Rock Bottom (3 page)
“Whoops,” Bobby said. “Sorry?”
“I think you should leave now,” Ullee said. “I think you ought to go.”
“You do, huh?”
“Now, man,” he said, and cursed in Dutch. “Now.”
The keyboard lay there, bent and twisted, torn and frayed.
“Now!” Ullee yelled. “Go!”
Bobby put on his jacket and stomped out into the Dutch mist. The old buildings looked down on him with their cockeyed dormer windows. Fog blotted out their roofs.
“Good job, dude,” he said. “Could you be a bigger asshole?”
Run Lola Run stood there with her cigarette. Her legs, Bobby thought, looked like a fishnet ladder to a hot Dutch heaven, one that, with these ragged hands, he could never climb. Another beauty out of reach. Another sexy sprite who would fall into the arms of undeserving men. Men who never knew regret, never thought twice, and never looked back.
She flicked her cigarette into the street and bounced on her heels.
“Hey, rock star,” she said. “How’s it going?”
JUST ONCE,
Joey thought, they could appreciate me. Just once, they could call her up and say, Hey, Joey, we know it must be tough wiping the spit of humiliation off your face each and every day, but we just want you to know we never forget how hard you work for us, how tirelessly you advocate our interests, how completely you sacrifice everything else to make sure we’re happy. Just once, she could call them and not get insulted with nicknames: Nazgûl, the Crippled Crone, Amphetamine Annie. She had a proper name and it wouldn’t kill them to use it once in a while.
They had no idea what it was like to be the ambassador and evangelist of the biggest joke in the music business, the defender of terminally damaged goods, the sunny shepherd of the walking dead.
Of course, calling Bobby had been a mistake. She had no love for Bobby. Bobby was hard to love, always fretting like the rabbit in Wonderland. It wouldn’t have done her any good to have him sitting here, scratching his hands. Generally, your enemy’s enemy was your friend. But with Bobby she’d rather take on failure all by her fucking self.
Failure was going to show up any minute now at this sidewalk café, in the form of John Hackney, their European A&R guy, who, back in ancient history, had the task of assuring the success of Blood Orphans on the continent. Hackney, whom Joey had made the mistake of contacting before her trip, just to see if he could get some press to these final shows, only to find out that he would be in Amsterdam too, on unrelated matters.
“We need to get together,” Hackney said. “We have to talk.”
Very
fucking funny.
Her trip had been an act of desperation. She’d gone stir crazy at the world headquarters of DreamDare, her management company with an employee roster of exactly one, that ridiculous office on Wilshire and Westwood she rented to show what a budding Brian Epsteinette she was, a low-ceilinged, dusty room full of unopened boxes and a phone that rang only with complaints from creditors, a quiet place where she sat at a desk doing crossword puzzles and checking her e-mail while in the offices around her, boutique offshoots of the movie business — editing and animation and postproduction — hummed and thrummed. Out of boredom, she’d forced herself on all these adjacent people, hanging out until they had to ask her, Uh, Joey, don’t you have work to do? ’Cause we do. And she would say, Oh, of course, what time is it oh shit I have a meeting over at Capitol, I have lunch with an agent over at ICM, I have to meet with the accountant and figure out what to do with all this revenue. I just can’t count it fast enough!
Upon which she would go back to her office and cry.
So she decided to cross the pond and see what the four stooges had been up to, witness the end of an era, make a clean break with that which had brought her almost-fame and several hundred thousand dollars that she’d frittered away on expensive dinners, rebuilt hot rods, and sky-high office rent. She wanted to see her blessed band’s last show, even though seeing them now, at the tight end of the career noose, would do little more than fill her with any number of different angers: at the band, at herself, at the record company. But anger on a first-class transatlantic flight was a fuck of a lot better than watching sunlight move across the Hollywood sign from your window, waiting for someone who wasn’t a collection agency to return your phone calls.
Not that she knew anything about running a company, or even going to work. When Joey was seventeen, an old man had driven up onto a Santa Monica sidewalk and plowed right into her. The accident provided her with two things: a settlement that meant a decade’s worth of financial security and a bum left leg with a nasty limp. At first she’d alleviated the pain with prescription painkillers, but then she put her purple Camaro into a guardrail while loaded on Vicodin and malt liquor. Now she just hauled around an infirmary-sized bottle of Tylenol, and a well-hidden bindle of coke.
You could get anything on a plane if you stuck it far enough up your ass.
In her wildest nightmares, Joey had never imagined that Blood Orphans would fail so completely. There had been Darlo and Bobby’s night in the Omaha jail, and the riot in Stockholm. There had been Bobby’s tooth loss and hand decay, and Shane’s descent into comically condescending religiosity, and Adam’s annoying art-school philosophies, his crushed velvet, his Fu Manchu.
But that was just rock and roll. The real problem, the quandary that turned folly into failure, was one very small number: 3,451. The number of copies of
Rocket Heart
sold. Figuring out who was responsible for that number would take the rest of her life.
The breeze picked up, spun leaves on Dam Square. She lit a cigarette and felt some postnasal drip. Eau de Cocaine slid down her throat.
“Nice day,” she said, smiling, as if she were on a date.
Conventional wisdom said that Blood Orphans had set themselves up by taking that advance. No one wanted to like a band that hadn’t earned it. Everyone from radio promoters to fellow bands to hipster blog bullshit artists looked upon them as some rogue element, as if their big record deal had forever polluted the workings of a pure and untainted pop music ecosystem.
But none of that would’ve mattered if
Spin
hadn’t gone after them.
Spin
’s hatchet job rendered them stillborn. The editor, some butch British fuck named Arthur St. George, took it upon himself to turn his review of
Rocket Heart
into an editorial on the evils of irresponsible rock-star life and made this screed the Editor’s Note, right under a picture of him looking smarmy at his desk in skyscraperland.
“You’ve no doubt heard about Blood Orphans,” St. George wrote, “the foursome from Silver Lake that went from unknown in their hometown to a multimillion-dollar act for Warners. Bully for them. We root for the lucky. It’s what makes rock and roll great. Still, it’s no surprise that their record,
Rocket Heart,
is terrible. Just flat-out criminally terrible, a hodgepodge of old Kiss riffs, vocals that make David Coverdale look like Placido Domingo, and guitar pyrotechnics so lame Steve Vai could do better with a ukulele. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that Warner Bros., proud home to generations of musical legends, has signed a bunch of racists. Yes, that’s right. Blood Orphans are racist. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before — I know, it’s only rock and roll — but ‘Double Mocha Lattay’ makes ‘Brown Sugar’ look like an appeal for tolerance. The track features lines like ‘Once you go black, you’ll never go slack’ and ‘Sweet little white boy, you’re the best don’t you know/buy me a mink fur coat and I’m your personal ho.’ Another example of this idiocy can be found in track three, ‘I Also Have a Dream,’ with the lines ‘I just want a cock as big as MLK/So I can walk down the street and yell, Ladies, this way!’ And finally there’s ‘Ultra-Apache’: ‘She was a squaw so fine, I loved to grind her gears/full lips, brown skin, and a trail of fucking tears.’ Blood Orphans deserve a fast burial in an unmarked grave, the entire print run of
Rocket Heart
burned in a fire of purification. Shame on you, Warner Bros. Shame on you.”
Within a week Warners had recalled the record and released another, in a vastly smaller print run, without the three offending songs. One hundred thousand discs and one hundred thousand inner sleeves into the shredder. Darlo, author of said lyrics, refused to apologize, make a statement, stage a benefit for the NAACP.
“These lyrics are a joke,” he said through their new, smaller, cheaper publicist. “It’s rock and roll, everyone. Besides, I’m one eighth full-blooded Cherokee. I know how racism feels. Lighten up!”
The label withdrew the offer for them to spend two months opening for Aerosmith, and suddenly Steadman, their domestic A&R man, could not be reached for comment. Steadman, who had listened to every one of the offending songs over and over and never made a peep of protest, who liked to party with them like it was 1999, was always out, gone for the day, or had just stepped into a meeting.
“Don’t worry,” Steadman’s assistant told Joey. “We’ll get them on tour in more suitable markets. Youthcentric markets. Cutting-edge markets.”
“Cutting-edge market” is code for “very small club.”
Not that the band themselves, lost in the funhouse, noticed.
And I am the one who takes it in the face today, Joey thought. I am the one who gets fucking dunked in it. Double Mocha Lattay, coming right up.
Joey adjusted her mohawk, which had grown out into a thick blond lump that defied all attempts at order, and watched John Hackney, their soon-to-be-former A&R man in Europe, arrive at the café.
“There she is,” Hackney said, and they rose to cheek-kiss. “Joey.”
Hackney, Joey thought, sure was one hot piece of ass, complete with thick lower lip, sleepy-but-knowing gaze, and sultry half-smile. They had met only once before, in London, back at the start of this long, strange trip, before the road to riches went from shiny yellow bricks to sticky black tar. The two meetings were bookends to the miserable epic of Joey’s ineptitude.
At that first meeting — drinks in Notting Hill, dinner in Soho, just the two of them talking strategy — Joey had made a pass at Hackney, but he’d declined, leaving her on a misty street corner like a poor man’s Twiggy. Maybe this time he’d want to show her his record collection.
Hackney was dressed in top Brit gangster gear, and smelled of oranges.
“Foggy day here in Amsterdam,” he said. “But it has its drama.”
“Does it?” Joey wrapped her coat tight. “I didn’t notice.”
Even though Hackney was supposed to be their Euro champion, the A&R executive had never been able to pretend excitement. Joey knew that Hackney thought Blood Orphans were that once-in-a-career clusterfuck he just had to grin and bear — that the fact that they’d been signed at all, let alone for a sizable percentage of the A&R budget for business year 2003, was a travesty.
Sometimes shit didn’t break a band’s way. That was one thing. If you were John Hackney, you felt bad about that. You did your best. But with Blood Orphans, Joey knew that he was thinking, Thank fucking God, and let’s just forget this ever happened.
“Talked to the band lately?” Hackney asked, sitting down.
“No.” She tried to look indignant. “They’re not talking to me.”
“Why is that?”
“Darlo says I’m a shit Midas. All I do is bring bad news.”
“You’re their manager,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be —”
“— a little self-defeating not to talk to your manager? The lunatics run the fucking asylum. It’s been a month since I spoke with them.” She thought about it for a second. “Actually, that’s not entirely true. Sometimes Darlo sends me text messages, one-word sentiments like ‘Lazy’ and ‘Lesbian.’ ”
Hackney lit a Players, and Joey mooched a light.
“I saw them play in Rotterdam,” Hackney said. “About two weeks ago.”
“How was it?”
“Memorable.”
“You’ll have to elaborate. With those morons, that could mean so many things.”
Hackney laughed at that, and so did Joey. But insults, even now, made her feel like a suck-up betrayer.
“Let me guess,” Joey said. “Shane’s still a Tantric Buddhist.”
“He sure is.” Hackney took a long drag. “And how.”
“Did he mention it onstage?”
“Between every song.”
Shane had started off as the closest thing to a normal person in the band, despite the fact that when they all met, he was a most devout Holy Roller, part of some scary Orange County clan. But he wasn’t vicious like Darlo, or pretentious like Adam, or neurotic like Bobby. He’d been a pleasant kid whose blond good looks and affable personality could have fit in anywhere. But delusions of grandeur had fucked them all in different ways, and in Shane’s case had made him a preachy, annoying mouthpiece for a number of successive spiritual dead ends.
“Let me see if I can remember it right,” Hackney said. “The cock is the lingam. The pussy is the yoni. The cock is also the jade stalk and the pussy is the emerald lagoon.”
“What else?”
He blew perfect smoke rings. Some calf hair peeked out where his cuff broke. Joey wanted to lick his legs bare.
“A most comprehensive retelling of the Kama Sutra,” he said. “Which some drunk in the crowd kept calling the Come On Sarah.”
“Did you get the guy’s address?” Joey asked. “I want to send the fucker some flowers.”
Hackney laughed. Joey fixated on his pearly British chompers.
“The heckling didn’t dissuade him,” Hackney said. “He kept on, into a discussion of Ashtanga yoga, and the virtues of ten glasses of water a day, and the magic aphrodisiac qualities of yohimbine.” He looked to Joey. “I know I’m missing some things.”
“Genghis Khan died having sex,” she offered. “He was a brave warrior.”
“He had many wives,” Hackney said, “and practiced the downward dog, the chanting hyena, the oracular ostrich, the galloping goat.”
“You’re killing me over here,” Joey said. “Killing me softly.”
Hackney puffed. “The lectures really thinned the room. By the end of the set the band was playing to their shadows. I introduced myself after the show, and they couldn’t have cared less. They practically pushed me out of the way to get to their beers.”