"I will take some of that coffee though," Jake told Acardio. "If its not too much trouble."
"Of course not," Acardio replied. He rang for his secretary.
The coffee was poured and Jake took a sip. It was excellent brew, imported directly from Costa Rica.
Acardio, the chairperson of the meeting, passed a few more preliminaries and then got to business. "Let me start off by saying that we at the label appreciate all of the traveling you two, as well as the rest of the band, have been doing in order to keep the album promotion machinery rolling. I know we've had some problems with each other, that we don't always see eye to eye on a lot of matters, but you've been very good sports about all this, particularly you, Jake. The way Brad Cummins treated you was appalling, absolutely un-called for."
"I thought you wanted him to treat me that way," Jake said.
"Well, we wanted controversy of course," Acardio said. "It does sell your albums, after all. But we weren't expecting him to be quite that brutal. I apologize for putting you into that particular position."
"Yeah," Jake said, not believing him for an instant.
"Anyway," Acardio said, "we've spent the last two weeks going over the recordings you boys made for us. I must say, you did a very good job with that primative equipment."
The recordings he was referring to were a cassette tape full of music the band had recorded in the small warehouse the label had rented for them to rehearse and compose in (the cost of which was being deducted from their recoupables as well). The recording quality was only expected to be good enough for the National executive to hear what the raw songs sounded like so they could decide which ones to use. The lyrics did not even have to be discernable since lyric sheets were provided with the recording. As such the only equipment they had been provided in order to produce the recording were an old mixing board and a commercial cassette recorder. No technicians of any kind had been assigned to assist them.
"It's very simple," Acardio had instructed. "Just plug everything into the mixing board, turn all the dials up to about mid-range, put the cassette in the machine, and start playing. Give us at least twelve songs, more if you got them. It shouldn't take you more than an afternoon."
It had actually taken three afternoons to record fifteen songs. Bill took control of the mixing board and sound checked and adjusted each and every input as carefully and anally as he used to oversee their sound checks at D Street West. The end result had been not exactly a studio-quality recording but about as close as it was possible to get without actually utilizing the resources of a studio.
"Thank you," Jake said. "We did work very hard on that, particularly Bill."
"There are some catchy tunes in there," Acardio said. "We're pretty sure we can use about half of them.
"Half?" Matt asked. "That's it?"
"That right," Acardio replied. "Here's a list of the songs we've decided on." He passed out slips of memo paper to Jake and Matt. They looked at them carefully, both noting that "about half" meant seven out of the fifteen selections.
"As you can see," Acardio said. "Most of the tunes we've selected were the un-recorded tunes you performed during the tour as filler. The audience response was good enough that we are almost obligated to include those selections on the next album. It's obvious, however, that we're going to need a few more songs from you before we start the recording process."
"We don't have any more songs," Jake said. This was literally the truth. The fifteen they'd presented were all songs they'd written and performed in the D Street West days. They had come up with nothing new since then, as they had had neither the time nor the inclination. Jake had not even sat down and strummed on his guitar — the process he used when composing new material — since before they'd released Descent Into Nothing.
"We need ten cuts for the album," Acardio said. "We can possibly get away with nine if you extend one of the less commercially viable tunes into a non-radio format length. That's what Earthstone generally does."
"Or we could use some of these songs you rejected," Jake said.
"No," Acardio said. "That's out of the question."
"What the fuck for?" Matt asked. "I mean, sure, a few of those are maybe a little simple — it's some of our earliest stuff — but you've also shitcanned some of our best work here. How about It's In The Book? The D Street crowd loved that one but you keep rejecting it. You wouldn't let us record it for the first album, you wouldn't let us use it as filler on the tour, and now you don't want it on the second album either."
Janice fielded this one. "It is a reasonably catchy tune," she said, "but I'm afraid it's too controversial. The subject matter, you know."
"Excuse me?" Jake said. "Too controversial? Do you even know what the song is about?"
"Of course we know what its about," Janice said. "It's a grotesque and highly offensive parody of the Bible."
"It's an examination of the negative values taught by the Bible," Jake corrected. "And a condemnation of religious hypocrisy."
"We can't release an anti-biblical piece," Acardio said. "The controversy would be too severe."
"Let me get this straight," Jake said carefully. "You're trying to make us out to be a bunch of Satan worshipping pagans because you think that sells albums, but you don't want an anti-bible song on our next album? Am I missing something here?"
"You're not following the context under which we're rejecting it," Janice said.
"Well, please enlighten us then," Jake said.
"It's too specifically insulting to the Bible," she explained. "Though you don't mention the scriptures by name, it's very obvious what you're talking about. We want any anti-religious or anti-biblical lyrics to be deniably vague. Like the lyrics for Descent Into Nothing. That's a perfect example of a deliberately vague satanic song."
"Descent Into Nothing is not about Satanism," Jake hissed angrily.
"Exactly," Janice said. "That's what we say when the censorship nuts or the family values people start complaining about it. The lyrics are vague enough so they can't point out a specific reference to the tenants of anti-religious doctrine."
"The song has nothing to do with religion," Jake said. "It's about..."
"It doesn't matter what your interpretation of the lyrics is," Acardio cut in (once again infuriating Jake with the suggestion that he didn't know what his own song was about). "The point is that Descent is vague and unspecific, only hinting at the Satanist theme that it encompasses. It's In The Book, on the other hand, is specific in it's content and would give the censorship freaks something solid to latch onto. Our goal is to make you controversial, even hated by certain classes of people, but not to step over the line to the point where people might actually start to consider real censorship of music. If that happens, this entire industry could flounder."
"And that means less money for all of us," Bailey said.
"Oh, well we certainly wouldn't want to make less money, now, would we?" Jake said sarcastically.
"I'm not going to get into that discussion with you again, Jake," Acardio said firmly. "You are bound by the terms of your contract and that's all there is to it. You are also bound to produce another album for us and you're short a few songs. So let's talk about what we're going to do about that, okay?"
"Fine," Jake said. "I guess we could try to compose a few more songs for you. There's a few ideas I've been mulling over in my head lately."
"Yeah," Matt said. "Me too. I've been thinking about doing a song about..."
"Uh, well actually," Acardio said, "I think we might have solved that problem for you."
"Come again?" Jake said.