The second part of the plan — keeping Darren and Coop from realizing what they were doing — had been a little more difficult but was aided by the fact that the two of them were so strung out on heroin that they paid little attention to things like musical quality and lyrical depth. It pained all three of them to see the drummer and the bassist in this state — after all, they were very close friends who had been through a lot with them — but they took advantage of this state to the full extent they were capable of.
"Is this a song about picking out soup, man?" Darren had asked when So Many Choices had first been introduced.
"Naw," Jake had told him. "It just seems like that. Actually, it's a deeply symbolic piece about the dilemmas of life as we know it, transcribed into a Zen-like representation of simplistic tasks."
"Ohhhh," Darren replied, nodding wisely. "That's fuckin' tight, Jake. Really tight. And not many tempo changes either."
"Yeah," said Coop. "You're really maturing musically, Jake. Seriously, man."
"Thanks," Jake had said. "Now let's go through it again."
It was through such discussions that they managed to convey to Crow and Doolittle that they were in fact working on new material at a furious pace and that they considered it to be "progressive" musically. As for the actual details of the songs or their composition — such as the fact that they were swapping roles for The Switch, or that Fuck The Establishment was full of angry profanity — they had simply asked Darren and Coop to keep that information to themselves for the time being.
"We want them to experience the full effect of our new style when they listen to the tape for the first time," Jake had explained. "If they hear about it in advance it'll spoil some of the surprise."
"I can dig that," Darren agreed.
"Yeah, me too," said Coop. "It's like a surprise party and shit."
Presumably, since none of the record company executives had called them during the rehearsal and recording process demanding to know what they thought they were doing, this plan had worked. They knew that Crow made a habit of calling both Coop and Darren at least once a day and that their respective manservants probably interrogated them every time they came home, but their answers about the musical quality and content must have been vague enough to keep from spilling the beans before the pot was boiling.
But the pot was surely boiling now and when Jake heard the phone ringing as Bill lined up to shoot his break shot, he knew it had finally boiled over.
The door opened and Manny stuck his head inside. He looked worried. "Jake," he said, "Mr. Doolittle is on the phone. He would like to speak with you."
"Mr. Doolittle?" Jake said, as if surprised. "Why whatever could he want?"
"Yeah," said Matt. "Crow told us we had the next two days off, didn't he?"
"He did," said Jake. He turned to Manny. "Take a message," he told him. "Tell him we're busy."
This served to fluster Manny. "Jake," he told him, "I think this might be important."
"You're not paid to think now, are you?" Jake responded. "Take a message."
His flustering grew worse but he pulled his head back from the door and disappeared. He came back less than thirty seconds later. "Jake," he hissed, "Mr. Doolittle insists upon talking to you right now. He is not taking no for an answer."
"Oh he's not, is he?" Jake said. "And what if I absolutely refused to come to that phone? Wouldn't he then be forced to take no for an answer?"
Manny actually started to tremble all over, his face turning a bright shade of red. "This is Mr. Doolittle we're talking about here," he said. "He is the second most powerful person at National Records. You can't say no to him, Jake. You can't!"
"I can't?"
"No," Manny said. "I must insist you come to the phone and speak to him immediately."
Jake looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if lost in thought. Finally he looked over at Manny again. "Well... if you insist," he said. He turned to Bill and Matt. "Shall we?"
"We shall," said Matt.
They followed Manny back into the living room, where the phone extension was sitting on one of the end tables. Jake sat on the couch. Matt and Bill sat next to him. Jake picked up the phone and put it to his ear.
"What's up, boss?" he said.
"Jake," Doolittle said, his voice low and controlled. "We just got done listening to that demo tape you submitted for us."
"Did you now?" Jake asked. "We're rather proud of our efforts on that tape. What did you think?"
"I think you know what we think," he said. "It was horrible. Every one of those songs is non-recordable, but then that's just what you intended, isn't it?"
"Non-recordable?" Jake asked, making no effort to sound surprised. "Whatever do you mean?"
"Let's cut the shit, Jake. Your little plan is not going to work."
"Little plan? What plan might that be?"
"You submit horrible songs to us knowing that we'll reject them and try to pressure us into renegotiating your recording contract. It won't work. You're stuck with the contract you signed and you will be in that recording studio on schedule with songs that we can actually sell."
"We've given you all the songs we have, boss," Jake told him. "If you don't like the ones we submitted we can come up with some more, I suppose, but it'll take quite a while. Maybe three or four months."
"You will be in that recording studio on January 3," Doolittle said forcefully. "And you will have songs that are acceptable to us by that time. If you do not, you will be in breach of contract."
"I guess we'll have to be in breach of contract then, Mr. Doolittle," Jake told him, "because we've given you the songs we have and we don't have anymore."
"Jake, this is not going to work," Doolittle told him. "I know what you're thinking. I've been dealing with punk musicians like you for twenty-five years and there is nothing that hasn't been tried. You're thinking that because we caved into you on some little things like what kind of guitar Matt plays or what songs you are going to do or what kind of moves you do on stage, that we'll cave on this too. But it won't work this time. This is too serious of an issue. You signed that contract and you are stuck with it. We will not renegotiate with you or change any of the terms of that contract and we will destroy your musical career if you're not in that studio on schedule."
"We never said we wouldn't be in the studio on schedule," Jake said. "We just submitted an entire tape of music that we are fully prepared to record."
"You submitted a tape full of crap," Doolittle told him.
"Crap is in the eye of the beholder," Jake said. "We have made a good faith effort to provide you with material for our next album. We have made this good faith effort by the deadline set in the contract. We are prepared to record these tunes we submitted and put our good name upon them."
"Those tunes are not acceptable to us," Doolittle told him. "Your contract requires that we accept the tunes in order to avoid a breach of contract charge."
"Well I guess you'll just have to go ahead and charge us with that then," Jake told him. "We made our good faith effort and you rejected it. There is no way we could possibly come up with anything else before the deadline."
"Jake, this is not going to work!" Doolittle yelled, losing his cool for the first time. "We are not going to cave on this! If we renegotiated contracts every time some punk-ass band tried a stunt like this, we'd be bankrupt in no time. You may think we'll decide to settle with you just so we can keep making money off of you, but we won't. We'll lose millions by ruining your ass just to avoid setting a precedent that this sort of behavior is effective."