“Well ... I know it’s not much,” Phil admitted, “but our gig money would go up as we got more popular, right?”
“Especially if you’re in there negotiating for us,” added Ted.
“A good point,” Pauline said. “After a few months of doing this I might expect to start getting as much as a hundred dollars a gig for using my valuable time in this manner.”
“Uh ... well ... when you put it like that,” Ted said, “I guess it really doesn’t sound like much, does it?”
“It does not,” Pauline said.
“I have an idea,” Jake said.
“What’s that?” Pauline asked.
“Maybe there’s room for a deal here, a compromise of sorts.”
“Yeah?” Ted asked.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “We each have something the other wants. You need a manager to help you get better gigs and more exposure, right?”
“Right,” Ben said.
“And we need some professional level musicians to help us put two albums worth of songs together.”
“Right,” Ben said again. “We still have the problem of not being able to get leaves of absence to help you out with that though.”
“Summer is now here,” Jake said. “Ben, you’re off during the summer, correct?”
“I am,” he said.
“And Ted, you said there was a possibility of dropping to part-time and only working occasionally. Is that something you could do in the next two weeks?”
“Well ... they wouldn’t like it, but I could probably get them to agree to it.”
“And Phil, you’re pretty much wide open, right?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “They wouldn’t miss me too much down at the studios. But what about the band?”
“I’m getting there,” Jake said. “My proposal is that you come work with us through the summer in the KVA studios. Help us get our shit together until it’s time to go back to school. We’ll pay you the same rate as we did before and work the same hours. And then, when the summer is done, Pauline will sign on as your manager for the purpose of getting you club gigs around the region.”
“Now wait a minute,” Pauline protested. “Don’t you think you should’ve discussed this with me before proposing it?”
“What’s to discuss?” Jake asked. “I think I’m offering a fair deal here. You spend a few hours a week calling clubs and getting the boys booked places by throwing your name and ours around. You get your twenty percent, which will be able to keep you in beer money, right?”
“I’m not drinking much beer these days,” she reminded him.
“Oh ... right,” Jake said. “Diaper money then.”
“Diaper money?” asked Ted.
“Never mind that,” Pauline said, casting an evil glare at her brother.
“We might be open to something like that,” said Lenny, who seemed to be the unofficial leader of Lighthouse. “But what about me? What about Phil?”
“They’re included in the deal,” Jake said. “Phil can help us plug the backup singing in right from the workup phase. You can too, Paulie. And as for you, Lenny, well, I’m sure we can find some use for another talented guitar player.”
“Now hold up a second, Jake,” Pauline said, starting to get truly flustered now. “Are you suggesting that we pay Lennie and Phil—two musicians we do not truly need for the work-up process—fifty dollars an hour for sixty hours a week?”
“Yeah,” Jake said simply. “Trust me, we’ll find use for them.”
“But the expense...”
“Fuck the expense,” Jake said. “We’ve sold almost four and half million records so far. We can afford this, Paulie.”
“I don’t think Greg and Jill are going to like this idea very much,” Celia said.
“No,” Nerdly agreed. “It is highly probable they will vehemently protest the excessive outlay of operating expense funds in this phase of the project.”
Jake simply shrugged. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” he said.
“What about when the summer is over and it’s time to start recording?” Pauline asked. “What are we going to do for a bass player and a drummer at that point?”
“I guess we’ll have to find some studio musicians for the actual recording,” Jake said. “I’m sure Obie can point us in the right direction there. If not, National will probably be able to lend us some if they think it’ll give them an edge in future negotiations.”
“Then why don’t we just get the studio musicians now?” asked Pauline. “Are we making this whole thing more complicated than it has to be?”
“Not at all,” Jake said. “We’ll have to scrounge up a new sax player from somewhere, that’s true. And we still haven’t asked the mothers if they’re willing to do this whole thing again. As far as the bass player and the drummer go, however, I would rather work with Ben and Ted here for the workup stage. It is my opinion—and I’m sure that Celia will agree with me here—that initially working up the tunes from the composition stage into the basic layout is the most important part of the entire process.”
“Absolutely,” Celia agreed.
“We know Ben and Ted,” Jake said. “We know how they work and they know how we work. That familiarity is important to this step and will save us considerable time and, I think, will produce a superior product in the end.”
Pauline sighed. She looked at Celia. “Is he jerking me off, C?” she asked.
Celia shook her head. “He is not jerking you off,” she assured her.
Another sigh. “All right,” she said. “It’s against my better judgement, and I don’t know how we’re going to explain all this to Jill and Greg, but I’ll agree if they will. I’ll manage them for club gigs—and club gigs only—if they get us through the summer.”
Jake smiled. He turned to the members of Lighthouse. “Well, boys. The ball is in your court. What do you say?”
“It’s ... it’s ... a very interesting offer,” Ben said.
“Hell to the yeah,” Ted agreed.
“Would all of this be in writing?” Lenny asked.
Pauline nodded. “It’s the only way we do business,” she said. “Everything will be spelled out in clear, concise language down to the last detail.”
The band members all looked at each other again.
“What do we think?” asked Phil.
“I say we do it,” Ted said. “I love working with these guys and fifty bones an hour is nothing to scoff at.”
“True,” said Lenny. “But it would mean no more Lighthouse for almost three months. We might start to lose our cohesion.”
“If you guys lose your cohesion after only a three-month break, you never had it to begin with,” Jake said.
“The man has a point,” said Ben.
“I’ll tell you what though,” Jake said. “Let me sweeten the pot a bit. You agree to this thing, and we’ll grant you unlimited use of the KVA studio building for rehearsals once we start the actual recording process and don’t need to use it anymore.”
“Your studio?” asked Ben.
“Once we don’t need it anymore,” Jake clarified.
“Wow,” Ted said. “It’s a pretty nice fucking studio. A lot better than your garage, Len.”
“No shit?” Lenny asked.
“No shit,” Ted assured him.
They passed another look among each other and then came to a silent agreement among themselves.
“All right,” Lenny said. “We’re in.”
Penn Hills, Pennsylvania
June 6, 1993
The warehouse that National Records had rented for Bobby Z and his band to rehearse in was not in the greatest neighborhood in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. It was in the township of Penn Hills, a high crime suburb on the outskirts of the city. Full of tenement buildings, public housing, streets lined with liquor stores with bars on the windows, and shabby post-war duplexes, it was not the kind of place you wanted to stroll the streets on at night—or even during the day really.
The building itself was in the industrial section of the township, near the railroad switching yard and a few blocks away from one of the shabbiest of the shabby neighborhoods. In the warehouse’s heyday, which had been from the end of the Korean war when it was built, up to the midpoint of the Vietnam war, it had been an important storage facility for manufactured aluminum products produced by one of the metals industry leaders. Until Bobby Z and company took up temporary residence in it, however, it had been abandoned and for sale for years. It had been necessary to evict a gaggle of homeless squatters from the interior before the power could be connected and the band equipment moved in. The walls inside were covered from floor to ceiling with gang graffiti, much of which dated back fifteen years or more. And, though the owners had hired someone to clean the place up, not a day went by without someone stumbling across an old hypodermic syringe or a used condom.