Chapter 146: Epilogue

Liz and I exchanged vows on the Saturday before Labor Day at the house in San Diego that we would share.

We almost managed to sneak our nuptials under the radar because other Liz Larimer news was dominating the music industry. Liz officially announced her deal with RaveLand Records and her intention to have a new disc ready to drop by the following June.

But it wasn’t just the news that had people buzzing. It was the fact that Liz had announced her pregnancy when she made the announcement in Los Angeles.

Liz had returned to her gynecologist after another 28 days had passed without her cycle starting. The doctor had given us the news that we had hoped for a month earlier and set the due date in late March or early April.

Liz proudly wore a T-shirt that announced “Mommy To Be” but took questions only about her recording deal – which meant a lot of questions went completely unanswered.

The wedding ceremony was a small affair. My mom and Liz’s parents were there, of course, but the rest of the invitations were limited to people that were close to both of us. The usual suspects were all there but none of Liz’s celebrity friends or the few people I’d met along the way were invited. The biggest celebrity names were our mutual friends – Melissa, Conny, Lucas and Ben.

The only other guests that had a familiar name were Caley Cross, who hadn’t been in the news in several months, and Chelsea Rome, who had been dropped from the RFN label a week earlier.

Even the news media got blacked out. Somehow the U.S. Navy had scheduled maneuvers very near the coast for the Saturday so all commercial aircraft had been diverted to a flight path farther away. Chris never said a word about it until months later when the topic came up.

We released our “official” wedding portrait on the small web site that always seemed to be the first to know about all the news that might involve a few of Nashville’s biggest names. The guy had changed the name from “NashvilleDirt” to “CountryNewsAndNotes” just before he revealed his secret to his wife, who had begun to wonder why he kept getting calls from a strange man at all hours of the day.

We threw a big party at our new San Diego home the day after the wedding and invited most of the people that had angled for a shot at watching the wedding. The free food and booze seemed to mollify the folks that had been left off the guest list. No one seemed surprised that a balding, poorly dressed professor had been invited to mingle with the pretty people.

Liz and I spent four days honeymooning on a yacht with some of our friends.

We spent most of the fall in San Diego while Liz worked on writing the songs for her upcoming disc. We went to Nashville for Thanksgiving and flew to Spain right afterward.

LLE shut down for a week between Christmas and New Year’s (for reasons I didn’t ask about) so we hosted a large New Year’s party at her Spanish villa.

We went on a short charitable tour when we returned to the United States. Including the sale of the DVD from her Dallas concert, Liz wound up donating almost $25 million to various groups, large and small, across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia before the New Year arrived.

Then we settled down for the rest of the winter in Nashville so Liz could get as much music recorded as possible before the birth of our child.

Olivia Rose Blakely was born on the Friday before Easter. She looked so tiny and adorable that I was afraid to even touch her but I couldn’t resist holding her cute little face against my chest so she could listen to my heartbeat. Over the coming months, that simple act became a surefire way to settle Olivia anytime she got fussy. When Olivia cried it was obvious to everyone within 10 miles that she’d inherited her lung capacity from her mother but the birth of a perfect little angel upgraded the holiday (in my mind at least) to Great Friday.

Liz had insisted upon a professional name change to go along with the new name on her legal documents. Liz Larimer’s next disc was to be released under the name of Elizabeth Blakely, the name she had scrawled on her notebook almost two decades before.

I told her that the name didn’t matter to me ... but she told me that it mattered to her. That was all the reason I needed to offer my support.

Olivia was the second “holiday” baby born in just a few months. Susan and Chris welcomed a son, Christian, on Halloween.

And Olivia wasn’t the next child to enter our lives after Christian’s birth. Rick and Eric, who had been battling red tape for two years in the effort to adopt, were approved by the litany of agencies that oversaw such things.

They took the same non-traditional route that Susan and Chris had taken, adopting a child from the foster care system. Jian was 18 months old. He had a smile that would melt any heart and the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen on a toddler.

Amber, Lucas and Brandon became like a pack of fierce lions looking out for the smaller lives. Anytime Jian, Olivia or Christian made the slightest peep (or if they’d gone a bit too long without making a peep), one of the older children would pop a head into the nursery to make sure everything was OK.

Liz only had a few songs left to record following Olivia’s birth but it was clear from the outset that she was far more interested in being a mother than a singing sensation. But with a host of people willing to play with Olivia, Liz finally went back to the studio and finished her disc about six weeks after Olivia’s arrival.

While Liz spent the months preparing her next release and adapting to her changing body, I spent mine working to keep her name in the news (which wasn’t difficult) and working to get my arm back (which was difficult).

The last surgery had restored some of the feeling to my palm but nine months after the attack I still had nothing in three of my fingers. I resigned myself to the fact that it was always going to be that way. I had enough of a grip to hold a baby bottle and enough movement to keep the muscles in my hand from atrophying. That was the best I could hope for.

We spent the better part of four months tossing around suggestions for the title of Liz’s next release. We were hindered by the fact that Liz hadn’t made up her mind if it was going to be a solo disc or one filled with contributions from other artists.

She finally settled on “United We Stand” as the disc name and “Freedom” for the name of her tour.

Liz released her disc one year to the day after the carnage outside of the (now former) RFN building in Nashville. She had never been able to decide on the format so she decided to make it a two-disc effort with 28 new pieces of music.

How she managed to mix that in with a pregnancy and a wedding is beyond me, but she managed. The only song that Liz didn’t get a writing credit was also the only song to be featured on both discs and the only song not recorded in Liz’s Nashville studio.

Glen Carter had offered a song to her called “Family and Friends.” She loved the song and convinced him that it would be better if he sang it with her. So we flew to his Texas ranch for five days while they laid down tracks. She planned to release it as the first single.

The song title became the titles for the discs. The first was called “Family” and featured 11 songs with Liz alone and one with Glen Carter. The majority of the songs were things she’d written for RFN but that the label had rejected. It was her final “screw you” to a corporation that had declared bankruptcy seven months earlier.

The second disc was called “Friends” and had 16 duets with people ranging from the obvious (Conny, Melissa, Ben, Lucas and Chelsea) to the unusual (pop stars Randi Raver and Lenny O).

Liz (and I) wrote a thoughtful foreword for the liner notes of the physical copies and on her website for the digital downloads. The cost for most two-disc volumes usually ran upwards of $60. Liz explained that the change to new management and a new method of releasing music had cut her costs significantly and she was passing it along to the consumer.

The new discs retailed for $24.99 and included a coupon for a free tour T-shirt if the buyer produced his unique receipt number, either in person at one of the cities we’d selected for her upcoming two-leg tour through North America and Europe or through her website (which had been redesigned by her manager’s granddaughter).

Liz’s accountants had assured her that the profits would be close to her “On the Ropes” release if the sales numbers were the same.

Fans were lined up outside of chain retailers three days in advance of the release and there were almost 100,000 people visiting her website at 11:59 p.m.

The first-day sales tripled her previous record and the disc went gold in 10 days, platinum in 24 and diamond in 71.

Needless to say, everybody involved was pleased with the outcome. It also goes without saying that those that managed to keep their labels alive were not quite as happy. They had staked their fortune on Liz’s failure and (like Michael McHenry) it had led to their downfall.

A year after we started to put the screws to the labels, only a handful of the best-known corporations were still surviving. Their top draws left for places like RaveLand and other independent labels and newcomers were too wary to line up to replace them.

By the time we sat down to put the finishing touches on the Freedom Tour, LLE was fully involved in the San Diego business climate. The PR and marketing staff was no longer revenue-negative because we had acquired several clients, most notably Ben, Kim, Conny, Melissa, Lucas and Chelsea.

My former professor said it was one of the rare cases when he’d seen an information campaign actually reach the audience it was intended to reach and in a manner that they understood it.

It was really not a lot more work since the group was in constant communication. We had to hire a dozen more people to handle the influx but the cost of the entire operation was paid for by the new clients.

Everybody was happy with the arrangement. The entertainers no longer paid out 70 percent of their earnings to a label. They were taking home 22 percent more money, on average, and had greater control of their products and their images. The average cost of music to the consumer was cut by at least half (and in some cases to a third). It was a win-win-win.

LLE’s profit margin had somehow doubled, and the woman that had entirely too much money to start with wound up with a lot more.

That led to a series of very large donations to scholarship funds, children’s hospital wings, veterans’ organizations and other worthwhile charities. Liz even sent a donation to my alma mater and the school she attended for two years to pay for renovations and upkeep at the field named for my former baseball coach.