18. Trust Me, Kid, I'm Gonna Make You a Star

This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing.
——The Tempest, III.ii

Four entries are enough to spend on a single day, so I'll wrap up Monday for you. On the way back from the audition, the band decided to try to squeeze in an evening rehearsal. Sarah and I stopped by the corner café at Thissio Square and bought a dozen gyros for the band, no other source of dinner being apparent. I think we actually did get in a little practice that evening, but we had to wait until 10 p.m. to start because the congregation of Athens Christian Center was using the sanctuary for a Monday night service.

At some point on Monday or Tuesday, I had a talk with B. (In fact, what follows is most likely a conflation of several talks with B. It's hard to keep all of this straight. I should have been taking notes!) He explained Q.'s failure to establish a schedule thusly: "He gets something booked, and then he tries to get something better." In other words, Q. couldn't tell us in the morning where we'd be playing at night, because with Q. no booking was final. At any time he might make one of those impossible shots and get something in a bigger venue.

What a way to manage a band, eh? A sponsor who expected to host a concert on a given evening had better hope Q. didn't find a more advantageous booking. I know bands cancel and reschedule all the time, but I doubt most of them are still actively trying to do it on the day of the gig. I wondered what kind of mess would result if this approach ever succeeded.

More later about that.

I asked B. about the big-name bands, specifically Switchblade, that hadn't materialized in Athens. He suggested that the deal had collapsed because Switchblade made unreasonable demands. I joked: "You mean they wanted only brown M&Ms?" He chuckled, but wouldn't divulge exactly what the demands were. Say it with me, kids: More later about that.

B. also described his incentive-loaded songwriting contract with Q., which struck me as the worst one since Ricky Williams signed with the New Orleans Saints.* Before I go into detail, allow me to emphatically restate the caveat that I may have misunderstood B.

Traditionally, songwriters get income from two sources: royalties (based on sales) and ASCAP/BMI fees (based on airplay). But if I understood B. correctly, his contract required him to forfeit both of these. Instead he was supposed to get a flat fee (it wasn't any more than $100, might have been less) for each song he wrote for Q. (I don't know whether he was to be paid for every song, or just for the ones Q. accepted.) The incentives kicked in if a song hit the Christian charts. I forget the exact numbers, but the higher a song charted, the more money B. was supposed to get—still all flat fees, and a few thousand bucks maximum.

The trouble, of course, is that not all the songs you write will be recorded. Of the ones that are, only a few get released as singles, and only a few of those do well on the Christian charts (unless you're Steven Curtis "34 Dove Awards and Counting" Chapman). Furthermore, Q. hadn't demonstrated that he could get a single recorded, mixed, released, and distributed, let alone onto the Christian charts. (He claimed to have sent a pre-release of Loudmouth's single, "Come Thou Fount," to hundreds of Christian radio stations. If he actually sent it anywhere, it was to the K-LOVE network, a sort of Christian Clear Channel. It does operate about 200 stations around the country—but with one playlist. I think K-LOVE was also on the other end of the brief phone interviews that some of the band members did two or three times a day—during which they were supposed to plug Q.'s Web site and the CDs, of course. Airplay on a network that big is nothing to sneeze at, but it doesn't equal chart placement. And even if it did, "Come Thou Fount" is a public-domain hymn that B. did not write, and to which his contract as he described it to me would not apply.)

Even more frightening: According to another friend of mine who makes his living as a Christian singer/songwriter and owner of a small indie label, the Christian charts are essentially controlled by one man: a Nashville "song merchandiser" who's paid big bucks by major Christian labels to listen to their records and tell them which songs to release as singles. (That may be why all the songs on Christian radio sound the same. When I'm in a different city and flipping through radio channels, I can usually identify a Christian station in less than five seconds of listening.)

So B.'s incentives were almost entirely beyond his control. They depended not only on Q. getting his act together but on the songs appealing to this merchandiser. Neither eventuality seemed very probable, judging from what I'd seen of Q., what I knew of B.'s writing, and what I'd heard on Christian radio.

How, you might ask, did B. get involved with Q. in the first place? Well, B. had been praying and seeking direction about his musical future when Q. called him out of the blue and described his vision for assembling a number-one** Christian worship band. Upon learning that Q. had already achieved his earlier vision of having the number-one distributed piece of Bible software, B. figured, "Well, maybe he can do it with a band too." (However, if Q.'s Bible software really is the most widely distributed—a proposition that I seriously doubt—it is only because he gives it away, a process that may work for software but has never been shown to establish a new band as "number one" in any meaningful sense in any market, Christian or otherwise.)

B.'s contract also entitled him to lots of those one-on-one chats with Q.—sometimes at 3 a.m. Apparently it wasn't enough that Q. suffered from insomnia in Athens—he had to inflict it on B. by waking him up and talking to him in the middle of the night. B. has a wife and four kids, and the contract with Q. was his only source of income at the time. Q. was paying him for the Greece trip, or at least had promised to. So I can understand B.'s inclination to extend the benefit of the doubt to Q. a lot further than I would. He was in this a lot deeper than I was.

Up to his neck, you might say.

The more Sarah and I learned about Q., the less inclined we were to hand out his CDs. We'd grown suspicious of them after E. expressed pleasure at the increased Web traffic the outreach was generating. We thought the purpose of outreach was to tell people about God, not to send them shopping for software. I kept one of the CDs, and a couple of months back I finally broke down and installed Q.'s software on my laptop, just to see exactly what we'd been offering people back in Athens. Five days later, my laptop stopped working because the HIMEM.SYS file had mysteriously disappeared. Of course it could just be a coincidence. More later about that.

On Tuesday, Q. and E. went out to find a laundromat. Meanwhile B. and I worked with Hannah, the 14-year-old U4ic singer, trying to nail down an arrangement for a song she wanted to do: "I Can Only Eat Margarine," a syrupy CCM number that became an unlikely crossover hit on the pop charts for a Texas band called Dirty Squeegee. The poor girl had sung this song only to backing tracks, never with live musicians. She didn't know what key she wanted. She had a chord chart—evidently prepared by a nonmusician, because it was indecipherable. We worked all afternoon and got the thing partially arranged, but it still wasn't ready before we had to depart for Hope Place (and thence to the showcase).

Halfway there, we met Q., on his way back with the laundry. He bet me 2 euros he could drop the laundry at Athens Christian Center and still beat us back to Hope Place. Understand: We had left point A and were standing at point B on our way to point C. Now Q. was claiming he could travel BA + AC in less time than it would take us to travel BC. He lost the bet, but never paid up—not that I considered it worth 2 euros to have to remind him. You see, dear reader, it didn't matter whether the issue was daily meals for us, backline for Qedem, a crib for the baby, or a measly 2-euro bet: Q. had no regard for his own promises. Just where did this guy draw the line when it came to keeping his word?

More later about that. (How did you know I was going to say that?) I made up my mind not to ask Q. for anything, even if it cost me 2 euros plus whatever I spent on food. Call it pride if you want to.

About the laundry: There was a perfectly good sink at Athens Christian Center for washing clothes and a perfectly good fence for drying them. That's how Sarah and I did our laundry. But Q. convinced most of the other band members that he knew of a reasonably priced laundromat. Well, it turned out to be not so reasonable. In fact, laundromats in Greece are expensive, a compound word formed from the prefix ex-, meaning "out of," and the root pensive, meaning "thoughtful or mindful." As in, "Thirty euros for my laundry? That's twice what you told me it would cost! Are you out of your mind?"

Maybe that's why Q. didn't pay up on our bet.

The showcase went well, although once again our audience was mostly other performers. A camera crew came by and shot some footage of the band. Afterward Q. had us reprise part of our set on a one-microphone PA in a little park near the Metro station. Then it was on to Monastiraki Square for another marathon outreach with Elias: guerrilla-style, no stage, just another small PA, this one with about four channels.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: In a rare display of sensitivity and generosity, Q., realizing how tired we were, engaged a couple of taxis to take band members from Panepistimiou to Monastiraki. Slight problem there: Holly preferred to take Logan on the Metro, which she judged to be a safer mode of transportation for a 7-month-old baby, given her lack of an infant car seat and the way Athens cabbies operate their vehicles. She was essentially slapping away Q.'s magnanimous gesture, and I could almost feel sorry for him, except that (1) Holly was right; (2) Q. proceeded to argue with her until she finally agreed to take the taxi just to get him off her back.

For dinner at Monastiraki, one of the German kids gave me a ham sandwich (they'd been distributed at Hope Place after Loudmouth left there). I bought some souvlaki for Sarah, then couldn't find her. She went hungry all night. I sat in with Qedem on an acoustic set as well as playing twice with Loudmouth. When not performing, I kept an eye on our cases and gear, which were piled on a curb under the supervision of Jeff, our volunteer from Korea. He was a nice guy but didn't cut a very imposing figure—anyone could have knocked him down and grabbed something. And I was afraid someone would—the later it got, the noisier and rougher the crowd got. But in the end, nothing was stolen, nothing was broken, and nobody got hurt.

And when that's your definition of a good gig, you know you're in trouble.

*This contract was negotiated by rapper/producer Master P, who had never done a sports contract before and probably won't be doing many more. Ricky could have picked a better agent out of a police lineup.

**And what does "number-one" really mean, anyway? Remember, Q. had a remarkable gift for vagueness, nicely illustrated by a conversation at Athens Christian Center in which he insisted that Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" was the number-one song of the 1980s. It turned out that he'd been listening to an '80s nostalgia station on which that was the most-requested song—which is hardly the same thing as the commonly understood meaning of a number-one song. So perhaps when he told B. he was trying to manufacture a number-one worship band, Q. really meant he was going to assemble a band that would have most-requested status on a nostalgia radio station 20 years from now.