Eddie replied that Gribbens wanted to work, and he was the only body available. “If they want you behind the desk, he’s all I can spare right now. All three rooms are working. Is it a bad idea? The whole fucking project’s probably a bad idea at this point. What do you want me to do, tell Gravitas I don’t want their money? Moon will probably have a breakdown before Ron can do any real harm. Just keep an eye on the kid, would you? Try not to let him do anything stupid.” Eddie looked down at the paper on his desk and the pen in his hand, indicating that the matter was settled.
Jake knew better than to push it.
Eddie sighed. “I wish I could give you a better assistant. But he’s been here a long time. It’s his turn. And he may know more than you think.”
In fact, the first few days back at work had introduced Jake to a new Ron Gribbens, much more sober-minded and focused on what he was doing. Jake was relieved that he didn’t need to have the talk with Ron he had imagined might be necessary, about keeping a low profile. He'd wondered, before they resumed the sessions, if Ron’s nervousness might manifest as an overdriven sense of humor. Fortunately, all of the comedic flair seemed to have been drained right out of the younger man, who now walked with a slight limp and wore a temporary knee brace. Jake figured that the new demeanor could mostly be attributed to his brush with death, but he wondered if some of it wasn’t also the result of Gribbens possessing some ability to read the tension in a room after all, and attenuate his personality accordingly.
Because there was no denying the vibe in the room. In the days after work resumed, the tension between Rail and Moon droned underneath everything like a sixty-cycle hum.
The subject was a ballad called “After the Storm.” Billy had spent the morning laying down the acoustic guitar and vocal live to a click track, and Jake was pretty happy with the sounds he was getting. Rail had maintained silence. He was either satisfied enough with the sound not to comment, or he didn’t care how it sounded because he intended to shit-can the song after indulging Billy for a little while.
A couple of takes in, Rail finally spoke up and asked Billy for the lyric sheet. His pen hovered over the page, tracing empty lines in the air. Then he dropped the paper onto the field of knobs and leaned back in his chair, looking at a fixed point on the ceiling as if something intensely interesting was occurring up there on one of the acoustic tiles.
After an adequately suspenseful silence, he said, “It’s too optimistic for you. And too literal. Your audience expects darker, angrier material.” He looked at Billy. “You could have your publisher shop it around and find an artist who could make a killing on it for you in the triple A format, but if you put this song out, I promise you the critics will crucify you. So will your fans. They’ll say you’re selling out, that you’ve lost your edge, gone soft.”
“I guess I have more faith in my audience than you do.”
“And that, mate, is why I’m here. Take a cue from Nine Inch Nails, Billy. If you’re going to write a ballad, at least have it be about self-mutilation, not getting better. You don’t even know your own demographic,” said Rail, and before Billy could argue, he turned to Jake. “Put ‘Black Curtain’ on the machine. We’re going to focus on something that’s working, because this isn’t.”
Gribbens had the “Black Curtain” master off the shelf before Jake could get out of his chair.
“Fuck this,” Billy said. He snatched his pack of cigarettes from where they lay atop the left monitor speaker and stormed out of the control room through the side exit, climbed the stone path beside the building, and disappeared in the direction of the creek and the woods beyond as the glass door hissed shut behind him.
Rail turned to Gribbens and said, “What are you waiting for? Cue the bloody song up. He’ll be back.”
The studio clock ticked out most of an hour. Rail listened to “Black Curtain” over and over again, making notes on the lyric sheet. He went out to the big room and picked up Billy’s red Les Paul.
For some reason he couldn't quite put his finger on, Jake felt unsettled watching Rail tune Billy's guitar. Then it came to him: it reminded him of a story he'd read about how Robert Johnson had handed his guitar over to the Devil at a crossroads, to have it tuned by the arch fiend, in effect, selling his soul.
Rail put on the headphones and told Jake to keep rolling the song and give him some guitar in the cans without recording it. Then he played a tight mechanical riff that locked in perfectly with the hi-hat, giving the song a chugging, metallic pulse. Jake and Ron exchanged an astonished look, but didn’t say a word.
Rail had just finished tracking his first pass at the song when Billy reappeared at the side door, walked straight through to the big room, and yanked the cable out of the amp, eliciting a loud crackle of static followed by a brief hum, then near silence, except for the tinny chatter of the backing track in the headphones when Rail took them off and handed them to Billy, who was now holding out his other hand for the guitar neck.
“Give me my guitar, you fucking hack.”
Rail slipped out of the strap and handed the guitar over. Billy slung it on and pulled the headphones over his neck. The two men stared at each other. Rail said, “Can you play that part or shall I teach it to you?”
“I can play it better than that. Go back to your side of the glass.”
They recorded guitar overdubs for the next three hours with scarcely any talk. Billy’s playing became more ambitious with each new take. Some of it was brilliant—a dissonant little melodic hook he played on a Stratocaster—and some of it was mere noise. Jake estimated maybe half of what they got would make the final mix and half of that would be buried in the background.
While they worked, Rail kept turning up the master volume of the monitors. Then he switched from the little near-field speakers to the big ones the size of refrigerators suspended on chains from the ceiling on either side of the glass doors. He turned it up some more, eyes closed, snakeskin boot tapping on the scuffed floor. Jake pulled a tissue from the box on the side of the console, ripped a couple of pieces off, rolled them into balls between his fingers and stuffed them in his ears. Just then, the left speaker went dead. Rail switched back to the small monitors, their white cardboard cones visibly jumping to life. He shot a look at Gribbens and shouted, “Fix it!”
Gribbens looked at Jake, who was keeping an eye on the pumping needles in the meter windows. Jake waved him to lean in and shouted directly into his ear. “The fuse is in the back of the speaker cabinet.”
Gribbens sprinted to the amplifier closet and rummaged through some plastic drawers looking for a replacement fuse. The control room was dimly lit, making the closet even darker. Gribbens pulled the chain to switch on the light.
Jake saw something fly past his face across the front of the console and only realized it was a beer bottle when it smashed against the metal chassis of a power amp inside the closet, right above Gribbens’s head. Gribbens flinched and looked up, foam splashing over his arm. Rail yelled, “You’re killing the vibe!”
For two seconds Jake feared Gribbens was going to yell back, but the guy’s face just twisted into a look of horrified indignation. Then he stood and pulled the chain again, vanishing into darkness.
Jake realized he'd been holding his breath when he exhaled at the sight of Gribbens disappearing back into the shadows. He took a small red Maglite from his pocket (he was never without it) and rolled it across the floor toward the closet. There was a brief moment of dim, dancing light from the darkness, during which Jake watched Rail out of his peripheral vision, but the producer was swaying his head to the deafening music, eyes half closed.
Gribbens, fuse in hand, emerged from the closet and pushed an extra chair over to the dead speaker. Jake saw he intended to stand on the wheeled chair to reach the speaker, and ticking his head firmly from side to side, pointed at the stool Billy had sat on while playing the acoustic guitar that morning. Gribbens moved the stool to where the chair had been, and stepped up onto it with fus
e and flashlight in hand. When he stepped down, he gave Jake a thumbs-up and Jake tapped the button to switch the big speakers back on. The bass vibrations shook the glasses on his face. The left side was working again. Rail opened his eyes and gave Jake a tight smile.
Sometime later Billy spun the volume knob on his guitar down, took it off and laid it on the couch. He said to his microphone, “I’m done. Go home.” And without looking up for a reaction, he climbed the spiral stairs to the loft.
* * *
21 November
11:23pm
Hey Jake — I finally decided to stop procrastinating about this communicating by way of journal thing and just get started. I find that I think more clearly in writing anyhow, so maybe this will help us figure some things out. It sounds like you have some questions to answer for yourself lately about what you really want from this career you’ve chosen, and while you may need to find the answers on your own, I know that I’ve been carrying around a lot of questions in my head too. Maybe we can clarify just what we’re doing here, living together but never seeing each other.
I just read that last sentence over and thought about erasing it because I don’t want you to worry when you read my first entry at four in the morning, or during a break in the studio tomorrow. Don’t think that I’m questioning my decision to move here or to be with you. I just want to be with you. I’m proud of you. You’re in the right place at the right time and you’re ready for it. If this is your big break, I wouldn’t want to hold you back. I knew what I was getting into when I met you and you were talking about your hopes for a placement at a big studio. I just wonder if your hopes and dreams are still the same now that you’re here and it’s really happening. We haven’t had time to talk about it and you probably haven’t had time to even think about it. But I see the pressure you’re under and I’d just feel a lot better about what you’re going through if I knew you were happy.
I’ve seen how happy you get, like a little kid, when you’re recording a band you like, and I know you’re trying to do something that few people succeed at. But when there’s no room for anything else in your life and I catch these glimpses of you between crashing at dawn and running out the door a few hours later to do it again and you look like the walking dead (I’m sorry but you do, lately), I have to wonder if this is what you really want.
So tell me what you think about this whirlwind you’re living in. Or just tell me something that happened to you during the thirteen hours I didn’t see you. I feel better already having started writing in this thing. Let’s see where it takes us. I love you.
Goodnight,
Ally
23 November
12:08am
Jake – There is an enormous bug on my desk. Seriously, it is huge. I wish you were here to get rid of it. I don’t think I can smash it with my shoe. Not only would that make an absolutely nasty mess, but I’d feel bad. I mean it’s not his fault that he’s gross or that so many houses got built in the woods where his little bug family has probably been living since forever. But I don’t think I can pick him up either. Yuck. Maybe if I give him a name I won’t mind picking him up. He looks like some kind of beetle. Is there a nuclear power plant around here? I shall name him Herman. YIKES! It moved. Here, I’m going to draw you a little picture of Herman the beetle. This is going to be ACTUAL SIZE. Really. Wait — I hear a key in the door. You’re home! I’ll show you the critter himself.
xox,
Ally
Nov. 24, 3:20 AM
Ally,
You’re sleeping right now and you look beautiful. I like looking at your face when it’s totally relaxed and there are no signs of worry on it.
I’m glad you started this journal. I'll take it with me when I can, and write to you on dinner breaks. Speaking of dinner, don't hate me, but we have to work on Thanksgiving. The album is getting more ambitious all the time, and the deadline is coming at us like a train.
One more thing—please switch from pencil to pen. I’m glad you didn’t erase that bit you were worried about, but you could have. I don’t want you censoring your feelings if we’re going to communicate this way. And I don’t want my half of the journal to be all that’s left when we’re 80.
Goodnight.
Love, Jake
* * *
Billy's lead guitarist, Flint, apparently didn't have any family obligations for Thanksgiving. He arrived around noon on Thursday in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car with three guitars in the trunk. His amps were already on site, and he seemed pleased to find that while Jake had put the Marshall stack in the big room, he had chosen a tight little closet space for the vintage Fender tweed: the confessional. Flint laughed out loud when Gribbens opened the door on the priest’s side of the box to reveal a binaural head—a Styrofoam mannequin head on a stand, with microphones in the ears. It would pick up a stereo image of the little guitar amp through the metal grate, reflected off the claustrophobic mahogany walls.
“It’s just an idea,” Jake said. “Probably looks cooler than it sounds, but we’ll find out.”
“Cool. I can play out my sins.”
Flint wasted no time. He plugged in and got right to work. The verdict was instant and unanimous—he was brilliant.
They spent the afternoon watching him writhe around with his cowboy boots firmly planted on the red Persian carpet, a sinewy spectacle of tattoos and silver jewelry bathed in the soft purple glow of the stained-glass windows, a joint smoldering from the headstock of his guitar like a stick of incense. He threw his body into every note he played, as if this wasn’t a studio, as if to play at all was to perform one hundred percent. And yet, for all the rock-star swagger, there was no pretension in him.
He knew if what he had just played wasn’t his best, and he didn’t need someone else to tell him. He would immediately ask them to wind it back a few bars and record over a particular passage. This kept Jake on his toes, punching in at exactly the right spot to seamlessly merge the old track with the new one until they had a guitar part that invariably opened up new dimensions of a song without overshadowing anything essential. Moon and Rail were both delighted with the results, and Jake noticed that the shift in focus away from Billy for a day had the effect of lifting a dark cloud from the church.
Flint played until the sun had set and the studio had darkened before announcing, “Man, I could eat a pig.”
Billy called his friend into the control room and announced, “I hired a caterer in honor of Flint’s bottomless stomach. He set up shop right across the road at the farmhouse. Says it’s almost ready. We’ll all eat together tonight, like the Waltons.”
The food was topnotch country cooking: shepherd’s pie and a big colorful salad with warm bread. The chef was a tall fat man who went by J.T. He scooped heaping piles of steaming food out of casserole dishes onto the farmhouse’s blue-and-white china, all the while talking around the cigarette that dangled from his lower lip. He had a British accent of a different region than Trevor Rail’s—to Jake’s unfamiliar ear, it sounded more working class. When they all complimented the food, J.T. said, “Payple seem to loyk my meals.” Jake had to guess again; maybe the guy was Aussie.
Back at the church after dinner, they tried out the confessional guitar amp. It was a pretty thin sound and not very usable except for a strange little intro riff that Flint came up with for one song. Jake switched him back to the big amp, and they worked until one in the morning with diminishing returns. Finally, the session devolved into a listening party with Flint and Rail playing CDs for each other and telling war stories about people they had both worked with, over a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch. Gribbens listened eagerly from his perch on the couch at the back of the room, while Jake wondered if they would ever get tired and call it a night. Billy was already passed out on a couch in the big room.
“You know, I think we might have almost worked together once before,” Flint said. “When I was in Kama Sutra, our A&R guy told us you were going to produce our second record but the
n it fell through. We ended up working with Andy Wilson instead.”
Rail nodded and said, “You ever hear about how Andy got that gig?”
“No, how?”
“Wilson, what a character,” Rail said, swirling the scotch in his glass. “I was supposed to do your second record, but it was a very competitive gig after your indie disc hit big. Columbia called me up as soon as they signed you, and I said, of course, I’d love to do it. We even booked the time. It was my idea to record at The Black Lab.”
“Great room,” Flint said and sipped.
“It is. Anyway, as it happens, one day about a week before the first session, Kit Holzinecht opens the door of his office and sees Andy Wilson’s asshole staring at him from across the room with that million-dollar view of the New York City skyline in the background. Wilson, fat bastard that he is, is standing on Kit’s desk, bent over with his pants around his ankles yelling, ‘Come on, you wanna fuck me? Go ahead and fuck me then, huh? You gave the Kama Sutra record to Trevor Rail? Come on, then, fuck me again, if you like it so much.’”
“It’s a shame Kit had to see that, but needless to say, he let Wilson have the record.”
“Oh my God,” Flint said, “How did I never hear about that before?”
“I’m sure Andy didn’t exactly want to brag about it.”
Jake and Gribbens locked eyes and burst out laughing. They couldn’t help it.
Flint rubbed his temples and said, “Unbelievable. And I knew Andy was the wrong producer for that band. The record sucked. It’s probably why we broke up.”
Gribbens was laughing harder now, apparently tickled even further by the idea that a great band could blame their breakup on a producer’s plea for sodomy in a corporate office. When he caught his breath, he said, “That record did blow,” a tear streaming down his cheek as he held his hand to his belly and tried to get it under control.
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 12
