The way Alex had it drawn up in his head, the best possible home for “Thrift Shop” was Lil Lori’s new album.
Part of the inspiration for it had come from the man in the pink suit and his bass voice, after all, so it was only right that he get a piece of the work.
The arrangement he’d designed in his mind went like this: Lori handled the rap verses, and the label boss came in with that enormous bass of his to sing the hook — the one built to burrow into a listener’s skull and stay there for a week.
He didn’t dislike Lori.
Steering Lori’s album away from the cliff would take care of Tony’s “employment” problem as a side effect, and it would put royalties in Alex’s own pocket on top of that.
Everybody walked away happy.
Which meant he had to move before the label actually went into production on the album, and there wasn’t a great deal of time to work in.
There was even less money.
The LCD digits on the little timer kept ticking over.
He put his nerves away, sat down across the desk from Chuck, and waited.
“Solid!”
Chuck had put on a Black man’s cadence and a Black man’s swagger to say it.
“You made the right call, BRO!” He balled up his right fist and stuck it out across the desk.
Alex didn’t move to meet it.
He simply let his face go flat and looked at him, cold and level, and held it.
“I’m sorry.”
Chuck pulled the fist back, mortified.
“Forget I did that. Sorry. Sorry —” He kept apologizing, stacking one on top of the next.
“I got carried away. Business has been slow lately. Mr. Song, I am very, very sorry.”
Most of the time, people of other races got nervous when a Black man pulled that particular face on them.
Even the mild, decent Black men in the neighborhood would use it on each other now and then, just to test what a man was made of.
Alex had been in this body long enough now to work the dial with some precision.
The trick was all in the eyes.
The eyes had to promise murder.
“Just call me Alex. First question.”
Having watched the man flinch at a flaw that small, Alex put it at eighty percent that Chuck had nobody standing behind him and no nerve of his own.
He let his shoulders down a fraction, took out his notebook, checked it, and asked, “If you sign a contract with someone under eighteen — does the contract have to be signed by a guardian?”
“Of course.”
Chuck was already up and crossing to the file cabinet, hauling open a drawer.
“Or the guardian can sign a power of attorney and delegate part of the guardianship to somebody else.” He found a document and held it out.
“That’s a standard power-of-attorney form. If you want to carve out only part of the guardianship, though, you’ll need a lawyer to draft it. Hang on.”
He looked Alex over, slowly, from the haircut down to the sneakers.
“How old are you this year?”
“Fifteen. Why?” Alex answered without looking up from the form. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Fuck!”
Chuck swore with real irritation.
“You just played me. You little hustler!”
And whose fault is that.
“Second question,” Alex said, moving right along.
“What have you got written in there? Going through them one at a time is a waste of both our clocks.”
It turned out Chuck was the sort of man who took an inch of ground and stood on it.
To make up for the fist-bump humiliation, he reached over and pulled the notebook clean out of Alex’s hands.
“Let’s see — mm, transfer of copyright in a song, equity share in a music album —”
Muttering to himself, he went digging through the cabinet for the relevant paperwork and tossed the sheets across to Alex one by one.
“Broadly speaking, that’s the lot, but I’ll be straight with you — these standard forms aren’t worth much.” Chuck dropped back into his chair.
“The law in this area is elastic. Hollywood and the music business have their own ways of playing it. Find a good agent. People are what matter.”
“I looked into it,” Alex said.
“Aren’t there associations that protect songwriters’ rights and the copyright in their songs?”
“You mean ASCAP — the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers — and BMI, Broadcast Music, Inc.?” Chuck spread his hands and explained.
“First thing: they only act for the rights of their members. And to become a member you have to pay in. BMI’s the pricier one, ASCAP’s cheaper. Second thing: you have to have work published publicly. Do you? If you do, they’ll usually send you an invitation.”
“No. This is my first song. That’s why I’m here for legal advice,” Alex said honestly.
“Well, there you are. That’s your problem.” Chuck opened his hands wider.
“If you haven’t published publicly, you don’t get invited, so you’re not eligible to be a member. And because you’re not a member, it’s hard for you to get published publicly. Circular, right?”
Alex’s head was beginning to swim.
“Then what about the copyright itself? My song, the music — that can’t just be taken away from me, can it? By a label, say.”
Chuck smiled.
“Oh, that can absolutely happen. Why do you think Hollywood feeds that whole army of agents and managers and lawyers and accountants? Because things like that happen all the time.”
“Which brings us back to it,” he added.
“Find a good agent.”
“And if I find a bad agent? By what you just said, if I haven’t published anything, no agent wants me — and if no agent wants me, I never get published. That’s circular too!” The frustration got into Alex’s voice.
The distance between the plan in his head and the world in front of him was turning out to be considerable.
“It’s a hard business to break into, kid.”
Chuck pointed a finger at him.
“A Black kid like you — ahem — look, I’ve seen a lot of African American kids.
Sitting in the back of the bus, humming something under their breath with a Walkman on, scribbling on scraps of paper with a pencil, dreaming about being famous.
Right?
A capitalist society naturally selects out the tiny sliver at the top of the pyramid and dumps the rest.
How many singers have come out of Chicago in the last ten years whose names anybody actually knows?
Divide that by the population and you’ve got your odds.
Same for all those boys and girls who go to Los Angeles chasing it — how many of them land a decent part in a year?
Most people are losers you never see, because nobody shows you the losers.
Be honest about what you can do, and don’t spend money on dreams that aren’t real.”
Nonsense.
Am I the same as them?
Alex rolled his eyes where the man couldn’t see it.
I’m a guy who woke up in somebody else’s life with a cheat in his pocket.
They went back and forth a while longer.
Chuck read the boy’s face and his answers, decided he wasn’t going to quit, and gave up trying to talk him out of it.
“All right. On copyright I’ll give you some advice. First: keep all your evidence. Your lyric sheets, your drafts, the scrap paper you scribbled on while you were writing it — don’t throw any of it out. It’s usable in a copyright suit. And record a demo of everything you write, because a performance is a kind of copyright too.”
“Second: you can take your lyrics, your score and your demo to ASCAP and file them. That runs about twenty dollars. Note what I’m saying — that’s a filing, and a filing is not ASCAP recognizing your copyright. If you want ASCAP to recognize it, you’re probably looking at a few hundred dollars and several months, because they have to do the comparison work and all the rest of it. And you still won’t be a member.”
“Last: giving an agent a bigger cut in your first few years in the business is a sound strategy. Whatever else you do, don’t sign a management contract for longer than three years. If you’re not happy with him, you want to be able to change when the clock runs out. And if you really do get in — if you qualify as a member of ASCAP or BMI — the association does a chunk of what your agent does for you. All the trouble you’re worried about right now stops being trouble.”
When he’d finished, Chuck pointed at the timer.
Fifty-five minutes, as it happened.
Alex decided the man had been conscientious after all, and that he’d gotten his money’s worth several times over.
He stood, shook Chuck’s hand with some ceremony, and said, “Thank you.” Then he counted out thirty-five dollars and handed them over.
“Uh — the consultation fee is the consultation fee. There’s the charge for the documents, too. Ten bucks.” Chuck indicated the sheets Alex had been putting away in his briefcase.
“…”
Alex promptly took every one of them back out, picked out the one that was actually useful — the guardianship power of attorney — produced ten dollars, and returned the rest of the paperwork along with it.
“Hmph.” Chuck made a small disgusted noise and checked the bills over carefully.
Then, out of nowhere: “You’re from the South Side, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Watch out for anybody who wants to pay you on a contract in cash.” Goodman flicked the notes in his hand.
“You people on the South Side — Black, African American — like to take payment in cash, because that way you can dodge the tax. And once the tax has been dodged and the season’s closed, if he breaks the contract on you, you won’t dare sue him. Because the second that contract comes out, all he’s facing is a lawsuit — and you’re facing the IRS. Understand?”
The IRS was no joke.
Alex knew that much: the most famous gangster Chicago ever produced, Al Capone, had gone down not to the FBI but to the tax men.
They were scarier than the Bureau.
He thanked the man once more and walked out of the McGill Law Office.