with him and he went to work restructuring our recording contract with Atlantic Records. Things happened during that time that made it an unworkable arrangement. The first thing probably went a good way towards undermining any chance of a healthy working relationship with Mick. The band went to his house in Bel Air, California one day to try and hash out a written agreement. It was summertime, so we all went out and sat down around the pool. Present were all the members of the band as well as Mick, his road manager and confidant John Courage and his lawyer, Nick Shapiro. As we started to go through the proposed contract, the band started to function in their usual fashion; disputing every second word and generally being impossible to deal with. We had a very bad habit of that in almost all our business dealings. We also seemed to find a way to make the very worst possible decision at every opportunity. It took us about two hours of haggling to get through the first seven or so paragraphs. Mick's lawyer was obviously getting frustrated by the nit picking and we were all getting a little short tempered. The second thing that happened was a lot more serious and probably dealt the killing blow. After Mick had gotten Atlantic to agree to restructure our contract with a sizable cash advance ($500,000 I think) and an increase in the percentage points, Mick Schneider rejected it as not being satisfactory! At that point, Mick (Fleetwood) decided that maybe managing Firefall was not in his best interests. As a result, we went for about another year and a half without an official manager and Mick Schneider stayed in nominal control. We were not the easiest band to work with at any time and considering the fatigue factor, we were probably raging jerks and for all the chart success we had achieved, we were hardly making a decent living. We were mostly serving as an opening act on a lot of 'A' list tours, and as such, we weren't being paid like a band with an unbroken string of gold and platinum albums and more than a half dozen straight top fifty singles. It was nice to be doing shows in sold-out arenas every night, but going home after the tour was over with hardly anything in your pocket dulled the thrill a little.