“I guess it never occurred to me,” Jake said. “Are you offering?”
“Fuckin’ A, I’m offering. I owe you big for all the work you’ve done with me on Step and Signed and my tour. Least I can do is help you out with the TSF. Besides, I ain’t got much going on these days. Neesh is gonna be working sixty-hour weeks for a while so I need something to occupy my days.”
“Well ... all right then,” Jake said. “Why don’t we give it a shot?”
“Let’s do it,” G said. “Monday morning, nine o’clock, KVA Records?”
“That’s where we’ll be. How much money you want for this gig?”
“Not a dime,” G said. “I’m just helpin’ a brother out.”
“Bullshit,” Jake said. “I’ll at least pay you the same as I pay the other musicians—fifty an hour for the rehearsals and your cut of a hundred grand for the TSF itself.”
“If it makes you feel better to do that, I won’t argue about it.”
“It would make me feel better,” Jake confirmed. “And what about doing some of your material? We should probably at least do Step and Signed, right?”
Gordon was shaking his head. “I don’t think we should do any of my shit,” he said. “It’s your show, not mine. In fact, I don’t think you should even introduce me. No sense distracting their attention away from you. I’ll just come out with a hat and a pair of sunglasses on and play my part and let everyone wonder who that nigger on the keyboards is. It’ll be fun.”
“You sure about this?” Jake asked.
“As sure as scoring with a groupie,” G said.
“That’s pretty sure,” Jake said.
“Yep.”
They watched the sun disappear over the horizon and the first few stars come out. They then picked up the cooler and the empty bottles and headed back to the house. After throwing away what needed to be thrown away and then stowing everything else, they each opened a fresh beer and headed for the entertainment room.
“Hey,” Gordon suddenly said, “remember that talk box I gave you?”
“Of course,” Jake said. “I have it in my composition room.”
“Did you ever figure out how to make music with it?”
“Hell yeah,” Jake said. “You were right when you said it adds a whole separate layer to making notes, but I took it up to Oregon with me when we were recording the last albums and played around with it quite a lot in one of the empty iso rooms when I wasn’t needed on a track in progress. I got to be pretty good with it, actually—not quite Frampton level or anything, but I can do solos and riffs that don’t sound like somebody strangling a chicken.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” Jake confirmed. “I might even find a way to lay down a track or two with it on my next album.”
“Bust it out, homey,” Gordon said. “Let me hear you play it.”
“Uh ... sure, okay,” Jake said. “Just help me carry the shit in here.”
They went to the composition room and hauled the amplifier, the speaker, the talk box, the microphone stand, the various cords and cables, and Jake’s sunburst Les Paul guitar back to the entertainment room. This took about ten minutes to accomplish. Hooking everything up took another ten. G then sat down on the couch across from Jake, near the speaker, and Jake sat down in a chair. He quickly tuned the guitar by ear and then set it up for moderate distortion. He played out a few riffs and a brief solo in order to get into the groove of playing. He then stepped down on the talk box pedal.
“All right,” he told G. “Here goes.”
He put the plastic tube in his mouth and then began to play some simple riffs on the Les Paul. The vibration of the strings was converted to an analog signal by the dual Humbucker pickups on the guitar and then shipped to the amplifier by the guitar cord, where it was distorted and amplified and then sent to the talk box, which was a basic isolation box with a plastic tube coming out of it. The sound traveled through the air inside that plastic tube and was emitted in Jake’s mouth, where he could use his lips, tongue, and jaw to further shape it in a variety of ways. From Jake’s mouth, it went into the microphone and came out the speaker.
He kept his lips, tongue, and jaw in a neutral position at first, so the notes he played came out sounding mostly normal, with just a bit of an echo effect. He played a brief solo and then the riff for Ozzie’s I Don’t Know. From there, he started to use his lips and tongue a bit, transitioning into the main riff for the Eagles’ Those Shoes, followed by the blues stomp from Rocky Mountain Way. He pulled these off pretty well, improving with each repetition he made.
“I like that shit, homey,” G told him enthusiastically. “It’s like Joe Walsh is in the fuckin’ room with us.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jake said modestly (and truthfully), “but I have definitely picked up the basics of the device.”
“Do some Frampton,” Gordon ordered. “That’s the gold standard there—and don’t even try to tell me you haven’t been playing around with Frampton’s shit.”
Jake chuckled. He had actually been about to make that claim. “All right,” he said. “Just don’t expect too much.”
He ran through his Peter Frampton repertoire, starting with Show Me the Way and then moving into the extended talk-box solo from Do You Feel Like We Do? Though he did not have quite the same output dynamic as Frampton had because of differing distortion levels, he was able to duplicate the talking guitar effect reasonably well. From there, he played some other examples of talk box tunes that he had taught himself: Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog, Pink Floyd’s Pigs (Three Different Ones), Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, and Steely Dan’s Haitian Divorce. Finally, he silenced the guitar and removed his mouth from the tube, breathing heavily.
“That was badass!” Gordon declared.
“I guess,” Jake said, taking a deep breath and holding it for a moment. “I always forget to breathe as much as I should when I use this thing. It’s like walking uphill.”
“You have got to find a way to use that thing at the TSF.”
“The TSF?” Jake said, shaking his head. “No way. We’re already pressed for time to work the set up. There’s no way I could work in a completely new tune.”
“I’m not saying you need to come up with an entirely new tune,” G said. “I’m saying that you can find a way to adapt the box into one of your existing tunes that you plan to play anyway. Extend the solo or the bridge or maybe even both on one of the less popular cuts and make it into something new. That’s what Frampton did with Feel, isn’t it?”
“Uh ... yeah, that is my understanding.”
“And the live version of Feel is now Frampton’s most popular track, isn’t it?”
“It’s certainly up there,” Jake had to admit. “Are you suggesting that I could pull something off like Frampton did? Take one of my more marginal tunes and turn it into something new by adding in some talk box.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Gordon said. “You could be this generation’s Peter fucking Frampton.”
“I am nowhere near as skilled with the instrument as Frampton or Walsh or even Sambora. I’m not sure I could pull it off.”
“You may not be as skilled as them, but you’re no slouch either. I think you can do this shit, Jake.”
Jake thought about it for a few seconds. The idea seemed to gain appeal the more thinking he did. “Maybe,” he said at last. “But if I do this, you need to step up as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want a keyboard solo of some kind in the tune as well. And I want to introduce you to the crowd at that point in the show.”