Fanfare (Country Roads #2) - Chapter 44

Monday, it was weird waking up and having nowhere to be. My first year of public school was over and I’d more or less survived it. I spent most of the day at Hanna’s just hanging out with her and Kat, not really doing anything in particular.

Since the audition was over, the daily practice sessions had ended, which meant the only thing I had to do was go train with Chef. I honestly felt a little at loose ends, since my schedule had suddenly gone from completely packed to empty literally overnight.

This is how I found myself sitting on the floor of Hanna’s living room watching a dumb romantic comedy that both of the girls were tearing up over when my phone rang.

“Charlie?” the voice said, a little unsure.

It took me a moment to recognize the caller as Rowan, since he’d never called me before and his voice sounded a little different on the phone.

“Yeah.”

“Are you, your band, and your mother able to be available tomorrow afternoon at four pm?”

“Mom works during the day, but I can ask her if she can get off. Why?”

“I don’t want to say yet, because things are still being finalized, but if at all possible, I’d like for the two of you to meet us at that restaurant place where you played the other night. It’s important that she’s there with you.”

“You’re being really cryptic.”

“I know! I can’t give any specifics right now, because I don’t want to promise anything that won’t happen, but this could be a big deal.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to her,” I said.

“Great. See you there.”

“What was that?” Hanna asked.

“It was Rowan. He wants me, the band, and Mom, I guess because I’m a minor, at the Blue Ridge at four tomorrow, but he won’t say why.”

“It has to be about that label scout, right? I mean, you only know him through music stuff and they said the other day how he and the scout kind of knew each other.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe it’s just a series of gigs or something. I don’t want to start thinking I’m going to become famous and then find out it’s just a tour of Jim-Bob’s music and hotdog stands across the southwest.”

“I hear that’s how Alton Stone got his big break,” Kat said, referring to one of the big names in early rock.

He’d made his name traveling tiny venues in the 50s, exposing audiences to an up-tempo version of blues that would lead the way into rock. Of course, he was a fluke. Most people who spend a large part of their career playing in tiny venues never made it out of those tiny venues.

“That was also like a hundred years ago. I’m just saying, let’s not get our hopes up.”

I called Mom and luckily, she normally got off at five. She asked around and she found someone who’d cover her the last hour, and she could work through lunch, which meant she wouldn’t even have to make up the time. While that did have her getting out just as the meeting was supposed to start, it was a small town, so it wouldn’t take her long to make it to us.

The rest of the guys all said they could make it, but I hadn’t been worried about that. They’d all been scraping by before we formed up, and the regular gigs we had at the moment meant none of them had to have a day job, although the tiny amount we got paid for all those gigs meant they still lived hand to mouth.

Despite what I said to Hanna, I was completely in my head about what the meeting was about the rest of the day and had a lot of trouble falling asleep that night. Thankfully, I didn’t have anywhere else to be, so I could sleep in, but I couldn’t keep from working through scenarios in my head of what might happen. It was hard to not dream about getting some big record contract and having them fly me out to the coast, where’d I’d cut my first record and play in a stadium to tens of thousands of fans.

Of course, I knew that wasn’t how it worked. Just because someone got a record contract, unless they started getting picked up for a lot of air-time or ended up on some kind of viral video, it just meant more regional sales, small tours, and a slow build building fan base. If getting a record contract was a one-in-a-million shot, turning that into being an A-list act was a one-in-a-billion.

Of course, the pessimistic part of my brain told me that Rowan was just being nice, the scout had actually hated the show he saw, and Rowan wanted to come down and let us down easy. Of course, the logical part of my brain also had something to say about this, since if that was what was happening, there was no reason for my mother to be there.

I’d expected Mom to be the last one there, but she showed up fifteen minutes after four, and still no sign of Rowan. Everyone was a little antsy and Mom was more than a little annoyed when it looked like she took off work just to get stood up. We were just talking about everyone leaving when Rowan finally pushed through the doors, followed by a man in a suit I didn’t recognize.

“Sorry I’m late. There was an overturned eighteen-wheeler that backed the freeway up. I appreciate you all staying I … Chef Tang, you’d mentioned a lawyer?”

“Yes. He’s also coming up from Asheville, so he probably got caught in the same traffic you did. Let’s give him a few minutes.”

“What …” I started to ask when Mr. Eaves came through the door accompanied by another stranger, making it a day of reunions, of a sort.

“And here he is now,” Chef said. “We have to open for dinner in forty-five minutes, which gives you less time than I think we all prepared for, so I think it’s best if we skip all the formalities and get right to it.”

“Not a bad call,” Rowan said, gesturing for everyone who’d stood up to take a seat at the big table Chef had put us at. “I’m going to start off by doing something that I think Mr. Goodman here might not like, but I’m going to give you a little background. I think most of you have heard of MAC records, and probably know them as the label for a lot of the big Pop names. What you probably don’t know is they’ve been looking at branching out into more genres to compete with Double-A and Echo, who are the big names in the business. The problem they’ve been running into is that they aren’t comfortable signing an artist that works purely in a genre they don’t know very well, which is where you come in. Last week a scout for MAC records came to one of your shows, and went back with a pretty favorable review, especially about how well you’ve managed to blend several genres together, with some songs that would fit well in ‘country’ and others that would fit in ‘rock,’ but all of which had enough ‘pop’ base to them that it’s not out of MAC’s wheelhouse. He talked to the acquisitions team, and they decided to send Mr. Goodman down here to talk with you. Since I have a long relationship with MAC, and they know we know each other, they asked if I’d tag along and sing the label’s praises … which brings us to today.”

He finally wound down and paused, I guess to see if anyone had anything to say, but all of us were a little too stunned to actually say anything, because it sounded very much like he was saying we were about to be offered a record contract.

“Well,” the man I assumed was Mr. Goodman said. “We normally go into this trying to not overplay our hand but I guess that’s the downside of having someone like Rowan here in the meeting. He is correct in saying we received a favorable report from Mr. Singleton about your performance, some of which he recorded and passed around the office. On the strength of his recommendation and the little bit that we heard, we do feel that you would be a good fit for MAC records, and I’m here to convince you to join our family.”

“Seriously?” I said, still not quite able to wrap my brain around it.

“Believe it,” Rowan said.

I think it sunk in for everyone at the same time; because - except for Chef, Mr. Eaves, and his guest, Rowan, and Mr. Goodman, all of whom I suspect already knew what was coming - we all exploded into pandemonium. Hanna had joined us as our not quite official manager and Kat had tagged along because she didn’t want to be left in the dark while everyone else was here. We were all out of our seats and Kat and Hanna were jumping up and down, hugging each other.

Mom at least managed to maintain her composure to some degree and stayed in her seat while the rest of us acted like fools.

I looked up to see Chef tap his watch in reminder and said, “Okay, okay. Let’s settle down. Chef wants to open up in a little bit and I’m sure there’s more to this than just waving a magic wand and giving us the contract.”

“Not as much as you’d expect,” Mr. Goodman said, pulling a stack of papers out of the briefcase he’d been carrying. “The contract for first-time artists is pretty boilerplate, so it shouldn’t take much work. I know the entire band is here, but I think I should say up front that the offer is for Charlie as a solo artist. Now, that doesn’t preclude the entire band from being a part of the deal nor does it mean that any product will be solely under Charlie’s name. What this really means is that Charlie is the one under contract, and all rights and requirements of the contract will be placed on him, although he’s free to share that, as well as any payments, across the entire group based on whatever agreements you as a group draw up.”

I saw Marco frown at this, but the other two seemed to take it in stride.

“I think having a minor under contract makes things a little more complicated than a standard boilerplate agreement.”

“Yes, we understood some adjustments would be needed, which is why they sent me instead of a music rep. Although we’ve had underage talent before, they’ve mostly come out of sister organizations we have a standing relationship with, usually from TV and film. Charlie is the first underage talent we’ve signed directly and I’ve been empowered to make minimal changes in order to accommodate his needs.”

“Okay, then let’s get started,” Mr. Eaves said, giving me a look that made it clear I needed to shut up and let him work.

What proceeded was one of the most interesting yet completely boring hours of my life. The person he brought with him was a contracts lawyer from his firm, and as close as they could get on short notice to someone who specialized in this kind of thing. Eventually, if I made it far enough in my career, I’d need to get an attorney that specialized in this kind of thing, but that was for another day.

One of the things that made the entire process interesting was their decision to sign me as a solo artist, with the rest of the band as add-ons. Apparently, they’d come to the decision that they wanted to promote me as a solo act, since that’s how they dealt with most of their artists, which was common in the pop world. One of the things it seemed they liked about me was that I was the clear frontman, and could be promoted like that, while still coming with a band, which was much more common in the rock world.

There were a lot of little things in the contract that needed to be changed, such as maximum working hours, the need for a chaperone that could sign any agreements for me individually, since as a minor, I couldn’t be covered by the same sign off that the band used, and licensing limitations.

The last one was the sticking point. In the music industry, the copyright for any songs that are released belongs to the label and not the artist. As a minor, however, I could only sign away copyright until I became an adult, at which point I’d have to renegotiate the ownership of the copyrights. Had they signed us as a band instead of me as a solo artist, they could have probably gotten around this, but they seemed a little stuck in their ways and had decided it was easier to do things like they’d always done, instead of switching it up to give them a better overall position.

Part of the contract required a minimum of two months of touring a year, as a way to help market my music, which they wouldn’t budge on. Considering my schedule, that basically meant spending two-thirds of every summer touring to meet the minimum requirements, and possibly the entire summer and even Christmas break, since they made it clear that was the minimum and I might get asked to do more. I wasn’t big enough to do an actual publicity tour, but they had language in the contract that would require that if my sales figures reached specific metrics.

Mr. Eaves and his associate put in language that limited their expectations on me during the school year, with carve-outs for holidays, but that’s as far as they could get the studio’s lawyer to budge.

They also wouldn’t accept Hanna as our manager, at least not on paper, which was understandable. They said what we did in practice was our own business, as long as we were meeting our booking schedule and producing as we should, but when it came to the business side of things, we needed a contact person the label could rely on, especially since I was a minor. Because I was underage, our manager would have to be someone with minimal power of attorney over me, which just meant they could sign contracts and forms in my name. The studio lawyer tried to convince us that they could assign a manager and we could sign over power of attorney to them, but both Mom and Mr. Eaves nixed that idea. In the end, it was decided that Mom would officially be our manager, since she could sign whatever was needed. Of course, I knew she’d be more than a figurehead, since she’d never leave something like my future to just myself and my friends. She wouldn’t have time to travel with us to shows and deal with club managers and the like, but I knew she’d be actively participating.

That became more clear as the negotiations went on. Although we hadn’t been expecting this or prepared for it, Mom had a whole list of questions and concerns she wanted addressed before she’d assign anything over. She needed assurances that nothing would interfere with my school. She actually got them to put into the contract blackout dates for my availability where I couldn’t be involved with anything music related. Mr. Goodman had wanted to keep it more informal, but Mom said if it wasn’t in the contract, she wasn’t going to sign me up. For a moment I thought she might have crushed the whole deal, but I guess they expected something like this, since he eventually relented and added the language in.

The other thing she negotiated in was an out clause if things weren’t working out or if my obligations were impacting my schooling. This was something the definitely didn’t expect and Mr. Goodman made it clear he wasn’t going to be able to just do it on his say so. After several breaks so he could call back to whoever his boss was, they finally found a middle ground. If my grades dropped below a B average and stayed that way for a year, I’d be allowed out of my contract, but all rights on any product produced up to that point would revert to the label. Mr. Eaves tried to talk her out of it, since this wasn’t just production and distribution rights, but completely signing over the songs, both performances and the songs itself, in their entirety.

I thought it was crazy, but Mom said it was that or nothing, since she didn’t want a contract being used as some kind of leverage against my schooling. I guess the caveat of signing over all of the rights if the escape clause happened was enough to convince the studio, because they added that too.

I kept checking in with the rest of the band, since even though they weren’t being signed, this affected them too. I felt a little guilty, honestly, that they were being treated as such an afterthought, but Mr. Eaves said once it was all done we’d put together a company that all payments would go through, for tax and legal purposes, and that company could then pay all of us however we decided to break it down, and they could be listed as part owners of it. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it at least gave them a little control back.

The rest of the stuff got signed off without comment and included things like a moral responsibility clause, which basically said the label could boot me if I did something to alter the image they put together to market me. It was a little fuzzy to me, since the way it was worded, if they sold me as some kind of bad boy I could go to jail and still be okay, but if they sold me as some kind of squeaky-clean kid next door, I might get kicked off for partying too hard in front of the cameras.

Mr. Goodman said that I’d have some input into what direction we went with my image, but the entire thing seemed to be specifically non-specific, which favored the music label.

As far as recording went, they agreed to have us in the studio to record by the end of June, if I could guarantee I’d have enough songs ready. Although the number of songs on an album could fluctuate, the number they picked to put on the contract was fifteen by the end of July, which is when they wanted to record.

The only issue was, an album had to make sense, so while we were getting close to that number of songs, not all of them made sense on one album. They spanned from pop-country to pretty straight alt-rock and the tone was all over the place. We’d probably have to come up with some more songs that fit into whatever we decided our first album needed to be. It had taken almost seven months to get together the songs we had now, only half of which were anywhere close to being ready.

It would be a big task, but it’s what we’d have to do if we wanted to make this work.

Everything got signed and Mr. Goodman and Rowan left, since they had to catch a plane that night to head back out to LA. Chef had to open up for dinner but insisted we all stayed as his guests, to celebrate the big moment.

This felt like one of those big moments where everything changes, and yet it was hard to see how exactly it’d all end up. The numbers we were talking about were huge to me, but we weren’t going to become overnight millionaires, either. There were no guarantees that we’d get much in the way of sales and most people who get signed to a record contract didn’t end up millionaires.

Right then, however, I couldn’t help but get swept up in the euphoria. The school year was over, I had a solid group of friends, and it looked like my dream of making it in music was becoming a reality.

What more could a guy ask for?

The End ( ... although not of the series)