"Palatable?" Matt asked, hating that very word.
"The three main tunes can be the releases — if they're as good as you claim. The other three can be the filler. For the other four..."
"Don't even think about suggesting your hacker tunes again," Matt warned.
Crow held up his hand in a gesture of peace. "I understand your position on that and I respect it. What I was about to suggest was that you do some cover tunes to fill in the rest of the album."
"Cover tunes?" Jake asked.
"That's right," Crow said. "You can even pick them out yourselves. We don't care what they are. Pick three or four tunes from the old days and re-work them into something new. Do some country and turn it into rock and roll. Do some polka and turn that into rock. We don't care. Just let us know what they are as soon as you decide on them and we'll start working on the legalities of letting you perform them. There are a few songs you are not allowed to do — Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, and stuff like that — but pretty much anything else can be arranged. Is that acceptable?"
"No," Jake and Matt said in unison.
Crow let his head fall onto his desk. Slowly he lifted it back up. "Why not?" he asked wearily.
"We don't do cover tunes," Matt said simply. "That's not what we're about."
"Everyone does cover tunes when they're short on material!" Crow screamed. "Fucking everyone! Look at Van Halen! They had cover tunes on their very first album! Diver Down was full of them! Look at Motley Crue! They did a cover of Helter Skelter on Shout At The Devil! Even AC/DC and Led Zepplin did covers! There's not a goddamn thing in the world wrong with it!"
Jake and Matt were both shaking their heads.
"Sorry, Steve," Jake said. "We don't do covers."
"Nothing but original Jake Kingsley or Matt Tisdale material will ever appear on an Intemperance album," said Matt. "I swore that on my Strat, man! Don't you understand that?"
"Christ," Crow groaned, feeling his ulcer flaring up again. "Do you guys know what you're doing to me?"
None of them apologized. "I'm pretty sure that none of us care what we're doing to you," said Matt.
"We're just holding to our ideals, Steve," said Jake. "You ever heard of ideals?"
"Maybe in some philosophy class I took once," he said. "So what's the solution here, guys? You tell me how we're going to resolve this. I've got studio time reserved for January 3 and that is set in concrete. You have a deadline to provide me with at least twelve tunes by December 15. How are you going to do it?"
"We'll give you what we got on December 15," Matt told him. "As I told you, we're working as fast as we can here."
"But we're also not going to rush ourselves and come up with sub-standard material," Jake said.
"Exactly," said Bill. "One does not hurry the structural engineer into premature erection of his steel girders, does one?"
"Premature erection?" asked Darren. "Is there such a thing?"
"Yeah," said Coop. "I would think that the earlier you could get your girder up, the better."
"Otherwise it might not come up at all," said Darren, who had been having just that problem with his own girder since he'd started using the heroin more than three times a day.
Crow was now at his wit's end. "Look," he said. "I don't know how to put it any more plainly than this. I need those tunes from you — any tunes. I don't care if they're crappier than Queensrhyche covering Scarborough Fair. You can scream 'fuck the establishment' over and over again while Bill plays Beethoven tunes and Matt plays a goddamn electric harp. Just get the shit done so we can get this album in production. If we wait too long, you're going to fade and everyone will forget about you. I don't want that, National doesn't want that, and I know for damn sure that you guys don't want that. Do I make myself clear?"
"Crystal clear," Matt said.
"So you'll get it done?" Crow asked.
Matt smiled. "We'll do the best we can."
This wasn't really an answer and Crow knew it, but his ulcer was making his stomach feel like a blowtorch had been lit within it and he knew that further discussion would gain nothing while only making the burning worse. "All right then," he said. "I'll hold you to that."
"You do that," said Matt.
They passed a few parting preliminaries — including Darren and Coop trying unsuccessfully to score a few more lines of coke from Crow — and the meeting came to an end. The five band members stood up to leave.
"Oh, by the way, guys," Crow said as they headed for the door. "Stop at Darlene's desk on the way out. She has some envelopes for you."
"What kind of envelopes?" Matt asked.
"Nothing big," Crow said. "Just a summary of your end-of-tour financial status. The same thing you got at the end of the last tour."
They opened their envelopes in the elevator as they descended toward the lobby. Each contained a sheaf of financial sheets listing the expenses and revenue during the tour and correlated it with the total expenses and revenue. They were all slightly different — Jake and Matt earned a little more in revenue since they were the songwriters, Coop, Matt, and Darren had all burned a little more in "entertainment expenses" while off tour — but all were printed in bold red ink. It was the grand totals that were shocking to behold.
Jake looked at his numbly. It was worse than he'd imagined. "Damn," he said.
"Holy fucking shit," Matt said, shaking his head angrily as he looked at his own.
"Is this shit accurate?" asked Coop.
"It's about what I calculated it would be," said Bill.
"Are they gonna keep giving us our booze and shit?" asked Darren.
The elevator reached the lobby. Instead of exiting to their waiting limos and car, they grabbed a seat in some of the chairs around the lobby fountain where — oblivious to the pointing and gesturing of the tourists snapping pictures of them — they compared each other's sheets.
Jake looked at the bottom line, ignoring the rest. Since signing their contract with National Records and recording their first album, Intemperance had sold a grand total of 4,608,279 albums and 6,356,721 singles. This had generated a total of almost $5.2 million in royalties for the band, or, about a million bucks for each band member. However, between Shaver, who collected twenty-one percent, and the basic recoupable expenses like recording fees, breakage fees, tour costs, and promotion costs, that revenue had been cut down to a total of $240,000, or, about $48,000 per band member.
But then the other expenses began to come in. The 'entertainment expenses', which meant drugs and alcohol for the band, roadies, and management while on tour; the 'legal expenses', which meant the lawyers and the bail and the fines and the helicopter trip; the 'housing expenses', which was their condo rent and groceries and drugs and alcohol and manservants while off-tour; and, of course, the infamous 'miscellaneous expenses', which included airplane tickets, vacation expenses, limousine service, their allowances, their pre-paid cover charges at the nightclubs they frequented, and a hundred other things they'd found a way to charge to the band. The grand total of these other expenses — of which the 'entertainment expenses' made up a significant portion — totaled just a hair over $900,000, or, about $180,000 per band member. The net result was that each of them was about $132,000 in the hole, and falling further with each passing day.
Coop and Darren, after getting over their initial shock at seeing a six-figure number with a minus sign in front of it, seemed to take it in stride.
"Well, it ain't like we didn't know this shit," said Darren. "Now we just have an itemized list of it."