The Wages, An Illustrated Story | 23. Songs and Parables | Miracle Fog
It had been a decade since we returned to Canada and recorded in Toronto, where Snappy Tramp Records released my supposed ’80s comeback single and video for ‘Better Part of the Week’.
Then Snappy Tramp’s expansion efforts bankrupted the label just as my song broke into the 100 for country.
The label’s grant request to help pay for videos froze. But the bills were due for completed videos by me and two new-wave bands called Sentence Fragment, and Sky Over The Palace. My concerns about the cost of the production came true, because the musicians with unpaid videos were entangled several-times deeper than other bands trapped in the collapse. My video wasn’t optional, and agreeing to shoot before the funding was approved had been a risk, but I had counted on profits to fall back on.
“We were just short of top 50,” Crystal sighed while we stared at the charts and our financial ledger.
My single and video stopped being distributed and played. Concerts were cancelled or pay went down because I was no longer a recording artist, but I was stuck with the whopping bill for the video. Personal bankruptcy would have confirmed my obligation to pay back expenses to the defunct contract—which was now paying me no royalties in return. That would also trap the brand-name ‘Brandy Cinnamon Wages’ as property of the non-existent company, preventing me from using my own name professionally.
“Wait, you’re Arnold, right? Who is Bob?” I would ask on the phone in confusion when the people I knew from Snappy Tramp were gone. My career had become a locked asset overseen by strangers.
I spent an incredible amount of money hiring a second lawyer who was more aggressive and connected.
Sky Over The Palace broke up while their musicians and management all sued each other, and their bass player went into hiding.
“Sammy has family in Quebec or maybe France,” their singer Olivia told me, near tears.
I was kind of worried for him. I had met Sammy a few times and he seemed like a sensitive soul, but I stopped dealing with Sky Over The Palace to avoid their chaos, and my second lawyer focused on my plight. He found a video-contract clause that related to a music-contract clause, and went in for the argument. He got my video deemed to be the collapsed label’s debt at pennies on the dollar, instead of clobbering me at full price—and I escaped with my name. The other bands got out too as a result, but only Sentence Fragment sent me a bottle of Champagne and a fruit basket for spending so much money setting a precedent for them.
I felt bad because the three unpaid bills made Steve’s video production company go bankrupt too, but not so bad that I wanted to have no name and scrub hotel toilets for 30 years to pay for a promo clip that was taken out of rotation. And I never found out what happened to Sammy.
