Chapter 27: Arrival

Everyone was at the house when Cheri and Tony arrived. The entirety of the Smith and Harris family, every one of their friends, and even Go-Go and his wife showed up to welcome Cheri home.

And home it was. In the basement of the Smith house the room next to Tony's, long used as a hodgepodge of study, den, office, and catch-all, had been cleared out. All of Cheri's possessions and even the furniture from her room in the Harris home had been moved in and arranged.

Father and daughter would share their own little enclave in the basement. Tony figured it was something that probably should have been done long ago, but this put a conclusion on things that just seemed right to him.

When Cheri could break through her tears she spent time with each person, hugging and thanking them for the gesture.

After about an hour, most of the well-wishers had left. That left just the teens in the basement. They were sitting around on couches and chairs that had always existed, but for years now had been pushed to the side or stored somewhere to make room for the band's equipment. It was actually a useable living space again.

Rebecca was the first one to voice it. "It kind of feels like we're sitting around Tony and Cheri's living room, doesn't it?"

Tony laughed. "I think Mom and Dad might have some objection to that, but I see what you mean. With the band gone and the two of us living down here it does kind of seem like it."

"It seems too quite down here," Anita said. She was engulfed in an oversized easy chair, idly petting Sparkles who was on her lap. Sparkles had decided it was safe in the basement, now that the infernal noise generators seemed to have been removed.

"How 'bout you baby-girl? How do you feel?" Tony asked Cheri.

"I'm fine, more than fine. It's great here," she replied. "I'm more worried about her than me right now." She pointed to Rebecca perched in her favorite place, Tony's lap.

"I'll be fine Cheri. It's just me, Mom, and Dad again, but that's the way it's always been. I'm already more comfortable with it because it occurred to me that being jealous of you is like being the same of Tina and Anita. That would be just silly actually. It's actually kind of cool that you're both part of my family and Tony's now."

"Ewww! Think about it," Anita said. "If Cheri is Becs' first cousin and Tony is Cheri's dad, doesn't that mean Becs is actually dating her uncle now?"

That got a chorus of chuckles from the room.

Savannah, GA
April 1986

The first weekend in April saw Tony, Tina, Cheri, and Rebecca meeting at the school's office after the second period. The scowling Mrs. Peterson reluctantly allowed Tony to sign all four of them out of school. She didn't believe for a second that those truants were leaving to catch a plane to New York. And the cockamamie story they cooked up about making a music video, hogwash!

The amused teens ignored the secretary and hurried off to pick up Anita and head to the airport. This time they had to make their way through the normal airport procedures and catch a commercial flight. The entire band plus Bea and Cheri were going. Bea was finally getting a chance to work with the promotion agency that was handling the band and a first-class trip to New York City was a perk she wasn't about to miss out on. Tony just appointed Cheri secretary and all around girl-Friday for the band. Family harmony could not be assured if she was left behind.

It was first-class right down to the limousines and four-star hotel. It was also a lot of work in a very short period of time. Someone failed to mention that they weren't shooting a music video. They were shooting three of them. Like the recording experience, the easiest on the band was Hallelujah. It only included Tony and Rebecca and very little of Tony and was done fairly quickly. For some reason it was done on a rooftop.

Not unlike the recording studio, the band had no idea what they were to do. What it did involve was a lot of acting like they were playing and singing, most of it in front of what was just simply called, for obvious reasons, a blue screen. It did involve a trip to a nearby park that started as the sun rose on Sunday morning and involved a fog generator and what looked like a full live setup. It was complete with stage and instruments, but nothing resembling anything like an amp or a speaker of any sort. It amused the rest of the band that the 'location crew' was fascinated with Anita. Apparently video film crews didn't often see twelve-year-old girls in their line of work. While she was doing nothing but strumming chords on an acoustic guitar and singing she seemed to get as much camera time as the rest of the band combined.

Completely unlike the recording studio, while the band fell asleep one by one on the late flight from New York to Atlanta, they not only had no idea of what they were doing when they arrived, none of them had the slightest clue of what they had just done when they finished. Not one of them had the slightest idea what any of the videos would look like. They just suffered hour upon hour of wardrobe, makeup, and shooting simply by following instructions from Robert, (not Rob, Bob, and certainly not Bobby). The only good thing about 'Bobby' was that the disastrous blow to the effeminate Robert's ego and national pride was committed by Anita, the only one who could get away with it without causing an international incident. Robert was not American, as he would remind someone seemingly at random once an hour, he was Canadian. God-damn Americans couldn't make a music video with an instruction manual even if he himself wrote it.

The trip was an indirect result of the whole sordid situation with Gateway Records. It was now known as Cobblestone Nashville Studios and majority owned by Cobblestone Digital Studios in a bizarre canary-that-ate-the-cat transaction that had Tony and Tina basically selling it to themselves and making Cobblestone Nashville a subsidiary. Eighteen year-old Tony Smith was the chief executive officer. That fact scared pretty much everyone, Tony included. The talent search was on to find someone to actually run the whole thing so Tony could comfortably retire to a position as chairman of the board before he went to college.

The idea was sound. For a small fraction of its worth Cobblestone, under the guise of the siblings, wasn't buying a record company so much as its contracts and its music industry expertise and talents. The other side of that was that they were running a veritable recording empire out of a pre-fab building which included a rehearsal area and a shop for rebuilding wheelchairs. Now that the plans had been corrected to include a 2,000 square-foot climate controlled vault and enough space to house a larger corporate staff they had finally broken ground on what was no longer being called the studio, but jokingly referred to simply as "The HQ."

Part of the Gateway acquisition was an Artists and Repertoire department. Commonly known as A&R, they were responsible for scouting new artists and promoting them once signed. Uninformed, though well intentioned, attempts by Jake, Bea, and the band itself couldn't come close to matching Cobblestone Nashville's A&R machine. When that machine got its hands on the Chaos master it bolted into action. It wasn't just good enough, or even great, it was an A&R dream. Promotional budgets were quadrupled no matter the band's already incredibly liberal (by industry standards) contract with Cobblestone Digital.

It was slamming rock, power ballads, and that voice all wrapped up in an incredibly marketable package complete with plucky sidekick Anita Breeland. Everything was marketable. Dewayne would grab a portion of the normally non-rock oriented black market. Tina had female rockers covered, the unique guitar styles would appeal to the hard-core "in the know" rockers, and Rebecca Harris could make gold records on a street-corner with a hand-mike and an eight-track tape recorder.

Many in the department had tried to recruit them nine months before based on the potential that was obvious from one live recording. The reality of the studio recording had bonus checks being spent by the A&R workers before the first record was pressed.