Chapter 138

Conny sat back in her chair and lowered her head.

“Sorry, Liz,” she said. “That came out worse than I meant it. It’s just ... the word has some ugly connotation. But, yeah, Glen’s right. We have something that requires fixing. I guess we came to the right place.”

“Liz didn’t make me into anything,” I told the room in a voice that was probably harsher than the situation warranted. “Until you said it just now, it never occurred to me that was what I was doing.”

“I get it,” Conny said. “And I’m really sorry. You’ve done a lot for me personally. I know that. It’s just when I hear that word it brings up images of some guy sitting in a darkened room plotting the assassination of third world dictators.”

“I don’t think the guy ... my friend ... has ever had a hand in anything like that,” I noted. “I think it was discussions along those lines that made him leave his job and move to a different field.”

“What field is that?” Ben asked with a tilted head.

“Private sector,” I said. “He mainly deals with information procurement – for a price.”

That caused a series of nods around the room.

“Don’t worry, he gives Travis a discount,” Liz said with a wink. I think she hoped to lighten the mood but it didn’t work.

“I think we need to get back to the discussion,” Lucas said. “So, this guy, he can get the president involved?”

“He seems to think the guy would be willing to act as intermediary,” I said.

Melissa tilted her head at me. She crossed her arms under her breasts (but for once, I didn’t glance down).

“This was already decided, wasn’t it?” she asked. “You just fed us the information we needed to get to this point.”

“No!” I said quickly before she could get up a head of steam. “I investigated – briefly – the feasibility of any of the options I saw. My friend knows the situation here ... obviously.”

There was no use trying to hide where the documents had come from.

“He’s been in things that make this look like picking out the flavor of cupcakes for the church social,” I continued. “I asked his opinion on what choices you had available. We agreed it boiled down to release everything; release nothing; release parts; or use the information behind the scenes. We discussed the upside and the downside to each of them. I am giving you the information we talked about so you can make the most informed decision available. There are a lot of moving parts to consider here. We have to look at your careers; we have to look at keeping the industry viable while it reforms; we have to look out for the consumer.”

“We have to hide things from the consumer, you mean,” Melissa noted.

I opened my mouth to speak but again, a voice through the phone cut me off. This time it was Susan.

“I think you’re missing a large part of the equation,” Susan said in a tone of voice usually reserved for me, Rick or Sarah. She was actually on the video screen so she could see who was talking. “Melissa, nobody there seems to get that ... to the average fan ... the labels are nonexistent. The executives have succeeded in drawing a curtain between them and the buying public. They’ve put your face on the stage between them. If you stop a hundred people on the street and ask them if they know your name or Lucas’s name, 90 percent are going to say they do. If you ask them to name your label, you might ... in Nashville only ... get three or four that know that you’re at TGI Nashville or that Lucas is at Ramblin’ Records. These are going to be the superfans that notice when you paint your toenails or when Lucas trims his nose hair.

“The average fan thinks that you set the price of the disc. They think that you decide where you are playing, when you’re playing there, how much tickets are going to cost and where the beer stands are located. Oh, sure, they know that there is some sketchy organization behind you but they don’t understand exactly how much control that corporation has on decisions. And that’s because the executives have succeeded in putting all of that on you. And, to be blunt, the entertainers were fine with it because it played to their egos to be the face that everybody saw.

“What do you think is going to happen if we pull back the curtain and the consumer finds out that they’ve been lied to ... by the labels, by the performers, by everyone involved ... for the last 25 or 30 years? So, yes, there are some aspects of what has gone on ... what the entertainers have helped to perpetuate ... that we need to keep shielded. Nobody thinks it will be hidden forever. In fact, I can’t see it staying hidden for another year after the first balloon pops. But you need that time to let the industry begin to correct itself, to find other viable means of getting your music to the public, and to repair the relationship with the consumer that has been damaged by all of this. Do I need to state this any clearer?”

The faces in the room, even Liz’s, had gone white as Susan spoke.

It had been a plain-truth version of the pabulum I had been attempting to spoon feed them a bite at a time.

“We’ve lost touch with the buying public,” Lucas said in a soft voice.

“It’s more than that,” Conny said. “We’ve betrayed them. We were eating caviar from the money they gave us and we were OK if they were stuck with pot pies for two days.”

“Shit,” Lucas said. “I ... my career is based on being the common man. And I never once thought about it like this.”

“This is what you’ve been trying to tell us since Dallas,” Melissa said to me. “You’ve been saying that the pricing and the interaction is the most important aspects of our images. You’ve been trying to draw us back closer to the public because you knew this was going to come sooner or later.”

“He calls it the war between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots, ‘“ Liz noted.

“That’s what it’s going to be,” Glen added. “But I think everybody there is going to be viewed as being on the right side.”

“The Nashville model is not the worst offender,” I said. “Hollywood is probably at the top; then the portion of the industry located in Los Angeles and its suburbs.”

“Hip-hop and Top 40,” Susan said. “We’re talking plainly, Travis. Don’t beat about the bush. In many ways, an artist’s profile is immune regardless of how much money you bring in or where you spend it. There are two places you’ll see backlash. The first should be obvious: Don’t push your point of view on topics you don’t understand and have never experienced. Liz has no idea what life is like in the inner city; she’s never going to know the perils of being a black woman. It’s OK for her to have an opinion. It’s OK for her to have an opinion that runs contrary to public sentiment. It is not OK for her to talk about it as though she knows firsthand.

“The worst thing in the world is for an entertainer to pretend he or she knows what it’s like to live on food stamps. You might once have known. But you don’t know now. And you don’t know how it feels to spend a third of a week’s pay to take your girlfriend to a concert. Don’t act like you do. And for God’s sake, don’t go out and buy a $300,000 diamond choker for your dog three weeks after ticket prices increased by $20. You’d think those sorts of things wouldn’t need a thorough explanation. But, yes, you’ve lost touch with the public. Your music still reaches them but nobody in that room is a ‘common man.’ Don’t try to get the public to think that you are. OK?”

“She just brought this up to let you know why it is necessary that some information remain secret for a bit longer,” I said, hoping to draw the conversation back to some sort of normalcy.

I got nods from the room.

“It’s like The Southern Belles a few years ago,” Glen said. “This was before a lot of you came on the scene but it’s a lesson in how not to treat your fans. They were on top, the best-grossing group in America, then they made some ill-advised comments on a couple of things they didn’t understand but felt strongly about. The fallout was immediate. They couldn’t give away tickets to their shows and fans started to boycott stations that played their music. They went from No. 1 to gone completely in about five months. Here we are, 10 or 11 years later, and they still can’t get a whiff of a contract from anybody. It’s why I’ve always done my best to keep my views on things private. I know that it’s been close to 45 years since I did what most people consider an honest day’s work.”

“That’s what we’re trying to explain,” Susan said. “The public doesn’t see how hard you work. They think your life is easy. And, to be honest, you have it easier than most of the people you try to reach with your songs. Your kids aren’t going to go hungry if you cancel a show. The average person sees fancy cars and pretty wives and thinks that life is nothing but roses and caviar for an entertainer. They didn’t get to see how hard you’ve worked to get here. They don’t get to see what you have to do in order to stay on the scene. So, to them, it doesn’t exist.”

I saw five performers really considering their place in the world. None of them looked happy to have it spelled out so plainly.

“It’s like I’ve been saying,” Lucas said. “I never hear this stuff from the people that are supposed to tell me it. I get... ‘you’re a man of the people’ and ‘your music speaks to Real America’ and shit like that. Damn it! It sucks to be exposed as a fraud!”

“You’re not a fraud,” I said. “And, your music does speak to Real America. All of you can say that. You’ve all made a concerted effort to stay true to your roots – musically and personally. The problem is that ... the people that handle you don’t really want you to get too chummy with the fans. They want ... a product. They don’t want the fans to know that you pick your teeth or Liz bites her fingernails. They want larger-than-life celebrities that can make them money on endorsements and on record sales. They don’t want real people. They want the image they create.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “Just ... in 30 seconds ... I’ve thought of 10 or 15 things I wanted to do that would offer fans a better look at who I am. None of them got done. I was blocked or somebody talked me out of doing it.”

“Can we move back to the topic at hand?” Liz said. “I know what you’re experiencing because ... I’ve been around Travis and Susan for a few months. I got the chance to face this ... before Dallas. I had to take a hard look at what I’d become and how I became it. I didn’t like it but it took me a long time to understand why. You’ll all need to sit and think about things on your own and without a bunch of distractions before you can start to come up with a plan to change it. OK?”

“As I understand it,” Glen said, “we’re going to use somebody to let the labels know we mean business. Then we’re going to prove it by knocking the stuffing out of one of the streaming sites. Am I right so far?”

“That’s how I see it,” Melissa said.

The rest of the group nodded.

“What’s the timing on this?” Glen asked. “Are we looking to move immediately? Are we going to close the streaming site before or after we let the labels know what we’re holding?”

“I think after,” Conny said. “We let them know that they’ll see proof of our willingness to see this through and then ... we hit MusicMayhem.”

“It’s going to take a lot of time to get the word out to all the big labels,” Lucas noted.

“Not as long as you’d think,” Ben said. “News like this will be spread pretty quickly. If we let three or four labels in L.A. know it’s coming, the rest will get the word within ... six or seven hours.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “The news will spread like a very quiet wildfire. Now, this is important. The intermediary is not going to have any idea who he’s dealing with. He’ll know the cutout. The cutout will know ... me. But it’s probably best if we keep certain people in the dark. The intermediary ... very likely will fall on the other side of this argument. The entertainment industry put a lot of money in his coffers. I’m talking performers and the people in the nice, cushy offices. So we’ll keep him blind and let everybody else guess. There are some big names in the other genres that are really out front on this. Trey Money is talking it up to anybody that will listen. Lenny O. hijacked a press conference for his new disc to talk about it; even Alyssa Grace is helping us by trying to help herself. There will be a lot of suspects so ... everybody should try to act normally. OK?”

“What do you mean by that?” Melissa asked.

I smiled and winked at her.

“Figures you’d be the one that needs a definition of ‘normal, ‘“ I replied.

She gave me the finger and I smiled wider.

“He means ... go about your lives,” Susan offered. “Don’t cancel engagements; don’t be shy about talking about the things you’ve been talking about; don’t go into hiding. Be visible and continue to be vocal. Don’t change anything you’ve got going on. OK?”

“Got it,” Lucas said.

“I have something I’d like considered,” Conny said.

The rest of the room went silent and we turned our attention to her.

“Is that OK?” she asked.

“Of course,” Liz answered. “There is nothing anybody can bring up that won’t get a fair hearing and consideration. What do you want to talk about?”

“The labels,” Conny said. “I ... I thought getting out from under my first label was a huge accomplishment. Now I find out I moved from one cesspool to another. I think we have to make them accountable ... even if they institute the changes we want.”