The Nerd had straggly blond hair and intense blue eyes and contact lenses over those eyes. He looked like a man who might be an accountant for a small private firm, while actually he was an excon who’d been paroled only five and a bit more months ago after having done time for 1st Degree Robbery, a Class-B felony punishable by a prison term not to exceed twenty-five years. That didn’t mean Calvin Robert Wilkins wasn’t smart; it merely meant he’d been caught. He wasn’t as smart as Avery, but then again he didn’t have to be. He’d got along just fine until the bad break that night of the bank heist when he got a flat tire during the getaway. He’d tried to ride out the flat, but the tire fell all to pieces and shreds, and suddenly he was riding on the rim with sparks flying and the fuzz gaining, and before you knew it his luck ran out completely and there he was upstate, wearing a number. He’d been paroled from Miramar shortly before Thanksgiving. Until just before Christmas, he’d been working as a dishwasher in a deli on Carpenter Avenue. Then he’d found the job at Lorelei Records, which was where he’d met Avery.
The boat they were on was a Rinker 27-footer powered with a 320-hp Bravo Two that could juice up to almost forty-three miles per at top speed. There was an aft cabin with an oversized mattress, and the dinette seating in the lounge could convert to a double berth, but they didn’t expect to be sleeping on the boat.
If everything went as planned tonight, by this time Tuesday, they’d all be sleeping in their own little beddie-byes.
If everything went as planned.
TOM WHITTAKER was program director for radio station WHAM. He was telling Harry Di Fidelio—Bison’s Vice President of Radio Marketing—that the question his station recently had to ask themselves was whether they should skew their targets younger or still go for the mother/daughter double play.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” Whittaker said. “With all these new uptempo releases, we all at once had a responsive audience for teen-based pop and hip-hop acts.”
“So which way are you going?” Di Fidelio asked.
“Well, we’ll continue to beam primarily to our twenty-five to thirty-four base. But what we’ve done over the past few months is expand our focus to the eighteen to twenty-four demographic. We’re trying to get away from that image of a thirty-something station. We want our listeners to think of us as dynamic and youthful instead.”
“That makes sense,” Di Fidelio said, and then got down to what Bison was paying him for. “We think Tamar will have a broad base among the thirty-somethings as
“Oh, hey, she’s terrific,” Whittaker said, gobbling down his second helping of chocolate pâté with vanilla bean sauce and raspberries. “What I’m trying to say, though, Barry…may I call you Barry?”
“Harry. Actually, it’s Harry.”
“Harry, right, what I’m trying to say, Harry, is that it was merely a matter of re-examining our goals. A lot of Top 40 stations try too hard to pitch their product to both the kiddies and their parents, and the result is mass confusion. At Radio 180, we
“ ‘Bandersnatch’ should appeal to both,” Di Fidelio said.
“Oh, hey, she’s terrific. I feel sure she’ll get hundreds of plays on our station.”
If much of what Whittaker was saying sounded like total horseshit, that’s because much of it
Moreover, this practice of Pay-for-Play, as it was called, was entirely legal provided the station mentioned on air that payment had been made. Usually, the deejay merely said, “This record was brought to you by Bison Records.” Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew that the music industry was a twelve-billion-dollar-a-year business. They further knew that only three broadcasters controlled more than half of the top hundred radio markets in the U.S. There were 10,000—count ’em, Maude—10,000 commercial radio stations in the land, and record companies depended on about 1,000 of the largest ones to create hits and sell records. Each of those thousand stations added approximately three new songs to its playlist every week.
Enter the independent record promoter.
