How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie Debartolo Read Free Book Online Page B

-thought-out words.
    At six o’clock I went back to see Terry.
    “How’s it going, Mags?” He tilted his neck from side to side and I heard his vertebrae release two loud cracks. “Mind if I cal you Mags?”
    “No,” I said, even though it seemed creepy.
    “Everything al right? You look a little gray.” I took a step forward and kept my voice down. “This might be out of line, but is Lucy always so curt, or did I do something to annoy her?”
    4“Both.” Terry told me there was a hierarchy at Sonica .
    Lucy had started as an intern, putting in sixty-hour weeks to get to her high-ranking position; thus she had an aver-sion to any person who didn’t start in the mailroom, especial y if the person’s employment could be construed as “carnal nepotism.”
    “But I swear, I never so much as—”
    “Not my business.” Terry waved me off. “Just expect the shitty assignments for a while. Hence the 66 gig.” Lucy came in shortly thereafter, handed me press creden-tials for the 66 show that night, then gave me a blue-lined copy of the September issue and explained that as an associate editor, I was required to read and copyedit the magazine before it went to print.
    “You have until noon tomorrow,” Lucy said.
    It was going to be a long night.
    “Only in America. This could only happen in America.
    Because America is in a tailspin from grace. What we invented—what our contribution to the world has been, the sonic representation of the freedom we as a country pride ourselves on—is rock ’n’ rol music. But rock ’n’ rol music is a dying man. No, not just a dying man. It’s a man being crucified, Eliza. It’s Jesus Christ. Our Savior. It’s The Way, The Truth, and The Light bleeding down on us from the cross, and you know what? We’re al just standing around watching the poor guy die.”
    That’s the analogy that Doug Blackman had offered me over cheeseburgers and French fries in his hotel room in Cleveland.
    Doug said radio was inundated with what he cal ed
    “musical heathens and soul ess pop pagans.” For the most part, they don’t write their own songs—and the ones who do can’t seem to write good ones—but they dress in hip clothes, they dance and lip-sync like nothing else, they’re skil ed in the art of self-promotion, and, most notably, they play by the rules.
    Doug picked up my tape recorder and spoke directly into the mike. “ Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever started a revo-lution playing by the rules.”
    The man was cynical, to say the least. But he had come of age in the sixties—that mythical generation of turbulence How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 4:59 PM Page 46
    4and change, where new things were new and people had hope. Rock ’n’ rol , civil rights, men walking on the moon.
    He’d protested wars and preached about a woman’s right to choose. He’d earned his opinion.
    Doug said the America he knew then was now the home of the lost, the confused, and the greedy. He said we live in a country that values commerce over art, a country that al ows mediocre talents to thrive and breed and poison the airwaves, movie screens, television, and printed word like toxic chemicals in the water supply.
    “Once in a while something pure slips through the cracks, but these days it’s rare.”
    “Why do you think it’s so rare?” I asked him.
    By then he’d had half a bottle of wine. He was worked up. “I’l tel you one of the reasons why it’s rare in music— because record companies have become little divisions of bil ion-dol ar corporations, that’s why. In some cases, record company CEOs are nothing more than middle-management kiss-asses. They don’t know shit about music and don’t care.
    Their job is to sel records. They don’t need a good ear, they need good marketing skil s. And that’s only half of it. There’s politics involved. Politics .”
    “How does that explain your success?” Doug scratched his temple, which he had a habit of doing whenever he paused