When It Stopped

By Mike Tierney

Brian Jones is a music freak. His new boss at Mars Records requests he keep that to himself. Their business model is imploding. The youth misspent inhaling his father’s vinyl collection, the passion for tunes that didn’t fade out after his dad died, the one-listen knack for picking a hit – these mark Brian for deep professional suspicion. Everywhere he turns people warn him, and it’s not like he doesn’t believe them. He just might not be the type who can fake it.

Blame it on the patchouli or the pancakes for dinner – which Brian invokes as the pith of his hippie rearing in Woodstock. It’s too much trouble to describe his father’s gig rolling tape in the studio up there for Dylan, or to deconstruct the lessons conveyed whenever the needle dropped on something the old man considered seminal. Now Brian can cite metaphysics and neuroscience to explain the emotional and chemical effects of a smash. He falls in love with the beautiful, damaged girls in the Replacements’ song. What he can’t do is work a stiff without feeling like a sell-out, or date a girl who owns a Bon Jovi record.

Viola Holliday can’t sing. She’s also treating her own grief with booze, pills, and other less therapeutic pursuits. Brian signs her to a recording contract anyway. She’s a girl to inspire Paul Westerberg if ever Brian met one, and the tabloids can’t get enough of her super-rich post-adolescent party crowd.

And he’s got larger logistical challenges. Mars’ biggest album of the fiscal year leaks, and his bosses task him with getting it off the Internet, and with leading the clampdown against music fans online. Martin “Sub” Standart throws Brian under the bus at every bump in the road.

Power Girl Stephi Mensch loops Brian in on the industry scuttlebutt – his bosses have decided he’s not their flavor – and leaves Brian little doubt what she expects if he’d like to be hers. Only the artist manager Stella Hayes appreciates Brian’s theories about music, possesses some insight into the role it plays in his life, and offers a way forward. It starts with breaking one of her clients in America.

WHEN IT STOPPED is a story about Brian Jones, trying to preserve his passion for music, during the last decent year in the music business. It's Mike Tierney's first novel. It was a finalist for the Tarcher/Penguin award for new writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Tierney
• Release date: Jan 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311294920

Mike Tierney

Mike Tierney has done every job in the music business for about two years. "When It Stopped" is his first novel.

Book preview

When It Stopped

by Mike Tierney

© 2017 Mike Tierney

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Cover photo by Niffer Calderwood © 2012

When It Stopped

Record One

Side One

1. Like A Heavy Gig

2. Welcome To Mars

3. Twenty Cent Yo

4. Out Of The Silence

5. Songs About Rivers

Side Two

1. (Turn This) No Into A Yes

2. When It Stopped

3. Tits For Tats

4. Might Have To Be Me

5. The Pop Game

Record Two

Side Three

1. Hope Is Not A Plan

2. Dead Air Dreams

3. Safe Words

4. (Set The) Bridges On Fire

5. Street Fighting Mensch

Side Four

1. Rub Somebody (The Wrong Way)

2. Ground Beneath Our Feet

3. Falling Man

4. Kernel Panic

5. (It’s) Just Too Heavy

6. Mysterious Circumstances (Rumored To Be Still Alive)

"The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."

– William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

"Industry rule number four thousand and eighty:

Record company people are shady."

– A Tribe Called Quest, Check The Rhime

Side One. Song One. Like A Heavy Gig.

Every job in our business is a two-year job. You might be somewhere two years, try to be everybody’s friend, give your bosses everything they ask for, and get swung for being an ineffectual loser. Or you can give two shits what anybody thinks, win beyond all reasonable expectations, go up somebody’s ass sideways, and get eighty-sixed when they decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth.

Woody shrugged when he told me the first time, like he was laying out two possible routes from the station to our favorite espresso cart.

Only question is, he asked, which position would you rather be in when you go looking for your next gig?

He forgot most of what he said when he riffed like that, no sooner than it came out of his mouth. But every one of those chestnuts struck a chord with me and got stuck in my head. I could sing that one in the shower.

Copyright 1992: the year I landed my first major market radio gig. So four jobs (and eight years) later, I sneaked out of the office on my last day at the cable channel V! for a long and inevitably liquid lunch with Woody Tripp.

When I walked into the bar he was at a table near the back, sitting across from my kid brother, who’d turned in his senior thesis that day, on track for his late graduation from Fordham. Woody would be trying to bend his two-year-job theory to fit Casey’s new gig teaching English in Thailand. Might’ve been a stretch. Then I tried to think of anything I’d stayed with longer than two years. Jobs. Relationships. Magazine subscriptions. A short list, from any of the above. Maybe the gospel according to Woody did apply beyond radio and records.

I watched them for a few beats from inside the door next to the jukebox. Casey finally looked old enough they might not have asked him for ID. Even seated he towered over Woody, whose little loafers dangled from his barstool, soles worn to the thickness of the dollar bill in my hand. Woody’s designer Hawaiian shirt screamed The Suburbs, not The Beach. Overall vibe: Vinyl Album Cover. Not so much old as faded.

Woody fit in there, inside my go-to Irish pub, a drinking establishment so utilitarian its original proprietor couldn’t be bothered to call it anything more artsy-fartsy than The Irish Pub. Generations later it remained provisionally named, crouching in the shadows of Times Square, flipping the bird at the encroaching heirs and shareholders of Walt Disney. Dark, narrow, choked with cigarette smoke, two other factors also endeared it: perfectly poured pints of Guinness and the best jukebox in Midtown. Three tracks for a buck, the Big Three Dylan Albums in their entirety.

Without looking at the numbers I punched up Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues for Woody and Nirvana’s Serve The Servants for my brother. Then I played the track that had pushed me to choose my new job over another two-year deal at V! Wasted, by Quentin. Mars Records would be releasing the Scottish band’s long-player The Chance We Took in the States that spring. The pub had somehow acquired it on import. I flipped through the pages of CD booklets, looking for something to play for Stephi. But she’d be late if she showed at all. And I didn’t have a fourth track.

A killer bar is where the drinks taste better than on your couch. And a killer jukebox makes the songs sound better. You walk back to your table while the opening notes of your first selection come on, feeling like it must’ve to swagger into a western saloon. Everybody looks. The room measures you up. You’ve chosen more than a song. You’ve settled on a statement about yourself and made it to a crowd of strangers.

Tom Thumb snarled with its medium-speed edge-of-the-rails electrical energy and anti-establishment attitude, as I walked over to join Woody and Casey. Woody and our father had bonded over that music as young dudes, keeping one another out of trouble back in the Sixties.

"They got some hungry women there and they really make a mess out of you."

We greeted each other per custom, leaning in close and bleating out Dylan lyrics. Casey sang ugly women. I made a note to correct him sometime.

The English degree, Woody told Casey, picking up where he’d left off. Curse of the Joneses. You pass those things down, like some families do high cholesterol or male pattern baldness. Of the three, I’m not sure which I’d personally enjoy least.

I thought the Curse of the Joneses was being named after Grateful Dead songs, Casey said. Hey, Bri. Bought you a pint.

I picked up my glass and chinked his.

Speak for yourself, I told him.

Lucky fucker, Casey said. Born when the rentals’ still loved The Stones. Wish they never heard of Jerry freakin’ Garcia.

My namesake OD’d on booze and barbiturates a month after I was born, I reminded him. Face down in his own swimming pool. ‘Death by misadventure.’ Try living up to that.

Or down to it, Woody said.

Don’t rub it in, Casey said. A Top Ten Rock N’ Roll Cause of Death and you know it.

Right behind?

Heroin O.D. and suicide.

And ahead of?

He put a finger to his lips, making a show of remembering.

Murdered in a hip-hop beef ...

And?

Ummm … auto-erotic asphyxiation?

Head of the class, little bro.

Way cooler than being named after a coked-up railroad engineer or whatever.

Casey had it least bad of my siblings. Our parents had christened our sisters Scarlet and Sugar. Both named after Dead songs and both English majors.

Among your family’s quirks, the hippie naming thing might be the most charming and original, Woody said. At the bottom of the list would be your surfeit of book learning and commensurate deficit of street smarts. For all your degrees, not one of you could tell me how an egg gets from a chicken to a Stop N’ Shop. And I know damn well the Jesuits didn’t teach you, Casey.

Eggs come from chickens?

Your father didn’t know either. And yet, Big Brother here fancies himself a captain of industry.

He jerked a thumb toward where I stood, without otherwise acknowledging me.

Says the class clown of ‘64, I said. Remind me, Woody, did you graduate high school, before joining the ranks of under-educated radio disc jockeys?

Got out while I still knew something. He resumed singing along with Dylan. "And picking up Angel, who just arrived here from the coast."

Casey and I joined in again.

"Who looked so fine at first, but left looking just like a ghost."

Woody had dropped out knowing plenty and played it by ear. When I was getting my ass handed to me in my first gig—where he was a paid consultant and where he pulled strings to get me the interview—his gut told him we should drop all the pop and rock records and fast-rotate the rap and R&B. Seattle was the whitest major market in America. Hip-hop was a fad. My skeptical bosses let me follow his advice anyway, and our ratings went through the roof. White people love black music, Woody advised back in the day, with a characteristic and complimentary shrug. Hip-hop’s the new Motown.

I keep telling him, Woody told Casey. Not one person in the whole history of the music business ever made a smooth transition from the radio side to a record label.

Lotta money to give it a shot, I said.

I hope they’re backing up the bakery truck and giving you an assload of bread, because you’ll be a gibbering idiot by this time next year. Woody addressed me directly for the first time, holding up his glass in a toast to the notion. Mark my words, kiddo, you’ll be talking to yourself.

Well, you did write the book on that subject.

I chinked his glass and finished my beer. Woody Tripp had intimate carnal knowledge of crazy. The entire industry knew that. His favorite holiday was April Fools’ Day. On that date in 1969, while programming the R&B powerhouse WHYT in riot-torn Detroit, he changed the name of his station to Whitey. He ran sweepers encouraging his mostly black listeners to Trust Whitey and Win with Whitey. He lost a lot of gigs on April 2nd. But he always landed in his feet, eventually climbing the ladder to New York, the number one media market in America. "The number one medium market in America, he liked to call it. Everybody’s so scared of getting blown out, you’ll hear more creativity in Scranton." Threats to Woody’s creativity lurked everywhere: behind the doors of corner offices, over his shoulder, under the bed. Shoes were a sell-out. Somebody told me Woody went barefoot for his entire stint at WPOW in Miami. Record promoters kept size-six sandals in the trunks of their cars, so they could get him into restaurants for expense-account lunches. When he showed up for corporate meetings in New York, his bosses decided to replace him with someone less colorful and more conventionally shod. Woody shrugged then too. His two years were up. He rode the elevator down to Sixth Avenue, stuck out his thumb, and hitched a ride up to Woodstock, where he sacked out on our couch until the phone rang with his next gig.

"I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough."

We sang the line together, on cue, if not in key. The group next to us—tourists, I guessed Dutch—decided they’d had enough too, and moved over one table. I gave them a tight-lipped apologetic smile.

Brian thinks he can make a difference. Woody shook his head. But the major labels have been soul-sucking musical garbage dumps since way before my time. Your father saw that too. They’re all going away now anyhow.

I tried to imagine what my father would’ve been like at Woody’s age. The guy sitting with my brother and me had mellowed into something more like the Nina Simone version of that Dylan track. The one where she says, Well, that’s it, folks, before she sings the last verse. My father found a way to stay young.

People are getting desperate, I said. When people get desperate, they do whatever it takes to adapt and survive.

When people in our business get desperate, Woody said, they do whatever it takes to hang on to their houses in the Hamptons.

Another instant Woody Tripp classic. None of those nuggets would stop the world from passing him by. The future belonged to people like me. It wasn’t about the money. That was something you threw out there to irritate an old hippie.

Sure, it sounds like a heavy gig, senior vice-president of Mars Records, Woody said. I have promo T-shirts more senior than him. How old is Brian now?

Not as old as he looks.

I thumped him on the head.

See, the vice-presidents are the people at a label who work for a living, Woody said. "We used to call them … y’know … workers. But to keep them doing all the dirty work without giving them raises, the presidents let them call themselves veepees now. The senior vice-presidents … the essveepees … I’m not sure what the hell they do. Doesn’t matter. They’re all just suits."

My father and Woody had shared an acute acquired disdain for suits. But things had changed. The big five companies and six or seven consolidated radio corporations controlled everything. Change from within was my only way forward. My father would’ve understood. And if being a suit hadn’t become cool exactly, it was the option that had presented itself.

What’s your new title going to be, kiddo? Woody asked Casey.

In Thailand? Guess the kids’ll call me Mr. Jones.

Because something will be happening there and you won’t know what it is. I paraphrased Dylan.

He tried to thump me again. I leaned back and made him miss.

How about instead, Woody proposed, we make you a Vice-President of English Language Instruction?

Hell yeah.

How they give out titles where Brian’s going, Woody said. Inflation. Like the way a dime bag is still a dime bag, and still costs ten bucks, but they give you less weed every year. Know what I’m saying?

No.

Nirvana came on. Over Kurt’s vocals, a sanctified child of the Woodstock nation asked if Casey was for real. He cursed the recently concluded Nineties and my brother’s Jesuit professors. He wandered off, to consult the Dutch tourists. Nirvana had been to my brother and me what Dylan was to those old hippies. Casey was a teenager when Kurt Cobain died. I was Kurt’s age, sharing an adopted hometown, a few miles from his house overlooking Lake Washington. I walked over there the day he died, some six years earlier, not knowing what else to do. And I walked over again the day I heard Courtney was tearing down the carriage house where they found the body. As if taking away what we all stopped to stare at and remember would make him any less dead or any more hers. Classic Stage One behavior on the scale my mother force fed me once upon a time. Denial. Grief was like that. Everybody on different pages of the same songbook.

Never argue with an old hippie, I told Casey. If they’re ever wrong about anything, they’ll tell you. Dad used to say they were right about civil rights, right about Nixon, wrong about drugs. They got music right too, I gotta admit that. ‘Music is life.’

Literally, Casey said. Like Mom’s heartbeat.

That’s right.

He must’ve gotten that theory of our father’s second hand from me—too young to hear it from the source.

The whole bass line on a loop for nine months thing, vibrating through the amniotic fluid, he said. First thing any of us heard. Hence, the preponderance of female bassists in rock bands.

Ten seconds on the clock. I consulted my watch. And … go.

Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth, Casey said. Tina Weymouth, Talking Heads. Kim Deal, Pixies. The cute one from Hole who OD’d.

The one I got drunk with at Linda’s.

What was her name? Casey said. And the one who replaced her, too. The hot one. Shit. Why am I choking on this?

And ... time, I said. Kristin Pfaff and Melissa Auf Der Maur. Afraid I can only give you credit for three.

You grade like a Jesuit, bro, Casey said. Besides, didn’t dad used to say, ‘Music is love’?

Used them both, I said. Interchangeably.

Quentin came on next. Music is love. More than hippie dippy mumbo jumbo to me. I’d felt it for real: in my ears, in my heart, and in my pants. I wouldn’t have known love without music to bridge gaps and fill holes. There would always be gaps and holes. Loss followed love. Everything stopped. One day I’d miss even the job I was leaving at V! When my father taught me about Sgt. Pepper, he pointed to the second hand on his Timex to show me how the final note of A Day In The Life sustained for forty-three whole seconds—an epic battle with dead air that the note loses every time. Another song would start. There was always another song. I believed in The Next Song with a religious certainty. As sure as I believed when I put my dollar in the jukebox that Nirvana would come on after Dylan. And Quentin would be next. Whenever I thought I’d heard it all, a new sound would burst through the cold hard ground of my cynicism. The most jaded motherfuckers I knew kept going to see new bands five or six nights a week. They stood at the backs of rooms, assumed the stereotypical cross-armed posture of the label exec. Nobody had seen more shit bands. One night, one of them might find what they were looking for. Maybe the next Nirvana.

Woody rotated over to the bar and stood waiting to order another round. He pulled a handful of hair back into a ponytail. Like a lot of rock stars, Woody still possessed a thick head of it he let grow past his shoulders. But he’d let his go all the way grey, and I had no reason to doubt it was all his own. He’d gone platinum now. With some effort, he secured it with the rubber band he wore on his wrist, old school wasted already.

Memories. Woody returned, setting down the frothy glasses he carried, nearly dumping all three across our table—in his eagerness to share whatever meditations he’d been alone with, while the Guinness built and settled under the taps. Nothing triggers memory like music. Not smells. Not even photos. ‘Tom Thumb’ didn’t just remind me of where I was the first time. It put me there. For a minute, instead of you two, I was back with your dad.

Years earlier, in another bar, Woody called that the secret to the Classic Hits radio format he’d invented. He reckoned people always felt the strongest connection to music they discovered when they were ages sixteen to nineteen. His client wanted to reach forty-five to fifty-four year olds. Figured out what year the fifty-four-year-olds were sixteen, and when the forty-four-year-olds were nineteen. Built a music library from the era in between. Boom. Caught a plane home that night. I told them, ‘Memory’s like a jukebox, full of records from your past.’ At various other times, in various other bars, Woody had compared memory to a mix CD, a music festival, a piano. Total clichés coming from anybody else.

The people who have the greatest trouble grasping music’s singular power over the species work with Brian and I in the music business, he told my brother. Most of them stopped giving a crap about music a long time ago. Now it’s about something else.

Yeah, I said, business.

Not what I mean, Woody said. Most of your new colleagues could write everything they know about music on one side of that cocktail napkin and everything they know about business on the other. I may not have finished high school, but I know that. Hey, my tune.

As Casey sang along with the first verse, Visions of Johanna brought me back to a time before he’d come along. Winter Sundays in Woodstock. The frozen vinyl seats of our wood-paneled station wagon, for which the Ford Falcon of my father’s bachelor days had been sacrificed (to Woody’s horror). Blonde On Blonde stuck in the in-dash eight-track deck (literally). My father in the driver’s seat, smelling like cold air and corduroy (and a freshly lit Marlboro Red). Heading out to some studio to pick up where he left off in the seven-days-a-week grind of making a record. I loved to ride to work with him and that album, which I couldn’t have understood, but which was as familiar as our days and the loose and shambling way we lived. Haphazard and spontaneous as thrift-store clothes and pancakes for dinner. Brought back with Dylan’s voice. Those old hippies had been pitch-perfect about music all right. I didn’t know if it was more like life, love, a jukebox, a music festival, a piano, or a mix CD. But I knew for shit sure there was more to music than what came out of the speakers.

Why these major label idiots are gonna drive this whole thing into a ditch has zero to do with business, Woody was saying to Casey. Naw, something darker. These cats steamrolled something, kiddo, something they can’t plug into their spreadsheets. Dragged it down the highway for a few miles. Let chunks of it lodge in the wheel wells. Couldn’t be bothered to shove it to the side of the road, let alone give it a decent burial. Gonna miss it one day, sure as we’re sitting here. Our innocence, maybe. Dime bags that’d last your father and me all weekend.

Still can’t get over how rad that is.

Innocence dies, Casey. Woody said. "This is more than that too. Like what makes one song special and so many others … stiffs … at the end of the day. Whatever that is. Magic, I suppose. Aw, who gives a shit?"

There’s still hope, right? Like that Quentin record. It’s fucking awesome.

It’s a fucking stiff.

I couldn’t remember playing Quentin for Woody. Something about The Chance We Took sounded to my ears like I might have discovered it among the Dylan, Joni, and Neil in my father’s record collection. Take it down. Dust it off. Drop the needle into the grooves with a pop on a Sunday morning. The kind of record that might do for somebody else what those old records had done for me.

Maybe I was born too late for the house in the Hamptons, I said. Not why I’m taking this job.

The three of us sang along involuntarily.

"Name me someone who’s not a parasite, and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him."

Well, if you’re taking it because you think you’ll find someone who can write like that, Woody said. That ship sailed.

Woody’s world was drifting away too. His thinly veiled contempt for the one I was inheriting betrayed his Stage Two: Anger. I’d lived through that one too. The Irish Pub filled up as Happy Hour approached. I weaved my way back to the jukebox between incoming clusters of drinkers, and spun Baby One More Time for Stephi, who was blowing us off. She’d lip-sync like a twenty-five-year-old school girl when it came on Z100 the previous Saturday morning, on the ride out to her parents’ in Montauk. They had about a zillion extra bedrooms. And it wasn’t like I had anything more pressing to do than watch her act out the music video, from the waist up, belted into her bucket seat. Every dance move drove home a painful reality. In the month we’d been hanging out, I’d gotten about as far with Stephi as I had with Britney Spears.

"My loneliness is killing me."

Not as long as you look and dance like that it isn’t, baby baby. For Stephi and Britney, those would never be more than clever lyrics set to a catchy tune on Top 40 radio.

"If I’m not with you, I’ll lose my mind."

Somebody should cover it, I told her. Under its luminescent teenage skin, the song’s pulsating heart beat dark and true for me, with a familiar, obsessive, mid-tempo melancholy. Loneliness. Deep, profound loss. Tarted up as disposable teen pop, it was totally subversive.

You take music too serious, Stephi told me.

I said other people didn’t take it seriously enough.

~~~

Two hours later I was back at V! one last time, gazing out the three windows of my office on the twenty-first floor, over the width of New Jersey to the tentatively rising hills in the west.

The Kittatinnies rambled out of Springsteen country, merged with the Shawangunks closer to Dylan country, off in the distance to my right. Up in Woodstock, our teachers taught us to tell them apart, emphasizing with tribal pride our locus in the world famous Catskills. From high above Times Square, I watched the last narrow band of December sun retreat beyond those Appalachian humps. I zipped my computer bag and it was gone. Another day’s light surrendered to the buzzy incandescence that was the point on this side of the river. The horizon had been swallowed by the Milford Plaza’s ten-story red M. As in Mine. Daytime America had vanished.

I snapped shut the channel’s laptop, panicking I hadn’t gotten everything off it. Irrationally. Plain paranoia and the Guinness talking. I’d spent my morning deleting jokey emails with God-knows-what attached, web addresses I might’ve visited in hotels on road trips, instant message chats personal and professional. Next to my desk in a solitary bookcase sat binders of ratings reports for TV shows past and present, research on music videos famous and obscure. None of it would have any value to me where I was going. Like it ever did.

No matter how much data we assembled about them, the Americans across the Hudson remained out of our grasp. Research can’t tell you where they’re going, Woody would say, only where they’ve been. Using it to navigate was like driving in reverse, steering by what was in the rearview mirror. It was old the instant the reports hit our desks—the product of opinions held last month, last week, an hour ago, whenever the study had been in the field. As Woody’s clients insisted on paying for it, he’d use the stats to acquire a broad-strokes feel for the audience and their general taste. Then he’d go out and gather intelligence, by observing the subjects in their natural habitats. He’d stalk them in malls, in nightclubs, on public transportation. Civilians, he called them. He used a police scanner to eavesdrop on their cordless phone conversations. Purely in the interest of science. He’d synthesize the empirical data with this less scientific intelligence, personify it into a representative composite radio listener. He’d give this character a name—Matt, let’s say—a job, a home, a car, a significant other and sometimes a kid, a CD collection, a closet filled with brand name apparel and accessories, a lifestyle. Woody would line-draw an indelible mental image of the kind of cat for whom he was trying to program. I want to visualize him tuning in and out. Once he’d gone to the trouble, he could anticipate his audience’s reaction—Matt ain’t gonna dig this—before the research came back and it was too late.

Between the binders, I recognized the glossy blue dust-jacket on my copy of Everything You Need To Know About The Music Business (And Whom You Should Be Afraid To Ask). I grabbed the thick volume and stuffed it into the slot in my backpack where the computer would’ve gone. The sum total of my personal effects fit into that and the Bloomingdale’s Medium Brown Bag my assistant had given me. The walls were as bare as the day I showed up and had been ever since. I never hung a framed poster or a gold record. It would’ve been wrong to take any attention away from the view. And Woody once said the workplace nesting impulse killed creativity and fostered an inauthentic sense of job security.

Keeping an eye on New Jersey?

Making sure it doesn’t wander off and bother the Midwest.

Peter Hinchliff deposited himself on an un-dented black leather couch inside my office door. The brown suede sofa it replaced had been nicer than anything I’d ever owned. But as a new network vice-president, I got an allowance for furniture. Use it or lose it. My assistant used it online and the new couch materialized. Back in my first radio job, I worked at a hand-me-down desk, hunched in what amounted to a daylight basement, with an eye-level view of feet and ankles. It was Seattle. So I might spy at hubcap level the rock star knees of one of the Pearl Jams, as he unloaded skis from his Jeep and carried them into the pied-a-terre he must’ve kept in the building across the street. Killer view in its own right.

So this is it, huh?

This is it, yeah.

He stood abruptly, and crossed my erstwhile office toward my soon-to-be ex-view. Directly above his thinning head of hair was his own two-windowed office. He’d never bothered hiding how much he coveted my third window. Now I got the feeling he might not wait until I got up to climb into my chair.

Off to become a record executive is the word on the street.

I can confirm.

I swiveled toward where he stood and leaned back.

Gonna find out why they call Mars Records the Death Star.

Apparently I’m gonna help run the Death Star.

I think you’ll find the Empire isn’t what it used to be.

Maybe we’re about to strike back.

Or you could just not go, Peter said. Hunter says he offered you a new deal. Told me he thinks you’re a smart guy. Said he mentioned what a cluster fuck Mars would be for you.

And he sent you to re-iterate.

It wasn’t unusual for Hunter’s dirty work to fall to Hinchliff. Or for him to reach up and snag it. He turned away from the windows, walked back over to the couch, reclaimed his spot on the cushion nearest the door.

Been better since you’ve been here, he said. Not many guys with your skill set. Hunter thinks you’re making a mistake. You know he worked there, right?

At Mars? In like the Seventies.

Back when the record business still meant something. Let’s be honest, Brian. It’s dead now, everybody knows it but them. But people will always pay for cable. We have what Hunter and I call a sustainable business model. He likes you. Doesn’t want to see you labeled a job-hopper.

Even if Hunter Fleetwood didn’t run the channel, he’d have been the only person at V! whose opinion of me mattered to me. On his way up the ladder, he’d done every one of my dream jobs. He worked at major labels on both coasts, managed A-level artists, booked bands for the biggest talent agency in Beverly Hills. He did hard time in music publishing, a sector of the business where he’d have endured the actuarial un-sexiness only in sufferance as he learned to count beans, seduced assistants, and typed another line on the industry’s most impressive CV. I idolized him the way Woody Tripp did P.T. Barnum. But Hunter advising me not to hop jobs would’ve been like Keith Richards telling me to just say no to drugs.

Hunter’s never stayed anywhere longer than two years in his entire career.

There he is, the savior of the record business.

Before that blasphemy was out of my mouth, the subject himself was on top of me, extending a hand across my desk.

Don’t get up, Hunter said.

Hinchliff had sprung to his feet already and was practically saluting.

I wanted to stop by and say good luck, Brian, Hunter said. As Bono says, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’

Hunter must have been Woody Tripp’s age, but he looked closer to mine. He folded his arms and stood there, blindingly handsome in an open-collared shirt and a hand-tailored blazer. His leonine head and authentic mane of curly still-blond hair appeared ready to be televised without notice and without glam squad. You could’ve dropped one of his cheekbones on a record and reasonably expected to produce music from the grooves.

I came by earlier and thought I’d missed you.

Was out to lunch, I said. With Woody Tripp.

Ah, yes, Hunter said. I’ve survived lunches of my own with Woody Tripp. You didn’t let him drive home, did you?

He’s at the Riga, I said. Stumbling distance. Woody doesn’t drive.

Thank God. Either of us ever tell you about a lunch we had, in Chicago, like twenty years ago? My God, I think it was more.

I was sure I’d heard all Woody’s stories more than once. This one didn’t ring a bell. Hunter glided over to join Hinchliff, whom he hadn’t greeted or acknowledged, and conveyed that—although the rest of the couch was vacant—he required the cushion Hinchliff had been occupying. Peter slid to the opposite end.

Don’t know if I should be telling this story out of school, Hunter said. But Woody has worse dirt on me. I was fresh out of college, doing radio promo for Mars out of the Chicago branch. He was programming the Loop. Never returned my calls.

Never returned my calls either, when he was my paid consultant.

So I started showing up at his station every day at noon, Hunter said. I’d tell the receptionist I had a lunch with him. Every day I’d sit in the lobby until a little after two. Then the receptionist—attractive, single mother, think I took her out once—would tell me Woody had gone into the studio for his show. Every day I’d leave her with the same stack of 45s, and a business card with a note for Woody. ‘Sorry I missed you again. Looking forward to our lunch.’

Hunter stretched his legs, leaned back, clasped his hands behind his head.

This goes on for two or three weeks. Then one day, the receptionist says she has a call for me and puts it through to the lobby phone. Woody’s calling me. Now, I’ve never spoken to the man. He says, ‘Are we having lunch today or not?’ He’s calling from down at Morton’s. So I scramble, find him sitting by himself at a two-top.

He watched the sky over my head, the movie version projected out there for him.

"He’s loaded when I sit down. Drinking Canadian Club rocks, I’ll never forget. Orders one for me without asking. I take it straight out of the waiter’s hand and slam it. Woody finishes his and orders another round. I’m trying to wrap my head around sitting there with Woody Tripp. Programmers were like rock stars back then, Brian. Woody was Dylan and McCartney rolled into one. Finally bring up one of my records, and he just waves his little hand. Calls it a stiff. So I order another drink, bring up another record. He sticks up his hand like a stop sign. ‘Stiff!’"

Hunter scooted forward to the edge of the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. He resumed eye contact with me.

"Pretty