The Devil of Echo Lake (12 page)

“Maybe it will become something,” Rail said.

“I don’t know. It’s a little dull. Sounds like an out-of-tune doorbell. Don't you think?”

“Yes, but it’s all about context. We may find a place for it, if only in a bridge or an intro.”

In the control room, Jake threaded last night’s master tape onto the multi-track and wound it back to the beginning. By the time he had his notes and coffee ready, Brickhouse had appeared and was asking Jake to fetch him a cup, too. When Jake returned from the kitchenette, Rail was giving Brickhouse the game plan for the day.

“We’re going to re-track ‘Language of Love.’ Burn over the version from last night—the vocals were useless anyway. This time we’ll get the whole song down, beginning to end. I imagine we’ll add live drums later. For now, I want to work fast and get Billy's ideas down while they’re fresh.”

The session went according to plan. The only snag came during Billy’s guitar overdubs. He had done three tracks of different riff ideas on his Les Paul, through a cranked amp, when he got frustrated during an attempt to double an exact performance of the third riff to fatten it up. Rail, who had suggested the double-track, finally told Billy to forget about it. They could go back and nail it on another day. It didn’t matter at this early stage anyway. But it was too late; by the time they moved on to vocals, Billy was already in a bad mood.

“Do you smoke when you sing?” Jake asked him while positioning the mic.

The rock star glowered at him before answering, “No. Why?”

“Never mind. If you’d said ‘yes,’ I would have asked you not to blow smoke on the U47. My boss would have my head if you did, that’s all.”

“Well you can relax. I can get through a whole take without a drag, okay?”

The vocals surprised Jake. He had been expecting Billy’s defeatist attitude after the guitar tracks to carry over into less than stellar singing, but in fact the reverse was happening. Billy sounded much better than he had the previous night. His voice was husky and sexy and oozing with sarcasm.

“Put a star on the track sheet,” Rail told Jake. “It’s a pretty special first take. He probably won’t be able to do as well once he starts thinking about it.”

“Like the guitar track,” Brickhouse said. “Too much thinking.”

“Not quite,” Rail replied. When Brickhouse looked up from the meters with a furrowed brow, Rail elaborated. “I wanted him to bang his head up against that one for a while. Billy sucks at doubling guitar parts, he always has. He’s too sloppy and spontaneous a player. If we need a good double, we’ll chop one together in the computer. But
trying
to get one pissed him off. And Billy sings best when he’s pissed off.”

*  *  *

At eight o'clock, Rail called for a dinner break and told Jake to get the Wurlitzer electric piano from Studio A and set it up for an overdub while he, Billy, and Kevin went into town for a bite.

Jake did as he was told and had just finished when the trio returned. His stomach was growling by the time they resumed work, tracking a little three-chord pattern that Billy played on the Wurlitzer during the choruses. It didn’t take long. After that, the session started to devolve into hanging out, and Jake could sense that Trevor and Billy were out of fresh ideas for the day. Maybe he would get something to eat before midnight after all. He kept busy tidying cables and organizing track sheets, but his curiosity was piqued when Trevor asked Billy, “Did you get the gift I sent you in Tokyo?”

Billy’s lax body language subtly tensed under his tight black clothes. “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”

“May I see it?” Trevor asked. “You did bring it along as I asked?”

Billy nodded, hesitated, then got to his feet and sauntered out to the stairs. When he returned from the loft, he carried a fancy silk brocade box, which he placed atop an equipment cabinet.

Rail took a languid drag on his cigarillo. The heavy smoke cascading from his nostrils made him look like a dragon as he lifted the lid of the box. Jake almost sighed audibly at the sight of a short, scarlet-and-black handled knife on a bed of gold silk. Flowers glinted on the black scabbard in mother of pearl, like the inlays on an expensive guitar.

Brickhouse breathed a low whistle of appreciation.

Trevor Rail drew the blade and turned it this way and that, admiring its lethal beauty, light flaring off the razored edge.

Billy said, “It’s cool and all, but I'm not so sure about using it in the artwork.”

“Why not?” Rail asked absently, his eye still on the keen edge.

Billy seemed to search himself for a reason. “Well, the flower theme, for one thing. It’s kind of feminine, don’t you think?”

Breaking out of his hypnotic examination of the play of light on steel, Rail met Billy’s eyes and said, “The samurai revered the cherry blossom because it doesn’t wither on the branch but falls at the pinnacle of its beauty, in full bloom. To them it represented a noble death, embraced without fear at the peak of a man’s powers.
Better to burn out than to fade away,
and all that. So you see, it’s a very rock-and-roll symbol.”

Billy just nodded. The knife went back into the scabbard with the decisive snap of well-oiled, snug-fitting hardware, and then disappeared into the box to the clicking of clasps. End of exhibit. End of discussion.

The night wrapped up with a rough mix of the song, and just when Jake thought he was done for the day at ten past midnight, Rail called over his shoulder on his way out of the control room, sliding into his wool overcoat. “Jake, dub three copies of that DAT onto CDRs for me. Tomorrow morning we’ll have a runner FedEx two of them to the bassist and drummer. Goodnight.”

Brickhouse shot Jake a
Sorry, kid, but that’s the job
look before pulling on his own jacket and following Rail out the door. Billy grabbed a beer from the fridge in the kitchenette and climbed the stairs to the loft where Jake heard him turn on the TV. Alone in the control room, he tore the shrink-wrap from the first CD blank and set about dubbing and writing labels.

He wore headphones while making the dubs, listening for any digital glitches or flaws. He was also still memorizing the lyrics and song structure to make the job of navigating the master tape a task he could perform without pausing to think.

When he took the headphones off, the sound of the TV was absent. Maybe Billy had gone to bed. Jake put the master tape away, turned off the lights and walked across the big room, touching the pocket of his L.L. Bean field coat on the way to make sure he had his car keys. Crossing the room, he noticed a tightening of his breathing and realized he was bracing himself to hear the piano. When the sound came, he wasn’t startled, but he still felt his stomach drop.

He almost quickened his stride, but then he remembered that Billy was here, possibly sleeping or possibly also hearing the phantom melody. Clearly, he had heard it last night, if only in his sleep. He had regurgitated it this morning. If it woke him now, would he think Jake was playing it? For a split second, the idea scared him more than the notion of a ghost in the church. If Billy complained to Eddie or Susan that Jake woke him up in the middle of the night, playing the piano across the loft from his bedroom… But what if Billy heard it and saw the piano bench empty?

Jake took a deep breath and climbed the stairs.

At the top, he saw that the most obvious explanation was the one that had evaded his tired brain. Billy was seated at the piano, hammering out those four uninspired notes, over and over. Jake turned on his heel and put his foot back down on the top step as quietly as he could, but Billy spoke, “I don’t usually dream melodies.”

Jake didn’t know what to say.

“I think the only reason I’m stuck on this one is
because
it came from a dream. It’s pretty unoriginal, don’t you think?”

Jake refrained from telling Billy exactly how unoriginal it really was. Instead, he said, “I guess Rail’s right about it depending on the context.” He took two steps toward the piano, looking over Billy’s shoulder to see what note he was starting on.

Billy played the four quarter notes again: C, D, G, C.

Jake said, “Maybe you’d like it better as a guitar riff, if you messed around with the rhythm. Or maybe on piano but in a different key.”

Billy asked, “Do you play?”

“Yeah, a little. Piano was my instrument at school.”

There was silence between them for some time, except for the piano. Billy played the monotonous sequence. Jake watched him play it. Finally, Jake said, “Try it up a whole step, in D.”

Billy’s fingers climbed up the keyboard and played the same intervals a step higher. It didn’t sound that different at all. Then he stopped playing and sat staring at the keys without blinking. The church was totally silent now. Billy’s lips parted but he didn’t speak. Jake felt a small pain in the palm of his hand and found that he was clenching his fists, digging his nails in as he waited for the D key to play itself right under Billy’s nose. It didn’t.

Billy looked at Jake, eyes wide, and said, “That’s a funny melody.”

Jake raised an eyebrow.

Billy played it again, this time singing the note names as he played them. His tired voice crackled, “Dee, Eee, Aay, Dee… Dead. It spells dead.” He stood up from the bench, picked up his beer bottle and drained it into his mouth. “I’m going to bed, Jake.”

“Okay.”

Billy closed the lid on the keyboard. He walked across the catwalk, leaving Jake standing alone beside the piano, trying to find his feet.

Billy parted the canvas curtain, hesitated, then said, “You were right; it’s much more interesting in that key.”

Nine

Two weeks into the project, Billy Moon had demo versions of six new songs completed, and Trevor Rail decided it was time to start laying the foundations for master recordings with a live rhythm section. The drummer was Steve VanHausen from Cradle of Fire, the bassist Jeff Cabenieri from Diamond Head. The two had never played together before, but their bands had toured with Billy on Lollapalooza the previous summer. By the end of the first take of a song called “Black Curtain,” the chemistry in the room was palpable.

But it wasn't good enough for Trevor Rail, who might as well have been pacing the control room with a cat o' nine tails. The producer wanted to splice together the best performance of each section culled from three or four takes of each song. In the computer, the edits would have been fast and easy, but Rail insisted they be done on the analog master tape with a razor blade, resulting in a grueling series of late nights for the engineers.

After the fourth night of edits wrapping up around four in the morning, Kevin Brickhouse was starting to feel like a zombie. The mirrors on the handlebars of his Indian had told him he was looking like one too, but his assistant, Jake, wasn’t looking so hot either, and Jake didn’t use rocket powder. Brickhouse knew he looked like shit, but as long as the kid looked like shit too, he didn’t have to worry about it. It wasn’t his lifestyle that was killing him; it was just the job. Good.

He looked out of the control room window at the rectory across the field. It was just a little farmhouse with crosses cut into the doors, but damn, the bed was comfortable. The place had a country charm that made him wonder what it would be like to finally settle down someplace quiet, maybe even get married again. Probably boring as all hell. He wondered if maybe it wasn’t such a good thing that this studio had windows—in Manhattan they were as rare as truly great songs—because knowing that dawn had crept up again and being able to see the house where his bed waited was probably only making him more aware of how tired he was. Better to have no sense of place beyond the studio walls and no concept of time beyond the number of beats in the bridge.

He pressed PLAY and listened to the edit again, trying to relax and not focus on it. This time he only paid attention to his tapping foot as the music went by. If the splice was too early, it should catch his attention when his foot felt awkward. But it was smooth; he kept right on tapping into the third chorus. He looked at Jake and raised his eyebrows.

“Sounds good,” Jake said. “Undetectable.”

“Hopefully it’ll still sound good when we’re awake.”

In the gray murk outside, a slouching shadow moved past the window, toward the front door of the church.

“Here comes Gribbens to drag your sorry ass across another sunrise,” Jake said with a hint of mirth in his otherwise tired voice.

“Aw, shit.”

“Why don’t you just tell him you’re going to sleep?”

“I should. He might have something for me, though.”

Ron Gribbens was a runner who had been flirting with the transition to assistant engineer for over a year. Apparently Eddie didn’t trust him enough yet to promote him outright, but he was often assigned to help out with setup or mixdown sessions that required extra hands. Brickhouse had met him on a session he’d done in Studio A the previous winter. A low-fi indie band called Upchuck. Their producer had been stuck on the asinine idea of tracking the entire band live in the big room with stage monitor speakers instead of headphones, resulting in feedback and bleed-through problems that required extra hands to sort out.

Gribbens had done a competent job and had charmed the band enough to stay on for a few days after the extra help was justified. Then Eddie O’Reiley asked him what the fuck he was doing chalking up overtime if the monitor problem was solved and put him back on deli runs. But the band, and Kevin, had been sorry to see him go. Even if everyone knew Gribbens was something of a liability—a well-meaning kid who would probably unplug the right wire at the wrong time if allowed to hang around long enough—he more than made up for it with personality. His jokes had a way of diffusing the tension that so often arose from musicians taking themselves too seriously. Brickhouse figured if the kid’s musical timing was as good as his comedic timing, he would probably rise to engineer before some of his more technically gifted peers.

When Gribbens got wind that Brickhouse was back at Echo Lake for the Billy Moon project, he had started dropping by after sessions with a six-pack, a bottle of Stoli, or a bag of weed. At first Brickhouse had been happy to partake of these gifts, and tired as he was, he did enjoy the kid’s company. They would hang out in the little living room of the rectory watching some rare video—a bootleg of Jeff Beck at the House of Blues, or four hours of Spinal Tap outtakes—and getting drunk.