Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels

by Steve Brewer

  From his place on the dais, Big Bill could see the wonder in the candle-lit faces as the song played. But he knew it wasn’t just the song. He knew it was also the sound of the recording itself that had heads tilted in awe toward the monitors. There was a warmth and immediacy to it that they hadn’t heard in years. It was free of digital sterility and binary exactness and was all the more accessible because of its slight imperfections. Big Bill also knew part of the effect came from hearing a full arrangement of the song for the first time. Having become familiar with the solo guitar version, there was something fulfilling about hearing it with a complete band. And when the cello slipped in under the bridge, it seemed familiar, like something subtle from a favorite old song. No one realized they’d been listening to the cello track on a tape loop for the first thirty minutes of the night. All these elements combined to create the exact effect Big Bill had intended. Number 99 my ass.

  When the song ended, there was a moment of silence before one of the A&R executives said to Franklin, as seriously as he’d ever said anything, “Play it again.” So he did. This time, part way through the song, the executives from each label huddled together to discuss strategy. They knew Herron and Peavy hadn’t called them together just to hear this thing.

  When it ended the second time, the crowd just stood there, mute. The house lights came up and Big Bill looked out to measure the stunned faces. He took the microphone and waited. He wanted them to think about it for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I guess the silence speaks for itself.” Big Bill knew every executive in the room wanted the song but he wasn’t interested in selling Eddie off in pieces. Herron and Peavy had a package deal in mind and they intended to wade deep in the revenue streams. “Franklin and I have had the great good fortune to sign the young artist who wrote and sang that song,” Big Bill said. “His name is Eddie Long and before I bring him out I want to talk a minute about the changing nature of our business.” Bill paused a moment to sip his drink.

  “I think everyone in this room will agree that it’s just plain remarkable that so many people in this country already know about this song. It speaks to the power of the Internet, certainly, but it also speaks to the power of the song itself. In fact, I betcha dolla that it’s a lot more about the song than the dubya-dubya-dubya dot com thing. And lemme tell ya what makes me say that. Franklin showed me a website the other day with a data base of nearly two-hundred’n fifty thousand MP3 files, that’s a quarter million songs, and not a-one you’ve heard of. But half the country music fans in America know about this one — and they wanna buy it too.”

  Big Bill walked over to Franklin who handed him a couple of boxes with master recording tapes in them. They both smiled. Big Bill held the boxes up for all to see. “The album’s already in the can, twelve tracks, so right off the bat you know we’ve got something unorthodox in mind.” He smiled and set the tapes on the podium. “Now, you’ve heard the first single. Believe me when I tell you there are at least two more. Of course you’ll be able to hear the whole thing before we execute any contracts, but trust your instincts based on what you just heard. You’ve got a rough idea of the value of that one song, now add a couple of zeros to that and we can talk.” Big Bill paused to let them think about that for a moment.

  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 Edd
ie’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.