While Jake was finding himself again, sixteen blocks away, on the twenty-eighth floor of another upper-class high-rise condo building, Matt was doing the same. He did things a little differently than Jake. In the first place, he was incapable of composing new material while sober. To prepare for this first attempt in two years he had smoked six hits of potent greenbud from the old plastic bong he used to use when he was a teenager.
"All right," he said, grinning on his living room couch as he felt the massive surge of THC obliterating his higher brain functions. "Now let's write some fuckin' music!"
The instrument he used to compose with was different from Jake's as well. Jake's tunes were all acoustic guitar based and any one of them could be translated back to its base form if so desired. Even the hardest rocking of Jake's songs, like Descent Into Nothing or Living By The Law, could be sung around a campfire by a single guitarist or even played out on a piano. Matt's songs, on the other hand, were all based on power chords on a distorted electric guitar and virtually none of them could be translated into an unaccompanied acoustic format, at least not without changing the basic melody.
What this all meant was that while Jake was sitting in relative quiet with his old acoustic on his lap, Matt had taken down his beloved Stratocaster and plugged it into a thirty-five watt amplifier and connected a series of effects pedals. He spent almost thirty minutes playing with the distortion levels and the effects and then turned the volume on the amp itself up to eight. He began to play, warming up with a series of riffs and solos that were loud enough to cause the pictures on his wall to vibrate on their hooks.
His new manservant, Emil (his last manservant had refused to serve him again) came rushing out of his bedroom within seconds of Matt's initial solo. He had to scream "Mr. Tisdale!" six times before his voice finally made it to Matt's ears.
"What the fuck you want?" demanded Matt after silencing the guitar. "Can't you see I'm composing?"
"Begging your pardon, sir," Emil said, "but the noise! The neighbors will complain."
"Fuck the neighbors," Matt said. "And don't ever refer to my music as noise again, you dig?"
"Uh... yeah, I dig," he said. "But, sir, the... uh... music you're making is sure to..."
"I'll stop when the cops show up," Matt said. "That's a rule that's always worked for me in the past. Now tell me what you think of this riff. Too heavy? Or not heavy enough?"
And with that, he ground out a crunching, multifaceted riff that reverterbrated throughout the floor above and below his.
Emil didn't answer. He simply fled back to his bedroom, worried for his immigration status when the cops finally did arrive.
Matt chuckled under his breath and continued playing. He played with different riffs, trying to come up with something new, something original, something that sounded like nothing he or anyone else had ever done before. After about twenty minutes he hit upon such a thing. It was a complex five-chord riff that blasted out of the amp like lightning from a storm cloud. He tweaked it a little here and there, refining and modifying, increasing the power in some parts and decreasing in other, playing with the distortion levels until he had something that made him smile with accomplishment.
"Yeah," he said, his ears ringing from the amp, his head nodding in satisfaction. "Now that is what I'm fuckin' talkin' about!"
He began to play again, doing it over and over, getting it down, imprinting it in his brain for all time. Once the base riff was there, he began to modify it again, to make it even more complex. Through it all, in his mind, he envisioned what the riff would sound like backed by Jake's guitar, by Nerdly's piano, and with the drum and bass beat keeping time. Once that was done, he knew he had another hit on his hands, something that a crowd would scream for. Now it was time to come up with some lyrics to go with it.
What to write about? he wondered as he put the guitar down and took another three hits of greenbud. What to write about? His mind automatically turned towards the three things he loved to write about more than anything: sex, gross intoxication, and violence. Like Jake, he cast his mind backwards over the last two years, trying to focus on a concept that fit into one of these categories. And, also like Jake, he eventually locked onto an aspect that had to do with life on the road.
The groupies. For him, this was one of the most enjoyable aspects of being on the road. He loved playing before a crowd, loved the applause — initial and final — and loved the adoration that swept over him at such moments, but he also loved the gratuitous sex that he was provided at the end of each show by the young, slutty, and gloriously attractive groupies the security team picked and chose and admitted to the backstage area. He loved everything about them — their namelessness, their youth, their willingness to do anything and everything, up to and including dyking out with each other or even pissing on each other for his pleasure.
"They serve me," he said, ripping out his new riff again. "They fuckin' serve me!"
He played the riff a few more times, variations of this phrase running through his head, searching for a lyrical rhythm that went with the music. At last he came up with one.
"You're here to service me," he sang as the riff ground out. "You're here to service me. You're here to ser-vice me! You're here to ser-vice me!"
He could hardly hear his own voice over the sound of the guitar, but that didn't matter. He heard it in his mind and he liked it. He envisioned that phrase as a repetitive lyric, sung primarily by the back-up singers — himself, Bill, Coop, and Darren. Jake would sing other lyrics in between the repetitions. Other lyrics... other lyrics... like...
"I want you down on your knees," Matt sang, imagining Jake's voice and then imagining his own again, mixed with the others. "You're here to ser-vice me." He nodded in satisfaction and then stopped long enough to write that down on a piece of paper. He then began working on more Jake lyrics to go between the service me lines.
"Bring your girl-friend please," he sang. "Just don't bring no disease. Yeah, you're here to ser-vice me! You're here to ser-vice me! No talking, no names, please! You're here to ser-vice me! I like to come clean you see! You're here to ser-vice me!"
He played and sang, pausing every few minutes to write down the particular lyrics he thought were keepers (he rejected the ones about "no cottage cheese" and "watch those teeth if you please"). By the time the LAPD finally pushed their way into the condo — assisted by the building manager (who had pounded on the door, unheard for more than twenty minutes) and his passkey — he had all of the chorus sequences written and had started on the main lyrics.
The entire band got together two days later for their first official jam session in more than two years. They met in their rehearsal warehouse where all of their touring equipment had been set up and attached to the soundboard and their basic recording set. Jake plugged his old Les Paul into the amps while Matt plugged in one of the Brogan brand Stratocaster knock-offs he'd been provided. Bill's piano was the electric one instead of the grand, the idea being simplicity in sound reproduction instead of showmanship.
Darren was ten minutes late and looking a little haggard. Most of his hair had grown back, although it wasn't as long as it had been before, and he had only minimal scarring from his encounter with the explosives. He still wore the earplug in his right ear, however, because loud noise allegedly still bothered him, as did a rampant, chronic case of tinnitus (ringing in the ear) from his damaged eardrum. He was also quite obviously stoned and under the influence of narcotic painkillers. Neither Jake nor Matt commented on it and didn't really care anyway. This was a jam session, after all, not a rehearsal, and during jam sessions, marijuana intoxication was not only allowed, it was mandatory.