Berke put one boot up on the table.
Roger Chester glanced at it, but he was a mouth in motion now, a speeding fireball of truth, and he’d decided he was going to give these people what they’d asked for.
“This business is about money,” he said. “Not art. Fuck art. Unless I can make a lot of money from it, and then I say ‘Bring me more art!’ But the profit on selling messages to people is mighty paltry. If it can’t be branded, and packaged, and promoted, and sold to a demographic, as far as I’m concerned, friend…it doesn’t exist.”
It was the second ‘friend’ that almost sent Nomad over the edge. But he held himself back. He held himself. He put his hands on his knees and gripped hard, and he tried for a tight smile but it emerged as a grimace. He had nothing against entertainment. Entertainment was fine. The Five’s material was mostly party band stuff, feelgood rockers or ballads, but still…to be told they had a boundary, a line they were not supposed to cross, a box they were supposed to be happy and glad and pleased not to ever climb out of. That seemed like a kind of death, in itself. The death of experimenting, the death of the noble failure from reaching too high. The death of caring whether what you did was good or bad. You just wanted to get paid, and to go home to your big TV, because nothing was more important than the cash.
“Mr. Chester,” Nomad said, “you don’t know anything about our music, do you? But it’s the same as it’s always been. A month ago…you’re right, hardly anybody knew us. We were working, and we had fans, but—”
“You weren’t going anywhere. I’ve seen your numbers.”
“Right,” Nomad said carefully. “So…what’s changed? We’re suddenly famous and all these people want a part of us—and you want to push us into everybody’s living room and iPod—because two of our members are dead? And one was put in the hospital? What about the music? That’s the same. We work, and we work, and we try our best, and we can’t get anywhere unless we trade on the deaths of our friends?” His voice broke. He thought the rest of himself would fly to pieces at any second. “You didn’t do these things for us before. That’s not right. We agree on this, sir. The Five is done, because if we’re ever successful again we want it to be for our music, not because of tragedy.”
“John.” Roger Chester let the name sit out there like an egg being fried. He smiled; it went away; he smiled again. “Nice speech, but pointless. Let’s say you three walk out of here today, mad as hornets, and you decide that’s it with this agency. You decide to fire me, for trying to make you lots of money and be very successful. Well…the thing is… I run this show. Not just me. Others like me, everywhere. See, we kind of guard the gate. We look for musical talent, sure. Got to have that. But there are lots of folks with musical talent. Then we look for the pretty people, or the people with something quirky about ’em. The people with attitude and personality. Something the mass audience would buy. We look for the rebels, or we create ’em. We line up the critics and the mentions in the magazines. We water grass, not weeds. So if we’ve let you in and you don’t click, if you don’t have the amount of sales we’re looking for, if it’s just not right, then…we kind of push you toward that gate again. And we’ll hang with you for a while, but if it looks to us like our time can be used more productively…then we have to push you out the gate, and we hope you do real well in the future. So you can walk out of here, but where will you go? Oh, I forgot the Internet! Like you can ever make any real money, or a real career, off half-assed bloggers and low-rent CD pressers.”
Roger Chester took a long sip of his coffee.
Then another long sip.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
Nomad’s solo was finished. It was echoing off along the black walls. Ariel stepped to her microphone again, and sang.
“So welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it,
It’d be a poor old world, described in just four minutes.
You got to get out there, see what’s in it, don’t let life make you crazy.
I wish you safe travel, courage, you can find it.
I wish you safe travel, courage, you can find it.
Was the old world,
Today the new old world.
Was the old world,
Today the new old world.”
And then the drums quietened again, to the beat of the bass and the snap of the hi-hat, and Ariel sang softly, as if reciting a children’s rhyme.
“Try and try, grow and thrive,
Because no one here gets out alive.
Try and try, grow and thrive,
Because no one here gets out alive.”
Sitting on the brown leather sofa with Berke and Ariel, Nomad thought of the plight of Ezra’s Jawbone, and the men in the suits saying that the awesome rock opera Dustin Daye, which followed no model nor copied any current sound, was no good because it lacked a single the kids would buy. And they made the members of Ezra’s Jawbone think they had failed, when it was the suits who couldn’t hear the music.
Nomad knew. It was partly why the man’s speaking volume was so loud and uncontrolled. “You have a tin ear,” he told Roger Chester. “Your hearing’s fucked up. So you wait for someone else to say music is worthwhile, it has value, and then you rush around and gladhand people and say you knew it all along. Maybe you’re afraid, because you have investors who are looking for quick money, and you can’t—won’t—support anything but the sure thing. But you make more money with the sure thing, right? The comfortable thing? So if you don’t like music anyway, if you don’t see the value in it beyond money, then how can you lose? And there we are…one day nobodies, the next day as sure a thing as you can get. Because tragedy struck, and we got some attention.”
“Sounds like a golden opportunity to me,” said Roger Chester.
“How you got yourself in control of people who really care about music, I have no idea. And you,” Nomad said to Ash. “You’ve got your ears up your butthole.”
Roger Chester took his glasses off and wiped the lenses with a white hankerchief. He still wore a slim smile. “All I can say to that is, we’re talking about the age-old war between business and art. Correct? Friend, business won that war a long time ago. And if you don’t already know that to be the truth, then…” He put his glasses back on, the better to see the face of the vanquished. “Welcome to the world,” he said.
Nomad told Berke and Ariel that he thought it was time to go. They all stood up, and then Roger Chester went a buttkick too far.
“I guess this means your friends died for nothing.”
Nomad stared at him across the desk. One month ago he would have thrown himself at the man, no matter who the fuck he was or how old he was, and he would’ve made that mouth regret its lips. He would’ve folded this man up at the joints and made him smile where the sun did not shine.
But not today.
He said, “You know where to send the checks.”
“I certainly do, Mr. Charles. Minus our fifteen percent commission, and minus expenses for travel, various promotional considerations and extra expenditures as specified in the agreement. I certainly do.”