The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [29]
I wasn’t going to say it. Because I didn’t believe it. In my early morning stonedness, writing songs, bass lines, dreaming up rhythms, I thought myself a genius. But in the light of day I had no confidence.
“That’s just boring. That’s really boring,” said the sampler player. “I studied music. And this man”—motioning to the bass player—“is the most talented musician in New York, and this man”—motioning to the drummer—“everybody wants to play with. You’re lucky that he’s playing with you. Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”
“You have to ask what key you’re playing in, you don’t even know the names of the chords you’re playing, Doughty,” said the bass player.
Long silence.
“We should split the money equally,” said the bass player.
“That’s what we’ll do. That’s the right thing to do,” said the sampler player.
“Nobody should be more important than anybody else,” said the drummer.
It was as if the solution suddenly occurred to everybody. They smiled these Eureka! smiles.
“Great! We’ve decided! What a relief.”
Our food came. They chatted; I sat there stunned.
Something occurred to me, fifteen years later. Since I had actually written the songs, I owned them. As we sat there, those songs belonged to me. Legally and actually. If we went before a judge, and the judge was told, He wrote the melody, and the chords, and the rhythm, and the lyrics, but I wrote the hi-hat part, the judge wouldn’t split up the songs even-steven.
I didn’t realize this for fifteen years.
“You think you chose us, Doughty,” said the bass player, observing my dazed state, “but after you chose us, we chose you.”
I wanted each of my bandmates to have a big cut of the songwriting: what I wanted was 40 percent. The idea was that splitting it four ways was 25 percent per man; I wanted it split five ways, because I was doing one extra job. A five-way split meant twenty per man. Twenty for me as an equal band member; another twenty for me as songwriter. I had no problem divvying up the proceeds from ideas I prodded them into actualizing when they were barely participating in the band. I had no problem giving each of them a sizable, permanent stake—ownership—in the songs. I thought I was being modest. One extra job.
I tried one more time. We had a meeting after hours in our manager’s office. The sampler player showed up drunk, with an open can of Guinness, and unbuttoned his shirt to his belly. His head lolled back like he’d been punched. “You stabbed me in the back,” he said.
My request for 40 percent—everybody’s got one job, but I’ve got two—was met with howls. That meant I was making double what each of them would!
I got whittled down to 33 percent.
“But that’s a third,” said the sampler player. “That number has too many implications for me.”
It became clear that if they felt the slightest bit unequal, these guys would actually walk on this, the best opportunity that had ever showed up in their faces. I had a terrible feeling that even as I conceded this, this huge thing, it wouldn’t be enough; they’d never really be happy. I’d always be a little bit too elevated. They’d always be aggrieved.
I got 31 percent—an extra 6 percent—but only on the first album. It’d be 25 percent each on the next one. All for one and one for all, huh? Some of these were songs I wrote a couple of years before I laid eyes on any of them—songs about Seth and Betty and my post-teen grief.
They told me that they’d give me a little extra money from our publishing deal. It was a six-figure sum—initially quite exciting-sounding—that would pay our lawyer, our manager, a long list of commensurate