Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (31 page)

“I think everyone in this room will agree that it’s just
plain remarkable that so many people in this country already know about this
song.
 
It speaks to the power of the
Internet, certainly, but it also speaks to the power of the song itself.
 
In fact, I betcha dolla
that it’s a lot more about the song than the dubya-dubya-dubya dot com thing.
 
And lemme tell ya what makes me say
that.
 
Franklin
showed me a website the other day with a data base of nearly two-hundred’n
fifty thousand MP3 files, that’s a quarter million songs, and not a-one you’ve
heard of.
 
But half the country music
fans in America
know about this one — and they wanna buy it too.”

Big Bill walked over to Franklin who handed him a couple of
boxes with master recording tapes in them.
 
They both smiled.
 
Big Bill held
the boxes up for all to see.
 
“The
album’s already in the can, twelve tracks, so right
off the
bat you know we’ve got something unorthodox in mind.”
 
He smiled and set the tapes on the
podium.
 
“Now, you’ve heard the first
single.
 
Believe me when I tell you there
are at least two more.
 
Of course you’ll
be able to hear the whole thing before we execute any contracts, but trust your
instincts based on what you just heard.
 
You’ve got a rough idea of the value of that one song, now add a couple
of zeros to that and we can talk.”
 
Big
Bill paused to let them think about that for a moment.

It would be an understatement to say this was not how most
record deals came about, especially for an unknown artist, but then, ‘
It Wasn’t Supposed To
End That Way’ was not most songs.
 
On the one hand, the executives couldn’t
believe how good the song was.
 
On the
other, they were afraid to imagine the deal Herron and Peavy were going to
propose.
 
Were they so brazen as to think
they could command the Garth deal right out of the box?
 
It crossed more than a few minds that they
should just leave in a big huff to show that their label didn’t let artists
dictate to them, but they had to wait to see if anyone else did it first, lest
they screw themselves out of this record based on nothing more than
principle.
 
No one budged.

 
“Well then, you’re
still with me,” Big Bill said.
 
“That’s
good.”
 
He nodded to his partner who
picked up a stack of documents.
 
“Now
before Franklin passes out his memo
covering the main points of the deal, let me introduce to you the young man
who’s made this all possible.”

The curtain parted and Eddie came up the stairs from back
stage.
 
He was wearing pressed Wranglers
and a denim work shirt unbuttoned to reveal a white t-shirt underneath.
 
He had his big flattop Gibson in his hand and
he was wearing his tan Stetson.
 
He kept
his head down until he reached Big Bill’s side.
 
“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to introduce Mr. Eddie
Long.”
 
A second spotlight jumped on him
and he looked up flashing his best smile.
 
Several of the women in the crowd actually gasped.
 
He looked that good.

Eddie bowed modestly and pulled his guitar into
position.
 
He looked out at the crowd,
found Megan, and winked.
 
Then he counted
it down, “a-one, two, a-one, two three…”
 
He busted into a rowdy solo version of ‘Dixie National’ and played the
crowd like a seasoned pro.
 
Meanwhile, Franklin
circulated among them, distributing the pages outlining the proposed minimum
deal points.

When Eddie reached the second chorus, he stopped singing,
but he kept playing the guitar.
 
Big Bill
talked over the music.
 
It was as
polished a dog-and-pony show as anyone in Nashville
had ever seen.
 
“As you can see from the
memo Franklin’s handing out, we’re
not exactly proposing a standard deal,” Big Bill said.
 
“The numbers in the right hand column are the
minimums for today’s bidding.
 
The maximums,
well, that’s up to you.”
 
The executives
were still absorbing the deal points when Eddie suddenly stopped playing the
guitar and Big Bill raised the microphone to his lips.
 
“Now, who’d like to start the bidding?”

Big Bill Herron might’ve been fixin’ to fall off Nashville’s
hot 100, but everyone knew he still had an ear for great songs.
 
They’d just heard proof of that.
 
Or had they?
 
No one stopped to ask that question, and that’s what Big Bill was
counting on.
 
Whether it was a great song
or not didn’t really matter at the moment, though.
 
The only thing that mattered was that the
people in this room, at this moment, believed it was a great song.
 
That was the genius of this gathering.
 
There was no time for doubt or focus group
surveys.
 
Big Bill was relying on pack
mentality, plain and simple.
 
All he
needed was one major label to start off in the right direction and the rest of
the herd would have to follow.
 
Big Bill
pointed at his old friend, James, the head of the second biggest label in Nashville.
 
“James?
 
Whaddya say?
 
You know that’s a
hit.”

James figured he didn’t have anything to loose by making the
minimum bid.
 
If no one countered, he got
the record as cheap as it could be gotten.
 
If someone did counter, he was off the hook.
 
And in his gut he felt Big Bill was right; it
was a hit.
 
So he made the bid, and that
was all it took.
 
In a matter of minutes,
the Acuff Conference Room looked like the trading floor of the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange.
 
Fueled by alcohol
and driven by greed and fear, the label heads bid higher and higher.
 
Once it achieved a certain momentum, the
thing simply fed on
itself
.
 
There were frantic cell phone calls to
corporate headquarters.
 
The smaller
labels either fell by the wayside each time the bid jumped by ten or twenty or
fifty thousand dollars, or they tried to forge ad hoc alliances to outbid the
majors.
 
It was a thing to behold.

The reporters for
Billboard
and
Radio & Records
would later
recall in breathless terms how the historical auction played itself out over
the course of a frenzied forty minutes.
 
When it was over, there were photo ops and lots of champagne.
 
The press release out of Nashville
the next day was picked up by all mainstream media.
 
Some of the articles that followed were
steeped in hype: “The new Garth!” and “Country music’s twenty-first century
savior,” that sort of thing.
 
But there
was one element in the stories that wasn’t hype.
 
It was plain and simple and true: Eddie Long
had signed the most lucrative rookie contract in the history of country
music.
 
Bar none.

45.

Carl opened up like a magnolia blossom once he realized the
opportunity Jimmy’s book afforded him.
 
It occurred to him he could attribute all sorts of statements to Tammy
— some true, some not — and it would be impossible for anyone to know which
was which.
 
“Tammy told me more than once
that she wanted Eddie to settle down and take a job at The Dollar Store so they
could start raising a family.”
 
He held
his putter in the air and wrapped his fingers perfectly around the grip.
 
“Of course, Eddie resented that real
bad.
 
He had his own dreams, you know,
the country music thing, and he told Tammy it was gonna be a cold day in
Jew-lie before he got tied down in Hinchcliff.”
 
Carl tapped the heel of the putter on the floor, then leaned toward
Jimmy, propping himself up by the club.
 
“I think he beat her too.
 
She
never said anything about it, but I saw a bruise on her leg once.”
 
Carl reached into his pocket and dropped
another ball onto the putting green.
 
“Now I hate to tell on her, but this might be helpful.”
 
He tapped Jimmy’s chest with the grip of the
putter.
 
“Just don’t tell
nobody
you heard it from me.”

Carl was suddenly acting like he was a key figure in some
sort of international espionage intrigue.
 
Jimmy figured he’d play along if that’s what it took to get Carl to
talk.
 
He grabbed the putter and assured
Carl that he was bound by a journalist oath of confidentiality and protected by
the First Amendment guarantee that sources don’t have to be revealed.
 
“Carl,” he said in all seriousness, “I’ll
take your name to my grave.”

“All right,” Carl said, wrenching the putter away from
Jimmy.
 
“Tammy told me she’d been seeing
another man.
 
A feller from Grenada,
I think.
 
She never said his name, but…”
 
Out of the corner of his eye Carl saw
his boss heading toward sporting goods.
 
“Hey, listen, I think I’ve said enough,” Carl said as he put the putter
back in its stand.
 
“And if you quote me,
I’ll deny we ever talked.”
 
He walked off
toward his boss.
 
“Hey,
Mr. Teasdale, how you doin’?”

Notwithstanding the fact that Jimmy hadn’t found the right
kind of poison out at the Lytle’s farm, his earlier suspicions returned.
 
If Eddie felt Tammy was standing between him
and his
dream, that
might amount to motive.
 
Of course there was the matter of having to
explain the other poisoning deaths and the gunshot wound, but, well, he was new
at this.
 
He’d just have to take things
one step at a time.

Jimmy looked at his watch.
 
It was five-thirty.
 
“Shit!”
 
He raced out of the store, dove in his car,
and headed south.
 
He had to cover a
Foghat concert at a casino in Vicksburg
in three hours and it was going to be close.
 
Highway 61 through the Delta wasn’t exactly the Autobahn and if got
caught passing too many tractors between Quitman and Warren Counties, he’d
probably end up writing a story about the appalling conditions at the jail in
Panther Burn or Nitta Yuma.

46.

To be charitable, one could have argued Megan was simply
being experimental with her foreplay.
 
She was wearing nothing but a pair of pink silk panties while sitting in
bed next to Eddie with a calculator between her legs.
 
“All right,” she said, “let’s add up how much
money you’re going to have a year from now.”
 
She took a swig off her beer then leaned way over to put it on the
bedside table.
 
Eddie peeked at her
underside and did what he had to.
 
Megan
shrieked and nearly fell off the bed before she started laughing.
 
“Hey!
 
You pinch that again and I’ll retaliate.”
 
She grabbed the toenail clippers that were
sitting next to her beer and brandished them at Eddie.

He covered his giblets with one hand and pointed with the
other.
 
“I was just trying to get that
piece of lint, I swear.”

Megan looked at her crotch.
 
“That’s not lint!”
 
She looked up
and wagged a finger at Eddie.
 
“Okay,
later tonight, I’ll give you a lint identification lesson but first, we’ve got
some accounting to do.”

Truth was
,
they’d both taken
drunk.
 
And, as if the alcohol and the promise
of a lint identification lesson wasn’t enough, Eddie was still plenty high from
having deposited two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into his checking
account.
 
It was an unheard of situation
for any recording artist, but especially for a first-time record deal.
 
The way it normally worked in Nashville
was this: after a label signed an artist to a recording contract, they advanced
the artist money for various expenses — legal fees, wardrobe, video
production, and the biggest expense of all, for recording an album.
 
It wasn’t unusual for an artist to be
$350,000 in debt to the label before the record was actually released.
 
The good news for the artist was that he or
she didn’t owe the label anything if the record bombed.
 
The bad news, in a sense, was the artist
didn’t get to spend all that advance money on fun stuff.

The label made back their advance only if the record sold
well.
 
Once it started selling, the label
applied the artist’s royalty income against the amount advanced.
 
It was only after the advance was recouped
that the artist started seeing money from record sales
as the artist
.
 
Income from
songwriting and publishing was a whole different animal.
 
To see any profit from record sales, the
artist had to sell at least 500,000 units in less than six months lest the
‘mechanical’ income be offset by long-term overhead.
 
There were probably hundreds of well known
country artists with good careers who made next to nothing on their record
sales, even after going gold.
 
The bulk
of their income came from touring and, if they wrote their own songs, from
publishing and radio play.

Now, ask anyone on Music Row and they’d tell you the same
thing — the standard royalty rate for a new artist in Nashville
was twelve percent of the retail price of the record with three or four of
those points going to the producer.
 
Of
course that was really just a screwy way of saying the standard royalty rate
for a new artist was eight percent, but that’s how they talked in Nashville.
 
Of course all this was a vast oversimplification
of how money was accounted for in the industry.
 
The real business practices were far more convoluted and deceptive than
this.