Five Flavors of Dumb (7 page)

It took me a moment to translate the message into English, but the gist of it was clear enough. Dumb would be spending Sunday afternoon recording a song they’d only just written, and had only rehearsed once.

Okay, so my genius had limits.

I stopped by everyone’s houses on the way to the recording session so that we could arrive together. It was a calculated decision to save on gas, make sure we all got there, and to elicit sympathy from Baz Firkin when he realized what a heap of crap I was driving. (USS
Immovable
had always gotten me sympathetic looks from everyone at school.)

The session started at noon on Sunday. Or rather, it
would
have started at noon if we’d realized that the studio was in the basement of a crumbling craftsman cottage. Instead, we drove back and forth through the funky neighborhood of Fremont a dozen times, looking for the snazzy building with tinted windows that turned out to exist only in our imaginations.

There was no doubt whatsoever that the man who emerged from the house a minute later was Baz Firkin. He sported a worn paisley shirt and faded black jeans, a ragged gray-brown ponytail floating down his back like a trail of smoke still lingering from the 1980s. I wondered how he’d made it through prison in one piece.

“Greetings, young ones,” he exclaimed as he glided toward us, although he seemed to be addressing only me. (Maybe he was distracted by my hearing aids—I noticed his eyes lingering on my ears as we shook hands.) “And may I say what a beautiful beast of a machine that is,” he added, pointing to USS
Immovable
. “I used to have one just like it. That was back when velour seats came standard, of course, not as an extra.”

Baz led us to a basement door, unlocking it with a rusty key. As he yanked it toward him, flakes of paint fell off.

“Et voila!” he cried, leaning back to afford us an uninterrupted view of the narrow hallway beyond.

No one spoke.

“Now, don’t mind the standing water,” said Baz calmly. “I’ve just laid rat traps.”

Ed followed Baz inside, pressing himself against the least mold-ridden wall, as if that might reduce his chances of contracting something contagious.

Baz retrieved another key, this one glinting like solid gold. He slid it into the lock on a second door, pushed the door open, and stood back once more.

I don’t know if anyone else spoke, but I’m pretty sure that I gasped.

Behind the door was a studio control room—a real one, with banks of electronic equipment that looked like it had been lifted from NASA headquarters. Behind the controls, separated by at least a couple panes of glass, was the studio. True, it had a peculiar odor, but it was a real studio with microphones on stands, and headphones for the musicians.

I looked at Dumb, and for a split second I could tell we were all thinking the same thing: We’d
arrived
.

Baz ushered the band inside, told them where to sit and how he’d control things like balance and reverb from the control room. To deter him from involving me in decisions about the band’s sound, I retreated to the corner of the control room and studied his notice board. One of the notices was for KSFT-FM, a local radio station looking for new bands to promote, so I scribbled down the e-mail address. Then I began snapping more artistic black-and-white photos of Will sweeping his hair back, and Josh manhandling two microphones at once—the kind of pics that would be collector’s items once Dumb became a household name (ha!).

It was 12:30 before Dumb was ready to begin recording, by which time Baz’s effervescent exterior had cooled somewhat. He signaled that I should stop taking photos, and indicated that my place was on a chair beside him. Then he closed the door and began relaying instructions to the players on the other side of the window. I wondered if their hearts were beating as quickly as mine.

I was delighted to discover that the control room was completely soundproofed, which had the advantage that I could hear Baz surprisingly well as long as he spoke up. I understood his commands, his approach, and what he wanted from the band. I even began to wonder if I was a natural in the recording studio.

Ten minutes later, I was aware of what a
dis
advantage it was to be able to hear Baz. I understood perfectly his confusion, bemusement, and general disgust. I was also able to decode at least one in three of his expletives, which equated to about one every ten seconds.

And it wasn’t exactly hard to see why he was so pissed. Tash and Will seemed completely overwhelmed by the experience of being in a real studio, fumbling around like their guitars had grown extra strings. Even Ed looked a little stage-struck. And at the front, the ball of energy known as Josh Cooke squeezed the headphones against his ears as he jumped and jived to a beat that must have been coming from a different song. Baz told him to sit down; Josh said he couldn’t. Baz told him that his movements were being picked up by the microphone and would ruin the song; Josh said his movements were an intrinsic part of the song. Baz opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

After two extremely deep, calming breaths, and a few seconds of total silence, Baz turned to me. “Is there another song you’d prefer to work on?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Okay,” he tried again, “let me rephrase that. Which song would you like to work on now?”

“The same one,” I said, but timidly.

“It’s utter crap. Pick another.”

“We don’t have another.”

Baz’s mouth hung open long enough for me to count his cavities. “Now
that
is the most depressing news I’ve heard since the judge put me behind bars.”

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 12:50. We had another two hours, but I’d have given anything to leave right then.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

I peered through the window. I knew Ed was frustrated at himself for letting us down, but Tash and Will still looked freaked out. And Josh was as clueless as before, rehearsing his movements like they had any relevance whatsoever in a recording studio.

When I didn’t answer, Baz clapped his hands together. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen: Dumb is going to perform the song over and over for the next hour. I’ll mark the useable sections of each track, then we’ll spend the last hour editing them together into a single track.” He smiled, but it was a patronizing smile that made me feel even more useless than before.

I looked at Dumb again, all of them still now, wondering why the instructions had dried up. Which is when I realized that Baz had turned off the connection between the rooms. My conversation with him was for our ears only; no point in battering the band’s morale any more. Baz’s offer was about as generous as we could hope for, I knew that, but I also knew that a true manager wouldn’t settle for it, and I knew I couldn’t either.

“Wouldn’t it be better for them to do one complete, perfect track?” I asked.

Baz snorted. “You’ll be lucky if they can pull off one complete, perfect verse.”

I have to say I liked the ebullient Baz much more than the obnoxious one. “Please turn on the speaker in the studio.”

“I don’t think you want them to hear what I have to say.”

“Yes, I do,” I said decisively. Baz shrugged as he flicked a switch. “Listen up, guys,” I said, staring through the window at the band. “We have two hours left. We’re going to run the song over and over, with a one-minute break between each track. If you need a drink, grab a bottle of water from my bag in the corner. Otherwise, sit still, focus, and let’s nail this thing.”

Baz leaned back and prepared himself, but he wouldn’t make eye contact.

After half an hour, Dumb had performed “Let Go, I Feel Crappy” eight times. Seven of those were incomplete versions, aborted mid-song following catastrophic collapses that caused the entire group to surrender en masse. The other one was bad enough that Ed looked deflated and Tash looked psychotic.

Another half hour, another six versions (four of them complete!), but I didn’t need to hear Dumb to know they were playing out of time with each other. To make matters worse, they were wearing down now and I knew they didn’t have many more renditions in them. Even Josh reluctantly sat down between takes, as dismayed as the Energizer Bunny to discover his batteries were running low.

I told Baz to take five, and I joined the band next door. They all removed their headphones, but only Ed looked up as I walked in.

“So here’s the deal. Baz wants to edit useable sections of each track together to make a single good performance,” I explained.

Tash was already nodding vigorously. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

I held up my hand. “If that’s what you all want, fine. But I think we can get one perfect continuous take.”

“Who cares?” Josh shrugged. “No one’s going to know either way.”

I gave the others a chance to have their say, but no one else seemed to have the energy. “It’s true, no one else will know. But
you
will, and I think you can do it. I saw you on the school steps, and you had everyone transfixed. You’re too good to cheat your way out of Dumb’s first original song.”

I don’t know what I expected anyone to say, but I certainly didn’t imagine that Will would be the one to agree. “Yeah,” he said, nodding his head in slow motion. Then: “Yeah.”

Suddenly Tash seemed to have a change of heart as well. “I guess it would be more satisfying to nail it.”

“Okay, good,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “So how can we make this work?”

“Well, the problem is, I’m not used to wearing headphones while I play,” explained Tash gruffly. “And the clicks are throwing me off. And my guitar sounds weird.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. I hate not being to hear the others the way I normally do. It’s weird.”

Everyone else nodded too.

“So leave the headphones off,” I said.

“It’ll be hard to stay in time without the click track,” cautioned Ed. “The acoustics here aren’t the same as in the garage.”

I couldn’t help thinking that these kinds of issues must arise for most bands the first time they record in a studio, and that Baz would know what to do. But having rejected his earlier suggestion, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for advice now. This was my band, and my problem. I needed to fix it myself.

“What about Ed’s metronome?” I said finally. “It has a flashing display. You could all watch that.”

Ed shook his head. “It’s LCD. We’ll never see it.”

“What if I relayed it to you from the control room?”

“You mean . . . you’re going to conduct us?”

It was so completely insane that I expected everyone to laugh. But no one did. Instead, Ed reached behind himself and pulled the little black box from his bag. He moved a dial, set the display flashing, and handed it over. Then he ran out to the hallway and grabbed a broom.

“Take this,” he said. “Make sure the handle hits the ground in time with the light. It’ll make the beat really clear. But you’ll need to go back to the control room, or the microphones will pick up the sound.”

A minute later I was standing behind the window once again, smiling anxiously as Baz watched me banging my broomstick up and down. He could have said something sarcastic, but to his credit, he didn’t. If anything, I felt like I’d won him over in some small way.

For the next hour I pounded my broom, and Dumb pounded to the steady beat of “Let Go, I Feel Crappy.” I felt the broom’s beats jarring my body like mini-earthquakes. Blisters formed on my thumb and palm, but I never took my eyes off that stupid flashing display. If Dumb could play through the pain, so could I. When else would I get to feel it too?

At 2:55 Dumb finished the twentieth and final rendition of the song, making it abundantly clear that their favorite version was number 17. At 2:59 Baz burned a CD of it, ejected the disk, and signed off for the afternoon.

“They need to practice harder,” he said. “If they’re really going to do this, they need to work
much
harder.”

“They will,” I assured him. “But they got better, right?”

Baz laughed. “Are you going to stand in front of them during their gigs too? If so, make sure you get equal billing. People will pay a lot to see the girl with the broom.”

 

Tash kept up a running commentary for the three miles back to her house, but I didn’t make any attempt to listen, or to catch snippets of her monologue by lip-reading in the rearview mirror. I could make a wild, stab-in-the-dark guess about what she was saying, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled with how things had gone either.

Eventually it was just Ed and me, but he hesitated when we reached his house. I could see in my peripheral vision that he wanted to say something, so I turned to face him, hoping it wouldn’t be too critical.

“I’m sorry, Piper,” he said. “I let you down today.”

Okay, that was the last thing I expected him to say. “What are you talking about?”

“I made so many mistakes. One of the times the song broke down, it was
my
fault.”

I had to keep from laughing. “You feel guilty because you screwed up
once
? Wow, if that’s our new standard I should be looking to replace Tash and Will ASAP.”

Ed smiled at that. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s just . . . I don’t want to sound cocky, but I’ve had a little more experience than them, you know? But that session was so new. No audience to distract me. Nothing but one song and a microphone that’s waiting for me to screw up.”

I held out my hand to stop him. “Look, Ed, if anyone should be feeling dumb right now, it’s me. I was the one banging a broom handle on the floor.”

“No, you did great! You held us together. Besides, that’s how people used to conduct orchestras before batons: They just hammered a staff into the ground.” I laughed. “No, I’m serious,” he protested.