Chapter 23: Tracks

OK this is just crazy, Riley thought as he slid a guitar case to one of the pilots loading the belly of the plane. He turned to reach back for the next piece of equipment to be stowed. Now I'm some kind of glorified equipment manager with the title of Director of Computer Operations for a company that really only exists on paper. We're flying off on a chartered plane to Nashville to record a record album like some rock stars. All because I had to go and fall in love with a girl with a pink guitar. All in a day's work for this crazy crew. What the hell happened to my life? I didn't even bother to show up for the first team meeting for soccer. No way in hell I have time for that. Is Tina really worth all this? He answered his own question by sliding a cased drum to be set with the next piece of baggage and looking for the next item. Tina was worth most anything.

The Dash 8 climbed toward the sunset. This time it held fifteen passengers and a crew of three. For the first trip, in addition to the twelve official members of the recording "team", Tony and Tina's parents were along (as president and chief counsel of Cobblestone) and Bea Wallace (as she called herself director-of-fucking-everything-else).

It wasn't that bad. Bea had a lot of help and she knew she had but to ask anything of the teens and it would get done almost as if by magic. There was no organization. If what amounted to one of the half-owners of the corporation was told they were out of copy paper, then copy paper showed up, and now, not later. The 'general manager' had no problems emptying trash cans, and if you needed help with your computer it happened just as soon as the IT department washed his hands after greasing the axle of a wheelchair. It was ... chaos. And so far, as jobs went, she was having a ball. There was something to be said for a job that paid as well as hers did that you didn't want to leave at night and couldn't wait to get up for the next morning.

Once the plane leveled off Tony was up and about playing cheerleader. He was feeling better. The nightmares still came, but Rebecca would just wrap him up and lull him back to sleep. There was, he noticed, a lot of tension and nervousness in the cabin. Tony had one thing going for him, he wasn't really afraid of failure. He'd suffered what he considered the ultimate failure and, well it couldn't get any worse. He finally did stop and slide into the seat next to Bea.

"So what do you think? Glad you left the cold and drab routine of the Daily Planet yet?"

"Tony! Yes, I am and thank you for thinking of me when you did."

"Pah! That sounds like an employee to employer comment if I ever heard one."

Bea laughed. "Yeah, I guess it did, didn't it? I don't know what's going to happen in the future yet Tony, but right now I'm having the time of my life."

"It's my personal secret for success I'm going to follow the rest of my life."

"And what's that?"

"Just surround yourself with amazingly talented people and hang on for the ride!"

"Oh is that it. What happened to hard work and early to rise and all that stuff?"

"Work smart, not hard and if you get up late then you probably have to work late. That sucks, so don't get up late."

"Very interesting; do you think those rules will work?"

"I have no idea Bea. You tell me. You're the one listening to gibberish philosophy from a seventeen-year-old."

Bea laughed again.

"I do think that's part of it though. Whatever you do, do it in a way you can laugh about it and make it fun."

"That just may be a decent philosophy Tony."

"It's why I hire high school students and avoid people with too many letters after their names at all costs. Who the hell knows how to build a recording company from the ground up? I mean that's just not done every day. There's no one out there with that on a resume, right?"

"No, I guess not."

"So we throw in musicians, sound people, computer people, and a PR person who does a bit more than she should have to, we make sure they are dedicated and people we trust and we just turn on the blender and see what happens. Of course this time we're gonna make sure not to include a battalion of fire trucks and such. That ruined the mix, but we'll be OK I think."

"You make it sound easy Tony," Bea said.

"That's the genius of it. It is easy, the fun parts especially. Heck, Kyle and Riley have a ball buying gazzilions of dollars worth of toys to make it happen. I'll bet you and Chrissie will have fun working with the architect designing the new building. When it gets down to the un-fun parts then we hire sour-faced people with lots of letters after their names, right? Let them do that crap, we've got music to make."

"That still sounds too simple," Bea replied.

"Doesn't have to be. When it starts getting un-fun for you let me know and I'll make sure to put a stop to that. I'll have Tina give you kazoo lessons and put you in the band or something."

"Tony you're crazy." Bea was laughing.

"There is much more truth to that than you can possibly know Bea. Really though we're glad you're here with us. We're glad not because you're some super-smart trained-from-birth-recording-company-builder but because you're our friend and we trust you, right? The rest of it we'll figure out. It can't be that hard. We are on a plane to Nashville aren't we? Gotta be doing something right? I do believe that makes you Bea Wallace, record company executive. See? We're already doing something right.

"Excuse me, can I get you two something to drink?" came a female voice from the aisle.

The plane was large enough for a small galley and a single stewardess to serve them.

"The finest champagne for my favorite employee Bea here, and if you could please set me a Coke down next to the beautiful redhead up front there it would be great."

"Gotta go Bea, just keep doing what you're doing. You got us here, now we're in our element."

They were not in their element. No one had any illusions of crowding all seven of them into a studio and knocking each song out in a few takes. It wasn't how albums got recorded.

At first they wanted each instrument laid down independently for remix. It was impossible for them. It showed up on the very first song.

To break the band in easily they decided to go with the simplest song that was to be included on the album. It was a basic studio version of a song Leonard Cohen had released a little more than a year before called Hallelujah. It was one of only three songs to be recorded that weren't entirely original. The other two started life as JD's "heartbreakers" but sounded nothing like he had originally written them.

It was simple: Rebecca sang, and Tony played accompaniment on the Rickenbacker twelve- string electric. It had actually been done on a whim for the encore in New Jersey. A whim because Tony grabbed the electric twelve string on a lark instead of the acoustic and then added just a touch of distortion. It was easily the most commented piece that came from the tape of the concert. The electric twelve with just a bit of distortion transformed the song into something a little more gritty and demanding.

So they set Tony, and just Tony, in the studio and had him lay down the track. After about six takes, they told him they could make something out of it but might want to come back to it. They didn't just want to use the best take, they would mix and match pieces of each into a whole.

Rebecca couldn't sing to it. Not really. For her it was some precise, mechanical Tony imitation. It didn't move with her. It didn't follow right. Gwen, Chrissie, and the experts at the studio were baffled. The component tracks sounded awesome apart, but there seemed no way to put the two together with anything near the powerful appeal of the live version. This went on for four hours before Tina simply put her foot down. "It will never happen guys, give it up. It won't work for anything they do. It probably won't work for Tony and Dewayne either with the new rhythm style he's using, but definitely not for those two."

The studio's producer, Chance, said, "I don't get it. I mean we did have some doubts when we saw you kids come in this morning. But Tony's playing is beyond just good. It's technically perfect. And Rebecca, well when guys like us go to sleep at night we dream about voices like hers and for us it's finally come true. This should be amazing, it is amazing actually, but it's missing something."

Tina snapped her fingers trying to come up with the word. "Synergy. Tony doesn't add notes together to get a tune in this case. He plays them for her. She sings for him. I don't think you can take them apart like a puzzle and have them fit together again.

Chance looked dubious for a minute. It always took four times as long to do it this way. "So you want them in together?"

"Yep, and so do you. You just don't realize it yet."

They did put them together. As always Tony keyed on Rebecca. He couldn't tell you what he keyed on, the movement of her lips, her breath, the squint of an eye; he didn't know what is was himself. For Rebecca, Tony was back, and she could just let go because all was right now. Because she needed him and that was OK. This was natural for her.

Nothing is perfect. It took them all of three takes.

Chance listened to the third take for the third time along with Gwen, Chrissie, and Tina, wearing studio quality headphones while most everyone else listened in on speaker. Tina looked at Chance with a twinkle in her eye as he put down the headphones. "So, what did you hear there?" she asked.

The producer shook his head then smiled back at her. "If I didn't know better I'd say those two just had sex in my sound studio and I just heard a gawd-damn musical orgasm! Do not let me touch that track ever again. How do they do that? You realize that last five minutes just made you like fifteen million dollars, right? People will flock to buy the whole album just to own a copy of that."