Rough Country

it’s inconvenient. She’ll take off.”
    Virgil wrapped her up from behind and said, “Honest to God, and not to be crude about it, but if I don’t get you on the bed tonight, something could break. I mean, something might fall off.”
    Sig reached back and squeezed his thigh: “We’ll just get rid of her.”
    Zoe knocked.

17
    THE DOUBLE-WIDE SMELLED like Dinty Moore beef stew, coffee, sweat, and the vagrant vegetable odor of marijuana. Jud Windrow leaned back in the beanbag chair, scuffing his boot heels across the shag carpet; sucked on a Budweiser, tried to stay alert, and listened to Wendy, Berni, and Slibe snarl at one another.
    He’d seen all this before. You had artists who’d spent thousands of hours learning how to play a musical instrument, who could tell you anything you might want to know about writing a song, about bridges and transitions and about single specific words that you couldn’t use in a song. Cadaver? Had anyone ever used cadaver in a song?
    They knew all that, worked it, groomed it, smoothed it out, sat up all night, night after night, doing it—and they didn’t know a single fucking thing about business. They were in a business, but they didn’t know it. They thought they were in an art form.
    He sighed and let them fight it out.

    HE’D PUT THE SKUNK among the chickens when he mentioned the necessity of recruiting another drummer, and possibly somebody different on the keyboards. Berni had gone ballistic, and he’d thought for a few seconds that she might come after him, physically, but then she had started pleading with Wendy, trying to save her job, and when Wendy had looked away, Berni began to cry.
    “I . . . I . . . I get this asshole cop who drags me down to the police station and tortures me, and now you guys are kicking me out of the band . . . No, don’t say you’re not.”
    Windrow then suggested that she could help front the band: play a rhythm instrument of some kind, sing backups, and she’d quieted down a bit.
    “As long as I get to stay . . .”
    Wendy defended the keyboard player: “We put too much weight on her, is all. She’s fine on recordings, but hasn’t got an act, you know? She stands back there and plays and looks kinda dead. We can work on that.”
    “She can play,” Windrow said. “But you don’t see many big bands without everybody having some kind of personality.”
    “We’ll get her a hat,” Wendy said. “I’ll work on her. The thing is . . . she does the melodies on the songs. She made the ‘Artists’ Waltz’ into a waltz . . . used to be a straight-up ballad.”
    “Okay,” Windrow said. “So she’s okay. Get her a hat.”
     
     
     
    THEN THEY MOVED ON to the terms of the contract, and that’s where Slibe jumped in with both feet. There were terms which, Windrow admitted, were favorable to him. After the initial month-long house-band gig, they agreed to play the Spodee-Odee for a week in each of the next five years, at Windrow’s option. If they refused, they’d agree to pay Windrow the equivalent of fifteen percent of the royalties from any records released during that period. On the other hand, if Windrow didn’t want them, in any particular year, he could cancel them without penalty.
    Slibe shouted at Wendy: “You see what happens? This guy takes a cut out of everything. He owns your ass.”
    “Not her entire ass,” Windrow said. “Fifteen percent of it.”
    “That’s how these guys steal from you,” Slibe said. “They get you all tied up in legal contracts that you can’t get out of.”
    Wendy wanted to sign anyway, for reasons that Windrow told her were good.
    “Listen: you can stay up here and be a ratshit band and play at the Wild Goose or maybe get a couple gigs down in the Twin Cities, or wherever, but you aren’t going to break out that way. You won’t,” he said.
    “They could get people to listen to them up here—” Slibe began, but Wendy said, “Shut up, Dad, let him talk.”
    Windrow went on. “If you wanna break out, you gotta put it on the line. That means I bring you down for a month, expose you to some of the top acts and top managers and agents in the business. And I pay you. What do I get? I get a new band that nobody knows—but you’re pretty good, and my big payoff comes if you do well. You make a couple records and they sell okay. So then you gotta come back and play the Spodee-Odee for not much money, but hell, that won’t hurt your reputation any. It’s one of the top