"That doesn't sound like a good way to go about it," Celia said. "A band is supposed to work together."
Jake felt a sudden wave of grateful affection toward Celia. She understands, he thought. He had expressed his frustrations about the haphazard composition process to Helen on several occasions and she had always nodded appreciably, going through the motions of sympathizing with him (when they were talking, that is), but it had always been clear to him that she really had no comprehension whatsoever of what he was talking about. Even Pauline, as tuned into the musical life as she now was, had never really understood the importance of band cohesion and what it gave to the creative process. But Celia did understand. Here, at last, was an actual sympathetic female ear.
"No, it's not a good way to do things at all," he told her. "This album is not an Intemperance album at all. It's three Jake Kingsley solo songs, four Matt Tisdale solo songs that happen to feature Jake Kingsley on lead vocals, and only three songs that fall under the basic envelope of classic Intemperance sound."
"Do you think it's going to flop?" Celia asked.
"No," Jake said, just a hint of uncertainty in his voice. "I don't think we're in much danger of that. The tunes are good; they're just not exactly Intemperance."
"Will that put off some of your core fans?" she asked.
"That's just the thing," Jake said. "We don't really have one single group of core fans — we have several. Even in our earliest albums, there was always a stark difference between the songs that Matt wrote and songs that I wrote. Ever since our club days, our fans have always been able to tell the difference just by listening to the beat and the lyrics. All of them fit into a basic Intemperance formula, of course, but it was always obvious who wrote which song. So what that all means is that there are those fans who only like Matt's stuff and think I'm some kind of pinko faggot. They'll crank up Who Needs Love? when it comes on the radio and sing it aloud with their friends, but they'll change the station when Point Of Futility comes on. There's also the opposite — those fans who like the deep thinking and lyrical formula of my songs but who think Matt's songs are crude and simplistic. They'll listen to It's In The Book and Descent Into Nothing over and over again on their tape player but will fast forward past The Thrill Of Doing Business. And then there's the other group of fans, the more mainstream of our audience. These are the fans we never intended to go after — the same fans that used to buy your music."
Celia chuckled. "Am I being insulted here?" she asked.
"Not deliberately," Jake said. "These are the pop music fans, the ones who listen to the stations that only play the top 100 songs of the last year or so."
"The stations that La Diferencia used to play on," she said.
"Exactly," Jake said. "As ashamed as I sometimes am to admit it, these fans are responsible for probably ninety percent of our singles sales and maybe thirty percent of our album sales. These are the fans that send us to the Grammy Awards every year — even if we do always lose. These are the fans who, for whatever reason, like the particular hard-rock sound we make in certain songs but detest it in others. They're spread pretty evenly between liking Matt's songs and mine. They loved The Thrill Of Doing Business and Who Needs Love? for instance. They equally loved Point Of Futility, I Found Myself Again, and, especially, I Am Time. They tend to hate much of our other stuff. These are the people who write me letters telling me how much they loved I Am Time but, when they bought the album, found they couldn't stand most of the 'noisy death-metal' that made up the other tracks. These people especially hated It's In The Book because they considered it blasphemous."
"Okay," Celia said. "I think I see what you're saying. You have mass appeal over several areas of the demographic chart."
"Right," Jake said. "As for what's going to happen when we release this next album, I foresee a lot of firming up on the lines and not much crossover."
"What do you mean?"
"The Matt fans are going to absolutely love all of his tunes," Jake said. "All of them rock considerably harder and represent a definite shift in style from what he normally comes up with. The Jake fans are also going to love my songs. I've got a myriad of deep, meaningful lyrics combined with heavy, blues oriented musical accompaniment. The Matt fans are going to particularly despise my tunes on this album and the Jake fans are going to particularly despise Matt's tunes. As for the mainstream audience... well... I think they're probably not even going to hear any of Matt's stuff because the pop radio stations aren't going to play any of it. There's at least three of my songs, however, that they're going to play the shit out of and that will appeal to that audience nicely."
"Think you'll pick up that Grammy this year?" she asked.
"No," Jake said matter-of-factly. "I don't think I'm ever going to pick up a Grammy. You might, once you go solo and start putting your heart and soul into your music, but I'm too controversial of a figure. They'll no more give me a Grammy than they would Ozzy Osbourne."
"Well, it's nice to hear you have confidence in me," Celia said.
"I wouldn't mind being the presenter when you win it," Jake told her with a smile.
She laughed. "I'll see what I can arrange," she said.
They flew on. The plane was now level at cruising altitude and coming up on the San Bernardino VOR station. Jake made his normal check of the outside and the instruments. As the last knot started to tick down on the DME, he said to Celia: "Now watch this part. This is really cool."
"What's going to happen?" she asked.
The DME clicked down to zero and the autopilot, already locked onto the Palm Springs VOR with the second navigation radio, put them into a thirty-degree bank.
"Look," Jake said, holding his arms up toward the roof. "No hands."
Celia looked a little ill at this revelation. "Couldn't you have at least pretended to be steering this thing?" she asked.
"Where's the fun in that?" he asked. The compass clicked over until it was reading 110 degrees. At that point, the autopilot slowly brought them back to straight and level flight, the compass settling exactly on 119 degrees.
"Nice," Celia said, taking a sip out of her water bottle again. "That DME thingy says we're now forty-eight miles out?"
"Forty-eight nautical miles, yes," Jake said. "We'll start descending in a few minutes."
"Does the autopilot do that too?"
"It does," he said. "I just punch in my target altitude and the rate of descent and it takes care of the rest."
"So, with a few more years of technological advances, we won't even need the pilot in the plane anymore?"
"In theory, there are aircraft that can do that now," Jake told her.
"Lovely," she said, sounding far from thrilled about the idea. "Why don't we change the subject? You never did answer my question."
"What question?"
"About the possibilities of you going solo next year," she said. "Do you think you and the boys are going to survive this animosity?"
"I think we can survive it," Jake said. "There are a few things we'll have to work on if we're going to."
"Like what?"
"We just need to learn to check our egos at the door," Jake said. "That's the first thing. There's no way in hell we'll be able to go through another composition and recording cycle like the one we just went through."
"What else?" Celia asked.
"Matt needs to get over his resentment about the rest of us voting Darren out," Jake said. "I'm here to tell you, the man holds a grudge like no one I've ever met before. And he's stubborn as hell too. He knows that letting Darren go was the smartest, most rational decision under the circumstances. He fucking knows that! But he won't even admit it to himself, let alone the rest of us. He just sits there and hangs onto the anger and lets it stew."