He didn’t want to hear that. Our project was almost done, and we’d worked so hard on it.
I mean, first you write the songs in your bedroom or wherever, and then you show them to a close friend. They say cool, so you start jamming in a cold garage — your fingers freezing while crowded around a kerosene heater and hating life. You rehearse for months like that. Then you find a bass player. The bass player knows a singer. Now you’ve got a band. You show the singer the songs, and he says, “That totally sucks, I can’t sing over that.” Back to square one. New songs come, they’re dumbed down. A different style. Lyrics get slapped on top of them haphazardly. The singer wants to call the band The Bedspins.
I nearly quit, but girls started to show up to the rehearsals. They liked the music. They liked the crap lyrics that the rich snob kid sung over them. They thought he was cute. Those girls danced and kissed our necks in dimly lit rooms. We played shows. More shows. A little bit of money came in. Then, Ethel dropped the bomb — his sister is connected to a record label, and she’s insinuated that, if time and money was invested into a really stellar demo, the band would have at least a shot at getting heard by the label. Okay!
“So here we are, and where is he?” Seth looked at the clock, scowling.
Ethel should have been at the studio hours ago, but he never showed up. It didn’t surprise me. He hadn’t been very involved in the process. There was always some lame excuse for why he couldn’t be there.
It’d mostly been me and Seth. We tracked the drums first for the Bedspins. Everybody played together, but the amps were isolated in separate rooms. We played communally in the drum kit room and listened to the mix through headphones. After that, it was bass. I tracked the bass, while Studio Mike punched me in for overdubs. After that, I spent a Saturday doing multiple tracks of guitar. When it was Ethan’s turn to come in and do the vocals, he kept delaying things.
“I’m not happy with my lyrics, I’m gonna work them out a little bit. I don’t think they’re sexy enough.”
“Sexy enough? What does that even mean?”
He was fronting the money for the project, because me and Seth were broke and he had the connection. But things just kept dragging on and on. He kept delaying coming in and recording his final vocal track. Finally he said, “Just mix everything down with the original vocals and I’ll come in and re-record everything when I finish my lyrics.”
Months went by. Seth and me kept going to the studio and messing around. When we’d taken things as far as we could, Seth wanted to record the original songs that we’d written around the kerosene heater while freezing our nuts off in Aunt Kathy’s garage. Mike flipped out when he heard those songs, the one’s Ethan hated.
“Why aren’t you guys playing these songs with Ethan?”
Nothing had to be said; Mike got it.
I did a bunch of odd jobs for Studio Mike. I tore down his front steps with Seth and Feral in exchange for some recording time. I tore up his back yard, graded it, put down a small brick patio in an area that used to flood. I raked his leaves, and cut down a dead tree, chopped it up with a chainsaw, and even got to use all that wood for a big party out in the woods that Studio Mike came to. He was a good guy, loved beer, and seemed to really like Ottermeat. It was complicated music: bizarre time changes and unexpected shifts in feel.
“We’ll record that music,” Studio Mike said, sitting around the bonfire underneath the water tower, a beer in his hand, his Gilligan hat crooked. “It’ll be sick, let me play synth and make noises. It’ll be sick.”
“Sure,” I said with a grin.
So that’s where we were then. A month after the party. In the studio. Our side project all tracked out. Seth just finishing up the last of the mixing. The album was a stark contrast to our other one with Ethan. Ottermeat was raw, weird, wild, complicated music bursting apart in every direction. Drums going crazy. Guitars freaking out. No vocals, just walls of strange Moog synth and sounds manipulated by cut up two-inch tape.
Mike snored like the world was ending.
“I can’t take it any longer,” Seth said. “Wake that fucker up.”
Mike’s snores had reached a crescendo, and any moment, Seth was gonna start smashing the mixing board. I leaned over and lifted the Gilligan hat off Mike’s eyes. Immediately, he sat up like I was a ghoul that was going to eat his face. He drew back his hand ready to punch me.
“Whoa,” I exclaimed, rolling away onto the carpet as Mike’s fist came flying at me.
“What what what what? What what!” Mike sprang to life.
Seth busted out laughing. My heart thumping in my chest. Mike would have knocked me out had his aim been better. He sat up, figured out who we were and what was going on, and said, “I punched my wife right in the face once … accidentally of course. She’d done what you just did.”
“Now you’re divorced,” Seth said.
“Ha! Yeah, now I’m divorced,” Mike said, scratching his beard like a maniac and grinning. “Bye bye, Mary Lou,” he said. His face dissolved into a frown. “All it takes is one good accidental sock to the jaw. Fuck.” Mike looked at the clock. “You guys are still here?”
“Yup,” Seth said, pointing at the screen. “I’m stuck on something.”
“What’re you stuck on?” Impatiently, Mike went to the computer and hit the space key. The music sprang up. It was jarring and heaved around like a rabid animal. Every time I heard it, it made me smile. Seth was a force of nature on the drums. “Owww, that sounds like shit.”
I couldn’t tell, I’m deaf in one ear and can’t even hear in stereo. My world is in mono.
Mike forcefully removed Seth from the chair and practically tossed him away. That guy’s strength is deceptive. He’s small but solid as hell. Mike sat down at the console and started to move some knobs around. When he hit the space bar again, and the music came back on, Seth’s head was nodding and so was Mike.
“Look, see that!”
“That’s it,” Seth screamed. “That’s the mix!”
They high-fived. I was just going by what they said. I couldn’t tell if it sounded better or not. I just went along with it.
“Done!”
“Done? That’s it?” I asked.
I sat up on the couch, feeling like I was getting sprung outta jail. That’s what recording an album is like: doing time in county.
Mike started bouncing the whole project down from his hard drive to CD. It was almost midnight, and he had to get up for work in four hours. He said, cool as a cucumber, “We need some beers to celebrate.” He fished some out of the fridge in his garage, came back, and handed us one can each. I popped mine and faked a sip and set it on the table.
Then, with his feet up, he picked up the manila envelope that Ethan had brought over. It was pre-addressed to his contact at the label, his sister, the lawyer.
“Now all we gotta do is get that prima donna to come here and finish his vocals. Then we can send your tape off into the void.”
Studio Mike
Studio Mike had heavy eyelids and looked like he was in a biker gang except he didn’t have a single tattoo. He’d been married to a very pretty blonde named Mary Lou. He’d had an Indian motorcycle and a golden retriever. But all that was gone. Sometimes I’d find a dog toy. There was a framed photograph of the motorcycle in the downstairs bathroom. But that was it. When I met him, he was living in the shell of a two-story house that used to be a home. All he had was the recording studio.
The house was haunted. The studio never made a profit. He’d take the money he made off of recording random local bands and dump it right back into his recording studio. He upgraded equipment constantly. Half the time, there’d be some big cardboard box he’d be cutting open.