“Thanks for the drinks, Lou,” Jake said, dropping a ten dollar bill on Samantha’s tray.
“Tipping is not necessary, Jake,” Lou told him. “Your presence is gratuity enough, right Sam?”
“Uh...” Samantha started.
Jake shook his head. “I would not dream of not tipping someone who brings drinks to me,” he said. “Especially when the drinks are on the house.”
“Well ... okay, I suppose,” Pinkerton said.
“Thank you,” Jake said. “And thank you as well, Samantha.”
“You’re very welcome, Jake,” she said with a flirtatious smile.
She retreated to other duties and Lou headed backstage. One of the bouncers stayed nearby, to make sure that perimeter around the celebrities stayed intact. They settled in and sipped from their drinks, Pauline making a sour face every time she sipped from her Sprite.
“Tell me again why you needed to drag me here?” Pauline asked Jake as she looked around at everyone staring at them.
“You are the managerial face of KVA Records,” Jake told her. “If these guys agree to sign back up with us for the next two albums, they’re going to need to hear some management shit.”
“They will be just as well compensated for their work on the next two albums as they were on the first one,” Pauline said. “I cannot conceive of musicians of their present stature trying to squeeze out a better deal than what we gave them last time. In fact, we could have just done all of this over the phone and I wouldn’t have to be sitting here pregnant in a smoky bar and Celia wouldn’t have to fend off propositions from bull dykes.”
“Yes, that was quite blatant, wasn’t it?” Celia said with a little shake of her head. “And she really has no chance with me—the poor thing. If I was going to do it with a woman, it would have to be a feminine one. Otherwise, what would be the point?”
“I’m with you there, sister,” Pauline said. She turned back to Jake. “Anyway, those are my feelings on the matter.”
Jake shrugged (still pondering the thought of Celia getting it on with another woman—not exactly an unpleasant mental picture). “I kind of wanted to see how these guys play,” he said. “Ben told me this guy they got on guitar is pretty good with it, and he’s a songwriter. They’ve got like six original tunes in their set.”
Pauline sighed and took another sip of her Sprite. “Okay then,” she said. “We’ll check them out. But can we leave after we talk to them? I really have no interest in seeing Weezer get up there and hack away.”
“Deal,” Jake said with a nod. In truth, he didn’t really want to see the headliner play either. Though he would have declared with a straight face that he was not one to judge a band on its name alone, he privately thought that any group who called themselves Weezer could not possibly be any good.
“We should’ve invited Coop to come here with us,” Nerdly said. “He probably would’ve liked to get out ... you know ... since the whole debacle with Veteran.”
“I’m not sure Coop would have really wanted to see us negotiating with musicians for an upcoming album now that he’s in contract lock,” Pauline said. “Nor am I particularly fond of being reminded of that whole mess.”
Veteran, the supergroup Pauline had been managing and had profited quite nicely from, had had themselves a little meltdown just as they finished up their North American tour. The strife between the band members and the drunken, coked out, stoned performances had become too much for Coop. He resigned from the band and was now back in Los Angeles, riding out the rest of his contract and living off the royalties from Veteran and Intemperance. The band had recruited another drummer but were having endless difficulties putting together material for the follow-up album they were contractually obligated to make. At some point along the way the remaining members decided that their problems were all Pauline’s fault and told her she was fired. She could have fought the firing—after all, she had signed on as their manager for the entire duration of their contract with Aristocrat (four periods) and they really did not have the legal right to fire her—but, tired of dealing with them, she had gone quietly. She would still collect royalties in perpetuity for their debut album—which had recently passed triple platinum and was still selling upwards of twenty thousand copies a month—but anything they sold from here out would go into the pocket of Ronald Shaver, who had swooped in and snatched them up before the ink had even been dry on the severance paperwork between Pauline and Veteran.
“I suppose you have a point there,” Nerdly admitted.
“Veteran’s next album is going to bomb,” Jake predicted. “If they even manage to put one together.”
“Well ... far be it from me to wish ill upon them,” Pauline said, “but ill is what I wish them. Except for Coop, they were nothing but a pain in my ass from day one.”
“Everything in life is a lesson, right?” asked Celia.
“Right,” Pauline said. “And I’m putting the lesson of ‘don’t sign up to manage a band full of egotistical druggies’ right up there with ‘vasectomies are not a completely reliable method of birth control’.”
Jake nodded respectfully. “Well said, Paulie,” he told her.
“Fuck off,” she returned.
Jake managed to get two more Captain and cokes into his stomach before the house lights went down and Lighthouse took the stage. The crowd cheered enthusiastically for them, especially after Pinkerton told them that the key members of the band had been the musicians backing both Jake Kingsley and Celia Valdez on their recent hit albums and that Jake and Celia (oh, and Nerdly too) were currently in the audience to watch their protégés in action.
The band put on a decent enough performance and Jake was impressed with them. It was obvious that they had put in a lot of rehearsal time. They opened up with a cover of Del Shannon’s Runaway, playing it with an almost heavy metal style, including a nicely done guitar solo after the second verse. The only real issue was that Phil, with his baritone voice, was unable to quite hit the high notes in the chorus as Del had back in the day. After Runaway, they stepped neatly into a cover of Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones, again adding a little heavy metal flair to the tune. Then, after a little between song banter by Phil, they launched into two of their original tunes.
The originals were a stark contrast to their covers. The first one—which was apparently entitled The Lost Times—was performed with both Lenny and Ben playing acoustic guitars and only a gentle backbeat from Ted on the drums. The lyrics were a concise and thought-provoking examination of a failing relationship that kept plodding along anyway. The second one, titled The Firing Line, did feature Lenny on the distorted electric and Ben back on the bass, but the tempo was slow and the distortion was not heavy. Essentially a song about taking a chance and trying to change a desperate situation, it played out rather nicely and included a good, mellow guitar solo and some nice vocal work by Phil.
In all, they did all six of their original tunes and four covers, closing out with a pleasant version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps that was played more or less as true to form, as if the Beatles themselves had been up there laying it down. The crowd cheered enthusiastically as Phil thanked them for coming and told them to enjoy Weezer, who would be taking the stage in forty-five minutes.