The Boiling of the Bones

24. Big Break

Mike from the record label called me a few days later. He wanted me to do some work for him, but he only needed me to record a jingle for a commercial. I worked a few hours one morning and then didn't hear from him again for a few weeks. At least I got paid for my work.

A few weeks later he called again. He had me come in for a few days to help a band lay down some tracks for an album. Once it was done, they didn't need me anymore for a few more weeks. It was all piecemeal gigs—little jobs that didn't pay much without any prospect of leading anywhere.

But I did meet a lot of skilled musicians who could jam. I hit it off with one guy, Louis, who was the best drummer I'd ever heard. He had a roommate Jerry who was pretty good on bass. They said they wanted to start a band and they were legit. I was in.

We looked around and found a guy, Max, who was a wizard on keyboards. I recorded a jingle for a diaper commercial with him one time.

We got together and jammed, and it was fun. Every one of those guys could play. They'd all been in bands before, and they'd played lots of shows. Most of them had more experience than I did. We decided to form a band, and we called ourselves, Sweet Poison.

We started playing covers and our shows were well received. We played in some of the good bars and clubs too. Some of them even invited us back.

Slowly but surely, we started getting a name for ourselves and good reputation around town, so we started charging clubs $1000, then six months later we bumped our fee up to $2000. It felt good getting paid and what was better was that we had leverage.

One night a club owner refused to pay us upfront. We were all pretty savvy musicians who'd been burned in the past and lived paycheck to paycheck, so we weren't going to get screwed over.

Lou was negotiating with the club owner.

"We get paid up front in cash or we don't go on stage."

"I don't have the money yet. I won't have it until the end of the night. I'll pay you right after the show.

"We'll play if we can have a guy collecting cash at the door. We get the first $2500 of the cover charge. Either that, or we don't go on stage."

"The deal was you'd play for $2000."

"Now we have to pay for an extra guy to collect our cut, so the price went up with the additional overhead."

The owner wasn't happy, but there was a line of people stretching down the sidewalk to see us play. He didn't want to turn them away, so he angrily agreed to our terms. It was a dirty business. We heard all kinds of stories. One guy got robbed by his own partner after a really good weekend.

He knew his partner did it, because of the inside knowledge. There was only one way to get in and out without triggering the alarm. There's a side hallway where the motion sensor kept going off because there was a spider living in the motion sensor, so they always have to shunt that zone when they turned on the alarm system. The thief went in through the roof—a hatch was pried open, down into that one hallway.

The office safe was hidden, but the masked thief avoided most of the security cameras and went straight to it, then 'cracked' the combination pretty quickly. Even the police agreed it looked suspicious but wouldn't prosecute after questioning him for an hour. They found his fingerprints all over the place, but he worked there, so that was not unusual.

I heard lots of other slimy stories of shady bar and club owners. Dealing drugs on the side, fake promotions supposedly blowing out ten thousand in cash at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. In reality, they only blew out three hundred in ones and fives but had a few people planted in the audience pretending to 'find' hundred-dollar bills. There were stories of igged promotions and contests, fake vacation giveaways and always cutthroat competition. One club had the power to the building cut an hour before a show. Someone had literally gone into the alley and sawed through an electric cable. They were lucky they didn't get electrocuted.