AT 29 (8 page)

He stood beside the car, drinking in the memories. He wanted them to be different, to conjure up a flash of insight followed by peace. Isn't that how bad memories are channeled? Bucinski cursed him anew. The rage remained.

Independents, like Blossom Records, pushed the envelope with new sounds. When its founder, Daisy Overton, left to get married for the first time, now on her fourth, her deep-pocketed father pulled his cash. After that nobody thought the label had a chance
.

- Alice Limoges

Blossom Records was located in Millburn, New Jersey, one of several north central New Jersey communities that challenged the state's reputation for grime, corruption and sprawl. Millburn was home to all manner of wealth, emanating from the thousands of New York City commuters who called the town home. Investment bankers, corporate moguls, actors, musicians, professional athletes and not a few idle rich could be found wandering the luxurious downtown shops that dotted Main Street. That a recording company could be found nestled among hundred year-old trees in a campus setting, nevertheless, surprised Miles McCabe.

He had researched Blossom's history, wanting to know why it was situated in Millburn, who founded it, and how it came to be in its sorry financial condition. He learned that it had been established ten years earlier by a wealthy father who doted on his only daughter. Thomas Overton had been married seven times, producing only one offspring from his third marriage to a violinist devoid of interest in anything other than his money and her concert career. She left him not long after their daughter, Daisy, was born. The subsequent divorce gave her five million and Thomas the sole possession of Daisy. He did his best to raise his daughter within the constraints of his real interest, making money.

Thomas hired all the help he felt necessary to ensure that Daisy was given everything he could not personally provide, either as a man ill-prepared for the responsibility of a little girl, or an impossibly busy financier. Daisy grew up under the tutelage of housekeepers, cooks, personal secretaries, private schools and the occasional interference of Thomas' next four wives. By the time she was eighteen and had graduated from an exclusive New Hampshire school for underachieving girls, Daisy was skilled at two things, riding horses and riding men.

Hefty contributions from Thomas gained Daisy admission to a succession of colleges from which she managed to quickly flunk out. When she was twenty-one she told him, “no more school” and settled in at the Millburn horse farm he had purchased originally for wife number six as a wedding present. Wives six and seven were long gone, but Daisy learned how to ride on the farm and she prevailed upon Thomas to keep it. She rode everyday and at night entertained rock star wannabes with her other charms.

Thomas worried that his daughter was too young to merely idle her time away on the farm. He tried to interest her in the world of finance, first executing stock purchases under his direction and later, as his personal assistant. Both endeavors proved disastrous, and like the other seven women in his life, he soon looked for a way to put her at a distance. Daisy sensed that she had reached a limit with her father, so she made one last plea for support. Together with her latest beau, a lightly regarded singer who could handle a horse and Daisy with equal skill, she proposed a recording studio that would be the vehicle to make him a star. The studio would be built on the horse farm in Millburn. She took her plan to Thomas at his office on Wall Street and asked him to foot the bill pleading, “I'll never ask you for anything again, Daddy!” Dubious, but hopeful, Thomas
took out his checkbook and Blossom Records was born. A year later with dozens of unsuccessful recordings littering the landscape, Daisy grew tired of the singer who would never be a star and sent him packing. She had many others on the Manhattan music scene to taste.

She spent the next year cruising the clubs, soon garnering a reputation as an easy touch for a recording contract as long as you could ride a horse and keep her warm at night. She wasn't a complete failure at the business. A few of the singles and groups she found actually had talent. This was more luck than savvy on her part, because the first test always centered on looks. Lean, tall and handsome drew her interest, followed by some measure of musical affinity and a weekend at the farm to test horsemanship and sexual taste. Any man or boy, because there were some boys mixed in, who passed the ritual got a contract. Once signed, she turned the professional part of the relationship over to the experts her father had hired to protect his investment. She, however, made sure they understood the unwritten contract that entailed attention to her.

In five years Blossom Records had twenty acts under contract. At any given time, between one and three of the contracts were minor moneymakers with the rest on the way out. She liked the number twenty and whenever one contract was allowed to expire, she quickly toured the clubs and found another lean, handsome replacement. Her father continued to make plenty of money and secretly needed the annual losses Daisy piled up to offset the part of his profits he couldn't hide from the taxman offshore. He was content to let her have her way.

However, when she was twenty-eight Daisy's maternal clock suddenly kicked-in. All toys were replaced with an earnest search for a father to her children. Not conceived just yet, but ready to be hatched just as soon as the right horseman could be selected. She stopped going to clubs and traded her rocker's wardrobe for a demure look. Then she hit the New York scene and its society pages like a whirlwind. Inside of six months she had her pick of men and selected the best looking horseman of the bunch. Blossom Records soon foundered, not because the business people Thomas had hired to keep it operating had failed, although it still was not profitable, rather, because he, too, lost interest. He loved his daughter and he loved his reputation in New York society equally. His time and attention were focused upon throwing the best wedding the city had seen in years. Daisy departed the farm and the company simultaneously as she turned her mind to marriage and babies. She moved into a chic apartment in the city to better supervise the wedding plans with her certain to be generous father.

At twenty-nine Daisy was married and settled onto a sprawling estate in Bedford, New York. Thomas Overton decided upon other ways to lose money for tax purposes and by twisting a few arms, unloaded the Millburn farm and Blossom Records as a package deal to a friend's venture capital firm, the one that Myra had joined.

What to do with Blossom Records became the headache of Myra not long after she settled into her new office. Make it profitable then make it go away was the marching order. When she studied the financials she believed it was a lost cause, but she remembered the one subordinate who always delivered back in her corporate days. She'd kept in touch with Miles McCabe from time to time and saw how devastated he had been when she attended his wife's funeral. Sometimes timing is perfect and she was heartened when he accepted the job. Whether he could fix things or not seemed less important than
giving something challenging to a man who needed an outlet just then, a man who had always come through for her.

After touring the facilities and meeting the employees, McCabe pored over Blossom's financial records. As a company it wasn't much. Certainly smaller than the last venture he had fixed and maybe a bit less complicated as well. Of the twenty contracts Daisy left behind, only one was profitable. A few others had contributed some revenue then declined, probably out of neglect. The rest had never delivered a penny. He was intrigued to discover four contracts involving non-U.S. citizens, two groups from England and two singles, a Canadian and an Australian. He separated the contracts into three groups; Jimmy Button who delivered a small amount of profit, six, including the four that intrigued him, and thirteen that merely dragged on Blossom's cash. Then he read every contract, taking pages of notes, cataloguing names, dates, expenditures, and every other detail that might influence the decisions he intended to make.

Over the next week, he studied his notes until they were committed to memory. He did not understand the music business so he read books and trade journals late into the night, trying simultaneously to get familiar with the industry while passing the lonely night hours without longing for his wife.

When he felt he knew something about the industry and his own contracted performers, he stayed away from the office, remaining home for another week to listen to every recording that Blossom ever made. The vast majority had never been released. For each one he added more notes to his catalogue, charting sales figures with graphs to help him visualize. He played the songs over and over many times. After he'd heard enough he turned on his newly purchased stereo and tuned into all the AM and FM stations he could find. He listened carefully for music genres comparable to the styles of Blossom's stable. He expected to hear some of Blossom's songs played from time to time, but despite hour upon hour, he heard only one of his artists. Six different songs by the same singer, each played only once in seven days of listening, Jimmy Button. He wrote down the titles.

When Miles returned to his office in Millburn he called his lawyers. All thirteen non-performing contracts were summarily broken with a curt letter sent by certified mail to the artists and their agents. It was a risky action. Music people talked. He knew his draconian act might result in Blossom being blacklisted. On this point all he could do was watch and wait. Next, he set about analyzing the remaining seven artists. He decided to retain the two English groups and the Australian and Canadian singles. He had no idea if something saleable could be culled from them, but his gut feeling told him to take a chance. The Australian, whose lone tape caught his ear, had a spectacular voice. He was puzzled that no recording by him had ever been released. He also elected to keep three Americans, two brothers who had been signed separately, but now performed together on the west coast and Jimmy Button, a steady, albeit unspectacular, moneymaker. Of all the songs Miles analyzed, only those from this artist and the mysterious Australian made him sit up and pay close attention. He picked up the phone and called Blossom's Director of Operations, Cindy Crane.

The boy Jonathan Whitehurst left behind did, indeed, find prejudice and hardship during his early life in the regions of Apollo Bay. His surrogate parents accepted him with joy and provided him with a warm, albeit, spartan home on their farm high above the picturesque bay that was an occasional stopover for ships. Still, as he grew he took on the nappy hair of the native Aborigines in spite of his otherwise pale skin. This did not sit well with the locals who came to populate the region from England and other parts of Victoria.

Those who now ruled the continent universally despised Australia's native population, the rightful owners of the land. They refused to understand the peculiar customs of these odd and, by some accounts, unattractive people who stole their provisions and burned their homes. There was no accommodation between the two cultures except for nefarious trade in alcohol and the occasional gun. White settlers rooted the indigenous blacks out with vengeance, often attacking their remote encampments in the dark of night, killing all with no mercy and no conscience. These were sub-human people who could not be tamed and could not be brought into the arms of God. And, the deepest hatred was reserved for those few white men who communed with the Aborigines. The settlers' memories of the murders of their women and children allowed for no interaction with any who had congenial contact with the enemy. In the youngster who mysteriously appeared on the farm of their neighbor, they saw unmistakable aboriginal intercourse.

So it was that Nathan Whitehurst came to be a lonely, friendless child who benefited from decent food, shelter and clothing, but only harsh human contact beyond that of his caring stepmother and hard working stepfather. Shunned by all others, he found himself alone, captivated by the big ships that occasionally anchored in the bay during the summer months, waiting out the harsher weather in the fertile seas above the equator. The boy spent hours gazing out at the tall masts and imagining what it would be like when he was old enough to sail away from his loneliness on a great adventure.

He grew to an imposing size that did not escape the surprise of his guardians, who in their unselfish concern for him, talked at length between themselves about what was best for this child who had no place among his peers. They knew of his interest in the ships and, after much soul searching, his stepfather went to the pier at Apollo Bay and asked to speak with any captain in need of a strong boy eager to set sail and, of course, to work.

A taker was found quickly as disease often slimmed the rolls of sailors at sea and many ships limped into Apollo Bay with only a fraction of the crew that originally came aboard. Nathan eagerly joined a three hundred ton, one hundred foot barque that featured an American captain out of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

Nathan was only fifteen, but already as big as many of the men with whom he toiled. Some of his crewmates shunned him for his odd appearance and youth, but others accepted him for his dedication to hard work and friendly smile. At night, when the moon cast a sparkling glow upon the water as far as the eye could see, flutes and fiddles would be produced from somewhere in the depths of the vessel. The sailors, gifted in ways to pass idle time, made music and danced upon the deck. The music often began softly with ballads and love songs sung in low tones against a backdrop of pretty notes blown
through handmade instruments. Then as the night went on, the rye whiskey took hold and the music went up-tempo with bawdy words shouted in unison to the tune of a fast paced fiddle in the hands of a gifted musician who would never receive his just recognition.

Nathan was enthralled by this wonderful routine and could not wait for the sun to set each evening so he could find a place along the rail and listen. The sounds that came into his ears met no ordinary appreciation. In his head each note found itself under intense analysis as he tested its merit within the structure of the other notes that came before and after. There was no song that he did not like, nor any that he could not make better. He had the same innate understanding of the crude instruments as he watched them being played. With no prior experience with music or the tools that made it, he instinctively knew that the fiddle was out of tune and the harmonicas and flutes had the potential to reach far better sound.