“I want you to look me in the face,” said Roger Chester, sitting behind his desk in his office with a picture window onto The Live Music Capital Of The World at his back, and Ash sitting elegant, composed and expressionless in a brown leather chair to his left. “I want you to look me right here,” he said, pointing with one hand, two fingers, into his own dark brown eyes slightly magnified by the tortoise-shell glasses. “And tell me why Ash says you won’t do a reality show.”
Nomad, Berke and Ariel were all sitting together on one brown leather sofa. Before them was a glass-topped coffee table with magazines on it like Money, Texas Monthly, Billboard and of course the People with them in a small box at the upper right. Nomad wished Berke would put her black high-heeled boots up on it and sweep the magazines aside, but she didn’t. His gaze kept being drawn to the huge horns on the bighorn sheep head mounted on the panelled wall between the picture window and the ceiling. If something like that fell, it could knock a man’s brains out.
“Don’t everybody talk at once,” Roger Chester said. He glanced at Ash. “How come they’ll spread it out thick to you, but to me it’s as thin as a spick’s wallet?”
Nomad almost said Mr. Chester ought to ask his pal Felix Gogo if his wallet was so thin, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Okay, I know you’ve been through some heavy…” Chester hesitated, seeking the right word for a man of his standing. He settled on, “Shit. Everybody knows it was rough. And I absolutely think you ought to take some time off. I guess you’re shell-shocked. Well, who the hell wouldn’t be? Right?”
“Exactly,” Ash agreed.
“But we have to talk about your future. We have to get serious about it. We have to strike while the iron is hot.”
Berke shifted her position. Nomad thought for an instant that she really was going to put up her boots and knock the magazines off, but the moment passed. He couldn’t help it. He had to say, “That’s a term used in branding cattle, isn’t it?”
Roger Chester peered at him over the rims of his glasses. “Oh, mercy!” he said. “Mercy me and Johnny Jehosophat! What’s your problem?” His voice not only took over the room, it nearly broke the picture window.
No problem, Nomad almost answered, but it would be a lie and that phrase could still send him into a rage thinking about a crazed waitress in Tucson. “We’re breaking up,” Nomad said. “Tomorrow night’s the last gig.”
“Yeah, I heard that from Ash.” Roger Chester drank from a coffee mug with a UT logo. “Didn’t listen to it, though. Didn’t listen, because it didn’t make any goddamned sense. You’re telling me you’re calling it quits, after all you’ve been through, all the shit, all the work, and now you’ve got network TV people interested in following you around with cameras and broadcasting your life to the world, and publishers wanting to do quickie books that ghost writers will write for you, and promoters crying out for you all over this country and in three foreign lands, and record deals hanging from money trees ready to be plucked, and you’re calling it quits. Quits,” he said to Ash, as if the suave fellow from New Delhi had forgotten his clipped English.
Ash just shrugged and smiled, showing some front teeth that Nomad thought would look so pretty on the floor.
“We need time,” Ariel spoke up, “to decide what we want to do.” She started to say Sir, but her lips would not let it through.
“And we definitely no way want to be in any fucking reality show,” said Berke.
“Oh, is that beneath you? That’s what this is about? You think it’s crass?”
“I think it’s unnecessary,” Nomad said. “We all do.”
“Do you think making money is unnecessary? Hm? Because that’s what it would be. A whole big truckload of money. Plus super exposure, an opportunity to promote new songs and CDs, maybe a tie-in to a televised concert special, and—” He slapped the edge of his desk. “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe I’m having to spell all this out! Look, you’re on top right now! You’re somebodies, instead of the nobodies you used to be. Your powder’s hot and you’re about to make one hell of a flash.”
“Yeah,” Nomad said. “Flash. That’s kind of what I was thinking, too.”
“Is there some cryptic meaning to that, or will you enlighten me?”
“I’ll ask you a question.” Nomad stared across the desk into the man’s eyes. “Can you name one song we’ve ever done?”
“‘When The Storm Breaks’,” said Ash.
“Not you. I’d like Mr. Chester to answer that. Any song titles come to mind?”
Roger Chester stared back. He took a drink from his coffee mug.
“Any lines from any of our songs?” No response. “How about CD titles?” Nomad asked. He raised his eyebrows. “Anything?”
In the Vista Futura, on the Saturday night stage in a shaft of yellow light, Ariel sang.
“You might be in a place where the old skin won’t fit.
You might feel as worthless as a cup full of spit.
Well some things don’t change, you know they never do,
but some things do change, they change with you.
In this old world.
In this tough old world.
In this hard old world.
In this old world.”
And now Berke’s drums strengthened in volume, the cymbals spoke with their shimmering voices, and Nomad stepped forward to lay down a solo with his Strat. The solo was loose and easy, almost with a bluesy vibe. It sounded like something that might have spilled onto the rainslick street from a club where the sign said One Night Only. Dean And The Roadmen.
He was nervous, not because of the solo—he had that knocked—but because the verse he’d written was coming up next, and because deep down he feared this song.
“One CD title,” Nomad had said to Roger Chester, in the fourth-floor office. “I’ll give you the first two words of our newest CD. Catch As—”
“I don’t need to know,” the man across the desk replied. “That’s Ash’s job.”
Nomad nodded. The way Roger Chester had said that spoke volumes.
“Do you even like music?” Nomad asked.
There was no longer any need for pretense. “Not your kind, no. Not particularly.”
“Do you like any kind?”
“Listen, don’t get smart. My grandfather started this business, friend. Started it from a travelling caravan of country singers who played places you people wouldn’t piss in. And my grandfather was the barker, standing in the back of a pickup truck hollering through a megaphone. Bringing in the customers from the fields and the barns, and charging them a little money for a lot of entertainment.” His voice was making the glass rattle. Nomad thought it was just a matter of time before the bighorn sheep had its revenge.
“Ohhhhh, now I get it,” Roger Chester said, his eyes gleaming. But not in a good way. “Ash, take at look at these three. You know what you’re looking at?”
Ash must’ve thought it was a trick question, because he refrained to commit.
“Arteests,” said the big voice. “I run into them occasionally. They go out to change the world and make grand statements, and they wind up living in their cars and playing on the street corner for lunch money. Well, can I tell you something?” He waited, but not very long. “Nobody gives one good fuck about art. About messages. It was true in my grandfather’s day, and it is for hell sure today. People want to be entertained.” He stressed that word with three distinct syllables, as if his guests had never heard it before. “They don’t care what music says. They don’t even listen. They want to go out to a bar on the weekend, have fun, drink some beer, maybe meet a girl or guy, and you know what you are to that? Background noise.”