"Blake Walworth returning your call on line one, Mr. Oldfield," Sally's voice said in the speaker.

"Thanks, Sally," Frank Oldfield told her and pushed the button. At least he returned the call this time, he thought. That's something. "Blake," he said warmly, "Glad you could get back with me. I couldn't get that girl you've got to put me through."

"Wendy's pretty good," Blake snickered. "When she says 'not available' she means 'not available.' When we switch our phone over to her it means we're out of the house."

"You ought to get a cell phone," Oldfield said, trying to keep it sounding like a suggestion, not a grump, although that's what it really was.

"Got one. I don't like it so I usually leave it home. If I do take it I keep it turned off unless I need to call someone."

"That's getting pretty non-communicative in this day and age," Oldfield said, still trying to keep it light.

"Frank," Blake replied, "Up on the Little Spearfish River there's this nice pool, back in the woods, quiet and peaceful. There is this huge rainbow trout that hangs out there, I've been trying to catch him for years. Just imagine that I've managed to drop a Number Two Royal Caddis right in front of his nose, and he's thinking about it real hard. Then the cell phone goes off. How far do you think I'm going to throw that thing?"

"I get the point," Oldfield laughed. Though he hated Blake's guts, the man could drop a good line or two. Now keep it cool, he thought. "Actually, this call was more to just chew the fat with you a little. I'm going to tell you right up front that I don't have any new proposal for you to turn down or ignore." Which wasn't the case, but he wasn't going to run it by Blake unless he was sounding real receptive. Now if he could have gotten to Jenny, well, that was a different story, but he hadn't had any luck with that in months.

"Well, I was wondering about that," Blake said. "Right now, we're a little more focused on Jeremy, anyway."

"How's he getting along?"

"Just fine," Blake smiled. "Growing like a weed. We had some concerns right from the beginning due to Jennifer's age and all, so we were down at the hospital in Camden getting some tests run just on general principles, but everything comes up normal."

"Well, that's good news," Oldfield said, genuinely warm. It could be a lot worse in this business. There was one girl on the label who liked crack just a little too much, and her kid had been born with the addiction. It had been a hell of a mess, still was. The worst thing was that it took her mind off music. But, back to business. "Hey, the other day I caught a couple of tracks of that girl with the harp you've got on your private label. She can beat the living hell out of that thing, can't she? That's not exactly what you think of when you think harp music, is it?"

"Thought that the first time I met her," Blake said cheerfully. "She is something else, isn't she?"

"Sings pretty good, too," Oldfield replied. "Not the kind of music I like, and wouldn't be anything we're interested in. Sales going OK?"

"Pretty good for what it is," Blake said cheerfully. "We weren't exactly expecting Saturday Night after all, but for a debut album in a niche all its own, we don't have a lot of room to complain. I'd say it's doing at least as well as we expected, maybe even a little better. It's still early yet, so time will tell."

"Honestly, better you than me," Oldfield said. "The guys up in New York would blow a gasket if I tried to put out an album like that, but there is a market for them if you can get to it and keep the costs under control."

"That's what we figured," Blake told him. "That's sort of what we want to do, and we're in a good position to do it. I'm not real happy about thinking of new wave Jenny Easton as a niche market, but maybe to you it is. But we can use that to open some other doors."

It was damn near the perfect opening for what he had in mind, Oldfield thought, but it was too early to bring it up. He needs to get softened up a little more. Maybe we can work our way back around to it. "It's always good that there's someone exploring the side roads," he said. "And, I mean, so long as you're happy. But I have to say that you've got to be running it a little close. If I were you I'd be worrying about bootlegging. The guys up in New York are having fits about it."

"Oh, you mean like kids copying MP3s around the Internet?" Blake said. "Actually, I'm not real worried."

"Worried? It's going to kill this business!"

"Not by a long shot," Blake replied. "Come on, Frank, you were a kid, too, once, weren't you? Don't tell me you didn't have a collection of cassette tapes that you copied off of other kids! Hell, I've still got some of my old bootleg Grateful Dead tapes around. I even ran one on my Walkman while I was out working in the yard the other day."

Grateful Dead? Oldfield shuddered. They called that music? "Well, yeah," he admitted. "I did have a couple bootleg Patsy Clines and Tammy Wynettes. But this isn't the same thing."

"I think it is. Face it, Frank, the technology is there, we're going to have to live with it. And in the long run I don't think it hurts us. I'll bet you eventually went out and bought the albums, didn't you?"

"I sort of wore the tapes out, yeah. I had to."

"Same thing. Hey, I know this girl that writes fantasy stories. Swords and sorcery stuff. She doesn't know much about the business end of it, so she asked me to look over her shoulder a bit while she works with the publisher. I had a long talk with this guy, he's in the business in New York. A couple years ago they had a warehouse full of old stuff that they needed to either sell or pulp. He got this wild hair and put the full text of each book on the net for free. Sales picked up. Once people got hooked on the story they wanted the book in their hands. Sure there are going to be losses, there are always going to be. But I think we win in the long run."

Oldfield shook his head. Sheer heresy. Where did Blake think he was coming from? "It kills profit, and let me tell you, the guys on the 89th floor don't like that."

Blake snorted. "You want to know how to increase profits and cut down bootlegging? Cut the price of the albums to where it isn't worth the trouble."

"I don't see how that would work," Frank said. This guy was either kidding or he was crazy!

"Might not work for you," Blake replied. "From our viewpoint, taxes are a major expense. If we can cut taxes, we've saved money. We could cut the price of Jenny Easton Production albums back a third, even a half, and what it would mostly mean would be that Bubba Winslow wouldn't be blowing the money out of his tailpipe or the government blowing it out of theirs."

"Well, yeah," Frank admitted grudgingly. "That might work for you. But I see you've got your prices up with everybody else."

"True, but that's only because we have to be right up there with everybody else or we look cheap. If everybody else cut prices, we would too, and we'd be glad to do it. But who pays full price, anyway? I've looked at it. Ninety percent of the albums sold in the industry are discounted from ten to fifty percent, sometimes more. That tells me there's slack there. But we can't start a trend here. A big outfit like Nashville-Murray could set a trend like that, maybe rationalize things a little."

"That'll never happen," Frank said. "The guys in New York would shit little green worms." This was getting far away from the thing he wanted to run by Blake, and he couldn't see how he was going to get back to it.

"You're probably right," Blake sighed. "We all have to work with what we've got. Maybe someday someone will get the message."

Oh well, change the topic. The guy was obviously a dangerous nutball, but he was standing in the way of him getting to Jenny to do real business, so there was nothing to do but listen to him and try to get him in a good mood. "So, you got any other niche projects working?"

"Nothing really hot," Blake said. "We're looking at a couple things, but it's all sort of on the back burner while we get used to living with Jeremy. If the right person comes along with the right thing, you never know. In fact, if you hear of something you don't want to mess with, good music but not Nashville-Murray commercial, we might like to hear a demo or two."

"It happens," Oldfield admitted. "We used to have a great old street-corner blues singer hanging around town. He was one of a kind, and I always thought someone ought to record him." He sighed. "He's dead now, but it would have been something right up your alley. We could never have touched it. Too small." That might be an opening. Well, try it. "I mean, like old-line Jenny might be just a little big for you."

"It's possible," Blake said dubiously, obviously spotting the fishhook. "We've done OK, though."

"You know," Oldfield said thoughtfully, as if the idea had just come to him. It hadn't; he'd been thinking about it for weeks as a possible way to get his foot back in the door. It was a last-chance, desperation move in order to come up with something that might get through this roadblock. "It might be interesting to talk about a one-album distribution setup the next time you do an old-line Jenny. An interlabel thing, not an artist's contract."

"Yeaaah," Blake said thoughtfully. "That might work if we did it right and could work out a deal. We'd have to take a real hard look at the numbers. We've been doing OK where we're at with Saturday Night, but it's something to think about. Kick it around down there a little, why don't you, come up with some numbers. We're a year away from thinking about another old-line Jenny if we even decide to do another one, so it's not like it has to be done today."

"Yeah," Oldfield said a little uncertainly. Part of it was acting, like it was something that he hadn't thought about. But part of it came from the fact that Blake had just threatened to take the one remaining option away: old-line Jenny. Does he even have any idea what they're talking about throwing away? "I'll push a pencil around on it sometime."

"Do that," Blake said. "Hey Frank, good talking to you, but I gotta go. I've been sitting here holding Jeremy. He just blew his diapers, and stink, my God! I gotta change this kid."

Oldfield hung up the phone and stared at it. You bozo, he thought. Don't you know what nannies are for? Aren't you playing the proud papa? At least you gave me a little nibble, and that's the best I've gotten out of you or Jenny in a year. Yeah, you might even bite, but what the hell would it be worth? Face it, I've got to get Jenny back to doing something that means something, old-line Jenny under contract with Nashville-Murray, and that's a baby step in the right direction, at best. And it'd be tough to push it further.

It comes back to the same old problem. There has to be some way to get to Jenny without having to go through Blake, talk some sense into her. I thought I might have had something with the scandal sheets, but face it, they dropped the ball and it fell flatter than cow crap on concrete. I should have made that tip a little higher up the food chain, but hell, it was worth a try. And, for that matter it still might work. It would be harder now that they'd broken the story and gone nowhere with it, but there had to be a way . . .

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