Chapter 17C: Balance of Power

Two days later, Jake was sitting in his living room, sipping a rum and coke and flipping through a collection of apartment brochures that had been sent to him. Manny was already gone, his fate unknown to Jake and uncared about. Jake himself had thirty days to find new lodging.

He now had $79,780 in his bank account, his share of the $500,000 advance minus Pauline's twenty percent and the amount he'd spent on groceries for himself and the monthly insurance payment for his Corvette. On Pauline's advice he was already considering another thirty thousand of it to be gone as well, earmarked for federal and state income taxes, which he alone would be responsible for calculating and paying. That left him with about fifty grand to pay for housing, gas, insurance, groceries, clothing, and everything else he would need to buy until their first royalty payments started to come in. The best they could hope for there was next July, assuming they got an album out by December and assuming that album went platinum very quickly. If not, it would be after the third quarter of next year, October, before they saw more revenue since their advance money and all the other expenses would be recouped first. That fifty grand was going to have to stretch thirteen months.

Granted, this left him with about $3800 a month to spend free and clear. That was considerably more than the average middle-class citizen of the United States enjoyed at this particular point in history, but the average middle-class citizen did not live in Los Angeles and was not used to living in a luxury condo. Jake simply did not have enough money to continue living in the lifestyle to which he'd become accustomed. Comparable apartments went for around $2500 a month. He figured his budget would allow only about $1500, $1700 at the most, for housing. In that price range he could find nothing in the downtown area that was livable to his standards. If he wanted to keep up something of an air of luxury, he would have to travel outward, to the suburbs.

"Oh well," he said to himself as he lit a cigarette and took a sip from his drink. "I suppose there are people who would kill to have my problems."

He took a moment to worry about Darren and Coop. Both had checked into the Betty Ford Center, as scheduled, and were currently enjoying their first twenty-four hours without heroin. He hoped they would come out clean and stay clean but even if they did, they were already setting themselves up for big problems down the line. Jake and Bill had both offered to find new housing for them while they were in rehab but both had refused. National had stuck their noses in and offered to continue leasing their current condos to them, something that would eat up their advance money long before the first royalty check, even if it did come in July. Those condos went for three grand a month, plus dues.

The phone rang, interrupting his thoughts. He actually sat for three rings before remembering that Manny was no longer there to act as phone secretary. He got up and answered it.

"Mr. Kingsley?" a vaguely familiar voice said.

"Who is enquiring?" Jake asked.

"Ted Perkins," the voice said. "I'm in charge of the endorsements department at Brogan Guitars. We met a few years ago while you were recording your first album, remember?"

"Yes, I do," Jake said, and he did. Perkins was the rep who had pushed the Brogan guitars on them during the recording and touring stages of Descent Into Nothing. He was also one of the people who had called and threatened Matt with contract violation when he refused to play one on stage. "How did you get my number?"

"Mr. Crow over at National gave it to me," he said. "It is my understanding that the endorsement contract we held with National regarding the guitar you play onstage during your tour is no longer valid."

"That's your understanding, huh?" Jake said suspiciously, not volunteering anything further. The contract they had just signed contained a strict non-disclosure clause about its very existence.

"This is information Mr. Crow gave to me," Perkins said. "I am told that you and all of the other guitar players of the group are now independent agents for touring contract endorsements."

"Yes," he said carefully. "I suppose we are. What exactly is it that you want, Mr. Perkins?"

"Please," he said, "call me Ted."

"Ted," Jake said. "What is that you want?"

"Well, I want to offer you an endorsement contract," he said. "I know you like our guitars, Mr. Kingsley, and it is our hope that you will continue to play them onstage."

"What kind of endorsement contract?" Jake asked.

"We should probably discuss this in person. Would nine o'clock tomorrow morning be convenient?"

"Tomorrow?"

"I could send a limousine to your residence to pick you up if you wish."

"Uh... why don't you just give the basics of what you're offering right now?" Jake asked. "And then we'll go from there."

Perkins didn't seem to like this but he went forth anyway. "We are prepared to offer you a five hundred thousand dollar endorsement fee if you would agree to exclusively play Brogan guitars on your upcoming tour and another five hundred thousand on any subsequent tours. In addition, we will provide you with free instruments for the duration of this contract."

"Half a million bucks a tour?" Jake asked. "Is that what you were paying National before?"

"I'm afraid I am not allowed to discuss the details of contracts with other clients," Perkins said.

"When would I get that money?" Jake asked.

"It would payable upon the signing of the contract," Perkins said. "Of course, if you were to not go out on tour for whatever reason, or if you were to play different guitars on stage, you would be obligated to return that money to us along with a moderate breach of contract fee."

"Of course," Jake said. "Look, Perkins, let me think this thing over for a bit. I'll get back to you."

"Uh... well... sure," he said. "But how about that meeting tomorrow? Are we still on for that?"

"I'll let you know," Jake said. "What's your number?"

He recited his telephone number and Jake wrote it down. Before he could say anything further, Jake hung up on him. He consulted a sheet of paper and dialed the number for the Hyatt Hotel. Pauline had moved in there the moment her hundred grand had been deposited in her account. She too was now looking for luxury apartments in the LA area.

"What's up?" she asked when she came on the line.

"I just got this phone call," Jake said. He then told her about his conversation with Perkins.

"Half a million bucks, huh?" she said, whistling appreciatively. "Not bad for just playing a certain guitar. I bet you can do better though."

"You think so?"

"It's worth a shot anyway. Didn't you always say you loved your Les Paul but you only liked the Brogan?"

"Yeah," he said. "I did say that." This too was true. Though the Brogan was actually a little bit sturdier of an instrument with more modern components, a Les Paul was a classic, the kind of guitar a musician could bond with.

"Why don't we call up Gibson and see if maybe they are interested in an endorsement contract? It can't hurt, can it?"

"No," Jake agreed. "I guess it can't. Will you talk to them for me?"

"What are big sisters for?"

As it turned out, Gibson was very interested in an endorsement contract with Jake Kingsley. They offered him a million dollars per tour and free instruments for life if he would exclusively play the Les Paul onstage. Pauline told them they would check with Brogan to see if they were willing to make a counter offer. Gibson then upped the offer to $1.5 million per tour and, in addition, they promised to release a Jake Kingsley signature model Les Paul for sale to the general public and they would give Jake a commission of twenty dollars for each one that was sold.

"Where do I sign?" Jake asked.

"But, Jake," Pauline said, "shouldn't we run this offer through a few more guitar makers first? There's a good chance that Brogan or Fender might up it."

"Nope," Jake said. "The deal couldn't get any better for me. I was planning on playing my Les Paul onstage for free anyway. Let's wrap it up and get it signed."

They wrapped it up and got it signed. Since Pauline had brokered the deal, she received $300,000 of the $1.5 million and would get four dollars for each guitar sold. Jake looked at his bank balance the day the money was wired and stared at the amount for almost fifteen minutes. There was now $1,279,203 in there. It was now official. He was a millionaire.

Matt was the next to become a millionaire. Learning from Jake's experience and utilizing the negotiation skills of Pauline, he signed an endorsement contract with Fender to do exactly what he had already been doing: play his Stratocaster onstage. They gave him two million dollars per tour and promised him thirty dollars for each Matt Tisdale signature model that was sold to the public.

This led to the rest of the band signing endorsement deals of their own. Bill accepted $750,000 to play a Steinway Concert grand piano while on tour. The Steinway people even promised to install high-fidelity pick-up microphones for optimum sound reproduction. Coop, from within the walls of the Betty Ford Center, actually got a bidding war going between Ludwig, Pearl, Lexington, and Yamaha, with Yamaha finally offering him half a million per tour and giving him a commission of twelve dollars per John "Coop" Cooper signature starter set that was sold. Darren was the only one who didn't get a six-figure deal. Brogan ended up offering him a relatively paltry $75,000 to continue playing their bass guitar during tours and to appear in advertisements in various rock music magazines. There was no Darren Appleman signature bass proposed and, thus, no commission. Part of the reason Darren didn't fare as well as the others in the endorsement game was because he was a bass player and that was simply not perceived to be as glamorous as the other positions in the band. A bigger part of the reason, however, was that he chose not to use Pauline as a negotiator and mouthpiece for brokering the deal.

"I ain't paying her twenty percent to get me a fuckin' deal with a guitar company," he said stubbornly when Jake — during one of his visits to the Betty Ford Center — suggested that it might be a good idea. "It's bad enough I had to give her twenty percent of the hundred grand we got for signing the contract."

This was typical of Darren's attitude toward the rest of the band during this period. While Coop seemed to be responding well to the treatment and seemed genuinely happy to be shaking off his heroin addiction, Darren was full of excuses and resentment. Counselors told Jake on several occasions that he hadn't even acknowledged the first and most important step of the therapy, which was to admit that he was addicted and had a problem. As a result of this stubbornness, Ted Perkins met with Darren on day 24 of his stay at the Betty Ford Center and put an endorsement contract before him that offered perhaps half of what he would've got with Pauline's help and was chock full of loopholes such as the magazine advertisement requirement, a rider that dictated he would not get paid until the tour actually started, and that he would have to reimburse Brogan a proportionate amount for any tour dates that were missed.

"We're gonna keep having problems with him," Jake opined on day thirty of the rehab, the final day.

"Yep," Matt agreed. "The best we can hope for is to keep him in line through the recording process and the tour."

On October 3, 1985, Intemperance entered their rehearsal warehouse (the rent on which was now entirely paid by National Records instead of being recouped from band profits) for the first time since recording the atrocious demo tape that had kicked off the dispute and eventual renegotiation. Their instruments were dusty and out of tune, requiring two hours of cleaning and maintenance before they could even begin playing.

"Jake and I have both been working on new tunes during this whole thing we've been going through," Matt said. "I have about six and Jake has seven or eight, right, Jake?"

"Probably seven," Jake said. "I'm not really sure about that last one I was working on."

"Fair enough," Matt said. "But for now, how about we start by refreshing ourselves on the three main tunes we had done before this whole thing started? Does everyone remember them?"

"You mean the ones you said sucked ass?" asked Darren. "The ones you replaced with that crappy shit we put on the tape?"

"You know why we did that," said Jake. "That got us the new contract we're under, remember?"

"I kind of liked the old contract," Darren said. "Nobody asked me or Coop if we wanted to change it."

"You liked it because it let you shoot heroin to your heart's content," Jake told him. "You didn't even care that it was bankrupting you."

"Hey, fuck off, Jake!" Darren shouted. "Just because you scored a fucking million and a half endorsement contract off this new deal doesn't mean the rest of us have to like it!"

"Hey!" Matt yelled. "Knock it off, both of you. We ain't going there. We're here to play some music and get an album together, so let's fuckin' do it."

Jake and Darren both glared at each other for a moment and then nodded.

"Let's do it," Darren said.

"Yeah," Jake agreed. "Let's see if we still got it."

"That's the fuckin' spirit," Matt said. "Let's do Service Me first.

They didn't still have it, not at first anyway. One or the other of them would constantly miss a cue or play the wrong piece or flat out forget what they were supposed to be doing. Jake screwed up the lyrics, letting entire sections go unsung. The harmony of the rest of the members during the chorus was unharmonious at best. But they kept at it, referring to music sheets and lyric sheets and starting over again and again. Finally, after almost two hours, they managed to play the entire song all the way through without having anyone screw up.

"All right," said Matt, nodding in satisfaction. "That was almost un-shitty. Now let's do it again. From the beginning."

They did it again, almost flawlessly. And then they did it again. And as they played and sang, gripping their instruments, pounding their drums and piano keys, letting their voices be heard, the magic of making music slowly overtook them. They let their fears and resentments, their worries and anxieties, slip away from them, floating out on a stream of electrons through wires, pounding out as vibrations through the air emitted by amplifiers. They became a band again, doing what they did best: playing their music. By the time they called it a day at six o'clock that evening, they'd dialed in two of their previous tunes and were well on their way to dialing in the third. They left the warehouse in much better moods than they'd entered it with, even Darren, who was still pondering how good it would feel to drive a needle full of heroin into his vein and wondering when the scrutiny would be off of him enough that he could do it again.

There wasn't a day that went by that Steve Crow didn't call either Jake or Matt to hound them about when he could expect a demo tape on his desk.

"We're already out of the Grammy Awards for next year since there's no way in hell we're going to get an album out by January 1," he complained to Jake one day. "And that fucking band of spics you got in a fight with released their new album three weeks ago. Have you heard that shit? They're already tearing up the charts! They're going to go gold in less than two months!"

"What does that have to do with us?" Jake asked.

"It means they're going to be in the awards and you are not," Crow said. "Do you have any idea how much free publicity we're missing out on by not being in the awards?"

"We're going as fast as we can, Steve," Jake said. "Have patience."

"If you would've been working on this new material during the contract negotiations you could've gone right into the studio once it was signed."

"Steve, think about that for a minute," Jake told him. "If we would've done that our entire negotiating position would have been compromised. You're lucky that Matt and I were even composing new tunes during all that. We could've just been sitting on our asses."

"I suppose," he said. "I'm just letting you know that you're in danger of obscurity. It's been almost two years since Thrill was released. A lot of your fans might have forgotten about you."

"Is that why Thrill is still in the top ten album chart?" Jake asked. "Is that why three of the songs on Thrill are still the most requested on rock radio stations nationwide?"

"That's now," Crow said. "It'll still take at least three months to record your tunes once they're submitted. A lot can change in three months."

"We will record no tune before its time, Steve," Jake told him. "We're getting there, okay? When we have the demo tape ready for you, we'll submit it."

"Three good songs and seven filler tunes," Crow pleaded. "That's all we ask, Jake."