Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1024 The Unforgiven

The Unforgiven

You may have heard the expression "I need a scorecard to keep all the players straight" applied to various situations from complicated family situations to corporate working environments. What Mintz did in almost doodle-like fashion after going over all the basic contracts, though, was literally make himself a scorecard.

The players: me, Digger, Ziggy, DMA LLC (which included me and Digger), Moondog Three (which included me and Ziggy), BNC and by extension Megastar Corporation, Sarah Rogue, and WTA. If everyone sued everyone that could be dozens of lawsuits.

But of course the thing wasn't just the lawsuits, it was the potential threats of lawsuits that were in play, too. As Feinbaum had once explained to me, most of the lawyers were not interested in having the cases actually land in court, and both the court and the lawyers are usually most interested in the parties coming to a settlement without a trial.

And then there were the backdoor deals, too.

Feinbaum explained it this way. "I got involved when things first got fishy between the band and the label. First album was on an indie label that BNC distributed, so they were intimately familiar with the band's market."

I couldn't stop myself from piping up. "Waitasec. We've been saying all along that Charles River knew how to market us and BNC didn't and that accounted for the drop in sales on the second record. You're telling me BNC was actually marketing us all along?"

Carynne jumped in. "Marketing is different from sales, though. BNC and CR had completely separate marketing and publicity departments. But distribution being centralized, yeah, I see what you're saying. That's about the representation to the retail stores, and yeah, that was the same sales reps, same department, on both records."

"Motherfuck."

She nodded.

"So all the noise they gave us about the problem with crappy sales being our image was too hard to categorize was just that, noise?"

Feinbaum took hold of the conversation again. "So it would seem. But a certain amount of incompetence and negligence is to be expected. For it to be enough to be considered criminal is unlikely. May I continue?"

I took a breath. "Sure."

"Don't get too hung up on their excuses for their failures. Now they're probably going to say that the success of Prone was a fluke, or entirely because of the breakout of 'Candlelight.' Which we'll get to in a minute." He produced some spreadsheets. "The first contract breach we have with BNC is the fact that your contract for 1989 explicitly states that the sales of both albums should not be aggregated to count against your advance or tour support. So even if 1989 was a complete flop, you should still be getting paid for Prone's sales–and the 'Candlelight' single's sales–separately from other issues."

"And are they?" Mintz asked.

Carynne pulled out some spreadsheets of her own. "These checks started arriving well after Ziggy's development deal was signed. I think we were meant to be placated by them but I think they're just makeup checks on what we're rightfully owed on Prone sales. Technically over two million dollars was supposed to come to the band as a buyout of the name rights, though, and if we've seen a dime of that, it's news to me. We've been given various excuses about the re-org slowing things down. We've still never received a statement adequately explaining what the damn checks are."

"But you've been cashing them," Mintz asked.

"Yes. We've been living on them," she said. "Should I have been escrowing them or something?"