Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders

by Bill Fitzhugh

  It would be an understatement to say this was not how most record deals came about, especially for an unknown artist, but then, ‘It Wasn’t Supposed To End That Way’ was not most songs. On the one hand, the executives couldn’t believe how good the song was. On the other, they were afraid to imagine the deal Herron and Peavy were going to propose. Were they so brazen as to think they could command the Garth deal right out of the box? It crossed more than a few minds that they should just leave in a big huff to show that their label didn’t let artists dictate to them, but they had to wait to see if anyone else did it first, lest they screw themselves out of this record based on nothing more than principle. No one budged.

  “Well then, you’re still with me,” Big Bill said. “That’s good.” He nodded to his partner who picked up a stack of documents. “Now before Franklin passes out his memo covering the main points of the deal, let me introduce to you the young man who’s made this all possible.”

  The curtain parted and Eddie came up the stairs from back stage. He was wearing pressed Wranglers and a denim work shirt unbuttoned to reveal a white t-shirt underneath. He had his big flattop Gibson in his hand and he was wearing his tan Stetson. He kept his head down until he reached Big Bill’s side. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to introduce Mr. Eddie Long.” A second spotlight jumped on him and he looked up flashing his best smile. Several of the women in the crowd actually gasped. He looked that good.

  Eddie bowed modestly and pulled his guitar into position. He looked out at the crowd, found Megan, and winked. Then he counted it down, “a-one, two, a-one, two three…” He busted into a rowdy solo version of ‘Dixie National’ and played the crowd like a seasoned pro. Meanwhile, Franklin circulated among them, distributing the pages outlining the proposed minimum deal points.

  When Eddie reached the second chorus, he stopped singing, but he kept playing the guitar. Big Bill talked over the music. It was as polished a dog-and-pony show as anyone in Nashville had ever seen. “As you can see from the memo Franklin’s handing out, we’re not exactly proposing a standard deal,” Big Bill said. “The numbers in the right hand column are the minimums for today’s bidding. The maximums, well, that’s up to you.” The executives were still absorbing the deal points when Eddie suddenly stopped playing the guitar and Big Bill raised the microphone to his lips. “Now, who’d like to start the bidding?”

  Big Bill Herron might’ve been fixin’ to fall off Nashville’s hot 100, but everyone knew he still had an ear for great songs. They’d just heard proof of that. Or had they? No one stopped to ask that question, and that’s what Big Bill was counting on. Whether it was a great song or not didn’t really matter at the moment, though. The only thing that mattered was that the people in this room, at this moment, believed it was a great song. That was the genius of this gathering. There was no time for doubt or focus group surveys. Big Bill was relying on pack mentality, plain and simple. All he needed was one major label to start off in the right direction and the rest of the herd would have to follow. Big Bill pointed at his old friend, James, the head of the second biggest label in Nashville. “James? Whaddya say? You know that’s a hit.”

  James figured he didn’t have anything to loose by making the minimum bid. If no one countered, he got the record as cheap as it could be gotten. If someone did counter, he was off the hook. And in his gut he felt Big Bill was right; it was a hit. So he made the bid, and that was all it took. In a matter of minutes, the Acuff Conference Room looked like the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Fueled by alcohol and driven by greed and fear, the label heads bid higher and higher. Once it achieved a certain momentum, the thing simply fed on itself. There were frantic cell phone calls to corporate headquarters. The smaller labels either fell by the wayside each time the bid jumped by ten or twenty or fifty thousand dollars, or they tried to forge ad hoc alliances to outbid the majors. It was a thing to behold.

  The reporters for Billboard and Radio & Records would later recall in breathless terms how the historical auction played itself out over the course of a frenzied forty minutes. When it was over, there were photo ops and lots of champagne. The press release out of Nashville the next day was picked up by all mainstream media. Some of the articles that followed were steeped in hype: “The new Garth!” and “Country music’s twenty-first century savior,” that sort of thing. But there was one element in the stories that wasn’t hype. It was plain and simple and true: Eddie Long had signed the most lucrative rookie contract in the history of country music. Bar none.

  45.

  Carl opened up like a magnolia blossom once he realized the opportunity Jimmy’s book afforded him. It occurred to him he could attribute all sorts of statements to Tammy — some true, some not — and it would be impossible for anyone to know which was which. “Tammy told me more than once that she wanted Eddie to settle down and take a job at The Dollar Store so they could start raising a family.” He held his putter in the air and wrapped his fingers perfectly around the grip. “Of course, Eddie resented that real bad. He had his own dreams, you know, the country music thing, and he told Tammy it was gonna be a cold day in Jew-lie before he got tied down in Hinchcliff.” Carl tapped the heel of the putter on the floor, then leaned toward Jimmy, propping himself up by the club. “I think he beat her too. She never said anything about it, but I saw a bruise on her leg once.” Carl reached into his pocket and dropped another ball onto the putting green. “Now I hate to tell on her, but this might be helpful.” He tapped Jimmy’s chest with the grip of the putter. “Just don’t tell nobody you heard it from me.”

  Carl was suddenly acting like he was a key figure in some sort of international espionage intrigue. Jimmy figured he’d play along if that’s what it took to get Carl to talk. He grabbed the putter and assured Carl that he was bound by a journalist oath of confidentiality and protected by the First Amendment guarantee that sources don’t have to be revealed. “Carl,” he said in all seriousness, “I’ll take your name to my grave.”

  “All right,” Carl said, wrenching the putter away from Jimmy. “Tammy told me she’d been seeing another man. A feller from Grenada, I think. She never said his name, but…” Out of the corner of his eye Carl saw his boss heading toward sporting goods. “Hey, listen, I think I’ve said enough,” Carl said as he put the putter back in its stand. “And if you quote me, I’ll deny we ever talked.” He walked off toward his boss. “Hey, Mr. Teasdale, how you doin’?”

  Notwithstanding the fact that Jimmy hadn’t found the right kind of poison out at the Lytle’s farm, his earlier suspicions returned. If Eddie felt Tammy was standing between him and his dream, that might amount to motive. Of course there was the matter of having to explain the other poisoning deaths and the gunshot wound, but, well, he was new at this. He’d just have to take things one step at a time.

  Jimmy looked at his watch. It was five-thirty. “Shit!” He raced out of the store, dove in his car, and headed south. He had to cover a Foghat concert at a casino in Vicksburg in three hours and it was going to be close. Highway 61 through the Delta wasn’t exactly the Autobahn and if got caught passing too many tractors between Quitman and Warren Counties, he’d probably end up writing a story about the appalling conditions at the jail in Panther Burn or Nitta Yuma.

  46.

  To be charitable, one could have argued Megan was simply being experimental with her foreplay. She was wearing nothing but a pair of pink silk panties while sitting in bed next to Eddie with a calculator between her legs. “All right,” she said, “let’s add up how much money you’re going to have a year from now.” She took a swig off her beer then leaned way over to put it on the bedside table. Eddie peeked at her underside and did what he had to. Megan shrieked and nearly fell off the bed before she started laughing. “Hey! You pinch that again and I’ll retaliate.” She grabbed the toenail clippers that were sitting next to her beer and brandished them at Eddie.

  He covered his giblets with one hand and pointed with the other. “
I was just trying to get that piece of lint, I swear.”

  Megan looked at her crotch. “That’s not lint!” She looked up and wagged a finger at Eddie. “Okay, later tonight, I’ll give you a lint identification lesson but first, we’ve got some accounting to do.”

  Truth was, they’d both taken drunk. And, as if the alcohol and the promise of a lint identification lesson wasn’t enough, Eddie was still plenty high from having deposited two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into his checking account. It was an unheard of situation for any recording artist, but especially for a first-time record deal. The way it normally worked in Nashville was this: after a label signed an artist to a recording contract, they advanced the artist money for various expenses — legal fees, wardrobe, video production, and the biggest expense of all, for recording an album. It wasn’t unusual for an artist to be $350,000 in debt to the label before the record was actually released. The good news for the artist was that he or she didn’t owe the label anything if the record bombed. The bad news, in a sense, was the artist didn’t get to spend all that advance money on fun stuff.

  The label made back their advance only if the record sold well. Once it started selling, the label applied the artist’s royalty income against the amount advanced. It was only after the advance was recouped that the artist started seeing money from record sales as the artist. Income from songwriting and publishing was a whole different animal. To see any profit from record sales, the artist had to sell at least 500,000 units in less than six months lest the ‘mechanical’ income be offset by long-term overhead. There were probably hundreds of well known country artists with good careers who made next to nothing on their record sales, even after going gold. The bulk of their income came from touring and, if they wrote their own songs, from publishing and radio play.

  Now, ask anyone on Music Row and they’d tell you the same thing — the standard royalty rate for a new artist in Nashville was twelve percent of the retail price of the record with three or four of those points going to the producer. Of course that was really just a screwy way of saying the standard royalty rate for a new artist was eight percent, but that’s how they talked in Nashville. Of course all this was a vast oversimplification of how money was accounted for in the industry. The real business practices were far more convoluted and deceptive than this.

  But after all the fancy accounting, which involved a Byzantine schedule of retailer discounts, packaging costs, “free goods,” mysteriously discounted royalty rates, and the split with the producer, a new artist might earn sixty-six cents for each CD sold and about forty-four cents on each cassette sold at retail outlets. And that’s before the lawyers, managers, agents, and the government took their cuts of the pie, ultimately leaving the artist with little more than a bewildered expression.

  As a guide, consider this example: a well known country artist’s recent debut record sold 500,000 units, thereby grossing $4 million for the label. Of that, the artist earned less than $200,000, all of which was applied against his advance of $350,000, leaving the artist still in the hole to the tune of $150,000. Most young artists lucky enough to have a gold record were genuinely surprised to discover they were in such serious debt after becoming so famous. But Eddie wasn’t most young artists. Thanks to his astute marketing scheme, a couple of good songs, and the negotiating skills of Herron & Peavy, he had a quarter million in the bank, a record that hadn’t even been released, and nothing to recoup before seeing royalties.

  “Where should we start?” Eddie asked. “Mechanical and songwriting royalties? Record sales? Touring? Merchandising?”

  “How about endorsements?” Megan said. “What do you think, Gibson guitars?”

  Eddie shook his head. “Nah, I’m thinking Internet companies. I bet we could get a hundred K a year endorsing E-Bay or something like that.”

  “A hundred thousand?” Megan sounded disappointed. “Eddie, you gotta start using bigger numbers. You gotta be more positive! Plus, think about it, those dot.com people have so much more money than good sense. Soon as you’ve got a number one single, I bet you can get a million dollar endorsement.” Megan keyed in 1,000,000.00 on the calculator.

  Eddie laughed and drained his beer. “Talk about your easy money.” He burped. “Okay, let’s do mechanicals next.” He leaned over and whispered in Megan’s ear. “Thanks to our little bidding war, we’ll earn a mechanical royalty rate of about ten cents for every song on every copy of the CD we sell.” He burped again. “Oh, sorry.” He twisted up part of the sheet and stuck it in Megan’s ear.

  “Oh, how gallant.” She sat there with arms folded as Eddie dried her ear. “You know, most guys? They’ll just belch in your ear and think they’re done.” She pointed her finger at the tip of Eddie’s nose. “But you…”

  “Yes, I know, I’m a full service sort of guy.” He untwisted the sheet and smoothed it onto the bed. “Now, where were we? Ahh, yes, mechanical royalties at ten cents a song. But of course I have to split each of those dimes fifty-fifty with my publisher.” Now Eddie sounded disappointed.

  “Hey,” Megan said in her upbeat tone, “that’s the cost of doing business.”

  “You’re right,” Eddie said as he pulled another beer from the six pack. “You’re totally right.” He gestured at the calculator. “So put us in for a nickel per song and we’ll be happy about it.”

  Encouraged by Eddie’s use of the word ‘we,’ Megan keyed in .05 on the calculator. “Okay, what’s a gold record,” she asked, “five hundred thousand units?” Megan thought about that for a moment. “Nah, that’s not enough. Let’s say it goes platinum, okay? So let’s see…” Megan keyed in the new numbers. “. . .five cents times eleven songs times a million equals… Woo-hoo!” Megan kicked her bare legs up and down on the bed. “Five hundred fifty thousand dollars. Plus the million from the dot.com people, plus the two-fifty non-recoupable advance brings us up to a million eight.” She clapped her hands together. “This is fun. What’s next?”

  Eddie looked down at the calculator poised between Megan’s ivory thighs. “I’m gonna have to do an audit on you pretty soon,” he said.

  “First things first,” Megan said. “Let’s take a look at touring income.”

  Eddie reached to the side of the bed, grabbed his Gibson, and started playing. “On the road again…” As Eddie did his warbling impression of Willie Nelson, Megan went through a series of calculations based on highly inflated estimates of income from touring, publishing, merchandising, songwriting, and co-producing deals.

  When she had added everything she could think of, Megan turned to Eddie, who still had his guitar in his lap. “A drum roll please,” she said. Eddie obliged on the soundboard of the guitar. Megan made a drama out of hitting the calculator’s ‘total’ button, then she leaned close to read the number. “Holy eight hundred pound Jesus!” She showed Eddie the calculator. “Sixteen billion dollars and forty-two cents!”

  Eddie looked closer. “I think you hit an extra zero or something.” Laughing, Eddie flopped back into the pillows and reflected on how well his life was turning out. It occurred to him that his one-of-a-kind record deal was exactly the sort of thing Jimmy would want to put in the biography. Eddie’s expression changed from contentment to curiosity as he realized how long it had been since he’d spoken to Jimmy. Then he realized he’d never given Jimmy his new, unlisted, number. But what could he do now? Call Jimmy and say, “Hi, how’s the book going? Thought you’d want to know I just signed a fantastic deal with Big World Records. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got my hands in Megan’s pink panties and she sends her best.” He looked at Megan and for a moment thought about asking if she’d talked to Jimmy lately. But there was something peaceful about her expression that stopped him.

  Megan looked like she was lost in a dream. She was still toying with the calculator, trying to figure what her cut of the total might be if she managed to secure the position as the second Mrs. Eddie Long. She made a mental note to find out if Tennessee was a community property state
and, if not, how she might get Eddie to move to one. She turned to look at him. “Have you ever thought about living in California?”

  47.

  Jimmy made it from Hinchcliff to the casino in Vicksburg in just under three hours, arriving just as Foghat hit the stage. The show was everything he expected, except that the band consisted of something less than the original line up, owing to the untimely death of ‘Lonesome’ Dave Peverett. Actually this ‘Foghat’ turned out to be fronted by a guy who had played cowbell on one song on the “High on the Hog” album. He had licensed the rights to the band’s name and had been playing around the country for several years without anyone noticing that only one of the band members was over the age of 30. Of course that really wasn’t surprising when you figure the only people interested in seeing Foghat now had to be so stoned that they wouldn’t have been able to do the math. But the upside was that compared to Foghat’s ‘77 live album, these guys were fabulous. Jimmy enjoyed the free show, took his notes, then headed back to Jackson.