"There’s a lot of it going around in that business, Isn’t there?" I asked.
"Too much," Coleman admitted, "I always avoided it myself, but I saw plenty go down from it."
"So how did you get past that situation?" Amy asked, prodding him along.
"I left when the band went down," He said simply, "It wasn’t worth the money to sue me, so they did the next best thing. Enforced the contract and made sure I couldn’t work anywhere else."
"Bummer," she said.
"I got a break though," Mike grinned, "I had made friends with some people in the A&R department over at Geffen. I was over talking to one of them in late 1980 when a commotion broke out in one of the studios. It was a recording session breaking down and the producer storming out of the place. People were screaming. It wasn’t a pretty sight."
"Sounds amusing," I commented, "What happened?"
"Well," he continued, "Jake and I went over to find out what was wrong. It seems that the producer could not coax a decent performance out of the starlet. The girl didn’t have much talent, seeing that she was signed for attributes, but she wasn’t the worst I’d ever heard. I went in there and listened to a couple of the tapes and talked to the musicians for a couple minutes.
"Jake just watched and let me go, he knew that I couldn't screw it up any worse than it already was. I asked the girl to sing the song for me, I forget what it was, but she wasn’t totally bad. It was just the fact that the music wasn’t going along with the song."
"And you knew how to fix it?" I asked him.
"I may have only been 20," Mike said, "But I knew what music was supposed to sound like. I had them change the tempo of the song, taking the drum kit for a minute to show them. We did a live take of the song and it was pretty good. I suggested a few more changes and we did two more takes. On the third take, we’d gotten it down and the track was done. I’d done in an hour what the other producer had been failing at for three weeks."
"Wow," Amy said, "So that was your true entrance into the business?"
"Yep," he said with a smile, "I couldn’t perform, but I could shape other people’s music to sound better. Jake introduced me to some other execs and after they heard what I did I was hired on the spot for a producer, a position I was to continue with for four more years, until I formed the Inquisition in 1984."
"Who did you produce?" I asked him, "Anybody I would know?"
"I got mostly unknowns at the time, though I did get pulled in on some bigger projects," he said, "I did an album with Pat Benatar, got Glenn Frey’s Smuggler’s Blues off the ground, not to mention producing the infamous 867-5309 song for Tommy Tutone back in '82."
Coleman went on for another hour or so about that time period, and while it was very interesting, I was unable to retain much about it because we finished off all the beer. By the time we finished up talking it was nearly midnight. Mike and Amy retired to the camper and I headed back into the house to take my lumps from Myrna. She’d locked the door to the bedroom and I ended up sleeping on the couch yet again.
Chapter 4
I woke up around seven with Myrna making herself food. I had a doozie of a hangover, but I didn’t mind too much at the time. Myrna scowled at me as she left, mumbling about me being a drunken bastard all the while. I ignored her, as usual, and pulled myself up. I took a long shower to purge the alcoholic remnants out of my system and ate a little breakfast.
I was wondering if I would be spending the evening with Mike and Amy again, and hoped that I would be. I went around and did my morning chores, cleaning up some messes and giving a young couple from New York a quick lecture about fire safety. Lucky for them it had been a wet year and an arsonist could not have burned the campground down if they’d wanted to.
I saw Mike Coleman once during the day. He was walking around the grounds, looking to see what he could see. Amy was nowhere to be seen, and Mike didn’t seem in the talking mood at that point. I found myself growing anxious for the next installment of his life’s story, which shows how pathetic my life was growing at that point in time.
I wasn’t disappointed, as Mike and Amy came in around six in the evening again. This time the menu was changed a little, Amy bought several steaks and they got cokes instead of beer. Coleman asked for a carton of Marlboro reds until Amy looked at him hard and he settled for the ultra lights. Again, they invited me out and while Myrna wasn’t looking I threw a couple extra steaks into the sack, along with some onions and peppers. Amy smiled and quickly took the bag out to the camper.
I went out with them and helped Mike Coleman start the fire while Amy went inside to prepare the steaks. Once the fire was big enough for cooking Mike and I sat down in the same chairs we’d been in the previous nights. Coleman cracked open a Coke and lit his first cigarette of the evening.
"Trying to cut down a bit," Mike said as he dragged on the Marlboro Ultra Light, "This’ll probably do it. The ultra lights have no friggen taste."
"I know how that is," I told him, "I went down to the lights for six months before I quit totally. By the time I quit I didn’t feel like starting again 'cause all I remembered were those things."
"Yeah," Mike said, "I made the mistake of starting during that horrid period of servitude in 79-80. Didn’t quit again until 1984."
"How did you get out of that contract mess you were in?" I asked him, just as Amy came out with the foil wrapped steaks.
"The only way I could," he replied simply, "I waited it out. I produced for a living up until I hit with Cole’s Inquisition. The contract with the production company ended on March 1, 1984. You better believe that I was just about ready to move on with my life. Thing was, the record company didn’t want me to perform, just produce."
"Back to square one," Amy said as she sat down and opened a coke, "Only with you on the other side of the control booth."
"Yep," Mike agreed, "And if I’d had any sense I would have stayed there, but I was young and I still had the urge to force my vision of music upon the world."
"How’d you get around it?" I asked him, "The record companies tend to be on the vicious side."
"Same way I got into the production business," Mike said with a grin, "I saved a bigwig’s ass. I’ll refrain from naming the bigwig, but he screwed up badly. There was this young girl with a great set of knockers and no singing talent whatsoever, and this guy had signed her to a deal and given her a 50K advance. Dumb move, because there was no way he could get a record out with her voice."
"Justin Cole to the rescue," Amy said sarcastically.
"Damn straight," Coleman said with a grin, "I laid out my terms for saving his ass. I wanted a no strings attached record deal for myself and the band I put together. Record ownership would remain with me and I would handle production alone. Basically, a deal that any sane record executive would have laughed at."
"But you had him by the balls," Amy said, "'Cause no one else would touch it?"
"Pretty much," Mike agreed, "He figured that if it saved his ass, the price would be worth it. It took me three weeks, but I managed to produce a single for the girl. I basically did about 40 takes and used the best-sung lines from each one. I had written the song myself and it was a hip-hop style track, before hip-hop really made it. The rest of the album was corny ballads not designed to be any more than filler. It was the worst thing I ever produced and it was the start of my career as a front man."
"Did the song ever do anything?" I asked curiously.
"Single made it to number three for about a week in the UK," Coleman said with a chuckle, "I think it might have hit the top forty for a week here in the US, but if it did it didn’t make it above #37. Still, that was a success for an artist that bad and it made back the fifty grand that he’d blown on her. He was ready to have my baby by that point."
"Now you just needed a band," Amy said, "I’m assuming this is where the Inquisition came into play?"
"It was then that I started to put them toge
ther," Mike said as he fired up another smoke, "The first one to join was a session musician named Ronald Spectre. He was about five years older than me, and had been playing sessions for over a decade. He’d never joined a real band as he had no writing ability whatsoever, just the ability to play what you told him precisely. This was a talent I wanted, because he could bring my drum lines to life exactly the way I heard them in my head."
"The next two members were to be Cookie Thomas and Trip Davis," Coleman continued, "They were part of what would now be labeled as a fusion band. The music was part punk, part funk, part hip-hop and almost all bad. I was assigned to produce the band’s debut album in early 84. The lead singer was terrible, and I used Cookie heavily to cover up his course vocal style."
Amy handed out steaks to each of us and a brief pause occurred while we opened them up and started to eat. When each of us had put down about half the steak Mike continued about how Cookie and Trip joined the band.
"Cookie, Trip and I were playing in the studio waiting for the rest of the band to show up," He continued, "I had put together a preliminary version of the song Red Lines to play with and I had Cookie give it a shot. The results were phenomenal. I knew then that I wanted more than just a standard backing band. I wanted participants and another singer to take up slack on things that I couldn’t do, such as the silky vocals that Cookie laid down for Red Lines.
"Alas, they weren’t able to join up for a while. Their contract held them to that awful band until the lead singer was either unable to continue or wanted to break up. That lasted exactly two months after the date of that first recording session. Jackson Grimes, who had been the leader of the dysfunctional band, knew that he was losing control. Grimes had been an abusive egomaniac, and he was about to be charged with domestic abuse. Not to mention the label was getting ready to drop them, partially because of my reporting how big an asshole he was in the studio.
"I happened to be there at Grimes’ last show with that band. He was exceptionally abusive to his audience and even went so far as to piss on the audience. When they started screaming at him and booing him off the stage, Trip put down his bass guitar and walked off the stage. Cookie threw her tambourine at Grimes and followed Trip. The drummer was standing up when Grimes pulled out a pistol. Grimes fired two shots at the drummer, whose name eludes me, three shots at those of us who were off stage, and put the last shot into his temple, blowing what little brains he had out over the audience."
"Yuck," Amy said with a groan, "Did you have to tell this story at dinner?"
"Sorry," Mike said sarcastically, "But it did serve the little bugger right. It cost the record company a mint too, because they were sued by nearly every person in the audience."
"I think I read about this somewhere about 20 years ago," I said, "Spurred on a nice bout with the morality people, didn’t it?"
"Those PMRC clowns have brought it up repeatedly," Mike said, "Threw it in our faces when we testified at the congressional hearings."
"You were there?" Amy asked incredulously, "I knew Zappa and Dee Snider, but don’t remember hearing about your testimony."
"I was still a producer then," Mike told her, "I wasn’t a ‘name’ at the time, so my testimony didn’t last long and didn’t get much coverage."
"So Cookie and Trip joined your band?" I asked him, trying to get back on topic.
"After I talked the record company into letting them out of their restrictive contract and into one with me," Mike confirmed, "Trip, the tall lanky Texan and Cookie the golden blonde California girl joined the project that was by then named Cole’s Inquisition.
"The hard part was finding someone who would play keyboards the way I wanted. I had interviewed dozens of them by the time I had the rest of the band together. I knew I wanted keyboard sounds, and I knew that I couldn’t play them myself during live shows. Cole’s Inquisition was put together with both live and studio in mind.
"It finally came together for me when the four of us were playing around in the studio. My girlfriend at the time, a knockout by the name of Teri Brakeman, was laying some background vocals with Cookie. I had considered putting Cookie on the Keyboards, but she had no shred of playing ability and was needed more up front. Eye candy for the masses, basically."
Amy tossed an empty Coke can at Coleman for that comment, which he nimbly dodged with a grin. I chuckled and grabbed another Coke to hand to her. She took it and Mike went on with the story.
"I asked Teri if she played anything," Mike continued, "She said she’d taken piano in high school, but hadn’t played anything since. With that, I sat her down at the keyboard and taught her the basic chords for the song we were working on. By the end of the day we had two usable tracks. A cover of Dave Edmunds' High School Nights and one of my originals entitled Fading, which was a fast paced number with Cookie and I alternating vocals. I played the tracks for some of the execs, and they thought there was potential. I was finally pulled off production and told to go ahead and finish the initial album. They just didn’t want those songs to be on it, so we really were at square one."
"What did they do with those songs?" I asked him, "They ever see the light of day?"
"Yep," He nodded, "They were on the soundtrack to Porky’s Revenge. Our version of High School Nights charted at an abysmal #92. I wasn’t thrilled, but the bosses thought that was great for someone on a soundtrack that nobody had ever heard of before. "The true work on the album came a few days later," Mike continued, "We reprised our version of Red Lines, along with a few other tracks. The band got along great, with the only real slowdown being the fact that I was having to teach Teri her keyboard lines on the fly, often taking over her keyboard and playing them out a few times until she picked it up.
"The exec over the project was incredulous of us, given the motley crew that I’d put together, but his hands were tied by the deal I had made with him a few months earlier. He let me do the project my way, considering it cost him very little to do so. After two months in the studio, an extreme time for those days, we had completed about twenty-five tracks. It required a double album and a long play cassette when I finished whittling it down. The final version was 79 minutes long and contained 22 tracks. The only reason Jake went along with it was because he knew that he’d have to sell less to have it look good."
"How’s that?" Amy asked.
"To get a gold record, you need to sell a hundred thousand copies," Mike explained, "To do it with a double album you only need to sell fifty thousand. Mainly because they cost more."
Amy nodded and started picking up trash. I finished the last bit of my steak and handed her the wrapper. Mike waited for her to finish cleaning up to start the story again. He pulled out a cigarette from the box and took his time lighting it. Amy passed around Cokes and sat herself down next to Coleman.
"The first single," Mike continued, "a simple rock song called Timing for Jenny, went to number three on the singles chart during the last weeks of 1984. The album sold really well, climbing itself up past gold in the first months. It didn’t really take off, however, until we did a video for the second single.
"We decided it was time to showcase Cookie Thomas and my song Red Lines was perfect. Her sexy and silky vocals combined with the swimsuits she and Teri wore in the video shot us straight up to #1 on both the album and single charts. The album went Platinum in late March.
"It was becoming time to tour, and the tour was bound to be a doozie," Mike continued, "Teri had spent months learning all the songs on the record and a few dozen covers that I knew that I’d use on the tour. Cole’s Inquisition wasn’t going to be your standard concert experience. I’d planned on it becoming a circus, similar to a Frank Zappa concert, with me as the ringleader."
"I heard you had some wild shows," I said remembering the news of the day, "Long ones too, sometimes putting Bruce Springsteen to shame."
"There being two singers, it increased the time we could go without gett
ing hoarse," Mike conceded, "I had that as an advantage. We debuted a few new songs on that tour, and covered a lot of records. Teri quickly became a good keyboard player. She wasn’t quite up to virtuoso stage, but she was holding her own and learning new tricks as she went along.
"The backstage antics were not as pronounced as everybody imagined they were. I didn’t allow drugs in the crew, and discouraged their use by the members of the band. The orgies were greatly exaggerated mainly because we were all too tired to even think of getting laid after a show.
"I’m not going to give a day by day recitation of this period," he continued, "But the tour continued for the rest of the year, moving on to brief European and Asian tours towards the end of the year. We released about four more singles from that debut album, all of them doing well, but not eclipsing Red Lines."
"I remember a poster my brother had around that time," Amy said, "It was of the five of you lined up with pistols and taking aim at something. I never could figure out what it was, it was so small and blurry."
"That was the cover of the first album," Mike said with a laugh, "I set up that improv shot just before the album sessions ended, the target was one of five copies I had of the album with Right On, Duckie. We blew the hell out of all of them and used the best shot of it for the album cover. It also made a great poster. Geffen, however, was wary of lawsuits and blurred it out. It became a great joke for us though."
"How did everyone in the band deal with the success?" I asked him, "I hear a lot of horror stories about how bands that do really well often fall apart when the success overwhelms them."
"I probably would have had that problem if I hadn’t been in the Rubber Duckie band," Mike said, "I saw many young artists go through it during the years I was just producing, though everyone had their problems with success. Teri and I had each other for support. Ron was married with kids and older than all of us. Trip had a few adjustment problems, but he was enjoying every minute of it. He was in a successful band and Cookie and I were taking the brunt of the fame abuse. Cookie was taking it the worst of all.