“Okay,” Jake said. “I’ll think it over. Now, are we done here?”
They were done. Jake left them copies of his promotion instructions and then went back to the studio. He was able to get in a few more hours of work before heading home.
Obie had been out on the road as well, he and his band doing what they called a “soft tour”, which meant they played consecutive shows in multiple cities for a stretch of about a month and then took long breaks of two or three weeks before starting another leg. As a country music legend with an impressive catalogue of twelve studio albums, he was able to sell tickets for almost as much as Celia charged and he, like her, sold out every venue within hours of release.
Obie flew home from Louisville on September 16th after a month of doing shows throughout the Midwest region. His next show was scheduled for September 30th in Nashville. On September 20th, a Saturday and the end of Jake’s workweek (it was a V-tach day so Laura was not there), Obie, Pauline, and Tabby met Jake at Whiteman Airport after he wrapped up for the day and flew back to San Luis Obispo with him. They were going to have a nice dinner together and then Jake and Obie were going to do some ATV riding on the dunes on Sunday. Aside from the family time together, there was also a little business to discuss.
They talked about it over the Saturday night dinner. Since Elsa was off for the weekend (as was Meghan, but she usually stayed home on her off-days) and since Laura was not much of a cook (as the youngest of five she had never been taught by her child-weary mother) Jake cooked the meal. It was simple fare, just hamburgers and tater tots, but Obie, who had been eating road food for the past month, tore into it voraciously.
“Glad you like it,” Jake said with satisfaction after the singer proclaimed his enjoyment of the offering for the second time.
“You’re a good man with the grill, Jake,” Obie said. “That’s something to put on the old resume.”
“I’ll add that in,” Jake said.
Obie took another bite of his burger, popped a few tater tots in his mouth, and then washed it down with a healthy swig of the IPA that Jake had served with the meal. “Pauline tells me you’re ready to start talking studio time,” he said.
“That’s right,” Jake said. “We’re coming along pretty well. We have V-tach’s tunes pretty much dialed in for the basics and I’m starting to work on the polish. As for my stuff, we’re a little bit behind V-tach, but progressing.”
“I’m gonna play on two of the tunes,” Laura said happily. “I even get a solo.”
“What’s a solo?” asked Tabby from her seat at the table. She had a mouthful of burger of her own.
“It’s when Aunt Laura plays her saxophone all by herself,” Pauline told her daughter.
“Oh,” Tabby said, seemingly disappointed that it wasn’t something cooler than that.
“We got Nat on board now, and Nerdly has agreed to be the keyboardist through the process. I guess he feels he’s experienced enough to engineer and play at the same time.”
“A good thing,” Obie said. “Are you talking two studios here, like you did with Tisdale and Celia?”
“No,” Jake said. “We can get by with one. It’ll be just like when C and I were recording at the same time. We’ll be using the same musicians and alternating days.”
“Glad to hear that,” Obie said, “because there’s no way I could’ve swung two studios anyway. I’m pretty booked up. I have Wild Hat using Studio C right now. They’re scheduled through December 23rd. I can give you C starting on the first business day of 1999 until May 25th. That do ya?”
“I was hoping to get in a little sooner,” Jake said. “By late November if possible.”
Obie was shaking his head. “Just not possible, unfortunately,” he told him. “A and B are booked up until the last week of February and Wild Hat is one of my most profitable acts. I need to get them finished up on time.”
“I understand,” Jake said. “First of the year it is, then.”
“You know I’d help you out if I could,” Obie said.
“Yeah, I know Obie,” Jake said. “And maybe this isn’t such a bad thing after all. We can slow the pace down a bit. Drop down to five-day weeks and only seven hours a day. That’ll give us lots of polish time without burning out.”
“Sometimes things happen for a reason,” Obie said.
“That is true,” Jake agreed.
“I hear the new songs on the radio, both for Matt and for Celia,” Obie said. “How’s the sales picking up now that you got two releases charting?”
Jake smiled. “As I predicted,” he said, “sales started rising within days of the promo of Dethroned and Limbo. Matt’s gone Gold now and weekly sales are still increasing. Celia’s gone Platinum and will likely go double-Platinum before the end of the year. The suits over at National are beside themselves.”
“Kicking themselves in the ass a little?” Obie said with a grin.
“Yep,” Jake said. “They of little faith. Of course, they’re still making money from the sales, but not as much as they would have had they taken the CDs a little more seriously. And every percentage point that they don’t get to keep is money in KVA’s pocket and Matt’s pocket.”
“Between the royalties and the touring revenue, is this going to get him out of his tax troubles?” Obie asked.
“It’ll go a long way toward that,” Jake said. “He owes them almost twenty-five million. I don’t think he’s going to make enough to pay that all the way down, but at least he’ll get on top of it a little and won’t be in danger of losing his house.”
Obie shook his head. “It’s hard to believe the man got into that much tax trouble.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “You don’t want to fuck with the IRS, that’s for sure. A good chunk of that is from the interest and penalties they tacked on.”
“Well, it was good of you to work with him on this,” Obie said. “Not sure I would’ve been so generous if he had put me through as much shit as he put you through.”
“Hey,” Jake said, “he’s making me money as well. And it’s always better to put things behind you when you can, isn’t it?”
“I suppose,” Obie said.
The Celia Valdez Living in Limbo tour of 1998 rolled across the northern portion of the United States through September and into October. They played in cities large and small, usually staying for two or even three shows in the larger cities and only one in the smaller ones. The schedule had been designed so they would hit all of the higher latitude venues before the snows of winter started to fly and then hit the southern venues during the winter months. They played three shows in Chicago, two in Milwaukee, one in Lansing, two in Detroit, two in Cleveland, one in Cincinnati, one in Toledo, one in Buffalo, and then they worked their way into New England, playing one show each in Bangor, in Portland, in Montpellier, and then were scheduled for three shows in Boston.
By the time they reached Boston, Celia and everyone else in the band and roadcrew were well acclimated to the grind of the road. It was not as bad as previous tours, for the band themselves and for the roadies. Lots of extended travel days and breaks had been scheduled in. Though the roadies had to travel on buses with the trucks from city to city, they often had a day off, or even two, when they arrived at their new destinations and often got to stay in actual hotel rooms instead of sleeping on the bus for weeks at a time. As for the band, they had it even better. They traveled from city to city in a chartered Cessna Citation business jet and stayed in luxury hotels every night.
But no matter how many breaks were put in, or how you got from one place to another, the road was still the road and it always would be. It was an endless succession of days and nights of doing the same thing in a different place. There were music store autograph sessions, there were radio station interviews, there were sound checks, there was greasy catered food, and, briefly, for two and a half hours at a time, there was the bliss of performing before sixteen to twenty thousand enthusiastic fans.