Bonding the Present With Your Future

Maybe you don’t know what Bowie bonds are. If not, let me fill you in. Lest you patriots get the wrong idea, let me assure you that they have nothing to do with Jim Bowie, knife-wielding original defender of the Alamo. No, they’re the result of a unique nexus between the music biz and the world of high finance. Last year, rock star David Bowie decided that he wanted his piece of the rock. So the Thin White Duke sold off shares in his future royalties for a cool $55 million.

Banker David Pullman, the brains behind Bowie bonds, closed three more celebrity bond deals last month, including $30 million for the songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, whose hits include “Stop in the Name of Love.”

Pullman currently is at work on similar deals for Crosby, Stills and Nash, John Steinbeck’s heirs and writers for “Seinfeld.” Other Pullman clients are songwriters for Tupac Shakur, Kim Carnes, Heart, Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Rod Stewart and Pat Benatar, whose future royalties will be bundled together and marketed as bonds by year-end.

Now, I don’t know anything about the stock market. Thus, I can greet its fluctuations with total equanimity. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you there’s nothing like having zero dollars invested to make you feel smug when the Dow takes a dive. To quote another artist who soon may become a blue chip, “When you ain’t got nuthin’, you got nuthin’ to lose.”

However, I do know that very few of the talents cited above have had a top-10 hit since the Spice Girls started eating solid food, although I believe Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” squeaked by at number 10 on the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language novels of all time. But maybe those Wall Street wizards have their ears to the comeback trail.

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As far as I can make out without trying to read those confusing pages of the newspaper with the tiny numbers on them, celebrities who issue royalty-based bonds are essentially borrowing money on income they haven’t collected yet, but plan to--as soon as, say, that dynamite Pat Benatar boxed set comes out and is splashed all over the display windows of Virgin Megastore.

So it’s basically “money for nothing,” as Dire Straits (another ‘70s group that should be issuing bonds of itself any day now) would put it. This sounds like a swell idea to me. In fact, it’s such a swell idea that I’ve decided to issue Beatts bonds.

Since I’ve spent the last year writing this column instead of those bond-bearing episodes of “Seinfeld,” obviously I’m not looking at big numbers when it comes to yearly income. And I know I’m no David Bowie (I’ll never look as good as he does in a dress, for one thing) so I’m not shooting for $55 million. Just a coupla mil would do me fine.

But I’m confident that if I mortgage my future, I’ll be able to have a much better present and can go on eating in restaurants that don’t have plastic cutlery without totally maxing out my Visa.

So what’s behind Beatts bonds? What makes them such a good investment that the phones have been ringing off the hook ever since the chance to get in on the ground floor was announced only a few newspaper column-inches ago? Why should you consider them an excellent money-earning opportunity?

First off, I own a couple of old Pez dispensers that a friend of mine who knows about these things told me were collectible. With the original Pez still in them. And I started buying Beanie Babies just ‘cause they were so cute way before the whole Beanie Baby craze got going, so I have the cow and the rabbit or maybe it’s a bear, I’m not sure, and they’ve got to be worth something. I hear they’re really big in Japan.

And then there are the magazines. Oh, they’re not old magazines; they’re just magazines that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, like last month’s Sunset and the magazine that comes free with your Triple-A membership, which sometimes has very absorbing articles about how to take Polaroids for insurance purposes after a fender-bender. But they will be old magazines someday. And with the prices they’re charging at yard sales these days for dog-eared copies of Life, you know I’m sitting on a treasure trove. Literally sitting on it, in some areas of the house.

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My trashy perfume collection could pay off big-time too. I mean, who else has an unopened bottle of Forever Krystle signed by Linda Evans? Plus Wicked Wahine from Tahiti, Rap Musk--the fragrance for foxy ladies, and my personal favorite, Sexy Afternoon cologne for men. Future collectibles just sitting there, gaining equity by the minute, provided they don’t evaporate.

True, my personal 1950s “Little Women” Madame Alexander dolls are a little bit the worse for wear, especially Jo, whose head has a tendency to come off in stress situations. But I’ve already been offered several dollars more than the purchase price for my mint-condition Xena action figure in the original box autographed by Lucy Lawless herself. And what about my copy of Madonna’s “Sex” book, still pristine in its tinfoil wrapper?

A person with less foresight than I might find it hard to see how the rock I picked up on the beach that could have fossils in it, or my niece’s bridal bouquet, can translate into cold hard cash. But in the future, when the ecology is completely screwed up and most of California is paved over for mall parking, anything found in nature will be of inestimable value, even dried flowers and rocks.

Of course, right now I couldn’t bear to part with any of these precious items, except maybe the Pez. But that’s why the whole long-term investment thing makes sense. Beatts bonds will only appreciate with maturity. And by the time anyone cares to cash in, I’ll be so mature myself that there won’t be room for all this stuff in the nursing home.

So stock up on Beatts bonds today, so I can make money the new-fashioned way--before I earn it.