The tick at Benji’s jaw is the only tell that he’s hanging on to his control as much as we are. He’s furious—fucking furious—and apparently, reaming us over the phone last week wasn’t enough. He wants to stick it to us in person. I work hard not to despise people, but Benji is an exception. He sits across from us, eyes narrowed into slits behind beer-bottle colored shades. “Let’s talk about the stunt you pulled with the ‘Lack of Evidence’ music video.”
None of us says anything. We all stare on, mirrored indifference stamped on all our faces.
“You are all aware that you signed a contract, right? That basically, what the label says goes?”
Another round of silence greets Benji as we all pretty much wait him out so we can get the fuck out of here and on with our day.
Benji leans forward, the bald patch on his too-shiny head reflecting the overhead light. It isn’t lost on me that he hasn’t offered us anything to drink. I don’t care; it’s just another of his ploys to show us who’s boss. “Do you understand that you work for the label? That you’re in this business to do what we say, and only what we say?”
I haven’t got time for this bullshit. I lean forward in my seat. “We didn’t get into this business for you to stifle our creativity.”
“Is that what you call the little pornfest you have on YouTube at the moment? Creativity?”
Keller snorts out a laugh. “Pornfest? Fuck man, if that’s your idea of porn, you need to look elsewhere.” He taps Josh on the shoulder. “You can hook a fella up, right? Show him what real porn looks like?”
Josh takes out his phone, his dark brown eyes glowing. “I can do one better. I can get Candy in here to show him.”
Benji bangs his hand on the coffee table. “Enough!” he roars, his face reddening as the blood rushes to his head. “You’ve had free rein for long enough. This label has been more than good enough to you. Allowing your stupid charity concerts…what do you call them? Your ‘Teddy Runs’? You’ve got one coming up this weekend, am I correct? And this is how you repay us—going against our wishes and making a smut video.”
I stifle a chuckle. This fucking guy! This is all sour grapes that started when I pitched a concept for the “Lack of Evidence” video. It pushed the envelope, even for us, but it was everything we wanted in a video—a video I felt sure was going to be key to the album’s success. More than that, the concept was perfect for showing how chemistry often cloaks the toxicity of a relationship. The label came back with a hard no. It was pretty much the exact opposite of where they wanted us to go. But they kept the forensics angle I’d suggested and hired Ronald, a buddy of Benji’s, to come up with an alternate concept and direct it. Not trusting us, Ronald didn’t share what his idea was. We didn’t find out until we got to the shoot location. He called it “Sequencing the DNA of Love,” and it had “laughingstock” written all over it.
I flipped my shit more than a little, pretty much sidelined Ronald, and we shot the video according to my original concept with the help of this girl, Jae, who ran the forensics lab we were shooting in. She was very sharp, a ton of fun, and so hot she had Josh salivating. Things got a little out of hand at one point when she took my concept way further down the road than I would’ve ever believed. That was my fault too—I told her to “get into it,” and fuck me! Did she ever!
That was too much for Ronald, and he split, swearing a blue streak. But at the end of the day, we all had a blast. We edited the video ourselves and released it on YouTube without asking anybody. By the time the label woke up to the fact, it had gotten over a hundred million views and was climbing fast, so fast they couldn’t even think of doing anything about it. They were forced to act like they were cool with the whole thing, and if there’s anything a label hates worse than being shown they’re wrong, it’s being shown they’re wrong and having to like it.
Benji has been on the warpath since then, and the shit really got piled high and deeper.
“That video has got to a hundred million views over the last week. Fifty million views more than ‘Tap Out,’ and that was our first number one.” Jeff takes a hairband from his wrist and gathers his shoulder-length blond hair into a knot at the back of his head. The cobra tattoo on his neck looks alive under his beating vein, and his hazel eyes bore into Benji’s.
“I don’t care if it gets more views than all of your other videos together, your days of going rogue are over.”
We stare at Benji. This is a fucking joke. We’ve been having drama with the label for over six months now, and lately it’s been escalating. When we signed with them, we’d been through six lean years—sleeping in our cars, playing anywhere that would have us, from bars to bowling alleys, eating so often at diners we knew every Denny’s waitress from here to El Paso by her first name—and they promised us seven fat years. We didn’t have an agent (we hadn’t even thought that far), and when they approached us after our gig at the First City Festival, up in Monterey, we jumped at the chance. We were green and didn’t know much about contracts. The cheap lawyer we hired wasn’t much better. Selling our souls for seven fat years was a sweet deal, right?
Fucking wrong.
