Chapter 5

After a final bow from everyone in the final number, we all ran backstage. Despite the power outage, our first tour date was a success, and everyone was in a great mood. While I joined them in that, I was also curious about what had happened, and I went to find a PA.

Finding one of the line producers for the show, I grabbed him as he hustled by and asked, “What was that power outage about?”

“A car crashed into a nearby power station. Knocked out power for the whole block. They were able to switch us over to another grid temporarily, or however the power company does that, but from the sounds of it, the neighborhoods near here will be out of power until probably tomorrow.”

“A car crash? Seriously?”

I’m not sure what I expected him to say, but that hadn’t been it.

“Yeah, some sort of medical emergency with the driver that caused him to lose control, from what the power guy told me. He said they were able to get to him and rush the guy to the hospital, but it blew some transformers, so the damage was done.”

“Jeez. I hope he’s okay.”

“The power guy said he walked to the ambulance, so I can’t imagine it was life-threatening.”

“Well, that’s good, at least. Everyone else is okay though, right? No one got hurt?”

“As far as I know, it was just the driver. Could’ve been a lot worse.”

“No kidding. Man, what a crazy night.”

“It’s always something,” the producer said, taking that as an opportunity to go back to whatever he’d been doing, and walking off.

“Charlie, there you are,” Phoenix West said, making his way through the crowd just as the other guy walked off. “Could we talk for a minute?”

He gestured to a small room a few feet down a side hall.

“Sure.”

Following him into the room, he closed the door behind me and said, “You put us in a bind out there, playing a song that wasn’t cleared.”

“What else was I supposed to do? People were getting restless. It was the only song everyone knew off the top of their heads that would work with just an acoustic guitar and drums, which is all we had to work with. I would have thought you’d be happy. News of unhappy fans on the first show wouldn’t go well for the rest of the tour. As it is, they’re all out there having a good time now. What could’ve been a bad experience turned out good.”

Phoenix held up his hands defensively and said, “I’m not criticizing your decision. Truth is, I think you made the right call, but I wish you would have taken a couple of minutes to at least run it by someone. These kinds of decisions can have long-term consequences. I’m not saying it will, just that it’s worth taking the extra time.”

“Noted,” I said.

While I got where he was coming from, it’s not like anyone came out with any instructions, either. I was a performer, not a producer. If it was such a big deal, one of his staff should have seen the problem and come up with a solution. Instead, all we got was, “We’ll know something in ten minutes.” If that was all I’d gone to the audience with, there would have been a riot.

Not that I was going to throw that in his face. West might be a little bit of an asshole, but I was going to have to work with him for at least the next several months, and this tour did bring me benefits, so it was better to just shut up and take the lumps.

“Look, Charlie, I get it. You’re used to handling things on the fly, making decisions in the moment. That’s great when you’re playing small gigs, but now you’re in the big leagues. Everything you do has consequences, and licensing is the name of the game at this level.”

“Okay.”

“You should consider that there’s a level of experience you need to get behind you as you start to play in the big leagues. If you were on my label, one of the first things we’d do is sit down and go through all of this stuff with you, so you understand the ramifications of decisions and what your options are in given situations. Your current team, they’re doing their best, but they don’t have the resources you’d get at a major label, and it’s going to end up biting you. Lawyers and managers are essential, but if you really want to take your career to the next level, to become a household name, you need the power of a label behind you.”

I knew a sales pitch when I heard one, and could see where this one was going, but I didn’t say anything.

“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about our last meeting, and I agree, that contract was harsher than it should have been,” he said, still going by the script he’d come in with, regardless of what I said. “Some of my people, they were trying to earn favor in the wrong ways, thinking that if they got just a little more from a new artist, the executives would reward them for it. I’ve dealt with that, and I want you to know it won’t happen again.”

Phoenix reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded document.

“I had my team draw up a new contract, one with much better terms for you. A bigger piece of the pie, including merchandise and a direct cut from concert revenue. And we’re not just talking about what you get from us. To show you we’re serious, we’re putting our money where our mouth is to show you what we can do for you. This contract commits GLR to a serious marketing push for your next few projects. We’re all in on making you a star, Charlie.”

He held out the contract. I didn’t move to take it. He’d picked this moment to spring it on me, instead of going through Benny, which is how I knew things were usually done. It all sounded great, but I had no doubt those promises came with a whole lot of caveats and addendums.

I was, however, willing to play the game, a little.

“I appreciate the opportunity, Phoenix, I really do. I’d be happy to have my people look this over. Would you send that over to Benny directly, please?”

That was not the answer he’d been hoping for, and he did a bad job of hiding it. Even with his sour expression, he tried to power through his script.

“You’re a smart guy, Charlie, and normally, that would be the right move. But I’ll tell you, there’s a clock on this. I had to go to the mat with my board to get this deal, since it’s way outside of what we normally give new artists, so it’s not going to be on the table long enough for a bunch of back and forth. If you want this, Charlie, you have to decide now. That’s what separates the bit players from the superstars. The ability to make the big decisions when it counts.”

“You’re right, it is. I understand you went to a lot of effort for this, and I’m grateful. But I won’t sign anything without my lawyer and manager reviewing it first. That’s not me being indecisive, that actually is my decision.”

Phoenix stared at me for a long moment before tucking the contract back into his pocket and opening the door to the small room he’d pulled us into.

Halfway through, he stopped, turned back to me, and said, “I hope you don’t regret this, Charlie. Opportunities like this don’t come around often.”

With that, he left, letting the door slam behind him. I had a feeling this wasn’t the last time he was going to try and push me into signing something.

The next day, I woke up late and just lay there, staring at the ceiling and enjoying the idea that I didn’t actually have to get up. This really was the life. The last time I’d done a full tour, I’d shared a cheap motel room with four other people, rotating who was sleeping on the floor, and booking gigs as tight as possible, which meant they were in between sleepless nights after we spent the day driving to the next venue, smashed inside a van with all of our equipment.

We had two more shows at the Hollywood Bowl, which meant there was no need to rush off to the next gig. Plus, the hotel the show had picked was significantly nicer than what I would have paid for out of my own pocket. I would have been happy with something a lot lower down the list, but I wasn’t going to complain, either.

It also explained why they’d decided after shows where we didn’t go straight to the next city, they’d fly me home instead of to the wherever the next show was. Even with a two day wait, at the prices this place was costing, it was cheaper to pay for two plane tickets than two to four nights in a hotel plus meals.

That was probably doubly true of our next shows, which were scheduled to start Thursday in Vegas. So I’d get to spend Monday traveling, go to school Tuesday and Wednesday, and then catch a flight to Vegas to do Thursday through Saturday shows. That was a lot of travel, but at least it made the schoolwork a little easier.

I finally pushed myself out of bed and found my phone. I’d sent Warren a text the night before about the whole blackout thing and had asked him to find out what had happened. I’d slept the morning away, which I hoped was enough time for him to find out something about it, because I was still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that someone had just crashed into a light pole and taken out a block’s worth of power.

“Hey, Charlie, how’s it going?” he said when I called.

“Good. I wanted to see if you found out anything more about what happened last night.”

“Yeah, I managed to get hold of a friend of the family,” Warren said. “Turns out the guy had a heart attack while driving. That’s what caused the crash.”

“Damn, is he going to be okay?”

“I talked to his sister briefly, and she said they managed to stabilize him, but they’re in a tough spot. He’s going to need to have a stent put in, which means heart surgery, but he got laid off seven months ago, and his carryover insurance lapsed last month, so they don’t have any insurance. It’s pretty bad.”

I know all about being in extreme poverty. Health insurance wasn’t something people at the bottom got to consider, let alone have. Even if you had a job that provided insurance, the premiums were expensive enough that getting it was essentially the same as trying to buy a private plane. It just wasn’t possible.

If this family was in that spot, they probably didn’t have car insurance either, which meant they would have lost their car, making getting a job even harder.

“I feel terrible for them. We had a similar kind of situation when I was little. Dad, of course, didn’t have insurance, and Mom came down with something, they would never tell me what, that put her in the hospital for four days. They fixed her, but we had this huge hospital bill, and Dad had already gone through bankruptcy like two years before, so that wasn’t an option. Only the fact that we didn’t have any property or really anything for them to take kept them from suing him. Mom finally managed to settle it when we moved to Wellsville, because she needed to clear up her credit enough to get the trailer.”

“I get that,” Warren said. “But there’s not much you can do, Charlie. It’s not your responsibility.”

I didn’t blame him for being uncomfortable with the conversation. He hadn’t grown up in those conditions, so for him, it was sad, but also kind of abstract. He didn’t know these people, so it wasn’t his problem.

“I know I’m not responsible, but still...” I said, trailing off as something popped into my head.

“What?” Warren prompted after I was quiet for a moment.

“I have a wild idea,” I said.

“What?” Warren asked again, a lot more dubious than the last time.

“Right now, I’m still getting a lot of press coverage. You said I have some phone interviews set up next week, right?”

“Yeah, a few.”

“People are bound to ask about the power outage. There’s a chance I could use the situation to help both of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, hear me out. People are going to ask about the power outage in the interviews, right? It’s the kind of thing that makes for a good story.”

“Probably,” Warren agreed.

“So, what if we use that to help this family out? I mean, they’re in a tough spot, and we’ve got an opportunity here. First off, I want to give them what I made from last night’s show that isn’t set aside to go to the band. Every penny of my cut. They need it more than I do, right now.”

“That’s really generous, Charlie, but doing this is keeping you from being able to perform elsewhere. You went for quite a while without getting paid, and most of what you made on the show got split, so there isn’t that much of it left. You’ve got college coming up next year, and you’re going to need to pay for it. Are you sure?”

“Hear me out,” I said, waving off his concerns. “I was also thinking we could start a donation campaign for them online. You know, through one of those sites like HelpingHands. One of the farmers outside of town did it after a fire took out his barn, and everyone gave, like, ten dollars, and he was able to get enough to build a new one. I’d also like to commit to using a percentage of my part of album sales or streams to match whatever people donate, I don’t know, for a few months. I can bring this all up and announce it when I’m doing the interviews, as a way to induce people to help donate to the campaign.