Still, the band soldiered on. What else could they do? They borrowed money from manager Asher to self-finance their touring, living in large part off the sales of T-shirts. But now even that was up for grabs: In some small Eastern town, they got a call from a Morgan Creek operative saying that if the band was going to continue â selling the T-shirts (which Mary’s Danish had paid for and printed at their friend’s company, Billabong), they would need to pay the label $8,000 for the rights to the artwork — or cut it in on the profits. It didn’t matter that the T-shirt image was taken from an old photo of Louis’ uncle, or that the income from their tour and in turn Morgan Creek’s record sales were bolstered by the sale of merchandise. Morgan Creek offered a deal: Stop selling the shirts, or have them made by the merchandising outfit operated by the son of president James Robinson — at twice the cost.
"At that moment," says Julie, "we were no longer a team. We were trying to keep the boat afloat, and now they were drilling a hole in it." The band reached their nadir at a show in Washington, D.C., when Robinson’s merchandising son appeared and promptly called Daddy. Soon after, they heard from Asher that Morgan Creek was itching to sue.
In a motel room in Phoenix, Mary’s Danish received a phone call from Asher, his voice low. Surely they were getting dropped, or the label had filed litigation over the damned T-shirts. What they heard instead was the cruelest surprise of their careers to date: Morgan Creek had decided to exercise its option to renew their contract. The band had hoped to be free agents again, to take elsewhere whatever momentum they had built. But now they learned that the company that had prematurely dropped the promotion of two albums despite decent record sales (109,307 on Circa and American Standard), that had abandoned them on the road and that had recently threatened them with a lawsuit, wanted them back. Mary’s Danish was trapped.
They ply their saws, and timber and proud oak are reduced to sawdust.
—Robert Schumann
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"The band was dead," says Gretchen. "They wouldn’t send us on tour, so there was no money coming in. The money from the last album was gone. Our lawyer and manager called the label almost every day pleading, saying, ‘This is ridiculous, these people are starving, this is their livelihood, please let them go.’ But they wouldn’t."
Asher, now senior vice president at Sony, remembers a face-to-face meeting with Morgan Creek chief operating officer Gary Barber. "I recall saying that this is really unreasonable, if you let us go now we can probably get this album a home elsewhere — it wasn’t dead yet. But they didn’t care. When I made the point that Mary’s Danish was suffering, Gary was entirely and transparently unsympathetic. He didn’t even try to conceal it."
Label president James G. Robinson had made his money selling Subaru dealerships and in film and, some say, couldn’t understand why, when you released a record, it didn’t have a blockbuster weekend like a movie. Wanting to turn a quick and relatively easy buck as he had on the Robin Hood soundtrack — which went platinum — he skimped on band development and support. And now, in 1993, the label was like a vacant car lot that still owed its distributor. Maybe it wouldn’t let Mary’s Danish go, as one former Morgan Creek employee suggests, out of spite for the T-shirt incident. Or maybe it was simply because the band was the one Cadillac left in the yard.
Meanwhile, Gretchen and the others were undergoing the depressing transformation back into civilian life. Working as a secretary at a law firm, she exchanged Doc Martens for flats, jeans for the mummy tubing of pantyhose. The only public airing of her lucent voice was telephonic, in the insipid greeting "Morgan, Louis and Bockius, please hold." She fingered paper clips, White-Out and the dead-skin film of faxes with the bewilderment of a veteran musician newly back from the mosh trenches. When her co-workers offered their saccharine condolences, she wore the coma smile of shame. This was not at all how she imagined it. The others, too, were doing time in reality — Julie called up nearly forgotten French verbs and attempted some translations, Louis thumbed nervously around the house while living off royalties from co-writing the Bangles’ "Walking Down Your Street," Wag and James did their best to drum up studio gigs. But what they weren’t doing was recording a new album.
Few bands in contractual purgatory hold out longer than a year. It was months into their waiting when David King came to the band with a do-or-die proposal. They all had been playing in side projects just to keep their musical organs pumping — Gretchen and now-boyfriend Louis formed Battery Acid — but David was explaining that his new band, Rob Rule, had a deal on the table.
