Amos was poisoned and robbed in Germany while touring with his band, Nevada Gas. A good Catholic boy from Jersey, Amos had played tenor sax at St. James High School, later trading in sax for guitar in a hardcore band. A diagnosed epileptic and heroin addict to boot, it was not really that surprising that he wound up dead backstage after a lousy gig at a grubby club in Munich. What was surprising was his life-long devotion to Skelly, a notorious white-collar crook with no moral compass whom he’d run into in college and who’d always bailed him out. The story of their association stands as a lesson about what happens when art and commerce mix.
First there is a combustion. And then everything starts to cool off.
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Amos was a music guy. He lived and breathed for it, surrounded himself with it, could not function in a mainstream world where it wasn’t the center of all conversations. He was too pure to write a hit though, so there was never enough money to get his vision to the devoted audience he knew awaited him -- the poetry and great books set to tunes that connected him to everything that he thought was real and important: music, emotion, passion, creativity.
The anointed, his fans, understood this. Skelly did not. The only notes he could make work were the ones that came in wads. He didn’t get the poetry part either, but he understood that musicians like Amos had something he didn’t, and what he couldn’t make, he bought, in this case, 70% of Amos’ label to the tune of 1 million dollars angel money a year. In return, Amos was promised complete artistic control over his music.
Skelly’s bucks bought him the street cred he badly needed to be able to think of himself as a music visionary -- the last facet needed to present himself as someone with a soul, something he did not and would not ever have.
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Darlene Norris was a year behind Amos at St. James. There, she blended into the sea of nothingness in the halls, just part of the water that helped float the mermaids to the top.
But Darlene was no mermaid, and it wasn’t the poetry or notes of Amos’s music she heard, it was the rage. She never missed a Nevada Gas show, crawling out her window past curfew to sharpen the axe she was going to use to chip away at the rules she felt confined her. In Amos, she saw the power and intensity that she lacked. She knew the music was important, but she did not fully understand it. Instead, she studied each performance and what she learned from it was the joy of disobedience. One day in her senior year, she was asked to take her younger siblings to church one Sunday morning, and instead took them to McDonalds. Another time, she stole the answers to a test she saw lying on a nun’s desk.
Darlene was obsessed with propriety, conformism, outward success. Always, in public, she colored between the lines. But internally she seethed with untapped rebellion. She longed to fuck shit up.
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“Nevada Gas front man poisoned and robbed in Germany.”
Many years later, Darlene was married with a plum job as a business reporter when she saw that headline and she wondered what had happened, how Amos, her first crush object, could have fallen so low.
Like all business reporters, Darlene believed that money was at the bottom of every good story and indeed, that was the case here: when she looked into it, she immediately found out that Skelly was the silent investor in Amos’s record label, Full Collapse.
At this point, Skelly was in prison for securities fraud, but that wasn’t even his main crime, since he’d owned a hedge fund with connections to World Industries, a waste management business that made money dumping trash in third world countries. Children near a site were dying near its biggest dump, and dots connected to back World Industries.
Skelly was much hated by the media and on twitter, so when news about Skelly’s misdeeds first hit the press, Amos had put out a press release talking about all the money Skelly had given to schools, charities and “our bands.” But the other bands still didn’t want to be on a label backed by Skelly, and the dirty money he made by having an entire lack of conscience. Amos couldn’t cover outstanding invoices without his significant financial contribution and soon Full Collapse was in full collapse.
Skelly never did understand why Amos would reject his money, or how he wound up touring crappy clubs in Europe without a band or a label behind him, and it made him very angry: without Amos in his life, he felt somehow lesser.
The same was true of Darlene, who had long thought of Amos as her only connection to a non-ugly world. Eventually Darlene went to visit Skelly in prison, ostensibly to write a story about him for her business magazine, but really to talk about their old friend Amos. Soon she fell in love with him, recognizing his amorality as the perfect match to her own.
What she wasn’t able to recognize was that Skelly’s heartlessness was congenital: that he would use her and throw her away as well, just as he had used up Amos. Upon his release, Skelly found a young diva to live with, one who was happy to take his money to further her career. Darlene is still waiting to hear from him, unable to recognize the long drawn-out process of a cool-off.
The Cool-off
well written
very cool!