"Or you're in contempt of court," Pauline said. "He will put you in jail until you agree to comply. You'll rot in some LA county cell for months."
"Months?" Bill asked slowly.
"At least," she said. "In theory, he could keep you in there for years, until you agree to do what you've been ordered to do."
"All of us?" Bill asked.
"All of you," Pauline confirmed. "You are all co-signers of the contract."
"I don't want to rot in some jail cell, Jake," Bill said. "You know what happens in those places. There are people in there who engage in anal intercourse by means of force and fear."
"Yeah," Jake said. "I've heard that."
"I don't want to engage in anal intercourse, with or without force or fear," he said. "So far I've kept that particular orifice as an outlet only."
"Well, except for that one groupie in Cincinnati," Jake said. "Remember, she did that thing with that dildo she had?"
"Oh... yeah," Bill said, blushing.
"I don't really need to hear about this, do I?" Pauline said, rolling her eyes.
"No, probably not," Jake said.
"Definitely not," Bill agreed.
"So you're saying," Jake summarized, "that because this is a flagrant violation of our contract, they can force us, by means of a court order, to keep producing music?"
"That's what I'm saying," Pauline said. "I don't see any way around it."
"But what about when Matt refused to play that Brogan guitar onstage?" Jake asked. "And what about when we refused to do those hacker songs they wanted us to do?"
"Let's take those issues one by one," Pauline said. "With the guitar issue, Matt was clearly in the wrong. Your contract explicitly states that you will play the brand of instrument that they tell you to play. They could have gone to a judge and they could have gotten a court order for Matt to play the Brogan if they had chosen to do that. They caved to him in that instance because of the money issue you're using to try to justify this plan. In that case, you were correct. In the great scheme of things, they decided it wasn't really that big of a deal so they let it go in the name of not alienating you too much."
"Okay," Jake said. "I can buy that. But what about the hacker songs?"
"Things were not as clear on that issue," she said. "Your contract does not say they can force you to do a particular kind of song, it just says you have to have a certain amount of material available for recording by a certain date. In other words, you have to have a 'reasonable amount of new recordings available for approval' by the deadline for each contract period. Now, since you had songs available for that — namely the tunes they rejected, which they have the right to do — their position was not as clear. They could have breached you for not having acceptable material, but they would not have been able to get a court order demanding you come up with something else since you did have material available for them."
"Hmmm," Jake said slowly. "I think I'm starting to understand this."
"So you're starting to see that you can't pull this off?"
"Maybe," he said, his mind spinning a mile a minute. "At what point does a song become officially submitted to National? When does it become their property and therefore count as material offered for them?"
She looked at him strangely for a minute. "Why do you ask?"
"I'll tell you when you answer me," he said. "So, what's the answer?"
She picked up the contract for the first time and started flipping through it. Jake and Bill watched her in silence as she did so. Jake lit a cigarette and took a few drags. Bill sipped from his beer and chewed his fingernails. Finally, she found the section she was looking for.
"When you submit the official demo recording to National," she said, "the tune officially becomes their property and they can order you to record it or they can reject it."
"So, as soon as we do our half-assed recording of a song in the warehouse and give it to Crow," Jake said, "that qualifies as a submission for consideration?"
"That's right," she said.
"And when we were having the dispute with them over the hacker tunes," Jake said, "it was those recordings of our early stuff — the stuff they didn't like — that kept them from being able to get a judge to order us to come up with new material?"
"Right," she said. "You made a good faith effort to meet your deadline. As long as you do that, they can still reject the tunes and they can still breach you if you don't come up with tunes acceptable to them, but they would not be able to get a judge to order you to do something else."
Jake was smiling now. "One last question," he said. "What exactly constitutes a 'good faith' effort?"
She was starting to see where he was coming from. She smiled as well. "That's a term that is very much open to interpretation," she replied.
"That's what I thought," Jake said. "And how many of those superior court judges in the Los Angeles area do you suppose are fans of modern rock music?"
"I can get a list of names and ages," Pauline said, "but I wouldn't think that any of them are. If there's a single judge under the age of forty, I would be surprised."
"Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?" asked Bill, who had been watching the conversation go back and forth like he was watching a tennis match.
"I think I am," Jake said.
"Yes," agreed Pauline. "And I think you're on to something."
Chapter 15A: Crossing The Line
December 17, 1984
Los Angeles, California
It was Monday morning and Steve Crow was going over the music sales reports from the previous week. He was dismayed to see that La Diferencia's debut album The Difference had moved into the number two spot on album sales, selling only six hundred fewer copies than The Thrill Of Doing Business, which was holding at number one for the eighteenth consecutive week. At this rate it was entirely possible that The Difference would take over the number one spot within a few weeks, dislodging Intemperance's album as neatly as I Love To Dance had aced out Crossing The Line and Young Love had aced out Rules Of The Road in singles sales. Young Love was, in fact, still holding strong at number one on the singles chart and would probably continue to for another few weeks. And from what he had heard La Diferencia was slated to release yet another single — Serenade Of The Heart — the moment Young Love started to fall.
"I wish we would've signed those fucking spics," Crow said enviously as he mentally calculated how much revenue that would have brought in and as he imagined how much less of a pain in the ass third world Venezuelan musicians would be compared to the lowlife antagonists he was being paid to manage.
And speaking of those pains in the asses, where the hell were they? It was ten minutes past nine. They had promised him they would be in his office, demo tape in hand, at nine o'clock sharp. It was just like them to show up late for a meeting. These days they seemed to do everything within their power to antagonize or generally annoy him. He wondered if they really had a demo tape for him or if they were just blowing smoke up his ass.
Crow had a respectable network of spies who kept an eye on the members of Intemperance for him. There were the manservants who lived with each band member and there were the limousine drivers who transported them from place to place (except for Jake, ever since that goody two-shoes bitch Mindy Snow bought him the Corvette, that particular avenue of information had been severely curtailed). There were the bouncers and the bartenders at the clubs they hung out in. And just lately there was Darren and Coop themselves. Both were so strung out on heroin these days they would tell him anything just to keep the supply coming. From this network came the information that, upon returning from their Thanksgiving vacation, Jake, Matt, and Bill suddenly decided to abandon the six songs they had been initially working on and start completely fresh. This had alarmed Crow greatly, enough that he had called Jake and demanded an explanation.