He ripped open Kingsley’s CD next, pulling out that insert.
Unlike with Valdez’s insert, there was only one picture of Jake on the entire thing, the cover shot of him playing his old Fender Grand Concert. There was no other artwork to speak of, just a mix of washed-out pastel colors that blended from one to the other and the track listing. In the lower right hand side were the credits.
Jake Kingsley – Acoustic guitar and vocals
Phillip Genkins – backing vocals
Pauline Kingsley – backing vocals
Ben Ping – Bass guitar
Ted Duncan – Drums and other percussion
Mary Kingsley – Violin
Cynthia Archer – Piano
William Archer – Synthesizer
Engineered by William and Sharon Archer
Recorded at Blake Studios, Coos Bay, Oregon
Special thanks to Laura Best for soprano saxophone on South Island Blur
It’s the same fucking musicians! Matt fumed. Kingsley’s and Nerdly’s mothers playing violin and piano for him. Ben Ping and Ted Duncan (whoever the fuck they were) putting down the rhythm. Pauline and this Phillip Genkins motherfucker singing backup. Even this Laura Best bitch on the sax (Kingsley’s got some fucking sax on his CD? What the fuck?) And again, there was no goddamn credit given for the lead guitar position.
How can I be the only one who has noticed this shit? Why aren’t the DJs and the fucking music media assholes all over this story?
He put the inserts back in their respective cases, not bothering to fold them up into the proper orientation, just putting them back to the size that would fit. He did not take the CDs out of the cases. Tim might say that what happened in the limo stayed in the limo, but Matt was not going to let anyone know that he had actually listened to either one of these CDs.
When he got home, however, he went immediately to his entertainment room and fired up the stereo system. His machine featured a twenty-four disc changer and he had to pull two CDs out first to make room, but he inserted both Jake’s and Celia’s work into slots 23 and 24.
He played Kingsley’s CD first. The first cut was The Easy Way, which he had already heard enough of on the radio and which he already knew was Kingsley playing the weak-ass guitar riffs. He skipped over it. The next cut was the title cut: Can’t Keep Me Down. Matt found it was a semi-hard rock tune that featured two distorted electric guitars for the melody—the first a drop-D tuned guitar, the second a standard tuned guitar with milder distortion. He had no idea who was playing the second guitar—although he had to admit that whoever it was seemed to know his way around the instrument pretty well—but he knew within ten seconds that Kingsley was playing the primary guitar for the tune. As with the riffs on that Valdez hard rock tune, the sound was as distinctive as a human voice to his ears.
He listened to the song all the way through, surprised and dismayed to find himself tapping his foot a little with the beat. There was no guitar solo in the main body of the song itself but there was an extended solo on the outro. It was not a highly technical solo by any means, but it was well-played and fit the tune. And it too was unmistakably Kingsley laying it down.
He noticed other things as the song played as well. At several points there was a third guitar playing, an electric with distortion so mild as to almost be clean, and it was mixed in atop the secondary melody in perfect harmony. That too was Kingsley’s work and Matt was familiar with the technique. It was an overdub meant to put in the sound of string strikes on that secondary melody. Intemperance had used that very same overdub atop Jake’s guitar when they’d recorded and mixed I Am Time, one of their biggest hits and their most experimental tune. Matt had fought tooth and nail at the time to not put that overdub in but, in the end, Kingsley and Nerdly had insisted upon it. And, once the tune had been played for them on the master of the album, Matt had had to admit (if only to himself) that it really had enhanced the sound of the tune when it was played in recorded medium.
He moved onto the next tune, something called Hit the Highway, according to the track list. He hardly heard the lyrics at all, concentrating instead on the instruments. The tune used a mildly distorted electric for the primary melody with piano for the secondary. Underneath all that, however, was an acoustic guitar strumming with the rhythm. Kingsley was playing the electric guitar but he was not playing the acoustic. Matt was very sure about this. The song had no guitar solo at all, not even a brief one, not even an outro piece.
He listened to the next song, and then the next until he’d heard the entire CD. He listened to Insignificance and the song with that saxophonist bitch, South Island Blur, twice. With Insignificance his opinion that it was going to be a hit did not fade, but was reinforced. With Blur, he listened again because he simply could not believe that Kingsley was actually trying to pass it off as rock. It used a fingerpicked acoustic guitar (played by Kingsley, he could tell) as the primary melody and that soprano sax as the secondary melody atop it. It sounded like a morph of mellow blues and some shit put down by a reggae band. And yet it had a catchy rhythm and a solid hook that appealed to the listener quite nicely. Once again, Matt found himself tapping along with the beat and even humming a bit to the melody.
He’s a fucking sellout, but he’s got some shit that’s going to chart here, was Matt’s conclusion when he finally finished listening to Can’t Keep Me Down.
He then used his remote control to switch to Valdez’s CD. He skipped over The Struggle, the first cut on the album, but listened carefully to everything else. Three of the songs he listened to twice: Playing Those Games, Why?, and Done With You. He discovered much as he listened. In the first place, it was not just Phil fucking Whoever and Pauline singing backup for Valdez, but Kingsley as well on several of the cuts. Jake was playing all of the electric guitar that could be heard in the album and he could be heard here and there providing some overdub acoustic as well. And now that he had heard an entire album’s worth of Celia Valdez’s acoustic playing (including the stunning fingerpicked melody on Why?) he now knew who the mysterious second guitar player on Jake’s album was. It was fucking Valdez herself.
Perhaps the most striking thing he heard on both albums, however, was the engineering of it. Both were full of overdubs and double-tracking of vocals and instruments on every single cut. But the way it had been done, no one but a professional musician or sound engineer would even notice. That was the mark of the Nerdlys in action.
“Those assholes really can mix,” he muttered to himself as he fixed himself a huge drink once the last song was over.
He sat in the silent entertainment room, sipping and pondering what he had just heard.
Kingsley and Valdez and the Nerdlys had formed their own independent label. He had picked up on the KVA Records logo and had not had any trouble guessing what those initials stood for. They had obviously been working on a tight budget for their production as they had been forced to use the same musicians for both albums. The musicians in question were Kingsley’s and Nerdly’s mothers—who undoubtedly did not charge much, if anything, for their services—and rhythm and support players that Matt had never heard of despite the fact that he had auditioned dozens of studio bass players and studio drummers for his own first album. Where had they dug those people up? They were not hackers by any means, so where had they come from?