an armchair, unable to stand under the dual weight of disappointment and fury. “Totally fuckin’ rad,” I muttered under my breath.
Mum appeared in the doorway and took in my livid face. “Isn’t that marvelous, honey?” she said nervously. “Your old friend Margie coming to stay! Won’t it be a tonic for you to have some girly chats with someone other than your old mum?”
I felt too exhausted and miserable to shout at her. “No, Mum, it is not marvelous. I have not spoken to this woman for about sixteen years. She’s a preachy little cow who practically told me I’d rot in hell when Blue Idea got signed. I’m obviously the only wealthy person she knows in London, and she’s after some free accommodation. You had no right at all to give out my phone number. And she’s coming tonight, my first day home.… ”
“But I thought you liked Margie!” She was pleating the freshly ironed tea towel in her hands.
I sighed. “I never bloody liked Margie. It was Mary Ellen who was the sweet one out of that church lot. She was quite nice, but the others were a bunch of nuts, and Margie was the worst. What am I going to do?”
Mum came over and knelt by my armchair. She put down her tea towel and stroked the hair away from my scarred forehead, apparently summoning up more reserves of mummyhood than she knew she possessed.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. “Let her stay tonight because she’ll have a problem finding anywhere else now. I’ll make sure she leaves again tomorrow—she doesn’t know that you’ve had an accident, so it’s quite reasonable to ask her to go. And if you don’t want to talk to her this evening, just say you’re tired and I’ll tell you to go to bed. How’s that?”
“All right, then,” I said, managing a smile. It was so nice to be taken care of. I had a sudden bottomless pang of remorse at what I was going to have to put her through in a matter of weeks after I’d waved her off at the airport.
“Thanks, Mum.”
Dexys Midnight Runners
THERE THERE MY DEAR
BY THE TIME BLUE IDEA FINALLY GOT TO DO BUSINESS WITH A REAL record company, I’d already played out the scene in my head a thousand times. As I sat with the rest of the band in a brand-new restaurant in Greenwich Village, near the offices of Ringside Records, I went over it one more time: “Let’s talk money—yes. Now, how does half a million sound to you?” or maybe “You’ll have that platinum record before you know it, you mark my words.”
Ringside’s Director of A&R, Mr. Wallberger, was late, so we sat nervously, saying little and feeling very out of place. The waiting staff hovered around in packs, looking down their noses at us. Eventually a put-out-looking boy detached himself reluctantly from the other waiters and came to plonk menus and iced water down in front of us.
We had come a very long way since the night of our first show, almost a year ago. I could barely even remember it now, although I still had a faint stain on one of my white shirts from the beer someone had spilled on me. Since then we had practiced, and practiced, and I had written more songs, and we had played in public at every possible opportunity. We’d rocked out to impress our classmates at school dances, got dressed up formally to perform at Justin’s cousin’s wedding reception, done David’s brother’s bar mitzvah, and played dozens of dark and sweaty all-ages rock nights at the local bar.
I sipped my iced water, trying to still my overoptimistic imagination by attempting to recall our first five gigs, in order. I failed miserably, but at that precise moment I was so nervous, I was hard-pushed to remember my own address.
Finally the door opened and Mr. Wallberger walked in, accompanied by his A&R manager, a skinny, hippie English guy named Willy Watts-Davis. Willy had been our introduction to Ringside Records. He had, by chance, heard a set we’d played in Asbury Park: He had driven down to see another Freehold band called Saul, who were headlining at the same venue that night, but was so excited with us that he spent the duration of Saul’s set chatting to us out in the parking lot (Justin assured him they were terrible anyway, and that he wasn’t missing a thing). Willy had then arranged an opening slot for us at CBGB’s in the city the following week so Mr. Wallberger could come and check us out, too. It was an outstanding stroke of luck. We had previously made a cheap demo tape and sent it round to various record companies, but with no response—unsurprisingly, since it sounded absolutely awful.
We’d seen them standing by the bar at the CB’s show—not hard to miss, there being only about eight people in the place. Neither of them were a bit how I’d imagined Record Company People to look; I was convinced they all wore sharp Armani suits with just a T-shirt underneath, chunky gold necklaces, loafers and no socks, and sported ludicrously skinny plaits to compensate for bald spots, sniffed continuously, and constantly rushed off to the toilet to do more drugs.
But no, Mr. Wallberger was large and clumsy-looking, thirty-five-ish, with a mop of curly brown hair, too-tight corduroys, and a scruffy button-down shirt. He looked as if he didn’t have a penny to his name. Willy had been hovering nervously around behind his boss, patchwork flares flapping around his skeletal ankles. I couldn’t see if he had his fingers crossed or not, but I wouldn’t have minded taking a bet that he had.
We’d played our hearts out, knowing that this kind of a chance was so slim as to be practically unheard of. When Mr. Wallberger came up to us after the set and invited us to lunch the next day to “talk some business,” we were beside ourselves with excitement.
Ringside Records—a real record label! I was sure that Dexys Midnight Runners’ first album had been released on Ringside U.K., and they were a fantastic band. A few months earlier, I’d gotten Sam to send us a tape of Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, and when it arrived in the post we almost wore it out, committing every single note to memory, and as many of the words as we could pick out. Justin decided to take Kevin Rowland as his role model, and started sporting woolly hats and quoting from Taxi Driver. He wanted us to learn “There There My Dear,” thinking that Blue Idea’s lack of a horn section would enable us to totally reinterpret the song, but our attempts at a rendition just sounded ridiculous—completely pointless and bald, like a newly shorn sheep. Finally, when Justin tried to get us all to go out for runs together, because he’d read in NME that Kevin did the same, we rebelled and chucked out the tape. Consequently it was months before we finally discovered that in fact the record had come out on EMI, not Ringside.
Anyway, the night before our meeting we all stayed in Brooklyn, with Joe’s aunt Sandi. The boys slept on her living-room floor, and I got the guest bedroom, but I hadn’t been able to sleep for more than a couple of hours with the anticipation. For most of the night I had lain awake whispering, “Please, God, let us get a deal. Please, God, let him want to sign us. Please, God, we’re not in it for the money or the fame” (something of a lie).
I wasn’t awfully optimistic, though—I saw no particular reason for God to shower his largess upon me at this particular juncture, even if he did overlook the fib. I hadn’t been to church for over six weeks, and had left the choir a long time before that. I viewed this lapse as merely a temporary suspension of progress along my spiritual path while sorting out my career, and fervently asked God to understand my position. But somehow I did keep forgetting to say my prayers at night. I must go to church this Sunday, I thought, deal or no deal.
So there we all we
re, hellos and apologies for lateness proffered and accepted. The multitudinous waiting staff cheered up slightly when the big guns arrived; they seemed to be able to detect the presence of a platinum Amex, despite the smokescreen of our collective scruffy appearances.
“Hello, Mr. Wallberger,” I said, and shook his hand.
“No, please, no one calls me that. Call me Rob.”
I knew immediately that this would be impossible, far worse than having to call Sam’s mum Cynthia. It was months before I realized that the music industry really was a first-name-only business.
We all ordered Cokes and designer-type sandwiches, which were just becoming popular in New York—radicchio and Brie, ham with red onion compote, that sort of thing. I could barely swallow because of nerves, and when asked a question, choked on a mouthful of Coke, which spurted fizzily and painfully out of my nose. Justin sniggered and I wanted to cry with embarrassment, but the Ringside Brothers kindly affected not to notice. The bass line to “There There My Dear” thudded persistently and annoyingly through my head, a sort of defense mechanism.
They chatted to us about nothing much for what seemed like far too long: the excessive number of waiters in the place (approximately three per customer), the consequently annoyingly slow service, and the bad attitude of said waiters.
“People are much nicer to you in England,” Willy sighed wistfully, and I could tell how homesick he was.
I was plucking up courage to ask him how long he’d lived in New York, and to explain my own British roots, when Mr. Wallberger put down his glass.
“So, like I said, I enjoyed the show,” he began casually. “I think there’s definitely something there. You’re all very green, of course, and the band still lacks quite a bit of cohesion—but once you’ve done a few weeks on the road, I’m sure that would sharpen up. Your music isn’t what’s hip at the moment, you’re not exactly New Wave, or post-punk either—but I’m willing to take a chance with you and put out your first record. I think it’s time for something new, and I think you have the talent. Like I said, I’m willing to take a punt on you guys, see how it goes.”
This was not quite the ecstatic welcome I’d hoped for.
“How much will you give us?” said Justin, to the point as usual. I blushed at his directness and folded my napkin up into tiny panicked sections underneath the table. I wished we had a manager. Our naïveté seemed to hover over the table, choking me, like a cloud of exhaust fumes. But a week ago we hadn’t needed a manager.
“You’d get an advance to record the album and get you out on the road—all recoupable, of course—we’ll have to decide what the amount would be. Enough to cover your expenses, anyway.”
“What does ‘recoupable’ mean?” asked David innocently.
I cringed even more, although I didn’t know, either. To his credit, Mr. Wallberger didn’t laugh, or even smirk at us. I think that was what convinced me that this would be a good deal to do.
“Recoupable means that we give you money up front—that’s the advance—and then once your record starts selling, we take a percentage of the money from each record sold and use it to pay back the advance. It’s like a loan.”
David and Justin were horrified. “So how do we make any money, then?” Justin demanded.
“Well, the idea is that we’ve signed you because you’ll sell a helluva lot more records than it takes to recoup the advance. Then we all start making a profit. Sometimes that happens with the first record, sometimes not until the second or third, sometimes never. It’s a chance we have to take.”
Joe asked, “So what if we don’t sell any records, does that mean we owe you all that money?”
This time Mr. Wallberger did laugh, but not in a condescending way. “Oh, no, it’s our loss. You see, once you’ve made a record that we believe will sell, it’s our job to sell it. That’s why we have marketing and promotions people, someone to take it to radio, someone to get press about the band and the record, someone to make sure it’s in the stores, and so on.”
I had a mental image of an army of uniformed workers knocking on radio station doors all over the country with big baskets full of our records, saying, “Here, have one of these,” but I did not really see what good that would do. I couldn’t associate the person in the radio station having the record with people going out and actually buying it. It was too big a leap of the imagination to picture the record being played on the radio at all. We had a couple of decent stations near us in Freehold, but the reception from our house was terrible, and so I rarely listened at home. I had no concept of college-radio charts or specialty shows playing new bands. It was all a mystery to me, and from the expressions on the others’ faces, I knew it was the same for them.
“But you don’t have to worry about all that stuff just yet—it’s early days. Let us take care of that. All you need to do is think about it for a while. We’ll send you a draft contract, you talk it over with each other and your folks, and call me. Here’s my card. No obligations. Once we’ve started the ball rolling, come by the offices and meet the team.”
“Yeah, and call me, like, any time if you have any questions,” chimed in Willy, who had been nodding in earnest assent during the last twenty minutes, until I was worried that his head might drop off. With every nod a little waft of patchouli drifted across to my side of the table.
I dropped my balled-up napkin surreptitiously onto the floor. A contract! Maybe this thing really was going to happen. I felt excitement rising in my throat like a blush, and “There There My Dear” exploded into a crescendo in my mind, “Rrrrrrobin, let me explain!”
Willy opened his mouth to say something else, but Justin sneezed suddenly and drowned him out. Willy tried again; Justin sneezed again. And again. And again. Every time Willy tried to speak, Jus sneezed, until Willy lapsed into embarrassed silence. David and Joe smirked, and I alternately examined my fingernails and my surroundings until normal service could be resumed.
“Normal service,” it seemed, did not apply to the restaurant. Mr. Wallberger was waving his Amex card indiscreetly in the air, trying to attract a waiter’s attention, but they all seemed to have been struck blind. Meanwhile Justin sneezed on and on, pausing only to wipe his streaming eyes with his napkin. Eventually one of the young men sauntered over with our check, and held it out to Mr. Wallberger, who threw his credit card onto the saucer without looking at the amount owed. I tried to imagine my parents doing that, and almost laughed out loud at the thought. I wondered if I would ever be rich enough to not care how much lunch cost.
We said elated good-byes, left the restaurant, and walked over to West Fourth Street to get the subway back to Brooklyn. Justin finally stopped sneezing, and we sang Dexys tunes full blast all the way back to Aunt Sandi’s place, substituting the words we weren’t sure of with choruses of “la-la-la’s.” There was a sense of unreality about the whole thing, emphasized by each of us calling out a different song title from Searching for the Young Soul Rebels to sing—we couldn’t quite believe that we had our own songs to sing from now on, and that people might actually want to hear them.
A draft contract was duly dispatched to us. Aunt Sandi had a boyfriend who was an attorney, and he looked it over for us, also showing it to a friend of his in entertainment law. It was deemed to be not a bad deal, for a new, unknown band. We would have to sign options for five records with Ringside, which meant that after each record we made, they could decide if they wanted us to make another one. If not, they could drop us, but we couldn’t voluntarily leave Ringside without breaking the contract until the five records were made. It seemed to be a very big commitment on our part, and not very much on Ringside’s, but apparently this was standard.
I started to worry that I wouldn’t be able to write enough good songs fast enough, but Jus pointed out that if the songs weren’t any good, we’d get dropped anyway, in which case I wouldn’t have to worry.
“Oh, great, thanks—pressure me, why don’t you?” I told him.
Then Aunt Sandi’s boyfriend commented that as the songwriter I would get more money than the others, because I’d get publishing royalties as well as artist royalties, which cheered me up no end. Justin looked sulky. After all, I thought, I already have more than fifty songs written, and I’ve only been at it for a year and a half. Many of them were religious, and I didn’t think that Ringside or the band would appreciate them—but that was beside the point.
We would get twenty thousand dollars up front for the first record, out of which we would be required to pay for our studio time and expenses, a producer, equipment purchase or rental, and a van.
“That’s a lot of money,” said Joe.
“Will there be any left over for me to buy a car with?” David wanted to know.
“It’s not our money,” I reminded him. “Remember what Mr. Wallberger said—it’s an advance. We have to pay it back again later.”
“How will we keep track of everything?” I added, as an afterthought.
“You need a manager,” said Aunt Sandi’s boyfriend firmly. “I’ll ask my colleague if he knows anyone good.”
That was how Mickey the Manager came into our lives. Mickey looked like he should have been a lifeguard on an L.A. beach. He was very tanned, with a rugged face and a mustache modeled on Magnum P.I. He had a couple of other bands on his roster, one of whom had recently become quite successful, and he was fond of spewing out clichés like “Stick with me, kids, I’m going places.” Boys apparently joined bands so they could meet girls (well, that was certainly the reason Joe had joined Blue Idea), and I was sure Mickey had started a management company for the same reason, because he couldn’t actually play an instrument or sing. He always had some ditzy little dolly on his arm, picked up from a show the night before. But his womanizing notwithstanding, we all quite liked him. He had a warm heart, under that sharkish exterior, and he did seem to work very hard for us and his other bands. We gave him a lot of healthy shit about how many polyester open-to-the-waist shirts he possessed, and the revolving door through which his girlfriends appeared to pass, but he took it all with good humor.
