Chapter 8: Adult Supervision

Savannah, Georgia
October 1985

"A what?" Riley asked. He and Tina were having a pizza after seeing a movie. He had asked her out the night before, but she had been busy with the band's meeting with Jake.

"A recording studio," Tina replied. "Actually I guess it's a whole recording company. The key, according to Tony and Kyle, is that it's a digital recording studio. There aren't many around."

Riley was fascinated by technology. Most of what he made at his part time job went into his home-made PC-AT clone. He even had a modem, though there was only one BBS around that was a local call from home.

"Digital recording? That's nuts! Do you know how much storage you would need for that? You'll need a mainframe to do that!"

Tina just stared at Riley, she had no idea what he meant by "storage" or "mainframe".

"Uh, well I'm not sure what that means. Kyle says there are a few studios doing it now. I know it's going to be pretty expensive. We're looking for a building right now, we want something downtown that's big enough that we can renovate."

"Wow, pretty expensive is right. The computing power to do that would be pretty impressive not to mention the banks of hard drives or tape drives you would need to store that."

"Do you know about things like that Riley?"

"Well yeah, when I'm not playing bad guitar it's kind of my hobby. I built my own computer at home."

"You built a computer? Isn't that hard to do?"

"Well, no, not really. You just buy the individual components and put them together. I just did it that way because it's much cheaper than buying one already built. You have to send off and mail-order all the parts that way though."

"Well if you know about that kind of stuff you should talk to Kyle. He's really just starting out with this."

"Well you're definitely going to need a computer expert or two. I'm pretty sure of that, and not just to set it up either. You'll need people full-time. That's what I'm going to do in college, I'm studying computer science."

"Oh, and I thought you were just a pretty boy, you must be a brain too!" Tina smiled at him.

"Well I've always been good with math and stuff. That's what you need for computer science. I do OK on the other stuff. I guess I'm just not as interested in it but I have to keep my grades up."

"Well you'll have to show me this computer of yours sometime. I've seen them, but I've never actually used one."

Riley looked at his watch. "It's only a few minutes after ten. We can go now if you want. What time do you need to be home?"

"Why Riley are you inviting me into your bedroom?" Tina asked with mock horror.

Riley chuckled. "Well I guess I am. The folks are home though so I guess I'll have to behave, this time." He waggled his eyebrows at her.

"OK, let's go. I don't really have a curfew but you can bet my mom and probably Tony won't go to sleep until I'm home so I try not to stay out too late."

The drive to the Porter's spacious split-level home took less than ten minutes. Tina was warmly greeted by Riley's parents when they came in. "Tina! What a nice surprise! We weren't expecting to see you tonight," Mrs. Porter said.

"Hi Mrs. Porter," Tina said and smiled at her. "Riley and I were talking at dinner and we need some computers for a project we're working on so he told me he'd show me his. I don't know anything about them."

Riley snickered. "Project? You call building a digital recording studio a project?" He shook his head. "They've decided they don't like the recording contracts they were offered so they're thinking about building their own studio."

Tina laughed at that. "Oh we're not thinking about it, we're doing it. Tony and Dad are already looking for property."

"Sounds like quite the project," Mrs. Porter said.

"Yeah, it is. Actually that's two he's working on. Remember the awards dinner? He's already got the foundations poured on our new building for the band and the charity."

Mr. Porter chuckled. "Well you did tell us that he could handle those people."

"More like they. If Tony can't bulldoze them into something Rebecca just bats her eyelashes at them," Tina replied with a smile.

Mr. Porter chuckled. "So I see. And if those two fail, your smile will certainly do the job."

Tina beamed at Mr. Porter.

"Tina doesn't want to be out too late. I'm just going to take her up to my room and show her what I have," Riley said. The two proceeded up the stairs of the split-level home.

"Here we go, have a seat." Riley pointed to the chair in front of his desk. Once she was seated he reached over her and flicked a lever up on the left hand drive bay and replaced the floppy disk with another. He then activated the power switch on the right side of the large beige unit and turned on the monitor that was perched atop it.

"OK, it will take a few seconds to boot."

Tina watched silently as incomprehensible commands filtered up the screen until it finally seemed to settle on the letter A followed by a colon. "OK, what did it just do?"

"Booted up. It's nothing but circuits and electronics until it has a program loaded. When you boot-up you load the basic program into it called DOS. All other programs run from that. Now, what do you want to do?"

"I'm not sure what to do. I'm not sure what it can do actually."

"OK, let's try the word processor. Jenny and I use that a lot. It's great for homework and papers and things." He replaced the floppy in the left drive with a new one and inserted yet another in the right hand drive and closed their latches. "Type in Wordstar and hit the enter key." While it was obviously labeled Riley pointed out the key as she might not be familiar with the concept. When it didn't work at first he had to tell her that she needed to type Wordstar as all one word.

From there he talked her through loading a document, one of his English papers, and showed her how she could make changes and add more to it. Finally he had her send it to the small Okidata dot-matrix printer sitting off to the right of the main computer.

Tina grasped the implications of what they were doing by the time the document had finished printing. "Wait! You can just print it out, just like that? Then you can turn it in at school?"

"Sure, Jenny and I do it all the time. She gets frustrated sometimes when I'm using it and she wants to write a paper. Once you use one of these it's very hard to go back to a normal typewriter again. No more white-out every time your finger slips or you forget the shift key. You just fix it on the screen and print it out. This one will even check your spelling for you."

"Well she should just get one of her own then!"

Riley chuckled. "Not likely; there's nearly three thousand dollars worth of equipment here. Mom thinks it's a hobby at best and a toy at worst. She thinks it's a waste of money because we have an Atari."

"Can you play games on it like an Atari then? I've played one before at Rhonda's house. Tony and I never bothered to buy one. Now one of these, I can see us buying. Can you show us what to get and how to use it?"

"I suppose, like I said they're pretty expensive. It would be cheaper to buy the parts and let me build you one."

Tina smiled up at Riley over her shoulder. "Well that's just what we'll do then!"

The two spent another hour going over the various programs Riley had to run on the machine; eventually leading to his latest acquisition, a new game called Bard's Tale. By then Riley was seated at the chair with Tina in his lap as they took turns entering the various commands.

Over the next couple of weeks Riley would build two computers: one for Tony and Tina to share, another that would be the first computer owned by Cobblestone Digital Studios. Once Tony and Tina saw the amazing speed of the last machine, which included a twenty megabyte hard disk drive in place of the second floppy drive, they insisted that their machine have one as well. Once that was agreed on, Riley got one of the thousand-dollar drives for his efforts as well, in spite of his protests over the cost.

"No, no that won't work." Tina said after interrupting.

"I told you," Dewayne said. "The riff you want is at least a quarter measure too long. Even I can't play it that fast, not if you want it to sound like anything but noise anyway."

The band was practicing in the Smith basement on a Thursday late in October. The song, Invisible Lover, was an original rocker written mostly by Tony and Dewayne. They had hoped to have it ready to debut the next day.

"Can you shorten it then while still reprising the main theme?"

Dewayne thought for a minute then picked out a few notes.

"Yeah! Build it around that!" Tina exclaimed.

"OK, Dewayne replied. I see what you want, but no way I can have it ready tomorrow. It'll take some work. I'll probably have something by rehearsal Tuesday."

"OK," Tony said. "Let's just pull it from tomorrow's set list. It really isn't something that needs to be done now."

"But Tony..." Tina started.

"Tina if Dewayne can't redo it before next week who can? None of this original stuff is all that important yet anyway. It will be I guess. But really it's all geared to what we're going to record eventually right?"

"Yeah, you're right. I just thought we could have that one ready this week," she replied.

"I know but relax on it OK. We've already decided we aren't following anyone else's schedule on recording. The clubs would rather us play covers anyway, we've had enough argument from them on that point."

"How's that coming anyway?" Gwen asked. Long gone were the days when she and Chrissie only attended one rehearsal a week. They were full-time now.

Tony looked at Tina. It had really turned into her baby though she relied heavily on Tony for advice.

"I think we have a building. It's on Telfair Square; it used to be an old Post Office. It's going to take some work but it is right in the middle of downtown and has plenty of room," Tina said.

Gwen was obviously excited. To many in the band the project was simply a means to an end. To Gwen, Kyle, and Tina this was something completely different. It was a way to work technology into music for Kyle. It was a way for Gwen to express her talent beyond Chaos. For Tina it was a brave new world with endless musical possibilities. Not just rock but jazz, her beloved classical, even country. She could work with endless musical possibilities.

"How long will it take?" Gwen asked.

At that point Tina looked back to Tony. She certainly wasn't up-to-date about how it would be built.

"Three months if everything goes well," Tony said. "I mean the interior and the sound studios. The actual recording stuff. Whoa! I suppose Kyle is the best to ask about that."

All eyes turned to Kyle and watched him let out a huge sigh.

"It's out there if you really want to spend that kind of money. The newest thirty-two track digital recorder out there is over $150,000. We'll need two. We haven't gotten into mixing boards and a thousand other things. Hell, even the tape will run you nearly a thousand an hour for everything we record. If you really want to lease a PDP-11 from DEC, well things get pretty expensive from there."