Album Produced By...

ALBUM PRODUCED BY…

Bruce Kimmel

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2012 Bruce Kimmel. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 3/8/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-6056-5 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-6057-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-6058-9 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012904251

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Front cover artwork by Justin Squigs Robertson

Book design by Grant Geissman

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PHOTO ALBUM

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

OUTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ALBUMS PRODUCED BY BRUCE KIMMEL

ALSO BY BRUCE KIMMEL

Benjamin Kritzer

Kritzerland

Kritzer Time

Writer’s Block

Rewind

How to Write a Dirty Book

Murder at Hollywood High

Murder at the Grove

Murder at the Hollywood Historical Society

There’s Mel, There’s Woody, and There’s You

Murder at the Masquers

With love and affection, this book is dedicated to all the amazing singers, musical directors and orchestrators I’ve worked with…

and to the memory of Laurie Beechman, Dorothy Loudon, and Michelle Nicastro, three of the most beautiful souls it’s ever been my privilege to know.

I’ve seen them all and my dear

I’m still here

—Stephen Sondheim

Nothing’s impossible I have found

For when my chin is on the ground

I pick myself up, dust myself off

And start all over again

—Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern

INTRODUCTION

Cut. Print. And that’s a wrap.

When I wrote the last line of There’s Mel, There’s Woody, and There’s You, I had no intention of ever doing a follow-up book. That’s a wrap meant I was done. I’d written a memoir of my acting, writing, and directing days up until 1993, when I began to go down a different road, life-wise. That’s what I’d set out to do and that’s what I did, even though I never in my wildest imaginings thought that I would want to.

But almost from the time it came out, I began getting nice emails and calls from people who’d enjoyed the book, and those emails and calls all concluded with, When is the next volume? You’ve got to talk about the record producing days.

Did I? The fact is that several years ago I’d begun a book about those days and I stopped a few pages in because I realized I just did not want to write it. It was not the time, nor did I want to revisit certain things. And so, in 2011 I went back to the Adriana Hofstetter series and wrote its fourth book.

But after I finished Murder at the Masquers, my mind kept going back to the idea of doing a book about the record producing years. Certainly they were interesting years and maybe I was ready to revisit the things that I’d need to revisit. I’d met and worked with incredible people, had mostly wacky and fun experiences, and learned a lot. I’d had some acclaim, and my dream that people would know that when a CD said Album Produced By Bruce Kimmel that it wasn’t just a credit, that it actually meant something.

What kept holding me back was that I didn’t want to write a book that came totally current. I felt that if I wrote a book that came totally current, then I should probably just die and be done with it. Since I wasn’t ready to die and be done with it, I had to get past feeling like that. But then I figured out that the story I really wanted to tell began in 1993 and ended in 2005 when I began a new chapter in my life. That got me over that hurdle.

And so I began doing what I always do: Thinking about things, jotting down notes on my bedside pad and everywhere else where there was paper and pen. Funnily, like my acting, writing, and directing days, what became evident immediately was that those days are a time we’re never going to have again.

Change was coming to the music industry and especially theatre music. My years were the last of the years when things were done a certain way. Oh, albums are still produced, manufactured, sold via the Internet and the few stores that are left, but mostly it’s been heading elsewhere. Everything I predicted back in 2000 when I formed what was then my new label, Fynsworth Alley, came true: Almost all the mom-and-pop stores went out of business, and within six years, most of the big chains went with them.

When I began producing albums I knew nothing about it. I flew by the seat of my pants, learned, figured things out, but I had the one thing that is key in any endeavor—I knew what I liked. I knew what pleased my ears. I knew which recordings I’d grown up with sounded great to me and which didn’t. I didn’t always know the why of that, but my ears just responded to a certain kind of sound, even when I was a kid.

From the very beginning I worked with an engineer who did not come from the Broadway world. He was a rock guy and we were two unlikely people who came together, were often more than adversarial, but ended up understanding each other and ultimately creating albums that were very true to what we liked in recordings.

Not everyone liked what we did, but to try and please everyone is a lesson in futility and always ends up muddled and unfocused and certainly not personal. I have had a point of view from the start and I stuck to it, let it mature and grow, and nurtured it. I was true to what I believed in because I simply don’t know any other way to do it. And if that means you get knocked occasionally (and I can assure you I got knocked, sometimes more than occasionally), then that means you get knocked occasionally.

In 1993, recorded theatre music was pretty much dead. Oh, a couple of the majors did a handful of cast album recordings every year, but the costs of doing those had become so outrageously expensive that very few were done. The majors simply couldn’t take a chance on anything but shows that seemed like sure winners, and things they might have taken a chance on some years before went unrecorded.

And no one was doing musical theatre singer albums, except for the odd album by Barbara Cook, Betty Buckley, or Patti LuPone. There was no interest whatsoever. Within two years of my producing journey all the labels were back in the game, and they’d even begun doing lesser-known theatre vocalists. We’d become so popular so fast that they saw what we were doing and decided it might be worth their while and, for a time, it was. But it wasn’t only the majors. The end result of what we began was that every vocalist, no matter how unknown, had to have a CD—usually funded and produced by themselves. The market became glutted.

The reasons we were able to do the vocalist CDs and not lose our shirts was because a) I chose the singers carefully, b) I did them for a price, and c) each album had a point and a point of view. While they were not exactly cheap, they were a lot cheaper than the majors could do them for.

I remember a nice gentleman from Sony calling me one fine day. They were about to do a solo album with Broadway singer Kristin Chenoweth. She was hardly a household name back then, but she’d done a few Broadway shows and Sony was obviously taking a chance with her.

Can I pick your brain? the nice gentleman from Sony asked.

Pick away, I responded. I was always very open to having my brain picked.

I know you might not want to reveal your budgets, but can you tell me how much you spend on a singer album when you do them? They all sound great and are so well produced and I’m just curious what they cost. Even a ballpark.

I don’t have to give you a ballpark, I said, I’ll tell you exactly what they cost. The recording costs, exclusive of mastering and packaging and pressing costs are between $32,000 and $35,000.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

You’re kidding, the nice gentleman from Sony said.

Not really.

How? How can you do that?

I have my ways, I said, laughing. Why?

Because Kristin Chenoweth’s album is nowhere near that.

Well, you’re Sony and I’m not. But what’s the budget if you don’t mind my asking.

$150,000, he said.

This time the silence was on my end of the line.

You’re kidding, I said.

Not really, he said. I wish I was kidding.

I’ll bet he wished he was kidding. You’d have to sell an awful lot of CDs to ever see that money back. Yes, Sony could ship as many as they wanted, but how many of those might be returned? Stores could return 100% of what they ordered the day after they got them, should the CD be a stiff.

I have no idea if Sony did or did not make their money back on that CD, but they did more with Kristin so I assume the investment was worth it and paid off, especially as she became more and more popular and especially after Wicked.

But at our budget level, we really only had to sell about four thousand CDs to break even on a vocalist album and most of ours sold that easily. How I did them and got the production values I did, with full orchestras, great arrangements and orchestrations—well, that’s the book, isn’t it?

If you’d told me back in 1993 that by the end of the decade I would have personally produced more albums in an eight-year period than probably anyone in history, I would have told you you were insane. But that’s exactly what happened.

The fact that I was allowed to do that many albums (for most years it was nineteen a year) is astonishing. The fact that many of them sold well or at least made their money back is equally astonishing. But, as I said, it was a different time and that time is pretty much gone forever now.

We began with two-inch tape and we ended with Pro Tools. We were certainly amongst the first people to do the switch, and maybe the first theatre music people to do it. That’s because my engineer was there at the forefront of the Pro Tools revolution and he is today a very successful Pro Tools engineer, doing many of the biggest soundtrack recording dates. Others followed. That was frequently the case back then. We did. Others followed.

So, I guess it’s time to rewind the tape, to go back to the beginning. 1993. I was forty-five years old. I’d received a call from Varese Sarabande Records’ owner Chris Kuchler. If I would shut down my label, Bay Cities, he was offering me the chance to become a full-time record producer and have my own division at the company. I’d be in charge of that division and would make all decisions. It would be mine alone. That sounded good to me. It was a new road, a new life, and I was about to leave behind all vestiges of my acting, writing, and directing days. It was scary, but I was ready for something completely different. And boy did I get it. This is how it happened.

And let’s do a take.

PROLOGUE

On a beautiful morning in March of 1993, I pulled out of the parking garage of The Shores in Santa Monica, the apartment building I’d been living in since 1988. I had the top down on my Mustang convertible and the ocean air smelled fresh and pungent.

I’d left at eight in the morning.

We start work here at nine, Chris Kuchler had said the week before and because I am a very punctual person I’d allowed myself an extra thirty minutes to get there.

The 405 was a mess, jammed with cars. I don’t do well in traffic—I’m claustrophobic and I get very antsy, then annoyed, then insane. I finally got to the 101 and proceeded south.

The 101 was worse than the 405. I got off the freeway at Cold-water Canyon and drove north. The Varese offices were located in the armpit of North Hollywood in a small industrial strip mall on Saticoy in a completely rancid-looking and ugly neighborhood. Why an extremely successful record label would have offices in such a place was anyone’s guess, but Chris was frugal and it was his company and he’d been in those offices practically from the beginning.

In a way, it was like coming home. Back in 1978 I’d become friendly with Tom Null, who, with Chris Kuchler and Dub Taylor, had begun a little record label—the melding of two separate labels. I’d met Tom, who was working at Vogue Records in Westwood, and he’d told me all about it and asked if I’d be interested in investing in it and becoming a part owner and partner. I met with them and was offered a third of the company for $2,500. In one of the stupidest mistakes I’ve ever made (and I’ve made some really stupid mistakes), I passed.

At the time, their plan was to issue classical albums, most of which were fairly obscure reissues. That was one of the reasons I’d passed on investing. I really didn’t see how they could succeed just doing that kind of small niche product.

But I did stay in touch with Tom and Chris and at some point early on, I suggested they get into soundtracks. No one was really doing them regularly back then, not in any meaningful way, save for the biggest films, and I thought there was a niche you could really mine.

They thought that sounded like a good idea and to get them on that road I gave them the soundtrack to my film, The First Nudie Musical. That became the very first Varese Sarabande soundtrack album. I also told them that I’d be happy to make suggestions and give advice and maybe even find them titles and everyone was fine with that.

They hired a nice guy named Scot Holton, who began finding them other titles. He was a big horror, sci-fi guy and that’s what he concentrated on. And slowly but surely, they began to succeed and get known—people began buying their albums and taking note of their weird inkblot logo and their motto, Expect the unexpected.

In those early years I did find them several titles: I got them five LPs-worth of music from the classic television show, The Twilight Zone. That music had never been released in any form.

One day I just called the CBS music department and got a guy named Robert Drasnin on the phone. He was a composer and ran the CBS music department. He thought it was a great idea to get The Twilight Zone music out, and he gave me all the tapes of scores that were in the CBS library—the ones that had actually been re-recorded in Europe so that no reuse fees would have to be paid to musicians when the scores were tracked into their many TV shows in the late 1950s and then into the 1960s.

Back then, when a soundtrack was recorded in the United States, the musicians got 100% of what they’d made doing the session if a soundtrack album was released. In other words, they got their entire salary all over again. It was a huge expense in a lot of cases, but the labels paid it because they had no choice. In time, economics and sanity would rule the day and that would all change.

The Twilight Zone (all five volumes) was a big hit for Varese. I had a royalty position and actually made a nice chunk of change from it.

Because I didn’t really know protocol or anything and because I’d had good luck with just picking up the phone and making a call to CBS, I did the same thing with Paramount. And as it had with CBS, it worked and I got Varese the soundtracks to An Almost Perfect Affair by Georges Delerue and Bloodline by Ennio Morricone. In 1979, I did the same with Warner Bros. and got them the soundtrack to a new film, A Little Romance, also by Georges Delerue.

That film was a big hit and the album did really well. At Oscar time I suggested to Chris that he send copies of the LP to everyone in the music branch of the Academy. After much hemming and hawing (getting Chris to agree to anything is a time-consuming affair), he bit the bullet and did it. And the score was nominated for an Oscar, despite having a lot of Vivaldi music in it (today it probably wouldn’t even be eligible to be nominated).

I suggested sending more albums to the Academy. After much hemming and hawing, Chris did so. The nominees for Best Score that year were The Amityville Horror by Lalo Schifrin, The Champ by Dave Grusin, 10 by Henry Mancini, A Little Romance by Delerue, and a little thing called Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Jerry Goldsmith.

Well, we all knew Goldsmith was going to win; there was no question about it. As I sat watching the Oscars they called out the nominees for Best Score and I suddenly had this weird feeling about who was going to win. And when they opened the envelope and announced the winner, my feeling turned out to be correct: Georges Delerue for A Little Romance.

The sending albums ploy had just resulted in Varese Sara-bande’s first Oscar-winning soundtrack album. Postscript: Since then, it has become standard operating procedure for all the studios to inundate the Academy with copies of the year’s soundtrack scores. Obviously it’s not quite as effective when Academy members are receiving fifty of those rather than one.

Because Chris had neglected to pay me my royalties on these various things for a few years, when it came time to produce my play, The Good One, I went to him and told him that we could call everything a wash if he’d fund the production. He furrowed his already furrowed brow, hemmed and hawed, but I think once he’d figured out how much he actually owed me that it would be cheaper to fund the production, and because Chris responds to saving money, he did. I also signed off on any further royalties from that point forward.

Meanwhile, Varese had become huge and a major player in the soundtrack game. Scot Holton had died and a young film music fan named Richard Kraft had come in to take over getting soundtracks for the company. And he’d been brilliant at it and gotten them A projects, credits on the end titles of the films and, most importantly, a distribution deal with a major, specifically Universal/MCA.

That changed everything. They were suddenly able to get their albums everywhere and they had many successes. One day they were offered the soundtrack to a little film called Ghost. They turned it down. Repeatedly. Finally the soundtrack was licensed to a man named Emmanuel Chamboradon of Milan Records. When the buzz on the film turned out to be incredible, Varese ended up sub-licensing from Milan. The album was a million-seller for Varese and made them. Of course, no one was really acknowledging that they only made a fraction of what they might have if they’d only licensed it themselves when it was originally offered to them. That little error in judgment cost them millions of dollars.

Still, they made millions from that album and became the most successful independent soundtrack label in history. And I could have owned a third of it for $2,500. By that time, Tom Null had been bought out of the company, as had Dub Taylor (who, I think, retained maybe a tiny percentage)—it was Chris’ company all the way.

Chris was an odd duck. He didn’t even really care about the music (he loved the Rolling Stones and listened to them every day, every hour, every minute), but that was probably a plus rather than a minus. What he was and is is a great businessman.

When Richard Kraft left the company to become a film music agent (and a brilliant one—still at it today), Chris called and asked me if I’d take over the soundtracks. But that was in the mid-1980s and I wasn’t ready to make that kind of life change back then, although had I it’s fun to wonder exactly where I’d be today. When I said no, he turned to a young kid and film music fan from Canada named Bob Townson, who picked up where Richard Kraft had left off. Both Bob and Chris are two of the skinniest people you’ve ever seen; you could put both of them behind a tree and you wouldn’t see either of them. They were a match made in heaven.

Bob jumped in and got them lots of projects. He was filled with the ego of youth, but he did what he needed to do and the company flourished. Meanwhile, we’d started Bay Cities and, like Varese had originally done, had begun doing obscure classical albums and, like Varese, had pretty quickly gotten into soundtracks (and shows, my passion). In three years, Bay Cities had issued ninety-three CDs, many of which were soundtracks. And Varese had begun to be annoyed with us because, miraculously, we were getting projects they wanted.

Finally, Chris made his phone call. Since Bay Cities was and always had been in utter financial turmoil, thanks to a series of independent distributors who seemed bent on putting us out of business, the company could not grow and certainly could not go where I wanted it to go—original recordings. In order to placate me, one of the partners, Alain Silver, who mostly ran the financial end of the company, had promised I could do three original recordings.

I’d chosen the projects—one CD of rare songs and incidental music by Stephen Sondheim. And two vocalist albums—one with a Broadway singer named Liz Callaway and one with a young singer in Los Angeles named Michelle Nicastro. But it had become way too apparent that we were never going to do them. We could not get paid by our distributor, the albums were not happening and this did not make me a happy person.

During all of that, I was working on the Fox show, Totally Hidden Video, but that well-paying job had come to an end and certainly I was not ever going to be making a living from Bay Cities, which was, at that time, paying each of its partners a whopping $750 a month. So, Chris’s call came at the right time for me.

We shut Bay Cities down because there was no other way. I had a good offer on the table and I saw no upside in keeping Bay Cites going the way that it was. It had been a fun sort of hobby, but if I was to remain in the music business I wanted to be a real record producer.

I had gotten a taste of it at Bay Cities. We’d done several small-scale albums and I’d absolutely loved doing them. We did a studio cast album of a Wright and Forrest musical called The Anastasia Affaire. We had a great cast, including Judy Kaye and Len Cariou. We recorded at a small studio in New York. The band was two pianos. Even back then I knew I was not satisfied with the sound I was hearing as we were recording, but since it was a live to two-track album (no mixing—you got what you got), there was nothing to be done about it, because I was not articulate enough to say what it was I didn’t like. I soon would be more than articulate on that topic—but that would be later.

That album had happened because I’d run into an old friend of mine at my New York hangout, Joe Allen. Walter Willison was then appearing on Broadway in the musical Grand Hotel. He got me house seats to see the show and we went out afterwards.

I told him about an album I wanted to do called Classical Broadway—classical pieces by Broadway composers. I’d already spoken to John Kander, Cy Coleman, and Charles Strouse, all of whom were excited about the project. Walter suggested I contact his friend, Harvey Schmidt. Since I was a huge fan of Harvey’s music, I did, and he became our fourth composer. Later, when we were recording Anastasia, I went to see Grand Hotel again because Zina Bethune had taken over a role and Walter wanted me to see her.

After the show, Walter, Zina, and I went to an Italian restaurant called Lattanzi’s on 46th Street. Walter said he had a surprise for me. The surprise was Harvey Schmidt, who was sitting there looking quite serious. We sat down, and within minutes I had Harvey howling with laughter and it was like I’d found a new best friend. We ended up working together a lot and he did become a great and close friend.

Classical Broadway came out well, but I didn’t really consider myself a real record producer—I’d just sort of been at the Kander, Schmidt, and Coleman sessions, but other than just saying That was a good one, I didn’t do much of anything. The fun part of it was getting to know the composers, all of whom I would work with many times.

The Anastasia Affaire did well enough that we could afford to do another original recording. That turned out to be a wonderful album of David Shire’s film music. David was and is a funny, goofy, and enormously talented composer. We’d reissued his brilliant score to Return to Oz. We decided to do a chamber album of his great film themes—The Conversation, The Hindenburg, Norma Rae, and many others. It would be David playing the piano, a singer doing four songs, and various solo instrumentalists, kind of the cream of the crop of studio players.

For the vocals we had Maureen McGovern. We did all the non-vocal things in Los Angeles, at Evergreen Studios in Bur-bank and on the 20th Century Fox scoring stage (a little overkill for six musicians, but what fun it was to be there, especially with the great engineer, Armin Steiner). We recorded the vocals in New York at Clinton Studios, where I would end up doing quite a few albums.

That album came out wonderfully. And I began to learn how to produce. I instinctively knew right away when a take was good and when it wasn’t—when we’d gotten the magic and when we hadn’t. I also learned that I could go into the studio and say a few well-chosen words to the artist and those words would really make a difference in the next take. In other words, it wasn’t much different from directing actors for the stage or film. In fact, I began to see record producing as making little movies for the ear.

We also did two other original recordings. The first was with the singer Joanie Sommers, an all Jerome Kern album, with a trio of great players. I’d fallen in love with Joanie way back when she had her first breakout hit, Johnny Get Angry. I’d followed her career over the years and had always loved that husky and sexy voice. In 1968 I saw her on one of those ABC Stage 67 original TV musicals, On The Flip Side, with songs by Bacharach and David. I wore out several copies of the soundtrack to that one.

One day, I saw that Joanie was singing at some tiny club in LA. I’d told my Bay Cities cohort Nick Redman all about Joanie. I’d brought Nick into the company to do soundtracks (Nick’s then wife had been my assistant during most of the Totally Hidden Video years), and we went to the club to hear her. We met with her afterwards and I told her we’d love to do what would be her first new recording in years. She jumped at that chance. Nick produced all those albums with me, although I was the hands-on session person.

We recorded at a little hole-in-the-wall studio called Trax, which was located right next door to the place where we mastered our CDs. There I met our engineer, Vini Cirilli, who would, of course, go on to become my partner in crime for every album I did at Varese and Fynsworth Alley, and some beyond that. It was the beginning of a long, fruitful, frustrating, and sometimes volatile and torturous artistic relationship.

He was also the engineer for our other original recording done around the same time—a new album with the new configuration of the old Baja Marimba Band, which was now called the Baja Marimbas. That album was a no-brainer: Julius Wechter, the leader of the band, was the father of someone who’d become my best friend and occasional writing partner, David Wechter.

Both Joanie’s and Julius’s albums were joys to do. Again, they were direct to two-track—no mixing, what you got was what you got. I was very impressed by the live sound Vini got, as well as the balances between band and voice. I made a handful of suggestions to him as we recorded each number, and he was able to give me exactly what I was asking for.

I remember Frank Capp, the drummer for the session, listening to a playback and saying, Where’s the ride cymbal? I may as well go home. Vini made an adjustment and we did another take. Frank listened and patted Vini and me on the shoulder-he could hear his ride cymbal and was happy.

That became a running joke between Vini and me—I’d always look at him at whatever session we were doing and say, Where’s the ride cymbal? I may as well go home. Frank Capp was right, of course—you really want to hear that ride cymbal and from Joanie’s session on, Vini and I made sure you did.

I also gave little tiny notes to Joanie on some songs—just a slightly different approach to a lyric or just maybe asking for a slightly different feel—small stuff that she took graciously and made work wonderfully. Neither album sold especially well, but I was very proud of them and was chomping at the bit to do more.

And now I was starting work at Varese Sarabande and doing more was finally becoming a reality. I’d already talked to Liz and Michelle and had several back-and-forth letters with Sondheim about what would eventually become Unsung Sondheim. I was ready to go.

The only problem was I wasn’t quite sure of how to go about any of it. These would not be live to two-track recordings. I wanted to do these right. I wanted a band and arrangements and orchestrations, which would require mixing. I didn’t want to do small-sounding albums. I wanted to make a statement with my first three albums as a real record producer.

I turned left on Saticoy and then a few blocks later left again into the parking lot for the Varese offices. I’d been there many times before, but this was now to be my new full-time home. What should have taken thirty minutes at the most had taken fifty, but I still made it with time to spare.

I parked and entered the office. There was a large main room as you entered and it was a pigsty. There were papers strewn about everywhere and three or four desks, each loaded with its own set of papers. I think there was still a little hole in one wall where Tom Null had once thrown a chair at someone. There was an art table where the booklet covers and packaging were prepared. Some posters from films that had their soundtracks on Varese adorned what I suppose you’d call walls.

Straight ahead was Chris’s office. His office was neat and tidy and quite nice-sized. He was there and I walked in.

Hi, Bruce, he said.

That was about it. He told me to choose my desk. Bob Town-son had his and I chose the desk that had the least clutter to clean off, the one nearest the front door. I began to clean it off and move the papers to other desks. At nine, David, who worked the back room and did all the shipping, came in, and shortly thereafter he was followed by Bob, who looked at me warily, smiled a half-smile, and sat at his desk.

I went to the back room, the heart of these offices. All the stock was back there in boxes on pallets, and there were a huge number of tapes on shelves. I walked around, taking in the lay of the land. I then walked back into the other room and went into Chris’s office. He gestured for me to sit down.

So, he said.

Happy to be here, I said in return. And ready to do albums.

We’d already worked out the particulars. I was to be paid $37,000 the first year, but it was clear that if we were all happy with the way things were going that the salary would increase right away. While that wasn’t a lot of money, especially compared to the $3,000 a week I’d been making on Totally Hidden Video, it would do me fine for a while. And, as Chris had said from the beginning, it was a job for life, which gave me a nice feeling of security for maybe the first time ever.

But I’d asked for a signing bonus, too. Chris had looked at me with that furrowed brow that I’d come to know very well and did his usual hemming and hawing. I said if he wanted me to give up everything and go down this new road he had to make it worthwhile for me. But I didn’t ask for money up front. What I asked for was that when the time was right