“I love you, hon,” Jake told her when the conversation finally wrapped up.
“I love you too, sweetie,” she assured him. “I’ll call you again tomorrow night, if I can.”
They hung up and Laura sat on the edge of her bed for a moment, pondering the thought of going over to the bar next door and getting a drink to help her sleep. In the end, however, she was just too tired. She stripped down to her panties and then turned off the lights. She had the air conditioner on high but it was still hot and sticky in the room. She lay directly atop the covers and curled up to go to sleep.
Tomorrow, she would do it all again.
Jake and Celia and the band that still had no name—but did have a few additional members now—got together for the first time the following Monday. The mothers had both agreed to play with them as well, but, as of yet, they were still in Cypress. The new projects had not yet even advanced to the point where they even knew which tunes were going to need a violin or a piano, or both.
Indeed, much of that first day was spent just setting things up. Ted’s drum set needed to be assembled atop the platform and then microphoned to the exacting perfection standards of the Nerdlys who, if anything, were actually getting more anal as they aged (if such a thing were possible). Once the drums were set, the amplifiers, the electric piano, the synthesizer, and then each individual instrument had to be adjusted, sound-checked, folded, mutilated and spindled, and then the entire ensemble had to be mixed together so that the sound coming out of the primary speakers sounded as optimum as they could make it.
“All right, guys,” Jake finally declared as they neared the three o’clock hour. “I think we’ve got audio output we can live with for rehearsal now.”
“I don’t know, Jake,” Sharon said, still frowning. “I’m still not quite happy with the high-end output coming out of the stringed instruments.”
“I agree,” Nerdly agreed. “It seems to me that if we just tweak the...”
“No more tweaking, please!” Celia pleaded.
“Right,” Jake said. “We’re not recording here, guys. We just need to be able to hear what we produce. I think we should get started.”
“Well ... I guess so,” Sharon said, clearly unhappy with this.
“If you insist, Jake,” Nerdly said. He was not happy either.
“I insist,” Jake said. “Let’s see what we got.”
They didn’t get very far in the next two hours. Jake had a total of twelve tunes he had put together as possibles for the next album and Celia had fourteen. They were able to do little more than just introduce a few of these prospects to the band by strumming them out on their acoustic guitars.
Over the next four days, however, they were able to develop a rhythm and start to fall into the groove a little bit. They reinstated the pattern in which they would work on each artist’s material on alternating days. Celia was assigned Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for her tunes. Jake took Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Jake’s days he started working primarily on his two favorite tunes—one a mellow piece called Standing Up High, the other a harder rocking piece called On the Water’s Edge—typically spending half of each day on each. On Celia’s days, she liked to concentrate primarily on one tune—it was called Should We Believe? and it was a profound examination of the religious beliefs she had been raised with—for most of the day and then begin playing around with the basics of some of her other tunes when burnout with Believe started to creep in (as it inevitably did after six hours or so).
Jill and Greg had indeed been upset to learn that Jake, Celia and Pauline had committed KVA Records to pay fifty dollars an hour to two musicians who were not really needed at all during this phase of the production. However, when the situation was explained to them, they’d reluctantly signed off on it. As it turned out, both Lenny and Phil were making themselves useful—perhaps not fifty dollars an hour useful, but useful nonetheless. Lenny, in addition to playing the guitar, could also play the piano. He was no Cindy Archer at it, but for simply playing out a melody as directed, he was more than adequate. He could also play a pretty mean harmonica and, though neither Jake nor Celia had envisioned any harmonica in their tunes, it was now an option as they started to work them up. And Phil, though he was not skillful with any musical instrument save his voice, did have an ear for music and was able to make suggestions and participate in discussions on how to put things together. He was also a good runner, going out for guitar strings, food supplies, beer, or anything else needed to keep the operation rolling. When none of these tasks were needed at a particular moment in time, he would hang out with Sharon at the sound board and help her by being a runner to whatever piece of equipment needed adjustment or manipulation.
One thing that did become clear before the first week was up, however, was that they needed to get a saxophone player as soon as feasible. Celia really liked how Laura’s playing had enhanced her last album and made it what it was and she had sax melodies and sax solos in mind for well over half of the tunes in her collection. Jake too had two of his tunes in which he thought a good sax would fit in. For the basic workups they could always use Nerdly on his synthesizer to simulate sax sounds, but they were poor imitations and did not usually convey what a skilled player with a real instrument would sound like.
“Fucking Bobby Z,” Jake complained during the lunch break on Friday. “Not only does he take my girlfriend away, thus cutting me off from my supply of sexual gratification, he takes our goddamn sax player as well.”
“At least you won’t have to worry about Bobby trying to fornicate with her,” Nerdly said. “It is my understanding he prefers external genitalia on his sexual partners.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” put in Phil, who preferred the same thing.
“I was not trying to imply that anything was amiss with that orientation,” Nerdly told him. “I was just pointing out a piece of information that, while not completely verified beyond a reasonable doubt, has been suggested and implied enough that it could be considered a likely hypothesis.”
“Uh ... yeah, of course,” Phil said, still trying to translate all that in his head.
“Wow,” Lenny said, awe in his voice. “You really do talk like that, Bill. It isn’t just media hype or image shaping.”
“Talk like what?” asked Nerdly. “Did my voice sound strange?”
“I have an idea,” Celia said.
“Let’s hear it,” Jake told her.
“Since Bobby Z stole our sax player from us, how about we steal his?”
Everyone looked at her. It seemed like a simple solution to their problem, but was it really?
“You’re suggesting we try to recruit Dexter Price to play sax for us? The Dexter Price.”
“Why not?” Celia asked. “He seems to be out of a job at the moment, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t think he will be for long,” Jake said. “He’s probably the hottest thing that blows a horn in the country today. Laura says he’s like Kenny G, except he can actually play. Someone will snatch him up in a heartbeat.”
“Why can’t that someone be us?” Celia asked.
Jake had to admit that she had a point there.
“Do you think he would play with us?” asked Sharon.
“If he did, I believe he would request a considerable amount of financial compensation for his efforts,” said Nerdly.
“True,” said Jake. “Laura mentioned to me once that he was pulling in a hundred an hour when he was with Bobby Z.”
“A hundred an hour?” Celia said. “That’s twice what we paid Laura!”