Celia was sitting in a chair near her microphone stand, sipping out of a cup of coffee and leafing through a sheaf of musical scores on her stand. She held a pencil on her right hand and was scratching a few notes here and there. Sharon was at the soundboard, making notations on the switches and dials and making a few notes of her own. Nerdly was sitting in a chair behind the Korg, looking at a diagram in the manual. Cynthia was sitting in a chair behind the Yamaha piano, frowning at it. She had never played an electronic piano before and was still getting used to it.
“Good morning, everyone!” Mary greeted as she entered the room. Jake echoed the sentiment. Everyone in the room gave his or her version of a return greeting.
Mary went over to a shelf next to the guitars and opened up the case that contained her rehearsal violin. She spent a few minutes putting rosin on her bow and then carried the instrument and her tuning fork over to the chair next to Cynthia and her piano. She began to go to work, making sure her strings were in proper tune.
Jake walked over to his seat next to Celia’s, but he did not sit down. “How’s it going, C?” he enquired.
“So far, so good,” she replied.
“What do you want to work on first today?” he asked. They alternated whose songs they worked on day by day and today it was Celia’s turn.
“The Struggle,” she said. “It’s going to be my first release and I’m still not liking the way it’s coming out.”
Jake nodded in understanding. The tune was solid as a rock, with good melody, deep, meaningful lyrics, and a nice hook in the chorus, but Celia was right. The way they were putting it together just didn’t sound quite right. “We’ll get it dialed,” he told her.
“Eventually,” she sighed.
Now that he knew what song they were going to work on first, he knew which guitar to grab. He walked over to the rack and pulled down the Les Paul, which he slung over his right shoulder. He carried it over to his chair and sat down. Just in front of his chair were two effects pedals he could use to change the basic sound of the instrument before it came out of the amplifier in the rear of the room. His guitar cord was sitting next to his seat but he didn’t plug in just yet. First, he picked up his tuning fork from the music stand in front of him and went to work on his strings. They were not terribly out of tune, since this was a daily ritual, and only a minor adjustment to the G-string and the E-string were required.
Just as Jake and Mary finished up with their tuning, the studio door opened and Ben Ping walked in. Ben was Chinese, born in the city of Cixi, on the eastern coast of the country. His family emigrated to San Francisco in 1960, when Ben was only three years old. He was brought up in American schools with American friends and American values. Though his parents had always wanted him to be a doctor or an engineer at the very least, young Ben’s life-path was altered when he was fourteen years old and picked up a guitar for the first time. He fell in love with the instrument almost immediately and discovered he had a significant aptitude for it. Soon, he found himself falling in with the musician crowd, playing in various bands through his high school years, learning to smoke marijuana and go to keggers, learning to grow his hair long, and forgetting how to produce and turn in quality school work. He retained just enough of a cultural reverence for education to successfully graduate, but his final grades and GPA precluded him from getting into any institute of higher learning that was not a community college.
That was okay with Ben, if not his parents. He got a job in a low-end restaurant as a busboy and then gradually worked his way up to a waiter at a higher end chain restaurant. This allowed him to move out of his parents’ house in South San Francisco and into a studio apartment in the City, where he spent much of his non-working time pursuing his musical interests with various bands that were getting together in the Bay Area. At some point along the way he came to the realization that he was pretty good with the guitar, but not great, so he made himself a little hotter of a commodity by switching to the bass, an instrument he had a little more aptitude for as it fit well with his engineering oriented mind. The band hookups came easier after this. Guitar players were a dime a dozen, but bands were always looking for a good bass player because, since it was not quite as glamorous of an instrument, there weren’t as many people playing it.
Though he was good with his instrument—Jake rated him as better than Darren had been, but still well short of Charlie’s skills—his big break never came. The closest he ever came to fame was that he had once played with a band called True, whose drummer claimed that he had once played in a band with a guy who had learned his guitar skills from a then un-discovered Neal Schon of Journey fame. It was a story that had never been verified, but he had liked to believe it was true.
After a few years of playing hundred-dollar gigs on his nights off, he decided that maybe it was time to establish a fallback position in case he did not ultimately end up being a famous recording star. He started taking classes at City College of San Francisco, focusing on general education and music. A little more mature in those days, he took his college education seriously enough to accumulate a 4.0 GPA by the time he maxed out all he could take at that level. This was enough to allow him admission to UCLA for the completion of his Bachelor of Arts in Music. And so, he packed up his meager belongings and made the move to the southern part of the state. After graduation, he picked up a teaching credential and was hired as a guitar teacher at Los Angeles Harbor College, a campus of the LA Community College district. It was not the most lucrative position in the world, but he enjoyed teaching young people the art of the guitar and it fulfilled him.
Until meeting Jake and Celia two months before, he had pretty much given up on his dream of being a recording star, but that had not kept him from playing in bands when he could. He had been playing bass for a group called Black Dog—a Led Zepplin tribute band—in a little club in the valley when Jake, Nerdly, and Sharon had wandered in one Saturday night after yet another frustrating session at their studio. The lack of a rhythm section at that point in their development had been hampering them quite badly, leaving them unable to progress much beyond the basic melodies of their tunes.
Black Dog was merely okay at what they were striving to do. The guitar player was never going to be mistaken for Jimmy Page and their singer did not have even a third of the range of Robert Plant, but they were able to put out palatable imitations that served to provide some nostalgic entertainment while one sipped on one’s drink and ate greasy bar food.