Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (34 page)

In order to accommodate Eddie Long’s debut disc —
Long Shot
— Big World Records pushed
back the street dates for a dozen of their established acts.
 
They also redirected a significant percentage
of the marketing budget from each of those projects to make a huge media push
on Eddie’s record.
 
The managers of the
bumped artists were so mad they couldn’t spit straight and the artists
themselves, understandably more concerned with their own careers than that of
the latest ‘It Boy,’ were fit to be tied.
 
In public, of course, every one of them talked about how excited they
were to have such an exciting young talent on their label and how they were
looking forward to the record and how the business was all about honoring the
music and no, they weren’t at all concerned about the delay in their own
release date, not in the least.
 
Don’t be
silly.
 
No point in speaking your mind
and running the risk that the
label give
you shorter
shrift than they already have.
 
Oops, did
I say that out loud?
 
What I meant was,
shucks, I’m just glad to be with Big World Records.

Meanwhile Big World had to solicit sales at the wholesale
level in order to determine how many units of
Long Shot
to produce on the first run.
 
Thanks to the extensive trade magazine
coverage and the Internet buzz, the demand was astounding.
 
Based on orders, Big World could have set the
initial run at a million units.
 
But
Eddie had other ideas.
 
He convinced the
label to try a high-risk marketing strategy.
 
And damned if they didn’t buy it.
 
They set the first run at three hundred fifty
thousand units.
 
It was enough to ensure
they got at least a few of Eddie’s discs into just about every outlet in the
country, from truck stops to Wal-Marts to Sam Goody’s but, at the same time, it
almost guaranteed that not everyone who wanted the disc would get it right
away.

Eddie’s thinking was that an initial under-supply of product
would increase demand by creating in consumers a sense of urgency for buying
the product immediately, whereas an over-supply would tend to make people think
there was no hurry to go buy it.
 
The
strategy was designed to create Beanie Baby-like hysteria in record stores.
 
Naturally Big World’s marketing department would
arrange to have television crews there to record the madness.
 
The footage would be broadcast on the news
and would create interest in the record for consumers who otherwise never would
have considered buying it.
 
As Eddie
explained it, “When you see fifty people fighting in the aisles over something,
you start thinking to yourself, ‘Shit!
 
I
need to get me one of those!’”

When the head of marketing asked how Eddie could be sure
such a group of people would break into a fight when a television crew was at a
store, Eddie just smiled and said, “Temps.”

Before starting on the
Long
Shot
disc, the duplication facilities cranked out a few thousand copies of
‘comp’ singles for radio and shipped them overnight.
 
The album version of ‘
It
Wasn’t Supposed To
End That Way’ was also made available as an MP3 file
for any station with MP3 capability.

The last piece of the marketing puzzle was put together out
at Willow Street Studios.
 
Eddie knew as
well as anyone that it was possible to sell a country artist without a music
video, but it wasn’t very smart.
 
They
shot it in two days.
 
The set was the
interior of a modest home, presumably Eddie’s.
 
All the furniture was covered in sheets and the walls showed the shadows
where pictures used to hang.
 
Eddie wore
black, befitting a man in mourning.
 
They
shot him as he wandered through the house, sitting on the arm of the covered
sofa, touching the wall where a cherished photo had hung.
 
All the while Eddie played his guitar and
sang.
 
Most of the video was shot from a
voyeuristic point of view as the camera followed Eddie and caught glimpses of
his face from a respectful distance.
 
But
about two thirds of the way through, as he sat at the foot of the bed, looking
down at his guitar, the camera pushed in and Eddie slowly looked up all sweet
and sad as he reflected on the unexpected loss of someone he had once
loved.
 
And then, with what looked like a
tear in his eye, he sang the words, ‘it wasn’t supposed to end that way.’
 
It just broke your heart.

Country Music Television and The Nashville Network put the
video in heavy rotation immediately and ‘
It Wasn’t Supposed
To
End That Way’ became the ‘most added’ song on country radio its first
week out.
 
It debuted at #7 on both
Billboard
and
R&R
Country charts and put Eddie Long on the map.

52.

Jimmy was in his kitchen having breakfast and reading the
paper.
 
After glancing at the news and
sports, he turned to the Southern Style section where he was blindsided by a
photograph.
 
The cup of coffee stalled on
its way to Jimmy’s lips.
 
“That cocksucker.”
 
It
was all Jimmy could say as he stared at the paper.
 
It was the photo of Eddie and Megan that had
run in
Billboard
, the one taken at
the Vanderbilt Plaza
the night Eddie signed his record deal.
 
And now it was running in the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger
along with a story about how another Mississippi
boy had gone to Nashville and hit
the big time.
 
The caption read, in part,
‘. .
 
seen
here
with his girlfriend, former Jackson
radio personality, Megan Taylor…’
  
“That cocksucker,” Jimmy said again.

While he could have been referring to Megan with a literal
use of the pejorative noun, he was actually using it in the figurative sense
and was thinking of Eddie when he said it.
 
It didn’t matter that Megan was draped all over Eddie in the
photo,
Jimmy still hadn’t gotten over her.
 
He
 
blamed
Eddie for stealing her from
him.

The
Clarion-Ledger
story said
Long Shot
had sold 350,000
units in its first week, making it the best selling record in the country.
 
In fact, according to the article, a near
riot broke out at one store in Atlanta
when a group of customers started fighting over the last copy of the disc.
 
There was even a photo of the event.
 
It looked like fifty amateur wrestlers
throwing punches and pulling hair.
 
It
was the sort of PR you couldn’t buy — well you could, actually.
 
In fact, not only could you buy it, you could
choreograph it too.
 
Jimmy could see
Eddie’s fingerprints all over the stunt.
 
He might be a cocksucker, but he knew marketing.
 
The story and the photo had been picked up by
half the papers in the country and it was helping make Eddie Long the hottest
thing out of Mississippi since
Faith Hill.

Ironically, it was just the break Jimmy needed.
 
Energized by a combination of jealousy and
aspiration, he spent the rest of the day and night at his computer working on a
book proposal for
The Long and Short of
It — The Unauthorized Biography of Eddie Long
.
 
Jimmy already had several sample chapters, so
all that was left was to finish an outline for the remainder of the book and
put together a section on audience and marketing.
 
Knowing he couldn’t submit the proposal
directly to publishers, Jimmy wrote a query letter then pulled out his
directory of literary agents and started addressing envelopes.
 
By
midnight
he was at Kinkos making copies.

Jimmy stood by the machine as it hummed and rocked and spit
out the warm, collated sets of documents.
 
It was a good proposal on a hot subject, but he was having second
thoughts.
 
He wondered if he should go
back and rewrite it to include his speculation that Eddie killed Tammy.
 
What else could he think?
 
The MSG in the Chinese food from a restaurant
that didn’t use MSG indicated that someone else had to put it in the boxes with
the leftovers.
 
The fact that Tammy was
MSG intolerant, which meant it
probably
gave her
headaches.
 
And the fact that the only
headache remedy in their house was poisoned.
 
Add to that Carl’s claim that Eddie felt Tammy was holding him back and
it was just too much to shrug off.

But while all that seemed to point at Eddie, there was still
the matter of the troublesome evidence pointing elsewhere.
 
The gunshot wound, for example, remained
unexplained.
 
Eddie obviously couldn’t
have done that since he was on the Gulf
Coast at the time.
 
And then there was Carl’s comment about
Tammy’s affair with a man from Grenada.
 
Maybe something had gone wrong there and this
mystery lover was the one with blood on his hands.

Jimmy mulled all this over on the drive home and decided not
to include his theory about the identity of Tammy’s killer.
 
Sure, it would have made for a more
titillating proposal, but he had no proof, only circumstantial evidence.
 
He figured publishers would see that as the
easy road to a hard lawsuit and who needs that headache?
 
No, he’d leave the proposal as it was, hoping
to sell it on the merit of his writing and the fact that Eddie was heading for
stardom.
 
Meanwhile, Jimmy had to return
to Hinchcliff to look for some direct evidence.
 
Then maybe he’d go to Nashville
and confront Eddie with his theory.
 
Or Megan.

Back at his apartment, Jimmy glanced again at the picture in
the
Clarion-Ledger
.
 
Seeing Megan and Eddie together hurt the way
betrayal always did.
 
But he took comfort
in the fact that now he knew where he stood with Megan.
 
Now he knew it was a matter of trying to win
her back and, ironically, Eddie’s sudden success looked like it might be the
thing to allow Jimmy to do just that — especially if he could prove the
cocksucker was also a murderer.

53.

“I’m cooter than Drunker Brown!” the man hollered, half
laughing.
 
“And I
wannanuther beer!”

The bartender shook his head and looked at the clock.
 
It wasn’t
noon
yet.
 
“Go home, Chester.
 
I ain’t serving you no more.”

Chester Grubbs didn’t seem to hear the bartender and, for
the moment, he seemed to forget that he wanted another beer.
 
His attention span had suffered as much as
his liver from three decades of drinking.
 
Not that he was always this drunk this early in the day.
 
His drinking spells came and went.
 
He’d go on a high lonesome for a while, then
he’d hit bottom, straighten up for a month, get some half assed job doing shit
work for shit wages, then he’d start drinking again, do something stupid and
get fired.
 
This circle had remained
unbroken for thirty years.

Chester was
sitting in a juke joint on a back road outside Broken Bow, Oklahoma.
 
Over the years he’d been in similar road
houses in Texas, California,
Tennessee, Kentucky,
Alabama, Georgia,
Louisiana and maybe a few other
states, he wasn’t sure.
 
He just moved
around, hoping to remain anonymous until he died.
 
Chester
had screwed up his life and he knew it.
 
No point in arguing with the truth, he’d say.
 
Better just to keep out of its way.

Chester looked
harder than two summers in hell.
 
His
face was all dirty crags and dull gray whiskers and there was something about
the trouble in his eyes that made it look like he’d spent more time in jail
than he really had.
 
It was hard to say
if he was a fifty year old who’d aged badly or a seventy year old who looked
pretty good for his predicament.
 
A long
time ago Chester had a lot of
promise.
 
But he hadn’t kept the promise
and the guilt gnawed at him.

That’s what first got him to drink too much.
 
Guilt over things he’d done and things he’d
failed to do.
 
Then of course it was
guilt over things he forgot he did until someone reminded him the next
day.
 
After enough of those nights he’d
have to move on and find somewhere else to drink.

“Hey!” Chester
yelled again.
 
“I said I wannanuther
beer!”
 
He threw his empty bottle across
the room.
 
It broke against the wall.