“Uh ... right,” Jake said. “Good advice, I suppose. So ... you’re better now?”
Ted nodded amicably. “I’m cool,” he said.
“All right then. How about we finish the sound check?”
They finished the sound check without further incident. They then began to play.
They went through The Struggle three times—which was to say they started it from the beginning eight times but only finished it three because the mothers were still not completely familiar with their parts. It was a soft-rock song with Mary providing the melody with her violin while Celia and Cynthia laid down the accompaniment to the rhythm set by Ben and Ted. Jake used his Les Paul on mild distortion to provide fills. He also had a fairly tame, easy listening type of guitar solo between the bridge and the final verse. Neither Celia or Jake was happy with the way it was coming out.
“It’s the violin,” Celia said after they finished the third run-through. “It just doesn’t ... sound right.”
Jake nodded. “I think you’re right.”
Mary was a bit taken aback. “What was wrong with it?” she asked. “I’m hitting the notes well, just like they’re written. Is it my phrasing?”
Jake and Celia were both shaking their heads before she even finished. “It’s not you, Mary,” Celia assured her. “You’re playing beautifully. It’s just that the timbre of the violin doesn’t match the feeling I’m trying to project here. It doesn’t convey the mood of the piece properly. I don’t think the violin is the right instrument for the melody.”
Mary nodded thoughtfully. “Now that you mention it, it doesn’t seem to quite be what is needed there. What did you have in mind?”
“I tried using the guitar to pick out the melodic notes before we recruited the two of you,” Jake said. “That didn’t sound right either. It was too harsh, too ... oh ... hard rock I guess.”
“I think an alto sax would sound better,” Celia suggested. “Not only that, it would free up Jake’s guitar for the fills and Mary’s violin for the accompaniment. A sax was actually what I envisioned when I first thought about putting the piece together as a recording.”
“Does anyone here actually know how to play the sax?” asked Sharon.
The two rhythm section members shook their heads, as did the two mothers. Nerdly joined the chorus of no’s. Jake gave a little shrug. “My dad used to have an alto sax in his collection when I was a kid and I played around with it a little. I never took to it much though.”
“But you’ve played one before?” Celia asked.
“That was close to twenty years ago, C. I was just a kid screwing around. I sure as hell don’t remember how to do scales on the thing now.”
“What about your old man?” asked Ted. “It was his instrument, wasn’t it? Can he play the thing?”
All eyes turned to Mary, who was shaking her head slowly. “Tom plays a pretty mean blues guitar, but he was never any good with the sax. He bought it in a secondhand store back in the early fifties, when he was still trying to make it as a musician. He thought it would increase his marketability if he could lay down some brass. He was never very good with it. He could play the notes, but he could never put ... you know ... any soul in it. He stopped playing it years before Pauline and Jake were even born. I’m not even sure where the thing is now. I don’t remember seeing it when we moved.”
Jake, who knew he had accidentally broken the instrument one day while pretending to be a hard rock marching band member, looked at the floor and said nothing.
“Well ... I guess we’re going to have to get ourselves a saxophonist, aren’t we?” Celia said.
“Just for one song?” Sharon asked. “Pauline and Greg are not going to like that.”
“It’s not just for one song,” Celia said. “I can use a sax as the primary melodic instrument in at least three of my songs, and I can envision using it for fills and solos in two or three of the others. This is actually something I’ve been meaning to bring up for some time.”
“Where in the hell are we going to find a professional level sax player?” Jake asked. “We’ve had a hard enough time just finding a rhythm section and our violin and piano players.”
Ben, who was typically the quietest, most reserved member of the group, suddenly spoke up. “Maybe I can help,” he said.
“How so?” Jake asked him. “Do you know a professional level saxophonist?”
“I used to,” he said. “Back when I was working on my graduate degree at UCLA, I played bass in the school’s jazz band. There was a girl who played the sax with us, and she was pretty good at it—a natural, if you know what I mean.”
“Is she a professional musician now?” Jake asked. “If she is, that runs us right back into our primary problem. Pros are usually committed elsewhere, or forbidden by contracts to play with someone like us.”
“She’s not a professional—or at least she wasn’t the last time I was in touch with her. She was an English major and she was working on her teaching credential. I always told her she was wasting her talent going into teaching. She had what it took to be a professional studio musician at the very least.”
“Intriguing,” Nerdly said thoughtfully.
“Agreed,” Jake said. He gave a meaningful look to Ben. “Were you and she ... you know ... tuning each other’s instruments?”
“Jake!” Mary barked at him.
“Well, sorry,” Jake said. “It’s something we need to know though. I don’t want to hire this girl if there’s going to be some ex-girlfriend drama going on between her and Ben. We’re having enough trouble keeping productivity up as it is.”
“Laura and I were only friends,” Ben assured him. “I haven’t even talked to her in almost two years. I have no idea if she’s even still playing or, if she is, if she would be willing to come play with us. I don’t even know if the phone number I have for her is current. This could all be for nothing—probably is, in fact.”
“Fair enough,” Jake said. “Go ahead and give it a try when you get home. See if she’s willing to come and audition for us.”
“Will do,” Ben promised.
“In the meantime,” Jake said, “how about we get back to work? What do you want to work on next, C?”
Laura Best was home when the phone rang that night. She sat on the couch in the $1200 a month Burbank apartment she shared with her best friend—Phil Genkins—dressed in a pair of tattered sweat pants and a long white T-shirt that hid every curve of her petite body. Her copper colored hair was down around her shoulders as she watched reruns of Cheers on one of the cable channels.
Laura, who was three months past her twenty-sixth birthday, was alone tonight. Phil was out with one of his many boyfriends and likely would not be home until well after midnight. And David Boulder, DDS, her fiancé (and her dentist—that was how they had met), had been unable to stop by tonight after the practice he was a partner in closed for the day. This was all very typical. Phil went out almost every night after his shifts as a singing waiter in an Italian restaurant, and Dave could usually only stop by on the weekends or the very occasional weeknight. His most frequent visits were during his lunch hour, since her apartment was only a mile from his office.
Sometimes she was forced to wonder just how committed to their relationship and eventual marriage Dave really was. She did not have much experience with love. Raised by a strict Mormon family, the youngest out of two brothers and two sisters, dating and socializing with the opposite sex had been something that was heavily regulated and supervised during her teen years. She hadn’t kissed a boy for the first time until she was in her first year of college. And she hadn’t gone all the way with one until her junior year at UCLA—and that had been a frightening and painful experience, one she would be happy to forget, if possible. Though she was no longer an active member of the Church of Latter Day Saints—which was to say she no longer attended services and she no longer gave ten percent of her meager teacher’s salary to them—she managed to graduate college with the basic prudishness of her upbringing still relatively intact—at least until she started dating Dave. He was the first man she had had sex with more than once, the first whose penis she had put in her mouth, and the first she had slept in a bed with—though that, like his visits, was an extremely rare occasion as well.