Seven

 

“For where God built a church,

there the Devil would also build a chapel.”

Martin Luther

 

 

 

Billy Moon came to Echo Lake on the second of November, a perfect fall day. Jake arrived at the church at eleven in the morning, one hour before the session start time. He parked his newly purchased, rusty Pontiac under the stand of pines, unlocked the double doors, and set the heavy black flight case he was carrying on the floor. The vast room was silent from the waxed floorboards and threadbare Persian rugs to the cobwebbed rafters. A hint of Pine Sol and the stronger aroma of fresh brewed coffee hung in the air. He had passed Rita, the head housekeeper, on the road from the main building.

Jake poured himself a paper cup of coffee in the kitchenette. He put a CD on in the control room and patched it through to the monitor speakers in the big room so he could listen while he set up. It was Peter Gabriel’s Passion soundtrack, a record that had kindled his interest in engineering in the first place.

He looked over his notes while the coffee and music sparked his brain into work mode. Kevin Brickhouse had requested a pretty standard assortment of microphones for the drum kit, and Jake had them all in the flight case. On the phone, Brickhouse had put Jake at ease with his friendly tone, but he also sounded tired. He had even joked that he would be leaning pretty hard on Jake if he didn’t get some sleep before leaving the Hit Factory, where he was finishing up a Ska record before making the trip up I-87 to Echo Lake on his Harley. “Thank God for Peruvian rocket powder, eh kid?”

As second engineer, Jake’s first priority was to keep the session moving without a hitch, hovering in the background like a good waiter, never voicing his own opinions on musical matters unless they were asked for, and then as diplomatically as possible. If everything went smoothly, he should be seldom noticed and take no credit for the session’s success.

But if things went awry, if equipment failed, as it invariably did in every project, or if the engineer made a mistake in front of the producer, it was his job to step in and remedy the situation, bypassing or replacing the faulty gear so fast no one noticed, or (in the case of operator error) taking the blame to save face for the guy making ten times the pay he was.

In a room lined wall-to-wall with buttons, knobs, and LCD screens, he was expected to be able to patch a sound through any combination of processors in any order without hesitation at two in the morning, in the dark, after three weeks of fourteen-hour days, catering to the whims of ego maniacs and drug addicts.

For this he could reasonably expect to earn rent and gas money and his name in microscopic print somewhere in the CD booklet. That was the apprenticeship his teachers had told him to expect. It was worth it, they said, because if you persisted and made a good impression, the day would come when an artist or producer would ask you to engineer the next one. Or, if you were very lucky, the engineer you were assisting would get sick and put you in the driver’s seat, so make sure you order his Chinese food from the worst joint in town. It wasn’t rocket science, but there were producers who acted like it was open-heart surgery. One mistake could cost you your career. There was the legend about the assistant who had walked off in the night, never to be seen again, after realizing he’d accidentally erased a Steely Dan master tape, or the one about how Paul Simon had vomited upon learning an assistant had erased one of his vocal tracks.

It reminded him of that children’s game Operation where you tried to remove plastic bones from the patient with a pair of metal tweezers, and a buzzer went off if you touched the sides. You were trying to get something out of the artist without damaging it—probing the heart without jolting the nerves. Recording music was a craft that existed somewhere on the borderland between art and science. Terrain that Trevor Rail and Kevin Brickhouse were reputedly very good at navigating.

Brickhouse made a loud entrance shortly after noon. Jake heard the Harley coming long before it pulled up in front of the church. He had once seen a picture of Brickhouse in Mix magazine, but the man’s appearance had changed since then. He no longer had hair, for one thing, and judging by the cinnamon and salt stubble that framed his face, Jake could tell he had taken the skinhead option as a rock fashion solution to the receding hairline he’d already had in that magazine shot.

He wore a black t-shirt that said guttermonkey in a lowercase logo, under an unbuttoned blue denim work shirt and blue jeans smeared with oil from the hog. An open bracelet made from a metal rod with a ball bearing on each end adorned his left wrist while an athletic wristwatch as thick as a double-stuffed Oreo squeezed the other above the hand that was swinging his Captain America motorcycle helmet by its leather strap.

He smiled at Jake with eyes that were friendly but sunken. Something about that look made Jake think of concentration camps.

“You Jake?”

“Yes. Kevin, it’s good to meet you.”

“I don’t think you were here the last time I was.”

“I’m new here.”

“Brian still work here?”

“Yes.”

“Cool. I’ll have to drag him out for a beer one of these nights. So, I see the drums made it. We won’t set up any mics for them until they bring a drummer in—probably not until next week at the earliest. To start, I think we’ll just be rolling tape while Billy plays around on the guitar and the computer. Just documenting song ideas, but we have to be prepared to use it as a master if he gets anything good down, so I want you to start by printing code on track twenty-four for the first few reels. That way we can lock in with his laptop and even automate some rough mixes later on.”

Jake got to work immediately. He was almost finished prepping the tapes when Trevor Rail arrived. His first look at the legendary producer eased some of the low-grade anxiety that had been plaguing his stomach ever since Eddie had assigned him to the project. Rail had cemented a reputation as a mean bastard, but Jake had been lacking a mental image to attach to the noxious persona.

Steve, one of the other assistants who had worked with Rail in the city before coming to Echo Lake, had done his best impersonation for Jake while they sat in the shop doing busywork. Steve’s English accent needed work, but he had sworn that the content of such priceless one liners as “Talk while I’m listening to playback one more time and I’ll do a razor edit on your windpipe” were taken verbatim from old “Third Rail.”

With a build-up like that, Jake was taken aback when the Trevor Rail he met on November second greeted him with a disarming smile that offset the seriousness of the man’s white-frosted black goatee and widow’s peak. Rail's nose and sideburns were sharp and angular, but his posture and clothes telegraphed the kind of laconic ease that Jake associated with wealth. When he introduced himself, his voice was gentle and courteous, his accent soft and attractive. It was difficult to imagine that voice rising in anger. What was I expecting, Jake wondered, a tail?

But when Trevor Rail curled his fingers around Jake's eagerly extended hand and squeezed it firmly in his own, everything changed. There was a low, droning malevolence transmitted by that hand, and Jake recoiled from it as if he had just opened a kitchen drawer in someone else's house, searching for a butter knife, only to find a handgun instead.

Rail ambled around the big room, chatting with Brickhouse about where he wanted Billy Moon’s workstation set up. More road cases had been delivered by Rock-It Cargo since Jake had opened the building, and Rail said he didn’t expect to get any further than setting up and maybe tracking the skeleton of a song tonight, if Billy was up for it.

“Does he have some strong material this time?” Brickhouse asked.

“I don’t know if he has any material. We’re going to write. Together, maybe.”

“No kidding. I didn’t know you wrote music.”

“Well, let’s say I have ideas. I’m more of a concept man. A catalyst,” Rail said.

“So it’s going to be a concept album?”

“God, no. Not like what they used to mean by that. But all of the best rock records have some kind of concept behind them, and Billy is at a point in his career where he could use one. Even Kurt Cobain, who despised all of that pompous seventies crap, had concepts.”

“So what is it? What’s the concept for this record that has no songs yet?”

“Maybe… Love and Death? What has great music or poetry ever been about, but those twin forces that undo a man?”

“Anyone ever tell you, you can be more pretentious than your artists?” Brickhouse said with a smile.

“I won’t deny high ambition. I want to make an immortal record.”

“Immortal, huh? Sure you don’t want to just stick with making immoral records? You’re good at it.”

“Kevin, I want to produce something that will still be on the charts in twenty years. A record that will outlive modern rock.”

“I’d say that was grandiose, but these days, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Just make a hip-hop record and it’ll outlive rock-and-roll. Rock is gonna be marginalized just like jazz and blues were. Whatever rock is—guitar music—it’s gonna be the soundtrack for nursing homes when the boomers retire. It won’t be cool anymore. That’s why I’m working like a mad motherfucker while I can.”

“You may be wrong, my friend. A new generation is discovering the first Doors album. They’re buying Imagine and Electric Ladyland, and in twenty years, new kids will still be buying Nevermind.”

“All of those albums outlived their creators because the artists died young.”

“There is something romantic about it, don’t you think? It adds to the mythos.”

“Worked for Elvis.”

“Elvis, you see? His myth outlived the rock-and-roll of his time. He and Bob Marley are on par with Jesus. They’re more than rock stars; they’re spiritual icons. That’s what I want to do: shape a legend.” Rail plucked a red pen from a coffee cup and twirled it in his long fingers.

“But you can’t plan that. You just have to be in the right place at the right time. Those artists are freaks of nature. And who can say why the world was ready for a certain voice?”

“I think some voices would reach an audience in any time. Styles come and go, but a voice that’s telling the truth about sex and death, a voice that’s been shaped by those energies, saturated by them… That’s magnetic. And it's the magic of this business to capture that genie in a bottle and sell it.”

Jake had given up even pretending to organize cables within earshot of the conversation and had drifted closer, fascinated.

“Maybe you can capture that,” Brickhouse said, “but you can’t create it or contrive it. Why do you think all these A&R sluts are always getting laid off and bouncing from one label to another? Those guys can’t do it either. You can’t manufacture gods. You can’t calculate genius.”

“Genius is overrated.”

“Well, the magazines sure do wear the word out. But Lennon, Morrison and Hendrix… Those guys were in a feedback loop with a cultural zeitgeist. Not likely to happen again in this jaded age, if you want my opinion. And that messiah thing? I don’t think that’s genius, exactly. More like a combination of beauty and tragedy.”

“There you have it: Sex and Death.”

“I thought your concept was Love and Death.”

“Love is elusive. Sex can be inspired with far greater precision.”

“And how do you inspire death?”

“I suspect it has something to do with putting the artist in the right place… at the right time.”

Rail lit a cigarillo and cast his gaze around the church in silence, taking it all in before heading back to his black BMW and disappearing up the dirt road toward the main building.

 

*  *  *

 

Jake was busy setting up equipment for the rest of the day while the pale light drained out of the sky. At seven-thirty Rail called the control room to ask if Moon had arrived.

“No sign of the artiste yet, eh, Jake? Alright, then. Take a dinner break and call me when you see the Moon,” Rail said and hung up.

Brickhouse sighed and drummed his hands on the Neve console’s leather palm rest. “So now we’re starting at what? Eight, nine, or ten? Man, I don’t know if I’ll be awake by then.”

“There are a few beds upstairs,” Jake said. “You could take a nap, and I’ll wake you up if Billy shows.”

“That’s tempting. But I’ve been up for almost seventy-two hours already. If I go to sleep now, I won’t be worth shit in two hours. I’ll just feel worse.” He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Do you know if I’m bunking here anyway?”

“Eddie said Billy wants to sleep here so if he gets an idea in the middle of the night, he can just come down and grab a guitar. You have the house across the road to yourself. It’s the old church rectory. Rail’s up the hill in the mountain house.”

“Well, if I’m staying right across the road, I may as well go unpack my saddle bags. Be back in a bit.”

Jake took the cordless phone with him and went upstairs to watch TV and wait for Billy.

When he came back down after an hour of back-to-back sitcoms, he found Brickhouse in one of the isolation booths using a tape-splicing razor blade to cut lines of cocaine on the metal surface of an empty tape flange. He watched as the engineer snorted up through a plastic straw, shook his head with a little shiver and glanced up at Jake through the window. Brickhouse pointed down at the little pile of coke with raised eyebrows. Jake held up his hand and silently mouthed the words, “No, thanks.”

Jake busied himself with filling in the hourly log on the work order for the day’s session, which so far didn’t entail much. He walked back into the big room to brew another pot of coffee, heard a couple of piano notes cascading down from the loft and froze in his tracks. He looked up, expecting to see no one, and instead saw a thin figure in a black T-shirt and tight black jeans hunched over the keys, face obscured by a mass of wavy black hair, cut straight at the chin. Jake let out a little plosive breath that was equal parts laugh and sigh.

He turned on his heel, went back into the control room, and dialed the mountain-house extension on the phone. “Billy Moon is here.”

Trevor Rail entered the church ten minutes later. Jake was threading a fresh tape onto the multi-track, Brickhouse was scrolling through the LCD screen of a signal processor, and Moon was still poking around with an arpeggiated chord progression on the grand piano up in the shadowy loft above the hanging lamps that cast pools of yellow light on the scratched and tape-marked wood floor of the big room.

The piano playing stopped when the double doors closed behind Rail. Jake watched through the control room glass as Billy Moon slowly floated down the spiral staircase and leaned against the banister near the bottom, staring at the producer. Jake could read the tentative body language, but not the expression on Moon’s face—there was more light in the control room than out there and Jake’s own reflection was superimposed over the reunion scene as Rail approached and then embraced his artist, cupping Billy’s head in his large hand, then looking him in the eyes with their foreheads pressed together like lovers about to kiss. Rail was saying something. Moon was nodding a little. Jake wished the talkback mic was on out there.

A moment later the pair came into the control room, and Moon gave a pat on the arm to Brickhouse, who slapped the singer’s shoulder, completing an awkward maneuver that was not quite half a hug, accompanied by a mutual, “Good to see you, man.” 

Jake introduced himself with a quick handshake before withdrawing to his place at the back of the room to await instructions. Billy looked relieved. He sat down heavily into one of the ergonomically perfect swivel chairs, rolled backward, put his Doc Martens up on the cushioned lip of the console and lit a cigarette. Rail leaned against the wall beside the cedar-framed glass doors through which a stone path could be seen winding away among the moonlit dead leaves down to a rushing stream.

Rail put his hands in his pockets and crossed his legs, the tip of one oiled, snakeskin boot pointing at the floor. His voice sounded lazy and indifferent when he spoke. “So, Billy, what would you like to do?”

Billy took a slow drag on his cigarette.

“D'you have any songs you'd like to play for me? Your rig is all set up out there. Of course, if you’re tired, we can start fresh tomorrow,” Rail said.

Billy took his time stamping the butt out in the ashtray Jake had set beside him on top of a rack of vintage pre-amps, then said, “Yeah, I’ve got something I could play you. Been writing on the computer in hotels a little bit. Keep in mind, it’s just a rough sketch at this stage.”

Things started happening fast after that. Billy powered up his laptop and sat down at the workstation Jake had arranged on a red Persian carpet in the middle of the big room following a diagram Danielle Del Vecchio had faxed him. Spinning knobs on a little desktop mixer and an array of synth modules, Billy conjured up a groove—sparse at first, just a heavy, deliberate drumbeat, which gradually built in volume and intricacy as he added pulsating bass lines and scratchy bursts of sampled guitar noise.

Brickhouse quickly identified each musical element and assigned them to tracks on the tape machine. Jake wrote the names—KICK, SNARE, HAT, SYNBASS, GTR1, GTR2— with a Sharpie in neat block letters on a strip of white masking tape under the console faders. Brickhouse called out orders to Jake for various compressors and reverbs, giving him just enough time to grab a pair of cables from a hook on the wall and stab them into jacks in the matrix for each device before calling out the next configuration. “Give me that bass line through the LA-2A on insert four, and patch aux two to the 480L, pre-fader, return on channel twenty-six.”

The groove looped over and over. Eventually it stopped mutating, and Jake looked up at Billy through the glass, just in time to see him grab the cheap talkback mic from the boom stand over his keyboard and pull it closer. Brickhouse was looking down at the console when Jake reached over his shoulder and pressed a tiny button the size of a Tic Tac in the vast field of controls.

Brickhouse saw what Jake had done and completed the idea by shooting his right hand out and slapping the PLAY and RECORD keys on the multi-track remote control pad beside his chair. There was a sound of mechanical tension arms locking into place and tape began to roll just a half a beat before Billy started singing.

 

Do you bite your lip?

Do you twirl your hair?

Do you swing your hips?

Do you even care?

Do you raise your voice, drop your pants,

Do you even have a choice, did you ever have a chance?

In a dirty phone booth

Do you swear to tell the truth?

How do you speak the language of love?

   

As below, so above

As the serpent, so the dove

The world is whispering the language of love

You can hear it in the calm

In the space between the bombs

The world is whispering the language of love

 

Do you pierce your lip?

Do you paint your nails?

Do you start to strip

When all else fails?

Do you crack your whip, empty your clip

Sing and dance on a sinking ship

For love

 

Billy stopped singing and slapped the space bar on the laptop. The groove stopped short, the last beat echoing through the reverb processors in the control room. “My voice is shit tonight, but you get the idea.”

Rail pushed open the glass plate doors that separated the control room from the big room, took a long slow breath, and said, “I smell money. Simply fantastic, Billy. The ragged voice even sort of suits it. Have you been chain smoking since your father’s death?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, keep it up, mate. It adds character. What do you say we go into town for a drink? We’ll pick it up in the morning.” Without waiting for a reply, he called out, “Kevin, come have a drink with us,” and to Jake, “We’ll pick it up tomorrow at eleven sharp.”

The three men put their jackets on. Brickhouse lingered a moment in the control room before following them out to Rail’s car. “Good job catching that vocal on the fly. ’Night, Jake.”

When the sound of Rail’s car had receded into the night, Jake spun the tape off the take-up reel, packed it into its box and finished documenting the equipment settings. He picked up his black nylon bag and slung it over his shoulder as he walked through the live room toward the front door. Moon would be going upstairs to sleep when he got back from the bar, so Jake left most of the lights on, darkening only the control room, which continued to sparkle and pulse with the perpetual activity of flashing LEDs.

He was halfway across the floor toward the ironbound oak doors when he heard the piano in the loft sound a solitary note. He froze in place, awash with dread, ears pricked.

It came again, like a bell.

He thought of bolting across the remaining distance to the door, but he knew that to do so would only lend credence to the notion that something real and awful was happening here. He resisted the urge. What if he was imagining the sound? It was certainly not difficult to vividly imagine a single note being struck on the instrument he had played since childhood. It wasn’t as if he were hearing a fully fleshed-out, two-handed piece of music. Surely his mind could evoke a single repetitive note in such detail that it seemed real to his tired brain.

So why not climb the stairs and see?

Would the note grow louder as he ascended to the loft? Would he see the key moving, like on a player piano, driven by some invisible hand? He felt the pressing need to urinate, but not here; it could wait until he got home.

The note rang out again. Tension iced his shoulders and he let out a short cry. He wondered if it was a black key or a white.

He looked at the other piano under its canvas cover in the kitchen area. Walking to it felt like walking through the shallow end of a pool. The solitary note from the loft resounded again as Jake lifted the cover and raised the keyboard lid. It was a high note, something in the octave above middle C.

He struck the E in that octave. As it faded, the phantom note came again, clashing horribly with the diminishing tail of the note he had played. That meant he had been very close in his guess. But the fact that a note he had actually played could vibrate with such dissonance in relation to what he wanted to believe was an aural hallucination caused the hair on his arms to rise as if lightning were about to strike nearby. 

The note from above sounded again.

He struck the next key down from the E he had tried and that was it. That was the one: unison. It was D, an octave above middle C.

As if pleased with his discovery, the grand piano in the loft played four notes this time: a short melody starting on the D, moving up, then down low, then up again, like a doorbell chime.

Now there was a beat to accompany the melody. It was his heart.