The next argument — and the major one — had to do with the track list itself. There was room for ninety-six minutes worth of recording material on the double album. Everyone agreed that all of Intemperance's major hits — those that had breeched the top ten list and those that had received extensive airplay — should be featured. This was a total of sixteen songs which, when mixed, would account for sixty-eight of those minutes. That left twenty-eight minutes that needed to be filled. Everyone had their own idea of what should be put into those twenty-eight minutes.
National wanted to simply fill the time in by putting another six tunes from the first four albums, leaning particularly heavy on the deep cuts from It's In The Book. Since those deep cuts were still receiving airplay it seemed, to them anyway, the most logical and easiest course of action.
Nerdly, on the other hand, was in favor of filling some of the time with Jake's between song banter — which had been recorded along with the music — and then adding two or three new studio cuts to the end of the album. He was the only one who liked that particular idea and National out and out forbid it the moment it was suggested.
Matt wanted to fill up a good portion of this time by putting in the various solos that had been performed as part of the live act. Mixed in with the recordings were more than seventy-five minutes worth of guitar solos, piano solos, drum solos, and even a bass solo from the last tour. If they were interspersed throughout the album they could eat up ten to twelve minutes of that twenty-eight and give those that had never been to an Intemperance show before some sort of sense of what they were missing.
Jake liked this idea and then expanded upon it. If they were going to put in the solos, why not put in some of the tracks they'd done during the earlier tours, tracks that had never been released to the public in record form, that had only been played live?
There were three such songs available to them. One dated back to the D Street West days. It was called Life Of Toil and had been written by Matt, recorded on the first demo tape they'd submitted to national when they'd first signed on, but never included on any album because it was over seven minutes long. Still, it was a hard-rocking tune that featured an extended guitar, piano, and drum duel between Matt, Nerdly, and Coop just prior to the closing verse and it played so well live that they'd used it in the The Thrill Of Doing Business tour as a space filler. Thus, it had been recorded in Detroit on the night that Darren had first openly smoked marijuana before stepping onto the stage.
The other two songs had been penned by Jake. The first, Twisted Logic, was one that had gone on the original demo tape Ronald Shaver had used to sign them to that original contract, but, for one reason or another, it had always been bumped from subsequent albums. It too had been recorded in Detroit during the Thrill tour. The second was called This Life We Live. Written initially for the Balance Of Power album, it was a long, ballad-like piece about the downside of being a celebrity, about the isolation and mistrust that came with the job, about the lack of privacy.
Jake, Matt, and Nerdly had elected not to put This Life We Live on the album for several reasons. Part of it was the length of the tune. It had four verses, a bridge, several sections of quiet acoustic guitar strumming and piano keys, and an extended guitar solo. Part of it was the song had some parallels to I Found Myself Again, the road song from that album. Mostly, however, they just thought the song was just a little too mellow to fit in with the harder rocking tunes from that album, that it would be more of a contrast then an accompaniment. Still, the band all liked the tune a lot, even if it wasn't quite classic Intemperance material, so they'd included it as part of the play list for the Balance Of Power tour and it too had been recorded live during their swing through Detroit on that tour.
"Let's do it," Matt said, when the idea of including these three tracks was broached. "We'll put in the solos as stand-alone pieces, throw in a few bits of Jake's between-song banter, and then intersperse these three tunes throughout the rest of the album."
"They're all too long for singles," Jake said, "but I bet they'll pick up some decent FM airplay on the hard rock stations."
"I'd really like to get a good listen to those tapes first," said Nerdly. "Especially for Toil and Twisted. They were recorded back during the Thrill tour. They might sound like nothing but fecal matter."
"They'll sound fine," Matt said. "Once we get it mixed and adjusted they'll sound as good as studio cuts."
The next argument began when they told Crow of their plan to include the unrecorded tracks.
"No way," he said, shaking his head before they were even done verbalizing. "We can't put unreleased material on a live album."
"Why not?" Jake asked.
"You just can't," he said. "I'm cool with the solos and the between song crap — people eat that shit up — but nobody wants to hear new music on a live album. They want to hear your classic tunes played live."
"And they'll get that," Jake said. "Every last one of our standard airplay tunes will be on the album. The unrecorded tracks will be bonus material to help sell the album, particularly if they get FM airplay."
"There's no precedent for this sort of thing," Crow said.
"Actually, there is," said Jake. "Frampton put unrecorded material on his live album. So did Cheap Trick and Journey."
"They are not National Records bands," Crow said. "What if those songs became popular? We can't release them as singles because they're all over four minutes long."
"So, in other words," said Matt, "you won't make any money off of them."
"We are a business," Crow said huffily. "If we go to the trouble of putting out a product, we should make money off of it."
"You'll make money off those songs because they'll help sell the album," Jake said patiently. "If they start to play them on the radio and people like them, they'll have to buy the album in order to get copies of them. It's the same principal behind not releasing It's In The Book as a single, remember?"
"Well," Crow had to admit, "you do have a good point there."
"Besides," said Matt, "those fuckin' recordings aren't making any of us any money right now, are they? They're sittin' in some vault somewhere."
This too, Crow had to admit, was a compelling argument. He took the proposal to Doolittle and Casting, expecting them to reject it out of hand and order him to start pressuring Jake and Matt — the true ringleaders of the band — to go along with the original plan of including deep cuts from Book. This was something he was not looking forward to because such confrontations were usually nasty, frightening, frequently unsuccessful, and always caused his ulcer to flare up. To his surprise, however, Doolittle and Casting both readily agreed to the plan.
"We don't give a shit what they put on that album as filler," Doolittle told him. "As long as the basic airplay tunes are there and the filler is legal and clear, the album will sell. The airplay tunes are what is going to sell the damn thing. Who knows? Maybe Kingsley is right and the unreleased tunes will help."
"The important thing," said Casting, "is that we get that album mixed, produced, and into the stores by late October, early November at the latest."