Chapter 129

I had to depart for my afternoon workout session with Kim as soon as the call ended. We were almost to the end when Liz appeared in the room.

“Come back to the office when you’re finished here, please,” she said.

I grunted my assent since I was in the middle of forcing my arm outward with a stick and it wasn’t the most pleasant feeling I’d ever experienced.

Liz stood and watched for a moment before smiling sadly and heading back to work.

“Is she mad?” Kim asked from the treadmill.

“Probably,” I muttered.

“Ben says that everything is falling in line like neat little dominoes,” Kim said as she looked past me to the door where Liz had just departed.

“It’s a little different close up,” I explained. I wrapped up my last set and sat up on the table.

Kim slowed down to a walking pace. She was now doing a three-mile jog on the treadmill every day and her time was down to less than 30 minutes. I usually managed to walk half a mile in the same time on the thing of the evenings before giving it up as a lost cause.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I took a towel to dry off my face before leaning forward and letting my arm dangle in front of me. This was about the only exercise that I could have a conversation during.

“Liz never really understood all the moving parts in formulating her image,” I said. “She just saw the end result and she was, for the most part, pleased with how things came out. Now she’s seeing that making her look like Polly Princess isn’t as easy as she thought. She’s used to a well-oiled machine that had contacts in hundreds of markets.

“The team out west is still making those contacts. Yes, the LLE brand opens a lot of doors but the doors of some places we really need to reach are closed and locked to us.”

“Why?” Kim asked.

“It comes back to cross-ownership,” I explained. “You’ve got a few main corporations that have a hand in the movie business and they own the theaters and the TV networks. It’s the same way with radio stations and the various labels. A lot of the stations are owned by two or three corporate entities. In turn, those entities are subsidized by the varying labels out there. RFN had a stake in ListComm. ListComm owns at least a piece of about 200 stations in the major markets. It’s why Liz did so well in the urban areas. ListComm stations are located in metropolitan areas. Conny’s label has a stake in Panda Broadcasting. They own a bunch of smaller stations in the Midwest. That’s why Conny gets a lot of airtime in the Midwest.”

Kim looked at me for a moment.

“I saw the data but I didn’t really read it,” she confessed. “What about Ben’s label?”

“Centurion,” I said.

“He’s signed to Vista,” Kim corrected.

“No, his label owns part of Centurion,” I amended. “They deal with a lot of stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania.”

“Where Ben’s fan base is strongest,” Kim finished. “That’s why he was so pissed off when he saw it. They played him.”

“They owned those stations before they signed Ben,” I noted. “They signed him because he is so popular in his hometown areas. But, the truth is, if that information had been out there when he was negotiating his deal, he could have a little more leverage.”

“He’s dropping them,” Kim informed me.

“What?” I asked, leaving off my exercises and standing up straight.

“He’s not really under contract,” Kim said. “He’s fulfilled his three disc requirement. They’ve just kept working together because it was easier. But after all this, he’s...”

She sighed.

“Ben is an honest man,” she said. “It’s why I love him so much. He was raised in a household where honesty was the highest virtue. They lied to him and he won’t forgive that.”

“Seriously, Kim, you need to talk him into ... letting this play out before he jumps,” I advised.

“He won’t do it in a way that changes the message,” she assured me.

“Screw the message,” I said. “This is about ... making sure he can still put out the songs that people love to listen to. Yeah, signing Ben boosted the profits for a few of Centurion’s stations. They didn’t have to pay royalties to themselves because they were going to play his songs either way. But it’s going to be that way no matter where he goes. There are only a handful of major labels that don’t have an ownership stake somewhere. And, he’ll likely lose his hosting gig at the Country Awards Show.”

“What?” Kim asked.

“Centurion is also tied in with the TV network that hosts them,” I said. “Panda and Centurion are both minor investors in TransMedia. They own the network that puts on the CAS.”

“Well, Jesus Christ,” Kim said. “I’ll bet he doesn’t know that!”

“Probably not,” I agreed. “One of the guys out in San Diego worked for World Wide Broadcasting. He’s the one that tied a lot of this together.”

“Why wasn’t this released?” Kim wondered.

I sighed.

“It comes back to something I just told Liz a little while ago,” I told her. “The public doesn’t want a master’s dissertation about things. They want ... snippets. They want a few brief factoids that can be easily verified. It would take two hours and 50 graphs to demonstrate precisely how Panda is part owner of so many things. Or ... it’s more like so many things are a part owner of Panda. It’s shell companies and trusts and stock swaps and offshore accounts going from one entity to another. It’s not a matter of having the CEO of Ben’s label working as the CEO at Centurion. This is about ... lifting the lid off the pot. It isn’t about pouring the soup on the floor. Not yet, it isn’t. I’m sure that some enterprising reporter will jump on this and put together a major expose. And, if the newspaper or website he works for isn’t involved, it might even appear somewhere.

“What we’re trying to do is show the public exactly what sort of people run the businesses that are providing the music they enjoy. It’s about proving that the people crying poor while sitting in their fancy offices in Nashville and Los Angeles aren’t exactly eating at the homeless shelter. Meanwhile, you’ve got studio musicians having to clean up the bars where they play at night in order to afford a shitty apartment. We’re just trying to shine a light; we don’t want to tear the roof off.”

“You need to find a way to get this information to the performers,” Kim noted.

“We’re only so many people, Kim,” I said helplessly. “It’s all we can do to keep a tight rein on the scope of the stories coming out. We don’t have the time or the manpower to contact everybody and give them the full story. We’re... 30 people, and that’s being generous ... fighting against a hundred labels all with PR teams three times our size. The labels are bringing in image consultants from New York and Los Angeles as we speak. They’re going to go on the offensive very soon if we give them the slightest opening. We’ve got people coming in at midnight out there so nothing gets missed on the overnight cycle.”

Kim stopped walking and shut down the treadmill.

“Yeah, I guess it really isn’t possible to keep everybody up to date,” she admitted.

“It’s not even possible to keep Liz up to date,” I corrected. “That’s why she is angry. Things move quickly. We have to respond just as quickly. And we find ourselves representing a thousand people with varying interest in what we’re doing. You know it yourself: There are people out there that don’t give a shit if some newcomer has to survive on a thousand a month ... so long as they get to live in their big house and drive their fancy car. I’m not talking about the executives. I’m talking about the mainstream performers. Oh, sure, they’re OK with the little guy getting a bigger piece of the pie ... so long as it doesn’t come from their slice. And, I’d bet my eye teeth that a suggestion that the big names help to fund the newcomers would fall flat on its face.”

Kim thought for a moment and then nodded.

“Yeah,” she said again. “It would be hard to convince even somebody like Ben to cut his take to leave more for other people.”

“I know it would,” I said with a conspiratorial wink. “I saw it firsthand.”

“You suggested it to Liz?” Kim wondered.

“Liz, Conny and Melissa,” I replied. “I couched it in PR terms. It would be a huge win with the public if they established some sort of ... charity ... to assist young artists getting started. Of course, it wouldn’t be a charity. They couldn’t take it off their taxes or see any tangible benefit.”

“What did they say?” Kim asked.

“I got blank stares at first,” I said, offering a rueful smile. “Then I got a litany of reasons why they couldn’t do it ... accountants, tax advisers, lawyers, managers. Then it came down to a list of why it really wasn’t feasible.”

“It really isn’t feasible,” Kim said. “I ... I know from my own career and my own finances that trying to funnel money to somebody just isn’t easy.”

“That was the argument that made most sense to me,” I admitted. “Liz pointed out that, from a tax standpoint, the best way to do this was to take a smaller cut from the label. And we all know that anything they give back wouldn’t be passed down the line. It would be passed up the line.”

“Yep,” Kim agreed. “That’s how it works in Hollywood, too. If I take a smaller salary for a project, they don’t pay the extras $20 more. They put it right into the profit column.”

“Yep,” I echoed. “But from strictly a public image perspective, this would play huge. You’re talking every entertainment media outlet in the free world extolling the virtues of the artists that contributed to the fund. You can’t buy that sort of publicity.”

“No, you can’t,” Kim said. “And, as a last ditch measure, it probably would be worth the bureaucratic bullshit they’d have to wade through.”

“We’re not there yet,” I said.

“I hope you’re never there,” Kim said. “You might be able to convince a few people that it is the right thing to do but you’re going to have to do a lot of fancy dancing for some people to pull a quarter out of their pocket.”

“Yep,” I said again.

The door to the room opened again and I turned expecting to find Liz waiting impatiently for me.

Instead it was Skye. She tapped her wrist where, in the olden days, people often wore watches to indicate that the mistress of the manor was awaiting my presence.

I sighed and nodded while Kim tried (and failed) to suppress a chuckle.

“Go take your medicine, young man,” she said. “I’ll hang out here for a little while in case you need me to call 9-1-1.”

I cradled my arm and rubbed my shoulder. I hadn’t even gotten the chance to enjoy the short-term effects of my last routine.

“Might not be a bad idea,” I agreed. “But make sure Ben talks to me before coming to a decision. I’ll drop everything to explain the situation to him. He’s what my dad used to call ‘good people.’”

“He is,” Kim said. “And you’re ‘good people’ too. Don’t forget that.”

I pulled on my soft sling, wrapped the damp towel around my sweaty neck and went to meet my fate.

Skye offered me a vague smile when she held the door open for me. I went in but I didn’t put my sweaty butt on the nice furnishings.

I looked for Jill to try to get a read on how badly I was about to get reamed – but she was nowhere to be found. Skye had closed the door behind me without entering.

“Can I just tell you that I was wrong and I’m sorry,” I began. “That way we can skip this part. I can’t talk to you that way ... in a professional capacity.”

“You can’t,” Liz said. “Take a seat, please. We have a lot to talk about.”

“We really don’t,” I said. “I know I screwed up. It won’t happen again ... or I hope to God it won’t.”

“It’s fine,” Liz said. “But you can tell me you’re wrong anytime you want. I like that way that sounds. This isn’t about that. I’m as much to blame as you are. We should have taken a minute to cool off before we made the call. I should have let you run the meeting for your department as you saw fit. But, yeah, I would prefer we keep our tones civil when we’re talking to work colleagues. Oh, and let’s not call each other ‘Sweetheart.’”

I covered my left eye to rub at my forehead.

“Hey, at least it wasn’t ‘Sugar Tits’ or something like that,” Liz said, laughing lightly. “It’s really OK. This is a personal discussion. That’s why I asked Jill and Skye to find other things to do. This doesn’t really apply to them and I don’t think you’ll want to talk about things in front of them.”