Chapter 5: Tight Quarters

Coos Bay, Oregon

September 24, 1991

In the bedroom of the hillside house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Jake’s digital alarm clock clicked over to 6:30 AM and the radio began to play. The device in question sat on the oak dresser eleven feet from the bed. The radio was tuned to 88.7 on the FM dial, which was the local Catholic station that played nothing but Christian oriented music. The volume was turned up to nearly the loudest setting.

“A pleasant morning to all the righteous out there,” intoned the soft-spoken disc jockey to the nearly three hundred current listeners in the greater Coos Bay region of Oregon’s southern coast. “That was Amy Grant with Father’s Eyes—a true classic if ever there was one. And now, to get you up and moving for your day, we have Sandi Patty and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with their rendition of What A Friend We Have in Jesus. Enjoy.”

“Oh, fuck no,” Jake said, quickly pulling the covers off and rolling to his feet. He nearly sprinted across the room and hit the off button on the alarm clock before the Mormons of the Tabernacle Choir could even hit their first high note. The strategic positioning of the alarm clock, the radio dial, and the volume setting had done their magic. Jake was awake and out of bed. Once these two things were accomplished, there would be no chance of him drifting back off.

He yawned deeply, rubbed his eyes and then stretched a little. Though his head was still fuzzy from the sudden sleep to awake transition, he did not feel badly. He had gone to bed at eleven last night after only two glasses of wine, so there was no hangover, no straining bladder, no headache. There simply was not enough time to do any serious drinking now that the recording process was in motion.

The ragtag group of musicians with no name, official or unofficial, and their sound team, had packed up and come to Coos Bay one week before and were staying as a group in a rented house. Though the house, which was costing KVA Records LLC eleven hundred dollars a week, had six bedrooms, five bathrooms and nearly 4500 square feet of living space, it was still quite crowded with nine permanent residents and eventually, though it hadn’t happened yet, four transient ones.

Nobody had to share bedrooms currently. Jake had the largest of the secondary bedrooms—the only one other than the master with its own attached bathroom. Celia had the master suite on the third floor because Greg was planning to pop in and out for a few days with some frequency during their stay. The Nerdlys had the secondary bedroom next to Jake’s—one without its own shower but they had refused to take Jake’s room when it was offered on the grounds that he was one of “the talent” and therefore their reason for being there in the first place. Cindy and Stan, the Nerdly parental units, had a smaller bedroom tucked away at the very end of the second floor hall. Laura had a tiny room that was tucked away in the rear of the first floor, just off the kitchen. Ted and Ben each had tiny little rooms located off the main entertainment room. Ted’s room had bunk beds in it, and the plan was to have the drummer and the bassist bunk together in Ted’s room when Mary came to play her pieces, or when Pauline came to take care of business (she was actually flying in this afternoon for her first visit). Phil Genkins, Laura’s roommate from Los Angeles and the latest part-time member of the band, would also be coming and going with some frequency later in the process, but Laura said he could stay in her room with her. This, of course, raised a few eyebrows among everyone—mostly the elder Archers—because everyone knew that Laura was engaged to her dentist. When she reminded everyone, however, that Phil was quite gay, the eyebrows came back down among everyone except Ted, who was a self-proclaimed homophobe.

Yes, Jake thought, things are going to get interesting as this little project floats along.

The morning air in the bedroom was brisk and damp, as Jake enjoyed sleeping with the window open so he could hear the sound of the waves rolling into shore a hundred and thirty feet below the cliffside the house sat upon. He shivered a bit and then shut the window, taking a moment to look out of it. His bedroom did not directly face the ocean, so he had to crane his head a bit if he wanted to see it. Sunrise had yet to occur, but the sky was starting to brighten with its approach. The stars were out, and could be seen, so that meant there was no marine layer this morning. That was good. He did not particularly like running in the damp morning fog that occasionally rolled in.

He turned away from the window and walked to his bathroom. After taking care of his morning business and washing up, he came back out into the bedroom and put on his loose fitting shorts and a sleeveless shirt. He donned his running socks and his battered running shoes and then made his way out of the room. The hallway was dark and the doors around him were all closed. From behind the door at the end of the hall, he could hear the rhythmic drone of Stan snoring.

He walked downstairs and made a left into the large kitchen area. Here, the light was on and Celia was standing at the sink wearing a pair of running shorts of her own, as well as a baggy T-shirt with a frog on it. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was filling her water bottle up. She looked over when she heard Jake enter and gave him a smile and a good morning.

“Good morning,” he returned, flashing a brief smile of his own. “How’s the tide?” The status of that tide would determine their running route, as there were places that were inaccessible to them when it was high.

“I haven’t looked,” she said. “My eyes aren’t even all the way open yet.”

Jake picked up a tide table that sat atop the refrigerator. He looked at it, found the day’s date and nodded. “It’s incoming, but we’re only two hours past low. High tide won’t be until just after ten.”

“We should be good for the beach then, right?”

“Right,” he confirmed. Both of them liked the route that took them along the beach for part of the way instead of the one that stuck entirely to the road. It was a better workout as well.

Jake filled up his own water bottle and they made their way out of the kitchen, through the dark entertainment room—they could hear the amazingly loud snores of Ted coming from behind his closed door, snores that were often interrupted by the jarring silence of sleep apnea, which he had proudly proclaimed to everyone he suffered from—and into the foyer. They walked out the front door and closed the door behind them. Jake opened a small lockbox installed next to the door by punching in a code. Inside was a key to the house. He used it to lock the door back up and then returned it to the box. They then walked down to the large circular driveway, where Jake’s BMW, Celia’s Mercedes, and a large white 1982 Ford van that KVA had purchased locally for its mass transportation needs, were parked.

They stretched out for a few minutes—Jake, as always, taking a moment or two to admire Celia’s magnifico pompis as she bent over to loosen up her hamstrings—and then walked out to the small, winding road that ran along this section of the coast. They could see the breakers rolling onto the small strip of exposed rocky shoreline below. Both of them were shivering slightly in the cool air.

“Shall we do this thing?” Celia asked.

“Let’s hit it,” Jake said.

They headed south down the road, going for a little more than a quarter of a mile, passing other ocean view houses, most of which were rentals, all of which were smaller and more modest than the one they were staying in. A narrow access trail intersected the road and they turned right. It was a steep, uneven trail full of switchbacks and liberally sprinkled with loose rocks. They treaded carefully here, not just because of the risk of a rolled ankle, but because if one fell in the right manner on this portion, one might find himself or herself tumbling over the cliff.

They reached the bottom without incident and were now on a strip of sand beach strewn with driftwood and sea kelp. During some of the higher tides, the water would come all the way up to the bottom of the trail, thus their need to carefully check the charts before heading out. At the moment, however, the breakers were rolling in twenty or so yards away. They jogged over to just outside the average breaker zone and turned to the south, quickly settling into a pace of about a nine-minute mile.

They spoke very little as they made their way two miles down the beach, their feet pounding into the sand, their path weaving back and forth depending on the terrain they were following. They curved along into a cove that was surrounded by even more towering cliffs. It was here that their tidal information became particularly important. During every high tide in this part of the cove, the water cut off both the north and south entrances and there were no trails out from within the cove itself. Though they probably would not drown if they found themselves here at the wrong time, they would certainly find themselves sitting on some rocks for six or seven hours until the water retreated enough to let them back out.

“This place is just so beautiful,” Celia remarked as they worked their way around rocky tidal pools and clumps of kelp. Tiny beach crabs scuttled to get out of their way. “I can see why Obie likes living here.”

“It beats the hell out of LA,” Jake had to agree. “No smog, very little traffic, not many earthquakes, just the occasional tsunami rolling in because of earthquakes somewhere else.”

“Not a bad deal,” Celia opined, “as long as your house is up out of the tsunami zone.”

“I’d like to find a place like this, but in California, within easy flight time of LA for when we’re working. Something to think about when our fortunes come rolling in.”

“You really think they’re going to?” she asked.

“I really do,” he assured her. “We’re underway now and our shit sounds good—or at least it will once the Nerdlys get their little hands on it. We only have the tedium of the recording and mixing process now.”

“And the negotiations with the labels for manufacturing, distribution, and promotion,” she reminded.

“They’re going to be fighting with each other over who gets to sign us once we present our masters to them,” Jake predicted. “Now that we got Laura playing her best and Phil on board, things are all falling into place.”

And indeed they were. It had been very touch and go with Laura for a bit, but gradually she warmed to the group, both musically and, perhaps more important, personally. And they had warmed to her as well. That band cohesion they were seeking did not appear magically overnight, but in small phases that nobody seemed to notice until they were well along. It had started with smiles. She actually had one, and it was a very pretty smile at that. They first started seeing it around the second week with her, just occasional flashes when someone noted that she was actually playing better, or when someone made a joke during the lunch breaks or during the setups. The smiles then came more frequently, became more animated and spontaneous, easier to appear.

Around that same time, they noticed her starting to converse more with them. Instead of sitting by herself during lunch, she would join in with the group, even occasionally add something to the conversation. And then, as that developed, they discovered she possessed a sense of humor as well, a dry, deliciously quick wit that caught one completely by surprise when it was displayed—the kind of thing that made one stare at her for a moment and think: Did she really just say that?

As the camaraderie and friendship developed between the pretty, square saxophonist and the rest of the band, her musical expression improved as well. Though she still proclaimed disdain with extreme prejudice for all things rock and heavy metal and most popular music, she did admit to them at one point that the music they were making with her seemed to transcend her preexisting stereotypes.

“Transcends your preexisting stereotypes?” Jake asked when she’d laid that one on them.

“It means,” she explained, utilizing that usually hidden wit of hers, “that you don’t suck quite as much as I thought you were going to.”

Everyone had looked at her in astonishment for a moment, and then burst out laughing.

“Did you really just say that?” Celia had to ask, shaking her head in amusement.

“No offense intended, of course,” she said, a smile on her own face.

“Of course,” Jake returned with a chuckle.

Whatever her personal opinions of their compositions, her phrasing got better with each repetition of each tune, until the music coming out of her instrument was just dripping with soul, was coming forth with all the talent that she had displayed when playing her favorites for them at her audition. Ben had been right all along. She was good enough to play professionally and make a decent living with her horn, and now that she was onboard with them, they were happy to have her as part of the team.

It was during this period of enlightenment that she suggested they give her roommate, Phil, a try as well. That had been during a Saturday afternoon beer bash when both Jake and Celia were complaining about their lack of suitable backup singers. True, they could double track themselves in the studio, and, true, Jake could sing some backup for Celia and Celia could sing some backup for Jake, but there were certain combinations of voices that certain of both of their tunes needed. In short, they needed someone who could sing soprano or mezzo-soprano for female backing on Celia’s Why? and Tell Me About Love, and someone who could sing baritone for male backing on Jake’s Hit the Highway and Can’t Keep Me Down.

It was the mention of the baritone that led Laura to speak up.

“My roommate, Phil is a baritone,” she said. “He’s a pretty good singer, too. He works over at Operetta While You Eat as a singing waiter.”

Everyone looked at her, perhaps wondering if this was yet another display of that dry wit. It was not.

“Operetta While You Eat?” Jake asked incredulously.

“It’s not as cheesy as it sounds,” she assured him. “The food is pretty good, and they make the waiters audition for the parts. It’s a good way for vocalists trying to break into the industry to pay the bills while they’re on their way up. Phil is actually classically trained.”

“No kidding?” Jake said, pondering that.

And so, they’d given him an audition and found that Laura was right. He really could sing, and he understood about things like keeping time and staying in key. He hesitated not in the least to take them up on their offer of fifty dollars an hour, once or twice a week, and to possibly make some trips up to Oregon once things really got rolling.

“I’m sure Laura has told you all,” he said to them after accepting the offer, “but I just want to disclose my sexual orientation to you all right now. I am gay. Hopefully you can all live with that.”

Laura had not actually told them that, but Jake didn’t give a rat’s ass if the man liked to fuck chickens while watching clown porn, as long as he could sing. Celia was actually somewhat delighted with the disclosure—she had a fondness in her heart for gay men since her brother, Eduardo, was one of them (though her family did not know this). Only Ted seemed to have an issue with the disclosure.

“Gay?” he asked. “You mean ... like you have sex with men kind of gay, or you’re just a happy motherfucker?”

“The former,” Phil told him.

“I see,” Ted replied, his face turning into a scowl.

“Is there a problem with that, Ted?” Jake asked.

“No, no problemo,” Ted assured them. He then turned his gaze upon Phil. “I just want it to be known that I am not gay, so don’t be hitting on me.”

Phil looked his morbidly obese body up and down for a moment, taking in the fat rolls and the triple chin, and then nodded. “I will try to control myself,” he promised.

“You do that,” Ted said.

After Phil had left the audition, Laura confided something to Jake. “He was kind of hoping that you might be gay, or at least bi,” she told him.

“Really?” Jake asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “He has the major hots for you. Always has.”

Jake nodded thoughtfully, unoffended. As a decent looking male celebrity living in Los Angeles for nearly a decade now, he was regularly hit on by gay men wherever he went. It was just part of the life. “Hmmph,” he said. “You should have told me that before you brought him here. I probably could’ve got him for thirty dollars an hour with a little flirting.”

“Probably,” she agreed. “But you know what the tradeoff would’ve had to have been, right?”

He looked at her in astonishment for a moment and then laughed. She had popped off another one.

There was one boundary, however, that Laura did not break down. She would discuss nothing about her personal life with her fiancé. She had let everyone know that she had a fiancé, that he was older than her by a considerable margin, that he was her dentist, and that no date for the nuptials had been set, but other than that, she was mute. She deflected any and all questions about her lack of an engagement ring, about if her fiancé would like to meet them all, about any plans she might have with him on her day off, or about whatever the mysterious “it’s complicated” might be. Even Phil did not know much about the good doctor, although he was able to confirm a few strong suspicions.

“I’ve met him a few times,” he told Jake once during a Jake day, when Laura wasn’t in the studio. “He usually comes over during lunchtime to boff her and then leaves right after. Every once in a while, once every two months or so, she’ll go away somewhere with him for the weekend. I’ve never once heard her tell me she was going over to his place and, unless she’s going away on a trip with him, she never spends the night away from home.”

“Interesting,” Jake said. “Married, I assume?”

“Obviously,” Phil said. “He has a goddamn wedding ring on his finger when he shows up at our place for his nooners.”

“That’s a pretty reliable sign,” Celia, who had been listening in, could not help but observe.

Phil simply shrugged. “It’s her business, and she’s made it clear to me that she doesn’t want me sticking my nose into it. I love her to death—she’s the sister I never had—but I’m not going to push her for information or judge her. I’ll just be there for her when this finally comes crashing down.”

“That’s sweet, Phil,” Celia beamed at him, patting him on the thigh.

Phil smiled at her and then went back to taking surreptitious glances at Jake’s juicy ass, pondering what it would be like to get his hands on it.

Now, as Jake and Celia reached the furthest inset of the cove and began to turn back toward the southern exit of it, Celia said: “I’ve forgotten how monotonous the recording process is. Over and over and over again with the same thing.”

“And we’ve only just begun,” Jake said. They were, in fact, still working on the first drum and bass tracks for the first song—Celia’s Playing Those Games—and they hadn’t even gotten past the first chorus yet.

“And the Nerdlys,” she said, shaking her head. “Madre de Dios, I love them and respect them, but I just might have to kill them before this is all said and done.”

Jake laughed. “You haven’t even begun to appreciate how annoying they can be,” he told her. “Wait until we start mixing.”

She groaned.

They ran on, exiting out of the cove and then going another half a mile, onto a broader beach that was part of Sunset Bay State Park. Here, was the most difficult part of their run. It was a set of steep switchback stairs that climbed two hundred and eighty feet back up to the main road. They mounted them and conversation quickly became impossible as they huffed and puffed and their legs burned with the exertion. By the time they made it to the top, the sun was now visible in the eastern sky and they were both dripping with sweat.

“That part is a killer,” Celia panted as they took up position on the left side of the road and headed back north.

“At least it’s mostly downhill from here out,” Jake said, panting as well.

And it was. Two and a half miles later, which they accomplished with an easy seven and a half minute mile pace, they were back at the rental house, both of them feeling the satisfaction of yet another day’s run being over and done with.

They walked up and down the road a few times to let themselves cool down and then went back in. They would have a little breakfast, take their showers, and then start getting ready to hit the studio.

Another day in Coos Bay had begun.

Everyone in the house except for Stan piled into the white van at 8:45 that morning. Ted got behind the wheel. He had been designated their driver since it was part of his profession to drive similar vehicles. On the way, he made a point to tell them another of his stories. This was quickly becoming a morning routine.

“I was working the night shift, you know, and around two thirty we got this call for a single car accident over on North White, just off the Ten. This dude was in a Mazda Rx7 and must’ve come off the ramp at well over a hundred miles an hour, lost it at the bottom, and spun into this oak tree on the roadside. Hit that fucker with his passenger side and destroyed that car. It was gnarly shit, dudes. We couldn’t even tell what the car was until we found a piece of the bumper. The dude himself got ejected from the vehicle and had to have hit something, maybe the tree, because he was on the ground about twenty feet away, smashed as flat as a fuckin’ pancake, deader than shit, his goddamn skull broken open. Didn’t even have to put the monitor on him to declare his ass.”

“Jesus Christ,” Celia whispered, unconsciously giving the sign of the cross.

“That wasn’t the weird part though,” Ted continued.

“It wasn’t?” asked Jake, encouragement in his tone. Ted’s stories were actually growing on him in some bizarre, morbid fashion.

“Naw,” Ted said. “The weird part is what we found later. You see, we start looking around the area after I pronounce him, shining our flashlights here and there, just to make sure there wasn’t someone else in the car with him—sometimes that shit’ll happen, especially with newer crews who get focused on the one patient and don’t think to consider if there’s more than one. Anyway, there wasn’t nobody else in the car, but about twenty yards away or so, one of the fire guys finds the dead guy’s brain. It’s just sitting there on the fuckin’ pavement, perfectly intact, like something out of an anatomy class or something. It flew out of his head in one piece and just landed there.”

“It had to have been ejected from the broken skull in a relatively stable parabolic arc in order to have landed intact,” Nerdly observed.

“Uh ... right,” Ted said. “My thoughts exactly.

“That is a disgusting story,” Cynthia declared.

“That ain’t no shit,” Ted agreed. “Of course, us medics, with our gallows humor, we can’t leave that shit alone. The first thing my partner says—old Jimmy Cann, a good medic, ex-Vietnam guy, he ended up killing himself a few years later, ate his fuckin’ gun, you know—anyway, he says: ‘That guy must’ve lost his fuckin’ mind, huh?’”

Cynthia, Celia, Laura, and Sharon were all appalled by this. Jake, Nerdly and Ben actually found it pretty funny. Out of political correctness, however, they kept their smiles to themselves.

“All right,” Jake said to Ted. “You know I gotta ask. What made you remember that story?”

“Drivin’ this van,” Ted said solemnly. “It’s the same year as the rig we were drivin’ on that call. I’ll never forget the old 82-973.” He looked back at Jake, who was sitting in the seat behind Celia. “It was the one where the heater would only blow on high.”

“That sucks,” Jake said.

“Yep,” Ted agreed. “It’s a sucky world sometimes.”

They made it to Blake Studios at two minutes to nine and all eight of them trooped in through the security and made their way to Studio B, which was theirs for the duration. Troy Stinson, a recent graduate of the master’s program in audio engineering at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, one of the most prestigious music schools in the United States, was waiting for them in the control room. He was twenty-six years old, looked like he was fourteen due to a severe baby face, and had been assigned by Obie to be the Nerdlys’ protégé for the duration of the recording and mixing process. Troy was an eerily smart guy, long on knowledge and with a good ear for music, but short on actual experience at his new profession. He was typical of the engineers that Obie employed.

With Troy was Alicia Hernandez, the twenty-four year old audio technician who had been assigned to work on the project as the Nerdlys’ assistant. She was a chubby, short woman with tremendous breasts and a pretty face. Though short on experience as well, she was a whiz with the digital software of the studio and had a good ear for the sound characteristics of the studio and the isolation rooms attached to it. She also made a pretty good pot of coffee.

Everyone said their good mornings and then all but Laura hit the coffee station in the corner of the room, annihilating Alicia’s first pot. She was used to this by now and quickly went about constructing another one.

They spent about thirty minutes drinking their coffee and talking over the plan for the day. The plan was not all that complicated: they were going to continue laying down the bass and the drum tracks for Playing Those Games. Nobody was naïve enough to think that they were going to finish them today, not with the Nerdlys in charge.

Once the coffee was done, everyone pulled their instruments and headphones out of the storage room in the rear of the studio. Jake was working with the Brogan drop-D tuned guitar for this one. Celia was not playing any guitar at all on this track, as there was no need for a rhythm track. Laura was not involved in the piece either—in truth, there was really no reason for her to be involved at all while they were only laying down the rhythm tracks, even when they moved on to pieces that did feature the sax—but Jake and Celia had made the decision to keep her in the studio with them for all sessions, both so she could learn the process of recording and so they could maintain that camaraderie with her. True, this decision was costing them money, but what the hell? It was only money. It wasn’t like Pauline, Jill, and Greg—the financial Nazis who nitpicked every expense—actually knew that Laura wasn’t really needed.

In the center of the primary studio room, Ted’s drum set was assembled with a total of six microphones arrayed in strategic positions. Two hung from overhead and had been painstakingly positioned by the Nerdlys over a period of nearly two hours on their first day. There was a kick mic on the bass drum, one on each of the snares, and another on the tom drum. All of these were wired into the sound board and then into the recorder itself. The drums would be the only instrument that was actually heard in the studio for this session, as it was pretty much impossible to silently play percussion. Everyone else’s instruments would be heard only in the headphones to avoid having their output bleed over into the drum mics.

Sitting well back behind Ted, but within easy sightline of him, was Ben, who sat in a studio chair. His bass was in his lap, the output from it being recorded as well. This required his amplifier to be enclosed in one of the isolation rooms and then microphoned from there, with the output going through the soundboard and into the headphone sets. The decision to record the bass and the drums together had only been made after another agonizingly long and technical debate between the Nerdlys regarding the advantages and disadvantages of doing the rhythm instruments separately or together. Doing them together meant that whenever either one of them screwed up, or just didn’t play to the Nerdlys’ satisfaction for the take, the process needed to be stopped and restarted. Doing them separately would have taken longer, but would have meant that only an imperfection in the instrument being recorded would necessitate a stop.

Jake was just to the left of Ben, his Brogan wired into a set of effects pedals and an amplifier that was locked in a foam insulated isolation box, and microphoned in there. He was not being recorded, but Ben and Ted both needed to hear his notes to keep themselves tuned into what they were doing. He would play along with the tune but if he screwed up, the tune would go as long as his screwup did not cause either Ben or Ted to screw up in turn.

Cindy was to the rear of the studio. Since her electronic piano was digital, it was easy to wire her into the soundboard and keep the output from her instrument from permeating the room and interfering with the drum mics. Of all the musicians in the room, she was having the most difficult time adapting to this method of playing. She had never recorded before and listening to the music coming through the headphones instead of just hearing it through the air was foreign and distracting to her. That was why they had started with Playing Those Games. Her part in the tune was minimal. She played the opening melody during the first verse and then had only a few fill parts once Jake came in with his guitar and the tempo picked up. The hope was this would help her get used to the process.