He did not let his mind think about any of this as he played. Above all else in life, he was a professional and he gave his all to the seven thousand some-odd fans out there watching him. Sweat poured down his face and onto his chest—he had removed his shirt shortly after the third song of the set. He was cold sober currently, as he refused to allow himself or his band members to engage in any intoxicating substance for at least four hours prior to any show. He played with a focus and intent that was almost supernatural, pouring out his heart and his soul into the licks coming out of the Strat. When he sang, his vocals came out powerfully and with all the emotion he could wring from them.
And he knew it wasn’t what the people wanted. That fact had been painfully driven home to him over the past three months in a variety of ways.
His album was selling dismally. Only three hundred thousand copies so far, well over two-thirds of that within the first month of release. Sales were only a trickle now, a few thousand each week at best. It was quite apparent to him that he was not even going to make Gold before the end of the year, let alone the Platinum required for him to win the wager with National Records and keep control of the post-production of his next album.
He wanted to blame the National executives for this pathetic album performance—wanted to do that with every fiber of his being, with every paranoid and suspicious bone in his body—but he just couldn’t. They had held up their end of the bargain. He knew that. They had pulled out all the stops to promote the album and push for airplay of his tracks with all of their connections across the nation. He had been monitoring their efforts during every step of the process. Uncharacteristically, they had done their best, probably, he figured now, so they could say they told him so and not be accused of trying to sabotage the deal.
Where the fuck did I go wrong? he asked himself over and over again. My shit rocks! It’s some of the best guitar work in the history of the fucking guitar! Why the fuck aren’t people buying it? Why the fuck aren’t the radio stations playing it?
Sadly, he thought he knew what the answers to these questions were, and they were all the same answer. It wasn’t Intemperance. He had inadvertently type-cast himself by playing with those fucking traitors and it was now coming back to haunt him.
The reason his initial concerts had sold out large halls was not because of Matt himself, but because National, in promoting the tour, had heavily implied—though not actually promised—that Intemperance songs would be performed as part of the set. They were not. Though Crow and the boys had begged, threatened, demanded, and begged some more for him to lay down some of the tracks he had written for Intemp, the contract Matt had signed with them gave him control over the set list and composition of any tour. And there was no way in hell that Matt was going to perform any Intemperance tunes on his fucking tour.
And so, National, being National, had employed a little innuendo and bending of the truth when announcing the tour dates in the localities they were scheduled in.
MATT TISDALE – The legendary guitarist for Intemperance performs his material LIVE IN CONCERT! read the posters, announcements, and promos done by DJs across the nation.
It only took about fourteen shows for word to spread across the nation that Matt was not, in fact, laying down any Intemp after all. There was no Who Needs Love?, no This Life I Live, no Grandeur, no The Thrill of Doing Business. Once that rumor became verified by word of mouth, ticket sales plunged into the proverbial toilet. Now, the hope that this tour—which was reasonably low budget due to the lack of any technological flourishes such as lasers, complex lighting, complex sets, or pyrotechnics—would actually turn a profit was all but dashed. They were losing upwards of thirty thousand dollars per show, sometimes more depending on the venue.
“Why?” Crow, Doolittle, and other bigwigs from National management had demanded of him when it became clear he would not be doing any of the Intemp material. “Why are you cutting your throat like this? Don’t you know that this is what they want to see?”
“They’ll get my new shit,” was Matt’s only reply. “The tour is to promote my new album, not to play a bunch of shit from a job I used to have.”
“It was that job that made you what you are!” Crow nearly screamed at him when he heard this.
But Matt did not budge an inch. He would not play so much as a single riff from any Intemperance tune. He gave the National executives no explanation. He gave the many rock media reporters who questioned him about this no explanation either. Unfortunately, however, he could not hide the explanation from himself. He knew all too well why he was not performing any Intemperance materiaclass="underline" his voice work could not compete with Jake Kingsley’s. He had a decent singing voice and he could carry a tune with it well—that was evident enough on the tracks for Next Phase—but he could not carry those tunes the way Jake had. He knew that. He fucking knew it. And he was not going to be compared unfavorably to that traitorous asshole. Not while he was still drawing air on this Earth.
I will never sing a song that fucking Kingsley has sung before me, he vowed with the same level of zeal and determination with which he’d vowed he would never play anything onstage but his old Strat.
That old Strat was screaming now, as Matt played out the final, furious crescendo of his fourteen minute long guitar solo—the second of two such solos in the set. He let the final note fade slowly away while the crowd cheered enthusiastically in response. While they were cheering, John and Steve came back out on the stage, the former picking up his bass guitar, the latter taking a seat back behind the double bass drum set.
“You like that shit?” Matt asked the crowd.
They liked that shit—after all, anyone who had bothered to show up had to be a Matt Tisdale fanatic—and they let him know they liked it by increasing the decibel level of their cheers, standing up on their seats, and holding their lighters in the air to create an artificial starfield out in the arena.
“Fuck yeah,” Matt said. “Let’s do one more here, then I gotta get the fuck on down the road, you know what I mean?” He turned to the band. “Let’s do it, boys.”
They did it, Matt churning out the intro to Into the Pain, the only song on the album that had been played on any radio station in the Washington/Baltimore region. John and Steve chimed in to set the rhythm. The crowd went wild once again.
The tune was seven minutes and twenty-three seconds on the album. In concert, it ran nine-fifteen thanks to Matt extending two of the guitar solos and the entire band making a huge production out of the finish to the song since it was the final number of the main set. At last, however, they finished it up and left the stage. They were not done yet, of course. The crowd cheered and yelled, stamped their feet, and shouted for more.