“Mick,” LJ3 greeted from behind his twelve thousand dollar oak desk. “It’s good to see you.”
“Glad you had time to squeeze me in today, Larry,” Mick returned, reaching out and taking the offered hand for the obligatory shake. He then sat down in the leather chair across the desk and set his briefcase down on the Berber carpet.
“Hey now,” Larry said. “It’s you and your fellow IMPs who are the lifeblood of this industry called radio. And National is one of the bigger music producers we play at CRCC. You bet your mutual fund I’ll always make time to see you.”
Right, Mick thought cynically. It’s actually the two and a half million dollars a year I transfer from National’s promotion budget account to CRCC’s general fund that keeps that door open for me and lets me call you Larry. If it wasn’t for that, they wouldn’t let me sweep the floors in this place. Of course, he would never actually say anything like that, or even hint at it. The game here was that they had to pretend that Mick was just suggesting new music and they were just considering and then ultimately accepting those suggestions. That deuce and a half in “incidental promotion costs” had nothing to do with anything.
“I have some new material being released soon that National thinks you might be interested in,” Mick told him.
“Always happy to hear new releases from National,” Larry said with a smile. “What do you have?”
Mick opened his briefcase and pulled out four CD cases, all of which had printed papers with very specific promotional instructions and information attached to them.
“These first two,” he said, “are a couple of new acts that National has signed and that they’re getting ready to release debuts on.” He slid one of the cases across—a mostly black case with a human skull the primary feature on the front. “This is Primal Fire, a thrash metal group out of Albuquerque. Bailey over in the NAD department is really excited about this one and the promo boys are telling me that we’ve got two solid radio friendly cuts on there they would like to see given saturation airplay—assuming, of course, that you folks like the cuts.”
“Of course,” Larry said, looking at the cover with a bit of distaste. “I’m guessing this would be for our hard rock stations?”
“Correct,” Mick said. “They’re radio friendly for that genre only. We’re talking about the cut Born to Die as the first promoted and then Cut Your Wings as the second. If we get enough airplay with those two, the album sales should be good and everyone is happy.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Larry said, pushing the CD and the paper off to the side.
“This next one,” Mick said, handing him a case with a barely concealed naked woman riding a black unicorn as the featured photo, “is Immaculate Conscription. They’re an all-female pop group aimed at the eighteen to thirty-fours ostensibly, but what National is really shooting for are the teens.”
“Ahhh,” Larry said knowingly. “So, they’re a bit too edgy to officially be a teen targeted group, but you anticipate they will be the primary audience anyway.”
“Exactly,” Mick agreed. “They’re a bunch of anorexic mid-twenties chicks that look like concentration camp survivors if you see them in real life, but look like hotness personified on camera when they’re all made-up and constructed. They do a lot of four-part harmony backed by dance beat and synthesizer tracks. The lyrics are simplistic, but full of heavy sexual innuendo that will appeal to the primary demographic, both male and female. Their videos are pushing up against the very boundary of obscenity. Fucking parents are going to hate them.”
“That is never a bad thing when you’re shooting for that demographic,” Larry said.
“It is not,” Mick agreed. “The teen guys are all going to be pumping their pythons to the videos and the promo pics, and the teen girls are all going to want to be them.”
“I like them already,” Larry said. “Would you suggest playing them heavily on the pop stations during the two to seven period?”
“It’s like you read my mind,” Mick said. The 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM was the time period when the twelve to eighteen male and female demographics were most likely to be listening—a sharp contrast from the 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM slot, which was when the eighteen to thirty-fours were most likely. “The first cut we would suggest promoting is In the Park, which is suggestive about furtive sex in a car while out on a date. The second cut to be promoted should then be Go Downtown, which is suggestive about male to female oral sex.”
“Only suggestive, right?” Radio executives nationwide lived in constant fear of actually having a song legally declared obscene on some level that would set a precedent.
“Naturally,” Mick assured him. “The lyricists that penned the tunes for these chicks are some of National’s best. Everyone will know what they’re really talking about, but the verses are ambiguous enough and symbolic enough for plausible deniability.”
“Very good,” Larry said. “We’ll give them a listen and see what we can do. What else do you have?”
“These next two kind of go together in a strange way,” Mick said, picking up the last two CD cases. “They’re not really new artists at all, but members of former top-selling groups that are now solo.”
“Oh?”
“Celia Valdez and Jake Kingsley are both releasing solo albums in the next two weeks.”
“Really?” Larry said, taking the CDs in hand and looking at them. “I’ve heard some rumors floating around about that.”
“The rumors are true.”
“They’re not on National’s label,” Larry said, seeing the KVA Records emblem on the back.
“That’s correct. They’ve gone independent and they signed with National for MD&P, therefore they fall under my umbrella for this region. They come as a package deal with some very specific ... uh... suggestions for how their music should be promoted.”
“Is that a fact?” Larry said, raising his eyebrows a bit.
“It’s a fact. National agrees strongly with their suggestions and would request that they be followed, if you can accommodate, of course.” This was the polite way of saying that CRCC needed to follow the instructions carefully or their income string could take a hit.
“We will certainly accommodate you if we can,” Larry said, which was the face-saving way of saying he would make it so. He then flipped the CDs back over and looked at the covers.
As a primary homosexual—though he was confident that no one knew about this—his eyes were drawn to Kingsley’s cover first. Can’t Keep Me Down was the title of the album. There was a glossy photo of Kingsley sitting on a stool with a battered looking acoustic guitar in his hands, as if he were playing it. He was wearing a pair of ripped and faded blue jeans and a sleeveless black shirt that displayed the tattoos on his upper arms. His face looked pretty much as it always had, perhaps a bit older than his cover photo for Lines On the Map, the last Intemperance album, but still unmistakably Jake Kingsley. He still had the shoulder length hair and the slight scruff of whiskers on his face. Larry did not suspect in the least that the scruff had been put in by photographic effects over the image of a clean-shaven face and that the hair itself was a carefully matched and styled wig that Kingsley had worn just for the photo shoot.
A little old for me, Larry thought, but I’d still hit that in a hot minute.
“I assume we should play this on the hard rocks?” he asked Mick.
“Well ... yes, naturally,” Mick said, “but it is also thought that there will be some significant crossover into the pop genre among the entire eighteen to forty-nine spectrum for both sexes.”