Chapter 3: The Supporting Cast

Santa Clarita, California

July 15, 1991

The headquarters (and the only physical building) of KVA Records was located in a nondescript single-story office building in the midst of hundreds in a newly developed Santa Clarita business park. The buildings were all black and gray with large tinted windows and spacious parking lots. They had all been constructed in the last two years with the intention that family doctors and dentists, personal injury lawyers, chiropractors, low-end accountants, and minor league architecture firms would be the target tenants.

Unfortunately for the real estate developers who had planned and built the complexes, the economy had taken a sharp downturn shortly after the wildly successful conclusion of the Persian Gulf War. Fully ninety-five percent of the more than one million square feet of office space in the complex stood unoccupied and with no prospects in sight. KVA Records, the lessees of three thousand square feet of rear building space at 2501 Prospect Park Lane, did not mind this at all. They had been able to sign a two-year lease on their offices for the absurdly low price of twelve dollars per square foot per year. The owners were so desperate for tenants that they had even thrown in the required sound-proofing of the studio portion of the office for ten percent less than cost.

It was ten minutes to nine o’clock in the morning when Jake pulled his BMW into a parking spot in front of the office. Already parked in their accustomed spots were a silver 1991 Mercedes S-class, and a lovingly cared for gray 1985 Honda Civic. That meant that Celia and the Nerdlys were already present and accounted for. This was typical. There was not a battered 1982 Toyota pickup or a 1988 Honda Accord currently parked in the lot, however. That meant that Ted Duncan and Ben Ping, their hired drummer and bass player, respectively, were not here yet. This too was typical. Ben always showed up exactly at nine o’clock, which was starting time. Ted tended to come rolling in at least five minutes late, sometimes as much as twenty.

Sitting next to Jake, in the passenger seat, was his mother. She was dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a white button-up blouse. Her hair was loosely tied back in a ponytail. She sipped from an insulated mug of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee that Elsa had prepared for her to take on the road. Today would be her fifth session in the studio and she was still enjoying the novelty of working with her son and his friends and learning the ins and outs of how their music was put together.

The two of them stepped out of the car and walked to the main office door. It was made of reinforced glass and was secured by an electronic lock. KVA STUDIOS LLC was printed in simple white text at eye level. He punched in the code—it was 40191, the date they had moved into the building—and the lock disengaged. He opened the door for his mother and they entered an empty reception area. There was no furniture here, no water cooler, no telephone. There was no need for a receptionist at KVA currently and no money to spare to hire one even if such a position was needed.

At the back of the reception area was another door that had no words printed on it at all. They walked through this door and into a hallway. Opposite the reception area door was a restroom that contained a simple shower area. Left from the reception area door, the hallway led to a conference room in which a simple wooden table and eight simple chairs had been placed. Here, a phone sat upon the table and, in the corner, was an IBM computer that, at the insistence of Nerdly, was hooked into a separate phone line and connected to something called CompuServe, the purpose and usefulness of which only Nerdly himself understood. Jake ignored the empty conference room and turned right instead. Here, the hallway ended in a heavy soundproof door. Beyond this door was the actual studio part of KVA Records. This door was of steel construction and was equipped with two deadbolt locks, a security bar, and was wired to a remotely monitored security system. No one gave a shit if a burglar made it into the front part of the building, but the heart and soul—not to mention a good portion of invested money from the partners—was behind the studio door.

Jake disengaged the locks with a key and they went inside. The studio was fifty feet by twenty, windowless, and featured cheap industrial gray tile flooring. The walls were bare of pictures or other decorations. The studio chairs were identical to the conference room chairs, which was to say that they were cheap office supply chairs designed for maybe two years of useful service. The recording equipment in the room was not commercial quality. It consisted of an analog sound board hooked to three amplifiers and a bank of cassette player/recorders. There was a platform just in front of the soundboard, made of treated plywood. It held Ted’s ten-piece drum set. Sitting to the left of the drum platform was Nerdly’s pride and joy: the Korg M1 digital synthesizer. To the right of it was a Yamaha electronic stage piano on a stand. Scattered haphazardly to the sides of the platform were a variety of guitar cases, extra microphone stands, extra amplifiers, and extra chairs. In racks installed on the walls were the guitars. There were seven of them. Ben’s Brogan bass hung in the center. To the left of it were Jake’s guitars: a black Les Paul that was his primary weapon, a Marshall acoustic-electric, and a Brogan Les Paul knock-off that was drop-D tuned for some of the heavier of Jake’s songs. To the right of the bass were Celia’s guitars: A Fender Grand Concert acoustic, a Brogan acoustic-electric, and a drop-D tuned Fender Stratocaster that she did not play on any of her tunes, but that she used to back-up Jake on a few of his.

Celia was sitting in a chair near her microphone stand, sipping out of a cup of coffee and leafing through a sheaf of musical scores on her stand. She held a pencil on her right hand and was scratching a few notes here and there. Sharon was at the soundboard, making notations on the switches and dials and making a few notes of her own. Nerdly was sitting in a chair behind the Korg, looking at a diagram in the manual. Cynthia was sitting in a chair behind the Yamaha piano, frowning at it. She had never played an electronic piano before and was still getting used to it.

“Good morning, everyone!” Mary greeted as she entered the room. Jake echoed the sentiment. Everyone in the room gave his or her version of a return greeting.

Mary went over to a shelf next to the guitars and opened up the case that contained her rehearsal violin. She spent a few minutes putting rosin on her bow and then carried the instrument and her tuning fork over to the chair next to Cynthia and her piano. She began to go to work, making sure her strings were in proper tune.

Jake walked over to his seat next to Celia’s, but he did not sit down. “How’s it going, C?” he enquired.

“So far, so good,” she replied.

“What do you want to work on first today?” he asked. They alternated whose songs they worked on day by day and today it was Celia’s turn.

“The Struggle,” she said. “It’s going to be my first release and I’m still not liking the way it’s coming out.”

Jake nodded in understanding. The tune was solid as a rock, with good melody, deep, meaningful lyrics, and a nice hook in the chorus, but Celia was right. The way they were putting it together just didn’t sound quite right. “We’ll get it dialed,” he told her.

“Eventually,” she sighed.

Now that he knew what song they were going to work on first, he knew which guitar to grab. He walked over to the rack and pulled down the Les Paul, which he slung over his right shoulder. He carried it over to his chair and sat down. Just in front of his chair were two effects pedals he could use to change the basic sound of the instrument before it came out of the amplifier in the rear of the room. His guitar cord was sitting next to his seat but he didn’t plug in just yet. First, he picked up his tuning fork from the music stand in front of him and went to work on his strings. They were not terribly out of tune, since this was a daily ritual, and only a minor adjustment to the G-string and the E-string were required.

Just as Jake and Mary finished up with their tuning, the studio door opened and Ben Ping walked in. Ben was Chinese, born in the city of Cixi, on the eastern coast of the country. His family emigrated to San Francisco in 1960, when Ben was only three years old. He was brought up in American schools with American friends and American values. Though his parents had always wanted him to be a doctor or an engineer at the very least, young Ben’s life-path was altered when he was fourteen years old and picked up a guitar for the first time. He fell in love with the instrument almost immediately and discovered he had a significant aptitude for it. Soon, he found himself falling in with the musician crowd, playing in various bands through his high school years, learning to smoke marijuana and go to keggers, learning to grow his hair long, and forgetting how to produce and turn in quality school work. He retained just enough of a cultural reverence for education to successfully graduate, but his final grades and GPA precluded him from getting into any institute of higher learning that was not a community college.

That was okay with Ben, if not his parents. He got a job in a low-end restaurant as a busboy and then gradually worked his way up to a waiter at a higher end chain restaurant. This allowed him to move out of his parents’ house in South San Francisco and into a studio apartment in the City, where he spent much of his non-working time pursuing his musical interests with various bands that were getting together in the Bay Area. At some point along the way he came to the realization that he was pretty good with the guitar, but not great, so he made himself a little hotter of a commodity by switching to the bass, an instrument he had a little more aptitude for as it fit well with his engineering oriented mind. The band hookups came easier after this. Guitar players were a dime a dozen, but bands were always looking for a good bass player because, since it was not quite as glamorous of an instrument, there weren’t as many people playing it.

Though he was good with his instrument—Jake rated him as better than Darren had been, but still well short of Charlie’s skills—his big break never came. The closest he ever came to fame was that he had once played with a band called True, whose drummer claimed that he had once played in a band with a guy who had learned his guitar skills from a then un-discovered Neal Schon of Journey fame. It was a story that had never been verified, but he had liked to believe it was true.

After a few years of playing hundred-dollar gigs on his nights off, he decided that maybe it was time to establish a fallback position in case he did not ultimately end up being a famous recording star. He started taking classes at City College of San Francisco, focusing on general education and music. A little more mature in those days, he took his college education seriously enough to accumulate a 4.0 GPA by the time he maxed out all he could take at that level. This was enough to allow him admission to UCLA for the completion of his Bachelor of Arts in Music. And so, he packed up his meager belongings and made the move to the southern part of the state. After graduation, he picked up a teaching credential and was hired as a guitar teacher at Los Angeles Harbor College, a campus of the LA Community College district. It was not the most lucrative position in the world, but he enjoyed teaching young people the art of the guitar and it fulfilled him.

Until meeting Jake and Celia two months before, he had pretty much given up on his dream of being a recording star, but that had not kept him from playing in bands when he could. He had been playing bass for a group called Black Dog—a Led Zepplin tribute band—in a little club in the valley when Jake, Nerdly, and Sharon had wandered in one Saturday night after yet another frustrating session at their studio. The lack of a rhythm section at that point in their development had been hampering them quite badly, leaving them unable to progress much beyond the basic melodies of their tunes.

Black Dog was merely okay at what they were striving to do. The guitar player was never going to be mistaken for Jimmy Page and their singer did not have even a third of the range of Robert Plant, but they were able to put out palatable imitations that served to provide some nostalgic entertainment while one sipped on one’s drink and ate greasy bar food.

It was during their rendition of Rock and Roll when Jake began paying more than superficial attention to them. It was the drummer he pondered first. The guy was pretty good, he realized. He was not just keeping the beat, but was also hitting all the flourishes that Jon Bonham had put into the same performance, and he was hitting them exactly as they had appeared on the album. And then he noticed the bass player. He too was laying down the exact rhythm required for the tune, keeping the other musicians in time, just like a good bass player was supposed to.

Life is just not fair, Jake thought at the time. We can’t find a goddamn rhythm section to save our lives, and these fucking hackers up there managed to pull in a decent one.

He shook his head, went back to sipping from his beer, and watched as Black Dog finished up Rock and Roll and went onto the number that would close out their set: Kashmir. Again, Jake paid primary attention to the bass player and the drummer and, just as the singer began declaring he was on his way, a simple thought occurred to him. Why don’t we see if we can steal these guys from them?

He mentioned his idea to the Nerdlys, both of whom had to agree that, for their purposes, the two musicians just might be what they were looking for. They both had some concerns though.

“Isn’t it a bit unethical to steal musicians away from an established band?” Sharon had asked.

Jake simply shrugged. “It’s an unethical world,” he said. “If they want to come of their own free will, what’s it to us?”

Nerdlys concern was more practical. “We know nothing about these people,” he said. “How do we know their level of commitment? Their personalities? They may be incompatible with our basic level of camaraderie.”

Again, Jake shrugged it off. “They gotta be more compatible than what we got now,” he said.

Nerdly had to agree that this was a valid point.

And so, the three of them hung around after the set was done. Soon enough, the band began to filter out, one by one. The singer and guitar player both headed directly for a group of women hanging around at the bar. The drummer, on the other hand, came out and started working to disassemble his set. He was a big guy with a beer belly and a balding head. His face was haggard and drawn, as if he were in perpetual pain. Jake guessed his age at around fifty, although he soon found out that Ted Duncan was only forty-one.

“Hey there,” Jake greeted from the edge of the stage.

“Hey,” Duncan grunted back, not even glancing in Jake’s direction.

“That was a good set you put on,” Jake told him. “You seem to know your way around the drums.”

“Thanks,” he said plainly, continuing to unscrew wingnuts on his snare drum.

“My name is Jake Kingsley,” Jake said. “Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

That got Duncan’s attention. He turned and looked at Jake, his eyes focusing on his face. He obviously did not like what he saw. “Jake Kingsley, huh?” he said. “And my name is Jon Bonham. Nice to meet you, Jake.” With that, he went back to work.

“I really am Jake Kingsley,” Jake insisted. “I just cut my hair and grew a mustache.”

“Of course you did,” Duncan said. “Look partner, I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but I need to get this stuff taken apart and back in my truck. I have to work a shift at six in the morning and I really need to get some sleep, you know what I mean?”

“I understand,” Jake said, “but I thought that maybe I could talk to you for a minute or two. You see, I’m putting together a solo album and it just so happens that I need...”

Duncan turned back to him and gave him a dangerous glare. “Goodbye, Jake, or whatever your name is. I’ve been about as polite as I’m going to be.”

The exchange had caught the eye of one of the club’s bouncers, a large Hispanic man with tattoos that looked like they had been put there by the best goddamn tat artist in San Quentin Prison. He came over and stood next to Jake, uncomfortably close to him. “Is there a problem here?”

“No,” Jake said, holding up his hands. “No problem at all. I was just leaving.”

He walked back over to the bar, where Sharon and Nerdly were waiting.

“That did not look like it went well,” Nerdly observed.

“He doesn’t believe I’m Jake Kingsley,” Jake said.

“Unsurprising,” Nerdly said. “Your current style of grooming precludes immediate recognition. Maybe I should go try?”

Jake shook his head. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Here comes the bass player. Let me go talk to him instead.”

And so he had met Ben Ping. Ben took a little convincing, but soon he realized that he really was dealing with Jake Kingsley and that Kingsley really was offering him an audition to play bass for him and Celia Valdez in their rehearsal studio.

“I’ll have to leave Black Dog,” he said.

Jake nodded. “Is that a problem?”

“No, no problem at all, but I also have a full-time job as a music professor at LA Harbor. That might be a problem. They kind of like me to show up for work.”

Jake was actually impressed that the guy was a music teacher. “I see how they might like that,” he said. “Do you teach summer classes?”

“No.”

“It’s May 16^th right now,” Jake said. “How much more of the semester is left?”

“Only two weeks,” Ben said, “but I’ll need to be back in the classroom on September 3.”

“So, you’ll be available for the entire summer?”

“Well ... yes, but that can’t possibly be enough time to get two albums recorded.”

“We’re not trying to record right now,” Jake explained. “We’re just trying to put the tunes together and we’re somewhat hampered by the fact that we have no rhythm section. All I’m asking for right now is a competent bass player and a competent drummer who can help us out until it is time to hit the studio. We’ll cross the bridge of what musicians will actually record with us when we come to it. The summer should be enough for us to get things in gear.”

“I see,” Ben said. “I guess I’ll have to say that I’m in. I’ve been an Intemperance fan since you released Descent Into Nothing. It would be an honor to play with you.”

“Assuming you pass the audition,” Jake qualified.

“Naturally,” Ben said. He did not seem the least bit nervous about the prospect of playing for Jake.

Jake nodded over in the direction of the drummer. “What’s his story?” he asked. “He seems like he knows what he’s doing.”

Ben nodded. “I’ve only known him since I hooked up with Black Dog, but he’s a good drummer. He says he used to do sessions back in the day. Claims he did some studio work for Graham Nash, Sammy Hagar, Don Henley, and a few others. He’s working these days as a paramedic over in Pomona.”

“A paramedic, huh?” Jake said. “That’s interesting.”

“He’s kind of fucked up in the head, if you ask me,” Ben opined. “I think maybe he’s been doing the paramedic thing a little too long, that maybe he isn’t so good at forgetting about the shit he sees in that job.”

“Really?”

Ben nodded. “Really. He’ll tell you stories that’ll have you almost puking ... or almost crying. He’s pretty emotional.”

“But a good drummer?”

“Probably the best I’ve ever played with. He could do a lot better than this tribute band, but he seems to have lost his ambition over the years.”

“Well,” Jake said, “maybe I can get it back for him. You think you can convince him to audition for us as well?”

Ben nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

And he had. It took a little convincing, but both Ben and Ted came to KVA’s studio two days later and showed what they had. Jake, Nerdly, and Celia had all been impressed by both of them and had made them an offer on the spot.

“Fifty bucks an hour,” Jake told them. “We’ll work six days a week, for the most part, with Sundays off, all through the summer. Lunches will be on us. Saturday night beers will be on us as well.”

Ben had no problem accepting the offer. He was free and clear through the summer months. Ted, on the other hand, had a full-time job with Southern Medical Services and would have to put it aside in order to accept the offer. He didn’t agonize over it long. Fifty dollars an hour was nearly four times as much he was making as a medic. He applied for a leave of absence and it was granted. On May 29^th, two days after the community college district started its summer break, Ben and Ted both reported for duty. Ted was ten minutes late for his first shift.

“Good morning,” Ben greeted now, as he entered the studio for the day’s work. He was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a cotton pullover shirt with a picture of a bicycle on it. His hair was shoulder length and he sported a Fu Manchu goatee. He had a dangling earring in his left ear and a wedding ring on his left hand. His wife, Lisa, was a former student of his. She was now in the college’s nursing program and pregnant with their first child.

The group offered their good mornings back to him. He walked over to the rack and pulled down his bass, carrying it over to his chair on the far side of Celia’s position. He began to tune.

“We’re going to be working on The Struggle to start the day,” Celia told him.

“Sounds good,” he said with a nod. He still couldn’t believe he had actually gotten this gig, that he was really playing with Jake Kingsley and Celia Valdez. And though they had already told him they would likely be getting another bass player for the actual recording process, he was hopeful that he could impress them enough that they would keep him on for that stage of the album. True, it would mean he would have to take some sort of leave of absence from the college, but it would be worth it. He would be a recording star! His dream come true! And he could tell by the tunes they were working on that both Jake’s and Celia’s albums had high potential. The music was solid, even if it wasn’t of the genre that each were associated with.

It was ten minutes after nine when the door opened again and Ted Duncan walked in. He had the harried look on his face that was his signature when arriving late for work—which he pretty much did every morning. He was dressed in a pair of khaki cargo pants and sandals, his shirt a faded and tattered souvenir from the 1983 US Festival that was about a size and a half too small for him and served to accent his beer belly in a most unattractive manner.

“Hey, guys,” he greeted, putting the proper tone of apology in his voice. “Sorry I’m late. The damn traffic coming into the valley was pretty bad this morning.”

“Yeah,” Jake grunted. Traffic was Ted’s most frequent excuse for his tardiness, followed a close second by car trouble with his old pickup. No one mentioned that fact that all of them had taken the same route into Santa Clarita from LA proper and had found the traffic to be its normal congested but predictable self. After all, most of the morning commuters were heading into LA, not out of it. “Why don’t you grab your sticks and we’ll get started on the sound check. We’ll be working on The Struggle for the first part of the morning.”

“The Struggle, right,” Ted said, heading over to his drum set. He had a seat and pulled out a pair of sticks from the holder on his bass drum. “Good tune.”

Now that everyone was here and had tuned the instrument he or she was going to be using, they started the ritual of the sound check. Sharon fired up the sound board while Nerdly turned on the speakers and the amps. Everyone plugged in, except for Ted, who played strictly acoustic in the intimate confines of the rehearsal studio (and had to keep his beats somewhat light, at that), and Mary, who played into a microphone set in front of her seat. In deference to everyone’s hearing, the speakers and amps were not set to a performance volume. Instead, they were adjusted to just have enough output so the music could be heard well. Sharon and Nerdly then had everyone play a little piece so the input levels could be adjusted. After this, the vocal mics belonging to Jake and Celia were sound checked as well. Since Jake had convinced the Nerdlys shortly after the acquisition of the rhythm section that perfection was not really needed for this phase of the production, and since they were used to doing this every morning before getting started, the process only took about twenty minutes to accomplish. Five of those minutes were taken up by Ted, who launched into one of his paramedic stories.

“I ever tell you about the time we had this guy with a chain link support pole through his chest?” he suddenly blurted, just as Mary was checking her mic.

“Uh ... no,” Jake said. “I don’t think we heard that one. Maybe after...”

“It was over in The Ranch,” Ted said. “You know, that ritzy-ass section of Pomona near the park? It was on Village Loop, which runs along the green belt there, and the road is kind of winding through these small hills. This college age dude and his girlfriend were flying down that road in the middle of the night—drunk you know—and he lost it on one of the curves. Fuckin’ car went up an embankment and goes airborne—just like something out of goddamn Dukes of Hazzard, I’m telling you—and comes down straddling this chain link fence around a water pump station. They land perfectly parallel with the fence and sever the top support pole with the front end. That broken pole went right through the goddamn windshield and through the chest of the dude driving.” He shook his head. “That was some shit to see.”

“I ... uh ... I bet,” Jake said.

“It killed him?” Cynthia asked, her eyes wide.

“Eventually,” Ted said, “but not right away. He was still talking and screaming when we got there, a goddamn three-inch aluminum pole going in through his sternum and out right between his shoulder blades and then through his seat and into the back seat. He wasn’t even bleeding. His girlfriend—talk about freaking right the fuck out—she didn’t have a scratch on her but we had to transport her for hysteria.”

“I can imagine,” Celia said, both fascinated and appalled.

“So, anyway, we had to get the fire guys to cut that pole down so we could get him out of the car. It was still attached to the fence, you know, and it was sticking through the seats in the rear. They got in there with a power saw and cut both ends. Man, that must’ve hurt like hell. That kid was screaming while they did it, sparks flying everywhere. I had to get in there with him and start a line and light him up with some morphine just to get him through it. And then, once they had him cut free, you could fuckin’ see right through from one end of the pole to the other. It was freaky, dudes. One of the freakiest things I’ve ever seen. You could’ve put a water hose in that thing and it would’ve squirted out the other side.”

Everyone looked at each other for a moment, this image in their heads.

“Once we got him out of there,” Ted continued, “we took him over to the trauma center. He stayed awake through all that. They took him into surgery right away, but once they took that thing out, he crashed and died in about two minutes. The surgeon said his aorta was ripped, along with a couple of the major branches off it. The pole itself was keeping him from bleeding out, but as soon as they removed it: El gusho.”

“Wow,” Jake said after a few moments of horrified silence passed. “That’s ... an interesting story.”

“Quite gruesome,” Mary said. “Whatever in the world prompted you to tell us that?”

“Your violin,” Ted said, pointing at it.

“My violin?”

He nodded solemnly. “Yeah. You see, there was a violin in the car. Apparently, the girlfriend played it. Whenever I see you tuning it up, it always reminds me of that call. I had a therapist tell me once that I should talk about these things instead of obsessing over them.”

“Uh ... right,” Jake said. “Good advice, I suppose. So ... you’re better now?”

Ted nodded amicably. “I’m cool,” he said.

“All right then. How about we finish the sound check?”

They finished the sound check without further incident. They then began to play.

They went through The Struggle three times—which was to say they started it from the beginning eight times but only finished it three because the mothers were still not completely familiar with their parts. It was a soft-rock song with Mary providing the melody with her violin while Celia and Cynthia laid down the accompaniment to the rhythm set by Ben and Ted. Jake used his Les Paul on mild distortion to provide fills. He also had a fairly tame, easy listening type of guitar solo between the bridge and the final verse. Neither Celia or Jake was happy with the way it was coming out.