"It was the worst day ever for all of us," Gretchen recalls. "He came to us saying, ‘You guys, we’re all starving here, and I don’t know what to do. Music is my life, and we’ve been rotting for a year.’"
There was a collective urging to just keep holding out — "They can’t keep us for another year, we’ve worked too hard to kiss it all goodbye now" — and they looked at their options: They could declare bankruptcy, the way Concrete Blonde had unsuccessfully tried to get out of their contract, or they could stay together and replace David, an essential songwriting member, and still they would be legally bound to a label with no future in sight. "We all firmly believed that Mary’s Danish would do something and be successful," says Gretchen, "but at that point we were so frustrated after so long. Our worst nightmare was coming true."
Morgan Creek’s Cadillac had rusted in the empty lot, the radio antenna bent, the tires deflated. July 14, 1993 — Bastille Day — four years and four months from the day they had executed their first contract with Chameleon Records, the band members passed around a pen to sign an agreement stating that Mary’s Danish no longer existed, that the dream was hereby, irrevocably, foreclosed.
Today, Morgan Creek’s Robinson recalls very little of it. He doesn’t recollect that the band was held in contractual limbo, that Morgan Creek renewed a contract to record their third record and never responded to the band’s recording budget, that his son was ever involved in the T-shirt issue, or that the band was forced to break up on his watch. "That they broke up is news to me," he says over the phone, voice indifferent. "I probably met the band once. Why am I supposed to have some type of feeling or emotion about them? I run the film company, and that’s where I spend all my time."
When it’s suggested that he might conceivably share some responsibility for the fate of Mary’s Danish, he snaps, "I don’t think they’re playing for the love; I think they’re playing because it’s a way to make money . . . Everybody’s always got a story why they fail. I’m not insensitive to failure, but I don’t accept it . . . I’ve played games with a broken collarbone, a knee blown up the size of a football, broken teeth. I’m not trying to get sympathy here, but it’s a matter of determination."
He pauses, impatient. "Let me give it to you straight: Maybe they weren’t good enough. Now maybe that isn’t news, but obviously we had confidence in them and obviously the public didn’t appreciate their music. We failed because we picked the wrong bands."
But past employees of Morgan Creek see it differently. Matt Aberly, the band’s A&R rep at Morgan Creek and now president of A&R at Warner/Reprise Records: "To say that Mary’s Danish is a band not liked by people is ridiculous. They had all the potential in the world and deserved to sell more records. They certainly seemed well on their way to being successful and got stopped short. It was very upsetting, very sad." Former Morgan Creek publicist Cary Baker, who is married to a Weekly staffer, also faults causes other than the lack of fan support: "I think that Mary’s Danish coming off ‘Don’t Crash the Car Tonight’ had everything it took . . . But development takes time, money, strategy, tour support, advertising — and these things were frowned upon at Morgan Creek."
To give Robinson his due, he did spend a decent amount of money on Mary’s Danish, and the notion that the lack of label support led to the band’s demise enrages him: "We fulfilled our obligations, but if it didn’t work, it didn’t work. It was a dead loss. What am I supposed to do — spend another half million dollars?! Where do I get my money, my cash? I wasn’t born with money and I don’t get a check from the government, therefore where do I get the money to fund various bands? From record sales."
Chris Kerr, the band’s hands-on manager under Peter Asher, finds Robinson’s comment laughable. "Well, you have to have records in the shops to sell ’em, don’t you? Every time I was in some city with Mary’s Danish, I would get out the Yellow Pages and start calling record stores to find out if they had it in stock, and they rarely did. In my opinion, the band was treated very badly. But then [Morgan Creek] treated all their bands that way. They could have been a great independent label just based on this one band, but they blew it. They didn’t understand music, and they didn’t treat musicians as if they were people."
Baker thinks the fall of Mary’s Danish offers a kind of warning for the rapidly changing industry: "With the Seagram’s mergers, there will be a whole new crop of entrepreneurs starting record labels, and all I can hope is that they get their money from sources that understand two things: talent and development of said talent. Mary’s Danish wasn’t a failure; Morgan Creek was just a totally flawed experiment — a record company owned by a movie company that often had the mentality that â 34 opening box-office weekend is what matters. They didn’t realize that it’s very often a long haul. And it should have happened with Mary’s Danish, because so much was right there."
The sharks I dodged The tigers I slew What ate me up Was the bed bugs.
