They got it.
“What I’m looking for here,” Celia explained, “is the piano to be the primary melodic instrument with my guitar as the rhythm accompaniment and the violin and Jake’s distorted guitar as the fills.” She picked out the primary rhythm again and then named off the chords in order. “Cynthia, can you duplicate that?”
“Well, not at one-ten at first,” she said. “Let me run through it at half speed until I get the feel.”
“By all means,” Celia said. “Do you need me to write it down for you?”
“No,” she said. “Compared to Beethoven and Bach, it’s actually quite simplistic.”
Celia looked at Jake, an amused smile on her face. “I think I’ve just been musically insulted,” she said.
Jake chuckled but Cynthia was appalled with herself. “Oh my God, Celia,” she gushed. “I didn’t mean to ... I mean, what I meant was...”
“It’s okay, Cynthia,” Celia assured her. “I took no offense. Rock and popular music is simplistic compared to classical.”
“We understand that, Mom,” Bill assured her. “Now go ahead and run through it.”
It took her a few minutes, but she was soon able to play the melody reliably at half speed. Celia strummed out the accompaniment at the same rate while Mary slowly began to add the fills where Jake indicated they should be.
“I think we got it,” Celia said. “Now let’s kick it up tempo to one-ten and I’ll start the vocalization.”
It was a little rough at first, but soon they were harmonizing fairly well. Celia, continuing to strum her part, sang out the lyrics, avoiding the bridge section for now since that was where the tempo change came in. The lyrics were fairly simplistic and straightforward—it was a song about breaking up, in the same tone as Jake’s own Point of Futility—but Celia’s beautiful contralto voice carried them well, projecting the emotion of the end of a relationship to the listener.
“Such a sad song,” Cynthia remarked at one point. “This one and Jake’s both.”
“There’s a lot of sadness in life,” Jake replied. “It’s an easy subject to write about.”
“That’s pretty deep, son,” Mary said.
Jake shrugged. “Shall we go through it again?”
They went through it again, and then a few more times. They then moved on to another song, this one from Jake. It was called The Easy Way, a tune he had penned a few years before and had really liked but, because it had not fit the Intemperance formula, had never fully developed.
“Okay,” Jake explained, “this one is going to feature a distorted drop-D tuned guitar as the primary melodic instrument with an underlying synthesizer track from Bill and his Korg. It is going to need some violin accompaniment and some piano fills. We’re talking G-major here at ninety to start and then we’ll go up tempo to one-twenty.”
“Let’s hear it,” Mary said. She was now fully into the jam session.
“Right,” said Cynthia. “I’m ready to get down.”
Jake introduced the song to them and they began to play around with it. Perhaps twenty minutes went by before anyone noticed that Tom and Pauline were no longer with them. And even when they did notice, they did not stop playing.
It was not that Pauline and Tom did not enjoy music. Both were lifelong lovers of the art and both spent much of their leisure time listening to a wide variety of compositions and genres. And it wasn’t that they did not enjoy watching the composition process take place. On the contrary, both had been fascinated with the interaction between the musicians and the bare beginnings of the evolution of the tunes. It was the repetitiveness of the process that got to them.
After hearing them go over This Just Can’t Go On for the twentieth or so time, and after coming to the realization that the five of them seemed to have every intention of running through every single song in both Jake and Celia’s inventory, Tom turned to his daughter.
“Do you want to go back over to our place and grab a beer or something?” he whispered to her.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Pauline replied.
They quietly got up and left the Archer domicile, heading back across the property to the Kingsley structure. Once inside, Tom pulled a couple of green Steinlager bottles out of the refrigerator and popped them open with a wine opener that hung from a hook.
“To family bands,” he said, raising his bottle to Pauline.
“Family bands,” she returned, clinking her bottle to his.
They took a drink and then Pauline looked at him, a sly smile on her face.
“What?” he asked.
“You got any pot?” she asked him.
His eyebrows raised slowly. “Pot?”
“You know? Weed, smoke, buds? I could go for a hit or two about now. How about you?”
Tom was blushing now. “Uh ... well ... wow, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it?”
“A bit,” Pauline admitted. “But let’s look at it rationally here. Jake and I have both known all of our lives that you and Mom like to get high on occasion. You’ve never actually done it in front of us, but you never really went to great lengths to hide it either.”
“True,” Tom said slowly, “but...”
“And I’m sure that you and Mom know that Jake and I have been known to flame a bowl on occasion, right?”
“Well ... with Jake there are actual pictures of it in the American Watcher, so, yes with him. You, however, well, I did kind of assume that you probably did it on occasion, but still, it’s not the sort of thing parents do with their children.”
“Why not?” she asked. “We drink beer together, don’t we? We’ve actually gotten quite hammered together more than once.”
“Again, true, but pot is something else entirely.”
“Yes, it is,” Pauline agreed. “So ... what’s the deal? You got any, or what?”
Tom looked at her for a moment and then took a drink of his beer. He swallowed it and then let out a great exhalation of breath. Finally, he shrugged. “Oh, what the hell?” he said. “I’ll have to check, but I think I just might have a little sitting in the back of a drawer somewhere.”
Pauline chuckled. “I thought that maybe you might,” she said. “Go get it. Let’s burn one, Dad.”
He left the room. He returned a few minutes later carrying a wooden cigar box that had been manufactured back in 1968 and had served as his stash box since 1970. Pauline smiled as she saw it. It was the same box she had pilfered from on dozens of occasions back in the early to mid-seventies, her high school days. She had always been careful only to take a few pinches out of it and to place it exactly back in its perpetual hiding place: the far corner of the top shelf of their closet. She had never found the box empty. She had never been caught.
Tom set the box down on the coffee table and opened the lid. Inside was the same small tray that had always been there. Next to it were a few packs of rolling papers, a disposable lighter, a small pair of scissors, and a plastic bag that held a respectable amount of green buds. He pulled the bag out and opened it.
“Wow, Dad,” Pauline said as she got a whiff of the odor. “That’s some top-shelf shit you got there.”
Tom nodded wisely. “If you’re going to do something, you do it right,” he told her.
“A good philosophy,” she agreed.
He set the tray down on the table and then pulled a medium sized bud out of the bag. Pauline could tell by the moisture of the bud that this was not weed that had been sitting forgotten for years. It was stuff that had been harvested in the past two months. He pulled a paper from the pack and then picked up the scissors and quickly cut the bud up into tiny pieces. He then rolled a nice, tight, fat joint. He handed it to his daughter along with the lighter. “Would you like to do the honors?”
“I’d love to,” she said, putting it in her mouth and sparking up. She took a tremendous hit and then passed it over to her father. He took it in his hand, hesitated for the briefest of seconds, and then, with another shrug, put it to his lips and inhaled.