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that led to his wife’s office—“but she’ll give you the details on that if you’re interested and if she hasn’t finished that giant thermos of martinis she brings to the office every day in a brown bag that she thinks I think is cranapple juice. What you want from me, if I heard you right this a.m. when you called, is anything I know about the way Jonesy, pres and sole owner of Western Records, Inc., does business.”
    “You’d make an old man very happy if you did,” I said, “and also help him earn a few measly bucks.”
    “Speakin’ of which,” he said, “bucks he’s got. Skid Row Annie in there can probably find out how many, if she don’t know already; she sure knows how many I’ve got, down to six decimals.”
    “These might help,” I said, hefting the manila folder. “Lots of bank statements and what have you in here, I took a peek earlier.”
    “So Annie’ll check,” he said. “Big deal. Think Jonesy’s gonna give you some tarted-up accounts for Annie to run her beady eyes over? Forget it. As for me, I never heard one word that Jonesy was less than ultra straight, and you can’t say that about too many guys in this rotten business.”
    “Or any other,” I said.
    He shrugged. “Know what? He don’t even send out large, well-attired dudes with pockets of C-notes and a plenteous supply of coke to all the radio stations. He doesn’t try to bribe DJs and programmers either directly or with expensive Christmas presents; forget about two-hundred-buck call girls stoppin’ by their hotel rooms, hell, he doesn’t even try and rig the charts, and I don’t mean the weather charts, neither. Heavens to Betsy, what secrets is little moi disclosing! What you must think of us!”
    I grinned, found the right control, and tipped my chair back a little further. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “how do you rig a chart, anyway?”
    “Listen,” he said, “airplay equals singles chart position which equals album sales, anything hard about that? The thing is, how do you get airplay? Pluggers can get you some, most you get from checkin’ out what singles are moving in the record stores. If it’s movin’, it gets played. Now, although it’s supposed to be this great secret, every record company in the world has a list of what outlets are on the checklist types like Gallup use to compile their charts. So the record company either pays the manager of one of these retail outlets—stores to you—to rig his daily totals in their favor, or how about sending out a fast-movin’ team of buyers to hit all the stores in the list. In England it’s easier, you got fewer stores to cover, shit, for a few grand your record starts burning up the sales charts, so it pops up on the singles chart, so it gets played, and around and around we go. Last I heard, over there weekly sales of twenty-five hundred or so are enough to break into the Top 75 and maybe seven to eight thousand to break the Top 40, which automatically gets you onto most of the important play lists. Startin’ to get the picture?” He drummed his feet noisily against one of the table legs.
    I nodded.
    “Know what the record industry sales were last year?”
    I shook my head.
    “Six point three billion. That’s up from 277 million in ‘55. So you can imagine what goes on with that kind of money at stake. Alan Freed, remember him?”
    I nodded.
    “Rumors of payola were rife! Scandals emerged! He disappeared. That was back in ‘60. Payola in one form or another to get airtime never went away. Ever hear of the Network?”
    I shook my head.
    “Late seventies,” he said. “Bunch of independent pluggers got together, backed by some of the major record companies. Five years later they were working on a budget upwards of fifty million dollars a year, and the squeeze was on. No one could buck ‘em; Warner’s and CBS tried; they couldn’t even get their major artists played on Radio Greenland.” He shook his head, then gave his fingernails a