Dissonance - Chapter 2

Friday I was getting a late start again, but this time on purpose. We had our first meeting with our studio rep, who had wanted to come out and see us before we met him again at the studio next week.

Although we’d been working out of Mr. French’s garage, this kind of meeting needed something more formal as a setting, which is why we were doing it at the Blue Ridge. While not formal, it was several steps above a high school teacher’s garage, especially in summer in the south, when we all felt like we might melt even with the garage door wide open.

Since he’d scheduled it for the middle of the afternoon, so we could use the dining room without bothering, or being bothered, by the normal lunch crowd, none of us felt like setting up our equipment for practice just to break it all down a few hours later to make it to the meeting.

I will admit, it was nice to get to sleep in for the first time since just after school got out, and we signed the contract. I didn’t get up until lunchtime, and only then because the phone was ringing. Mom had already left for work, and we’d given the label our home number, since anything official had to go through mom, because I was a minor. With the meeting coming up, there was always a chance that it was something about that, so I couldn’t just roll over and ignore it.

“Hello?” I said after stumbling into the way too bright front room to answer the phone.

“Did I wake you up? It’s practically lunchtime?”

“Victor?” I asked, recognizing his voice.

“Yes. Everything okay? You’re not sick or anything, are you?”

“I’m fine. I just had a chance to sleep in for the first time since school got out, or at least I did until I was rudely woken up by the phone.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” he said, his voice sounding anything but sorry. “I heard through the grapevine that you were going to be out here next week.”

“This grapevine wouldn’t own a restaurant and practice martial arts, would it?”

“It does. It also said you shouldn’t slack-up on your training just because you’re going to be out of town all summer.”

I don’t know why I didn’t suspect this sooner. Chef had been really supportive of my success, to the point that I didn’t question it when he didn’t even bring up the fact that I was going to miss training all summer. He’d been teaching me self-defense, mixed martial arts, and kung fu since the end of last summer and, except for a few days off here or there for injuries or something school or family-related, I hadn’t missed any training. Even when I did have to miss for something unavoidable, he’d made sure I did double the next time we worked out. Why I somehow thought he’d just let me go for three months with no training after all of that, was beyond me; but, I hadn’t even questioned it.

“I’m going to be really busy,” I said.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to train. I mean, I enjoyed it when I was doing it and it had saved my butt multiple times over the last year. But I also had my literal dreams on the line, and I didn’t want anything to get in the way of making this work.

“I know, and I’m not asking for a major commitment. Chef put me in contact with one of your teachers, whose garage I think you’ve been practicing in, so I could get some kind of idea of your free time. Apparently, while you will all be working very hard, you’re only allotted so much studio time each day, since there are other people also needing the space. Yesterday, he said he should be able to give me your producers’ number, and would let him know to expect a call about working with your schedule.”

All I could do was shake my head. Vincent was the hatchet man, but I could feel Chef’s fingers in this. If I had to bet, he’d be the one actually making the calls and working things out. Chef had a way of dealing with people that always ended up with him getting what he wanted.

“I’m not getting out of this, am I?” I asked.

I’d put enough surrender in my voice to try and make him feel guilty. Although it would have never worked on either mom or Chef, Vincent was in his twenties without a long track record of dealing with teenagers. From the long pause after my question, my ploy at teen angst seemed to be working.

“Look, we both know who’s the driving force behind this. When I get off the phone with you, I have to call Chef and report in. If you honestly tell me you don’t have time, I’ll cover for you, but stop and think about it first. You’ve made some serious progress and worked really hard at this all year. You’re going to be really surprised what almost three months off is going to do to your conditioning and form. Your dedication to this so far is why you’ve done so well.”

“I get that, and while I love it, I’m not sure this is something I want to dedicate my life to. Chef talked me into going to a competition a few months ago, and honestly, it was a huge mistake. Looking back on it, I could have been seriously hurt; or worse, seriously hurt my hand. I’m on the edge of something really amazing here, and I don’t want to jeopardize it following someone else’s dream.”

“Then don’t spar or compete. Chef will push you as far as he can, because he wants you to be the best you can be, but he understands this isn’t going to be everyone’s life. Hell, he’s heard you play, so he knows it’s not going to be yours. Long run, though, even if you only train and do some light sparring just in training, it’ll still be worth it. I don’t mean for actual fighting, although with your track record I wouldn’t put that off as unimportant, but in just your mental and physical health. Honestly, how do you feel now, compared to how you felt a year ago?”

“Good,” I said.

That was an understatement. I felt the best I’d ever felt in my life, at least physically. It had been the most evident when I was playing baseball last semester. I’d always enjoyed playing ball, but I hadn’t been nearly as good as I was last semester. Part of that was having real coaching instead of just playing pickup games, but a big part of it was also just being in much better physical shape than I'd been in, before.

It was also a big help on the stage every Friday and Saturday night, since it could get pretty grueling playing guitar and singing at full energy for multiple hours. If these same opportunities had come up a year ago, I might not have been able to keep it up and perform at the same level the whole time.

“So don’t lose what you’ve built up. Let’s just try it and see how it goes, okay?”

He was right, but I still didn’t love that I was being manipulated. Chef was almost like a father, or at least a father figure, for me and one of the reasons I’d managed to get the opportunities I had right now, I hated the way he’d sometimes manipulate people. I know a lot of that is from working with teens and young adults who had bad home lives or were resistant to doing things they should, but he knew me well enough to know he could have just sat me down and talked to me about this like Victor was.

Someday soon, we were going to have to sit down and have a discussion about his little games.

“Okay, fine. Let’s schedule times for me to come work out with you. If it starts getting in the way, though, I’m going to shut it down.”

“Which you should. I’m glad you’re giving it a chance. I know music is your thing, but you’ve got a natural talent for martial arts. It would be a shame to waste it.”

We said our goodbyes and hung up. I didn’t say anything to him, partly because his ego was already big enough and partly because I didn’t want Victor to think I approved in any way of his playing a part in Chef’s game, but I was looking forward to seeing him. Training with Chef was great, but I really enjoyed getting a different perspective on things. For one, Chef mostly sat on the sides and instructed, while Victor would get in and actually show me what I was doing wrong, which usually made it a whole lot easier to figure out what a given move should look like.

They also both had very different outlooks on life that made their training feel so much different. Besides, Victor was a lot closer to my age. Even if he was a decade older, I enjoyed hanging out with him.

I decided to go ahead and just get my day started since I was already up. Now that I wasn’t groggy and was over my dealing with Chef and Victor, I was starting to get excited about today. We had the contract and had been practicing, but meeting the studio rep and going over the plan for next week was the first real step towards us recording our first album, which was still blowing my mind.

Kat had swim practice, so it was only Hanna and I riding over to the Blue Ridge. She must have been pretty excited too, because she was standing in her back yard, waiting for me as I came across the creek and small wooded area that separate the trailer park from her subdivision.

We were the first ones there, but the rest of the band arrived shortly after, since they were still having to drive the hour back and forth between Wellsville and Ashville every day.

The studio rep, however, was almost an hour late, to the point I started wondering if I should call Rowan to find out what we should do. I couldn’t really call the label, since we didn’t have a contact yet. We wouldn’t meet the manager they were assigning us until the tour and the guy who’d come here last month to negotiate my contract had just been a lawyer with the label and wasn’t involved in the day-to-day. The guy we were meeting today would be our actual point of contact if we needed something that our manager, when we finally met him, couldn’t take care of.

Right about the time I was starting to decide I really did need to call Rowan, a guy walked through the doors of the Blue Ridge looking enough out of place that he had to be from the label.

While I would have thought a music label out of Nashville would have been country-focused, or at least southern, everyone I had met so far seemed straight out of central casting in New York or Los Angeles, and none seemed particularly comfortable with the way things were done in the south.

Here, even most of the rich people dressed at least mostly casually and it wasn’t uncommon to see boots with a suit. Guys wearing highly polished shoes and light blue, pin-striped suits with hair that looked to have a gallon of some kind of gel in it looked wildly out of place.

“Which one of you kids is Charlie,” He asked, coming up to us.

I did not love being called kids. Admittedly, Chef was in the kitchen so the oldest person in the empty dining area was twenty-four, but this guy couldn’t have been a year or two more than thirty, and had a condescending tone that instantly set me the wrong way.

“I’m Charlie,” I said, trying, and failing, to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

Hanna, who knew me well enough to recognize my tone, made an expression at me from behind the guy’s back basically telling me to be on my best behavior.

“Hey, man, it’s good to meet you,” he said, grabbing my hand, which had been down by my side, and shaking it. “I’m Kent Graham and I’ll be your contact with the studio, which I know you’ve probably already figured out, but hey, better to say these things aloud. Am I right? I listened to some of the stuff Tony had recorded when he was out here, and I have to say, I loved it. I’ve listened to a lot of new groups, and you guys have some serious potential.”

Although I hadn’t really gotten a chance to meet him, I knew he was referring to the music scout who’d come to hear one of the regular shows we played here at the Blue Ridge. His recommendation was one of the big reasons we’d ended up getting signed for a contract.

“Thanks,” I said, thrown a little off balance.

He’d gone from condescending to genuine sounding praise and enthusiasm so fast that it was hard to get a handle on him. I’d been prepared to hate him as soon as he called us kids, but the attitude had dropped almost instantly.

“So,” he said, sitting down at the table we’d all been around and pulling a laptop out of the, I assume expensive, backpack he’d been carrying. “Are you guys excited for next week?”

“Yep,” I said, with everyone making sounds of agreement. “We’ve been working on our songs, trying to get them ready, every day since we signed the contract.”

“Good, good,” he said, clicking away at his laptop. “You wouldn’t believe the number of new bands we’ve signed that aren’t used to the level of work that’s going to be expected of them when they get in the studio, so I’m glad to hear you guys are on top of it. I do want to warn you to not to get too fixated on what you’re doing now. Working in a garage and in a studio are very different things, and your producer will have definite ideas about where a song should go. This’ll work best if you’re prepared to be flexible.”

“We are,” I said. “I’ve actually worked with a producer before, although not formally. I haven’t heard yet if he’s going to be our producer on this, but I know he was calling the label about it.”

“If you mean Rowan Hughes, he is, and I am really excited about this. I don’t think I need to tell you how big of an opportunity this is, since you know him. Have you heard the new record he produced for House of Grace? Holy cow, it’s good. He’s already got two Grammy’s and I think he’s going to end up with another one this year. I swear, anything he touches turns to gold, which is good for us. Am I right? Especially since he’s coming in so cheap. When they told me he’d called about producing your record, I was like, no freaking way, ’cause not in a million years would anyone pay for a guy of his level for a brand new band. That’s not a judgment on you guys, mind you, just how the business is. Hell, he’s actually making it easier on our budget, since he agreed to straight minimums, putting everything else on the backend. But that’s numbers stuff and I’m sure you guys aren’t interested in that.”

I was shocked at how fast and long this guy talked before he finally stopped to draw a breath.

“Uhh …” Was all I could manage, not quite sure how to respond to the flood of words.

“You were going to tell us about how things were going to work next week,” Hanna said, prodding him along.

“Right. Your first day in the studio is a week from tomorrow. We have twelve hours of studio time booked through Sunday. I know that may seem like a lot to you, but I want you to understand how compressed that is. Considering the tour schedule you have set up, which starts in the same area, we decided against flying you out somewhere with more workable studio facilities, which really limited the window we have available to us. Normally, it takes about sixty to a hundred hours of studio time for an album to really take shape, with groups who don’t have a lot of experience in the process taking closer to the hundred hours. You’re going to fall roughly in the middle of that time frame, which would normally really concern me, but I’m confident Rowan will be able to keep you focused.”

“We already have all of the songs ready, though,” I said. “That should help.”

“It does, to a degree, but most of your studio time isn’t used writing songs. It’s figuring out the specifics. Things can sound good in front of a crowd and completely different when put on tape. Things you were able to brush over in person will become a lot more obvious when you start hearing it broken out. When it comes to the actual studio time, I’m not worried about that. Rowan knows how to run a room and I’m sure he’ll be able to keep you all on track. What I want to talk about is what you do outside of that time. It’ll be tempting after a long day in the studio to go out and blow off some steam. Everyone I’ve ever worked with has done it, even when they say ‘no, we’ll be good and stay focused,’ so I’m not going to delude myself into trying to talk you out of it. What I will say is this. You have a very limited time to get this right, and this is your one shot. Your dailies, that is everything you record every day, will end up back at the label and someone, often me, will be listening to it. If there is a consensus that it isn’t taking shape into something marketable by the halfway point, there will start to be discussions about pulling out before we spend any more money on this. Coming in hungover, still drunk or otherwise messed up will make it hard to produce what you have to do. I’ve seen a lot of guys getting their first shot and crashing and burning because they didn’t take it seriously enough. Keep your eye on the prize, because it’s hard to get a second shot if you blow your first one.”

“We will,” Hanna said, before I could reply.

“Good. Once your studio time is done, it’ll be time to start your first tour. I understand all of you have been on some level of tour before, but mostly on a smaller level, right?”

“Yep,” I said.

I’d gone to several stops with Willie Johnson, an old-school blues musician who’d been the regular house band at the Blue Ridge until we started splitting time with them partway through last year. He’d been the one to convince Chef I should have a shot at music, and asked me to sit in with his band when I first moved to town. He’d helped me learn a lot about music and the music business, and when he’d done his annual tour, he’d let me go with him on a few stops. The rest of the guys, being older, had been in groups before and had done small local tours. For all of us, this would be the largest thing we’d done, with actual money behind the tour instead of just a random booking of gigs. From the schedule I’d seen, we’d still be playing small clubs, but that was a step up from the bars we’d played in before.

“Good. That means you’ll at least be comfortable up on stage. You don’t have a big name yet, so most of the places you’ll be playing at, you’ll be the mid-week fill-in. We’ve managed to arrange for some radio time in most of the markets you’ll be in, which should help bring out a few people, and we’re going to try and get radio play in those markets, but that isn’t a sure thing, so expect the crowds to be mostly disinterested. They’ll be there to hear music, but won’t know you or really care whose playing. Don’t let that get you discouraged. This is where a lot of bands start, and even if none of your songs breakthrough on a national level, you can make a good living doing regional tours and building a smaller, but dedicated fan base.”

“I saw the schedule yesterday, and it said they had fifteen stops,” Hanna said. “Is there marketing in all of those locations?”

This was the first I’d heard about our schedule, other than our first stop was July the first and our last was August seventh. Although it didn’t surprise me, I hadn’t realized Hanna had managed to get the full schedule yet. I was glad she was on top of it, but I did wish she’d shown it to me.

“No, we’re still working on it. Five of the performances will be opening for someone else who’s already done several shows. They’re fairly regional, but they’ve got a bit of a base already, and piggy-backing you on their tour will help get yours off the ground. Since they’re also signed with us, it lets us combine the marketing. Since you’re the opener, you won’t have any marketing specific to you. They’ll be doing all the radio spots, although we do have a couple of DJs we work with from time to time that we’ll send your record to when it’s finished. They’ll at least listen to it and, if they like it, hopefully they’ll get you some playtime. This’ll also let you get a feel for how the tour is going to go without the pressure of having to carry it yourself. After those first five, you’ll be breaking off and doing your own gigs. Right now, all but two are solo gigs, meaning you won’t have any openers, which is good and bad. We do have a call out for local performers and we’ll try to get someone at all of your stops before you get there. They’ll have a little local following that will come to see them, and hopefully stay to hear you, which’ll help pad your numbers. This is the key thing about your first tour. It’s all about building up your fan base, so that next time you come through, you’ll already have a pre-set number of people you might be able to expect, making each tour a little larger than the last.”

“Since they’ll be on their own there, you said they’ll have some interviews and radio time for those stops though, right?” Hanna asked.

“They should. We’ve booked a few spots already, most of them with the morning drive-time shows, so be prepared to get up very early. We’ll have more by the time the tour actually comes around. Most DJs want to have some idea of what you sound like, or who you are, before they agree to schedule an interview. So, a lot of that’ll have to wait until we finish in the studio, and have something tangible to send them. That’s the other reason we wanted to start the first leg of the tour piggybacking off of a more established act. It gives us time to get your music into the hands of the DJs and their producers so we can finish setting up the back two-thirds of the tour. As you can imagine, a lot of new groups are competing for the same air time, because for an unknown group, a mention on drive time radio can be the difference between having enough people come out to make the stop worthwhile or empty seats. If you get empty seats, it will be harder to book a venue the next time, since the venue makes most of their money on the door and concessions.”

“So, no late nights on tour, either,” Hanna said.

“That’ll be harder to manage and I’m not saying don’t have a good time. I’m not your parent and neither is your tour manager, so we’re not going to tell you what you can and can’t do. I will say this. Most of these venues don’t know who you are. They’re giving you stage time because we have deals with them. They want to keep us happy, and they need to keep the acts coming. If you get a reputation for being difficult, it will be harder to find places to play the next time through. These guys talk. If you’re so messed up, or so tired that you can’t finish your set; if you break or destroy stuff, or cause other problems; you’ll find yourselves having a hard time getting stage time in that market again.”

“We’ll take it seriously,” I said.

I got why he was pointing all this out. Although I’d been more or less insulated from the wilder side of the industry, I knew it existed. Although I didn’t realize what I’d seen at the time, I’d watched people doing all kinds of drugs while I was traveling with my dad. They usually hid it when they realized I was around, but it was impossible to miss the after effects. That, of course, didn’t even touch my dad’s alcoholism, which I knew first hand had cost him a lot of work over the years as he became less and less reliable.

“Good. The thing most people in my position never point out to artists until it’s too late, is that this is a numbers game. If you are making money for the label, you’ll have a lot of opportunities ahead of you. If you’re doing things that end up costing the label money instead, you’ll find yourself out of the business; and, second chances in this industry are hard to come by. Like I said, I’m not your parent, so I’m not going to tell you what you can and can’t do. But if you make it so I can’t get you air time, can’t get your record finished without going into overages on the studio, or can’t book you into venues, we’ll have to find a different group to put our money behind. You guys have a great sound and a ton of potential, so let’s make this profitable for all of us.”

I had a suspicion he didn’t have this same conversation with every group he worked with. He wasn’t being patronizing, exactly, but I could tell a lot of this was because I was a lot younger than the normal people they worked with.

I wasn’t mad about it, though. Even though he might not say it to everyone, the math of ‘do we make the label money or not,’ was going to be true for everyone; and labels wouldn’t hesitate to cut people not making them money. Dad had probably never gotten this lecture, and I’d witnessed him burn his career down around himself, slowly making himself more and more unbookable.

I’d rather get a lecture now, than end up like that.