The Devil of Echo Lake (16 page)

xox,

Ally

Nov. 24, 3:20 AM

Ally,

You’re sleeping right now and you look beautiful. I like looking at your face when it’s totally relaxed and there are no signs of worry on it.

I’m glad you started this journal. I'll take it with me when I can, and write to you on dinner breaks. Speaking of dinner, don't hate me, but we have to work on Thanksgiving. The album is getting more ambitious all the time, and the deadline is coming at us like a train.

One more thing—please switch from pencil to pen. I’m glad you didn’t erase that bit you were worried about, but you could have. I don’t want you censoring your feelings if we’re going to communicate this way. And I don’t want my half of the journal to be all that’s left when we’re 80.

Goodnight.

Love, Jake

*  *  *

Billy's lead guitarist, Flint, apparently didn't have any family obligations for Thanksgiving. He arrived around noon on Thursday in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car with three guitars in the trunk. His amps were already on site, and he seemed pleased to find that while Jake had put the Marshall stack in the big room, he had chosen a tight little closet space for the vintage Fender tweed: the confessional. Flint laughed out loud when Gribbens opened the door on the priest’s side of the box to reveal a binaural head—a Styrofoam mannequin head on a stand, with microphones in the ears. It would pick up a stereo image of the little guitar amp through the metal grate, reflected off the claustrophobic mahogany walls.

“It’s just an idea,” Jake said. “Probably looks cooler than it sounds, but we’ll find out.”

“Cool. I can play out my sins.”

Flint wasted no time. He plugged in and got right to work. The verdict was instant and unanimous—he was brilliant.

They spent the afternoon watching him writhe around with his cowboy boots firmly planted on the red Persian carpet, a sinewy spectacle of tattoos and silver jewelry bathed in the soft purple glow of the stained-glass windows, a joint smoldering from the headstock of his guitar like a stick of incense. He threw his body into every note he played, as if this wasn’t a studio, as if to play at all was to perform one hundred percent. And yet, for all the rock-star swagger, there was no pretension in him.

He knew if what he had just played wasn’t his best, and he didn’t need someone else to tell him. He would immediately ask them to wind it back a few bars and record over a particular passage. This kept Jake on his toes, punching in at exactly the right spot to seamlessly merge the old track with the new one until they had a guitar part that invariably opened up new dimensions of a song without overshadowing anything essential. Moon and Rail were both delighted with the results, and Jake noticed that the shift in focus away from Billy for a day had the effect of lifting a dark cloud from the church.

Flint played until the sun had set and the studio had darkened before announcing, “Man, I could eat a pig.”

Billy called his friend into the control room and announced, “I hired a caterer in honor of Flint’s bottomless stomach. He set up shop right across the road at the farmhouse. Says it’s almost ready. We’ll all eat together tonight, like the Waltons.”

The food was topnotch country cooking: shepherd’s pie and a big colorful salad with warm bread. The chef was a tall fat man who went by J.T. He scooped heaping piles of steaming food out of  casserole dishes onto the farmhouse’s blue-and-white china, all the while talking around the cigarette that dangled from his lower lip. He had a British accent of a different region than Trevor Rail’s—to Jake’s unfamiliar ear, it sounded more working class. When they all complimented the food, J.T. said, “Payple seem to loyk my meals.” Jake had to guess again; maybe the guy was Aussie.  

Back at the church after dinner, they tried out the confessional guitar amp. It was a pretty thin sound and not very usable except for a strange little intro riff that Flint came up with for one song. Jake switched him back to the big amp, and they worked until one in the morning with diminishing returns. Finally, the session devolved into a listening party with Flint and Rail playing CDs for each other and telling war stories about people they had both worked with, over a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch. Gribbens listened eagerly from his perch on the couch at the back of the room, while Jake wondered if they would ever get tired and call it a night. Billy was already passed out on a couch in the big room.

“You know, I think we might have almost worked together once before,” Flint said. “When I was in Kama Sutra, our A&R guy told us you were going to produce our second record but then it fell through. We ended up working with Andy Wilson instead.”

Rail nodded and said, “You ever hear about how Andy got that gig?”

“No, how?”

“Wilson, what a character,” Rail said, swirling the scotch in his glass. “I
was
supposed to do your second record, but it was a very competitive gig after your indie disc hit big. Columbia called me up as soon as they signed you, and I said, of course, I’d love to do it. We even booked the time. It was my idea to record at The Black Lab.”

“Great room,” Flint said and sipped.

“It is. Anyway, as it happens, one day about a week before the first session, Kit Holzinecht opens the door of his office and sees Andy Wilson’s asshole staring at him from across the room with that million-dollar view of the New York City skyline in the background. Wilson, fat bastard that he is, is standing on Kit’s desk, bent over with his pants around his ankles yelling, ‘Come on, you wanna fuck me? Go ahead and fuck me then, huh? You gave the Kama Sutra record to Trevor Rail? Come on, then, fuck me again, if you like it so much.’”

“It’s a shame Kit had to see that, but needless to say, he let Wilson have the record.”

“Oh my God,” Flint said, “How did I never hear about that before?”

“I’m sure Andy didn’t exactly want to brag about it.”

Jake and Gribbens locked eyes and burst out laughing. They couldn’t help it.

Flint rubbed his temples and said, “Unbelievable. And I knew Andy was the wrong producer for that band. The record sucked. It’s probably why we broke up.”

Gribbens was laughing harder now, apparently tickled even further by the idea that a great band could blame their breakup on a producer’s plea for sodomy in a corporate office. When he caught his breath, he said, “That record
did
blow,” a tear streaming down his cheek as he held his hand to his belly and tried to get it under control.

Jake saw the gun sliding out of Rail’s pocket and froze. The draw had a leisurely quality to it. He thought of yelling, but he didn’t know what to yell. He thought of kicking off from the floor to roll his chair away from Trevor Rail, but there was no time.

Rail fired. It was incredibly loud, even in the little room designed to absorb sound. Flint jumped to his feet, spilling scotch and ash on the floor. Gribbens’ laughter was clipped off as if someone had pressed a mute button. White dust rained down from the ceiling onto the assistant’s head. He looked up at the bullet hole in the acoustic tile above him, swallowed, then met Rail’s unblinking gaze.

Rail said, ever so gently, “Our guest may piss on his own record, but you may not.”

The control room doors swung open. Billy stood there taking in the scene from over the front of the mixing console, red-eyed, hair tousled. To Jake, he said, “What the hell was that?”

Jake didn’t answer. The gun was back in Rail’s coat pocket.

Rail rotated his chair to face Billy. “Go on up to bed, Billy. We’re done for the night.”

Twelve

Jake didn't tell Allison about the gunshot incident. He almost wrote about it in the journal that night while she slept, but he could hear her telling him to quit the job, that this was no way to live, that the long hours were bad enough, but at least she hadn't thought she was living with someone who was likely to get killed when he went to work, like an inner city cop. Not until now, anyway. He closed the book without writing anything and went to bed beside her, feeling that to write anything about the night and omit the gunshot would be an outright lie.

He woke up early and went straight to Eddie’s office. Gribbens wasn’t there. Eddie was on the phone. Jake hung back by the door and listened. Eddie was saying, “I don’t know what to tell you, Bob, there’s no standard anymore. I should replace at least one of the old analog Studers with a new one, but I don’t even know if they’ll still be making them in a couple of years. Analog is on the way out.

“The pity of it is that the musicians who are coming up now don’t even know that it really does sound better…. I know. You know what I tell them? I say it has an
infinite sampling rate.
Yeah, I do. Digital can suck my dick; analog tape is the only format with infinite resolution. But who cares, right? At the end of the day, it’s coming out of some guy’s car speakers over the engine noise with the radio station compressing the shit out of it…. Uh-huh. I don’t know what to tell you. None of it’s a good investment. Here today, gone tomorrow. Yup. Alright. Best to Laura. What’s up, Jake?”

“Hey, Eddie.” Jake walked in but didn’t sit down. He said, “Have you seen Gribbens today?”

“No. Why, is he late for the session? If he’s sleeping through, I will wring his neck,” he said, picking up the phone again.

Jake raised his hand and said, “No, he’s not late. We don’t even start until eleven.”

Eddie put the phone back in the cradle. He sat back, studying Jake. “How’s the project going? Are you getting anything you can use?”

“Yeah, we have basics for about nine songs done. Some are really good. Yesterday we started lead guitar overdubs. Everybody seems happy with the sounds.”

“Good. So you’re confident about driving the desk? I mean, I haven’t heard any complaints.”

“Yeah, I think I’m doing alright.”

“Well, I’m waiting to hear back from Danielle Del Vecchio. I told her the studio only includes an assistant with the day rate. Told her they need to find some real money for you, now that you’re engineering.”

“Thanks.”

“You have to make sure Rail gives you the proper credit, too. An engineer credit on a Billy Moon CD could kick-start your career. Of course, then I’d be stuck having to replace you already, so don’t let it go to your head before you have good reason to make the leap. Maybe your phone will start ringing in five months. You never know.”

“Yeah. Uh, listen, Eddie, last night Trevor Rail fired a gun in the studio.”

“In the studio.”

“Yeah, the control room.”

“No shit. He didn’t hit anybody, right? If he did, I would have been woken up,
right, Jake?
”

“No, no, he didn’t hit anybody. I think he was aiming for the ceiling.”

“Why?”

“You mean there could be a rational reason? I don’t know why. To make a point, I guess. He’s pretty dramatic to say the least.”

“So I’m told.”

“Well, what do we do about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, are people allowed to fire guns in the studio? I didn’t see anything about firearms in the facilities handbook. Are you going to call the police or talk to him about it?”

Eddie sighed through puffed cheeks and fat lips. He looked at the paper-strewn blotter on his desk and said, “Jake, I know you’re new at this, but don’t talk about calling the cops again or I’m going to start worrying about you. If I called the cops every time I heard about one of our clients using illicit drugs, or having an orgy with a bunch of prostitutes, or, hell I don’t know, practicing animal sacrifice to invoke their muse for a vocal track, I would have put us out of business in the seventies.

“The biz is full of people who are highly unstable, theatrical, and emotional. Our job is to stay sober, levelheaded, and non-judgmental about their lifestyle choices. It’s really none of our business, if no one gets hurt.”

“Somebody
could
get hurt. Eddie, I don’t know about this guy. He’s kind of a loose cannon. Definitely, somebody could get hurt.”

“Rail is an intense character, but he’s not going to
kill
anybody. It’s like how some film directors establish a tense atmosphere on the set to motivate the crew or to provoke inspired performances. People hate those guys, but they make some of the best movies. Are you sure he wasn’t firing blanks?”

“There’s a hole in the ceiling.”

“Hmm. I’ll have Buff spackle it when the project’s over.”

“I’m not getting paid enough to take a bullet.”

“Are you saying you want off the project? Do you want me to tell Danielle they need to find another engineer?”

Jake considered. Then he said, “No. I just thought you should know what’s going on down there. We’ve already had one fatality.”

“Come on, that was an accident. Look, Jake, it's not the first time a producer or artist ever put his gun fetish on parade. Phil Specter was legendary for waving a gun around on those Wall of Sound sessions. Fuckin’ David Crosby, the gentle hippie? He’s a gun nut. Just chill. If you let this kind of thing get to you, you won’t last long.”

“Forget I said anything, then.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear you’re getting decent tracks. Let me know if you need anything.”

Jake turned to leave. Eddie called after him, “Hey, Jake! You let me know if he puts a slug in any of our equipment. The ceiling’s one thing, but if he shoots up any vintage gear, Gravitas is gonna have to pay for it.”

*  *  *

Billy woke to the sound of a fist banging on the front door downstairs. He crawled out of bed and pulled his black kimono over his pale, naked body on his way across the catwalk. When he opened the heavy double doors, he found Flint, fist cocked for the next round of pounding. Billy said, “You should be careful with that hand. We still have to get another day or two of tracks out of it.”

Flint looked like he had forgotten to take his sense of humor with him when he left the rectory across the road. He appraised his red knuckles and said, “Motherfucker must be solid oak. I thought you’d never hear me.”