Chapter 16b

They finished up the basic composition of the song. It actually took about two hours to do. Jake was allowed to dictate how the intro would be performed, how the chorus to bridge section would be played, and how the final ending would occur. The other musicians played as Jake wanted them to play, with only Nerdly making a few minor suggestions that had to do with tempo changes and timing. Matt kept his comments to himself and played his guitar expertly, just as he always had.

"You see?" Nerdly asked them when they had finally finished, written down their changes on the music sheets, and successfully run through the piece twice. "It is possible to work together despite the recent clash of egos and hard feelings."

"Right," Matt said. "Now how about we start the next song? We still have three hours left in this session.

The next song they decided to work on was called My Life. Written by Matt a few months before — before all the shit had seriously started to hit the fan — it was an intelligent, well-constructed piece in which Matt pontificated about the lifestyle of a hard-partying rock star in first person perspective. In the verses, he talked about his expensive house and his expensive car and the fact that he could no longer drive his expensive car because the state had revoked his privilege to do so. He talked of getting wasted and having any woman he desired just because of who he was. He talked about being worshiped by fans and how he sometimes liked this and sometimes wanted to hit them. The chorus sections of the song all started with my life is... and then used a variety of other lines to illustrate that point. For instance, the first chorus, after Matt's house and car and life of luxury were described, was:

My life is lavish. Yes, I'm better than you

Money? No object. Got no bills overdue

Got more rooms in my house than I ever could use

Got servants, got limos, can afford substance abuse

And the second chorus, after the verse describing Matt's wild sexual abandon and constant womanizing, was:

My life is sleazy; can have any bitch I want

Models, groupies, porn stars; I've screwed Miss Vermont

The mile high club? Got a gold member's card

The bitches want me, I use 'em, and then I discard

In general, Jake liked the song. It was fairly classic Matt Tisdale work in lyrics and was actually a step forward for him in musical composition. The basic musical backing for the lyrics started with a medium tempo power riff on Matt's guitar and backing by the acoustic sound of Jake's. Unlike most of Matt's songs — and most Intemperance songs in general — the rhythm guitar would not be playing all the time. It was to be mostly silent during the verses and would kick in strongly in the spaces between the verses and the chorus and feature strongly in somewhat of a dueling format during the instrumental portion after the second verse.

"I like it, Matt," Jake told him after Matt led them through it the first time — singing into his own microphone and playing unaccompanied on his guitar — and then explained the basic backing philosophy he was after. "I think it'll pound out really good."

Matt didn't acknowledge the praise. "I'm gonna go through it again," he said instead. "Let's start working the drums and bass in for the basics and then we'll work on the acoustic and piano later."

"Right," Jake said. "You want me to start singing it?"

"No, not yet," Matt said. And with that, he hit the first riff again.

Things went fairly smoothly for the rest of that day and they departed the warehouse, not exactly on good terms, but at least without cursing at each other. The problems started up again early the next day when it came time to start working on the transitional portions of My Life — the part that involved Jake's rhythm guitar and Nerdly's piano. Every time Jake or Nerdly would suggest some way of putting their instruments into the song, Matt would automatically veto it.

"I don't want a fucking G to F switchover in this part," he would tell Jake. "I want a fucking D major to C major alternation, just like I fucking wrote it."

Or when Nerdly would suggest an enhancement of the basic piano rhythm Matt had laid down, he would bark: "We ain't doing no fucking flourishes in this song. Just play the goddamn notes like I told you to."

Matt seemed to think that Jake and Nerdly were trying to take over his song when, in reality, they were simply trying to do what they'd always done on every Intemperance piece dating back to the pre-D Street West days. They were offering simple suggestions based on their musical knowledge and talent — the sort of things that had always enhanced their music in the past and made it what it was. When Jake or Nerdly or even Coop tried to explain this to Matt, however, he wanted to hear nothing about it.

"This is my fucking song!" he would yell. "Just like Cut Me Loose was Jake's fucking song! We will play my song my way. Is that clear?"

It was clear. And after another wasted day of constant bickering and precious little progression at their task, the band was finally forced to come to a basic accord on the dispute.

"All right," Jake said toward the end of the day, "it's obvious that there's only one way we're going to get anything done around here and make our submission deadline."

"And what might that be?" Matt asked cynically. "Put you in complete and total charge?"

"No, not exactly," Jake said. "We put whoever wrote the song in complete and total charge."

Matt looked at him suspiciously. "What do you mean?"

"I mean we do six of your songs, six of mine," Jake told him. "The songs you wrote, you tell us how to play and we'll play that way. We won't offer any suggestions on anything. When we do my songs, the same thing holds true — with one exception."

"What exception is that?" Jake asked.

"Unlike you, I do like input from the rest of the band so I'll still take suggestions. I will have ultimate say-so on whether or not to accept those suggestions and what I say is what ultimately goes. Is that fair?"

"What about when the time comes to put our playlist together for the album?" Matt asked.

"We generally put ten songs on the album," Jake said. "I'll pick my best five and you pick your best five and that'll be the album."

"What about the order of play?" Matt asked.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Jake said. "Quite frankly, I'd be thrilled as hell to have that to worry about right now."

As much as Matt wanted to argue about this plan, he simply could not. He knew it was not the optimum way to put things together, but he was also a realist enough to know that, at this point in the game, it was the only way things were going to get done. "All right," he said with a nod. "Deal. And I expect every one of you traitorous motherfuckers to stick with it."

They all stuck with it. And, admittedly, the bickering and fighting had been reduced considerably, if not entirely eliminated. They worked out My Life to an uneasy perfection and had then gone to work on another of Jake's songs, a tune called Lines On The Map, a fairly poignant and typical Jake Kingsley multi-tempo piece that discussed the fact that there were more than 185 separate governments on the Earth and that perhaps this was partially the reason why there was so much war and why nothing made any sense.

It was when they started the next set of songs, one by Matt and one by Jake, that more problems cropped up. In this case, both of the primary songwriters were equally guilty of the strife. Since it had been agreed that each of them were in control of their own tunes, they both wanted to record a song that did not really fit the Intemperance signature sound.

Matt's song, Faces At Dawn — basically a hard-driving piece about the ravishes of liquor and drug abuse on the body — was composed by using a heavy palm-muted guitar progression. It was essentially the sort of piece Matt had been trying to push on them for years, ever since hearing the Master Of Puppets album by Metallica. Granted, he had become the master of the palm-muted technique, developing an entirely new style that, if the song were ever recorded, would spawn an entirely new generation of imitators. The problem was that a modified palm-muted piece was still a palm-muted piece, which meant it was too up-tempo to mix well with a piano, which meant it would not fit Intemperance's signature sound.

"Where does Nerdly's piano fit into all this?" Jake asked when Matt first introduced the piece to them.

"We'll put some in," Matt said. "We'll do tempo changes between the chorus and the verses that'll slow down enough for piano work and then the entire bridge can be nothing but piano and your acoustic guitar."

"But during the bulk of the song, no piano at all?" Nerdly asked.

"That's right, Nerdly," Matt said, glaring at him. "No fuckin' piano at all. Do you need to be in the fuckin' spotlight every goddamn second?"

Jake and Nerdly looked at each other with concern and then simply shrugged. They played the song the way Matt wanted it played and although it did not sound like an Intemperance signature song, even Jake had to admit it was a well done piece of music.

That led to Jake's next song, which was just the opposite. It was called I See You, and was about the struggle between the meek side and the strong side in one's personality, how they complimented each other, and how a person could not function if one buried one's strong side in favor of the meek. Jake had written it shortly after returning home from the international tour and he considered it one of the best pieces lyrically he'd ever composed. The problem with it was that it was too slow of a piece to go on an Intemperance album. Musically, it could only be played to the accompaniment of a finger-picked acoustic guitar, a few piano notes, and maybe some soft bass notes, during the verses and the chorus. There was no room at all in most of the tune for a distorted electric lead. Jake had filed the tune away in his unused file quite some time before with a vague notion of pulling it out again if he ever went solo. But when Matt forced them to do a tune with very little piano in it, it occurred to Jake that the old rules were pretty much dead. He dusted the song off and introduced it at a session as soon as they had Faces At Dawn down.

"What the fuck was that shit?" Matt demanded after Jake did the first run through of it. "How in the fuck are we supposed to translate something like that to an electric riff?"

"We're not," Jake told him. "The verses and the chorus will be acoustic guitar only. We'll put in a basic electric riff for the bridge intro and then an extended, double distortion solo before the final verse. We'll up-tempo the climatic verse to include some accompanying distorted lead in the background and then fade to black after the last lyric."

"You're out of your fuckin' mind!" Matt accused. "No electric in the verses or the chorus? That's fuckin' easy listening shit!"

Jake simply shrugged with a smile on his face. "Do you need to be in the fuckin' spotlight every goddamn second?" he asked.

They argued some more, with some of the other members even casting their doubts about whether a piece like this should be on an Intemperance album, but Jake held the trump card ultimately. They had already agreed to do things the way the songwriter wanted them done.

They worked the song out and gradually, as everyone heard more and more of it, they began to like it. Jake's guitar picking during the vocal portions was rich, melodic, and mesmerizing. Charlie's bass strings and Nerdly's piano were worked in to provide the perfect accompaniment, and Jake's voice seem particularly suited to the slow, mournful verses and chorus. Although Matt remained bitter that his lead guitar played only a small part of the song, he was musician enough to do his very best on the parts where he did play. His first notes kicked in after the second chorus, playing a nicely composed riff to back the bridge vocals. After the bridge, Jake switched his guitar over to distortion and took over the electric riff while Matt put down an impressive solo that started medium tempo and progressed to a fast, finger-tapping climax one minute and twenty-seven seconds later. Following this, the first portion of the climactic verse was sung with no accompaniment at all except for Jake's acoustic and then the final chorus went back to two heavily distorted electrics in unison that kept up the tempo to the final fade-out.

All in all, Jake was very pleased with the end results. I See You was still nothing like a typical Intemperance tune, but he thought it one of the best pieces of music he'd ever composed. And he realized something very fundamental while the composition was underway. He liked having final say over the engineering of his tunes. He liked not having to answer to anyone but himself.

The tune they were working on now was called Grandstand, another non-traditional piece by Matt, and, so far, the tune they were having the most problems with. Grandstand was not just another heavy-metal palm-muted piece, although it did contain some very hard-driving riffs throughout it, it was something almost entirely new in the spectrum of music. It was a fast tempo power chord dominated song with heavy drum and bass backbeat, little piano, and little rhythm guitar, but Matt wanted the lyrics sung in the style of a rap song.

"A fucking rap song?" had been Jake's first reaction.

"It's not a fucking rap song," Matt replied. "You just sing it like one."

And so he'd demonstrated, running through the basic tune for the first time and singing the lyrics, in machine-gun, hard-core rap style, while grinding out the guitar. Jake's first impression was that it sounded like shit and that this was some sort of one-upping maneuver in response to I See You. It was only after they continued to try putting the tune together that Jake realized Matt was entirely serious.

"Matt," Jake said the one time he'd tried to reason with him on this song, "There's no way in hell National is going to put this song on the album. They'll use their veto power on it. This is more than just a departure from formula, it's a completely new style of music unlike anything that's been done before."

Jake had expected another profanity laced argument but, to his surprise, he got a reply that was almost reasonable. "Didn't we say the same thing about I Am Time?" Matt asked Jake. "Remember? A harmonica in place of a lead guitar? Unprecedented! Absurd! But we fuckin' did it, didn't we? And it fuckin' sold almost seven million copies as a single, didn't it? In fact, it's still one of the most played songs on rock radio."

Jake had to admit that Matt had a point. He argued the issue no more and tried the best he could to sing the song as Matt meant it to be sung. The problem was, Jake had never really listened to rap music and had never picked up on the nuances of conveying the proper emotion with his voice in that style. He tried the best he could but he just couldn't pull it off. It would only sound like what it was — Jake Kingsley shouting out lyrics instead of singing them. It got to the point where Matt was accusing him of deliberate sabotage.

"All right," Matt said now as everyone took their places in front of their microphones. "Let's do a few run-throughs of Grandeur again and see how bad Jake can fuck it up this time."

"I think it'll be better this week," Jake said, not rising to Matt's bait.

"Oh?" Matt asked. "And why would you think that?"

"I had dinner with Bigg G after we left for the week on Thursday," Jake said. "He helped me a little bit with the whole rap thing. I also spent most of my flying time on the way back from Chicago listening to Bigg G's albums on the CD player. Of course, I couldn't play them that loud because they'd drown out the radios, but I think I'm starting to see how it should go."

Matt looked at him, seemingly wondering if Jake was fucking with him. Apparently he decided that he might not be. "All right then," he said. "Let's see what you got."

They ran through it. The opening consisted of both guitars playing the palm-muted power riff while the drums and bass settled into the beat. And then the guitars fell silent, leaving only the rap-style backbeat of the bass and drums. Jake began to sing. The lyrics were basically about wanna-be musicians who did not have enough talent to move beyond club gigs, about how they could get the barest taste of the big time but knew they would never reach it. The emotion of the lyrics — as Matt intended them to be sung — was that of contemptuous teasing, a taunting of those with lesser talent by those who had it all. Jake knew the lyrics by heart now and did not have to refer to a sheet. Though they did not come out of his mouth with perfection on this first run-through, it was clear to the other band members that he was trying. They sounded much better than the previous week.

Matt nodded slowly when they finished the first run-through. "Could be better," he said. "But it has been worse too. Let's do it again. A little more projection this time."

"Right," Jake said.

They went through it again and again. Slowly, as they moved toward their lunch break, Jake began enjoy the theme of the song more and more. And as his enjoyment of it went up, the emotion of his singing got better and better.

"Now we're fucking getting somewhere," Matt said as they shut everything off for lunch. "Once you start applying yourself, we progress. How about we just skip the first part next time and go right to you applying yourself?"