“I’m sorry,” Jake said again as she buried her head in his shoulder and cried, wetting his shirt with her tears.
“How am I going to tell him what happened to it?” she asked into his shoulder. “How am I going to tell him I was drunk and feeling sorry for myself and left it out in the rain? Madre de Dios!”
“I’m sure he’ll understand,” Jake said, although this sounded weak even to him.
“Oh my God,” she said. “This is just jodidamente perfecto!”
Jake had picked up enough Spanish from her to know that that meant ‘fucking perfect’. “I know,” he told her soothingly, his hand rubbing up and down her back. “It’s like losing a piece of your padre. But I’m sure he’ll understand. When it comes down to it, it’s just a thing. You’re still here and he’s still there, right?”
“It’s not just that,” she said. “I need that guitar! I need a twelve-string for Riding and for Faith and for the intro to Going. We were going to work on those tunes this week! I can’t duplicate those with a six string. How am I going to do them?”
“We’ll get you another guitar,” Jake told her. “I bet that music store in Portland has a few—you know, the one I took Laura to for the soprano sax?”
“I can’t replace my papa’s guitar!” she said.
“The show must go on,” Jake told her soothingly. “Your papa will understand that.”
The loss of Celia’s guitar caused the entire group to change their recording plans for the day. Their intention had been to work on Celia’s song, Riding Up Front, a clever reference to where she sat when she flew in Jake’s plane used as a metaphor for facing one’s fears in life. Riding featured Mary on the secondary melody with her violin and Celia laying down the primary melody with her twelve-string. There had been high hopes of getting Mary’s tracks down and then, perhaps, to start working on some of Celia’s while they were in the groove, but now they had no twelve-string for her to play.
“Maybe I should just stay here for the session today,” Celia suggested when they discussed the matter over breakfast (which she did little more than pick at).
“Stay here?” Jake asked. “We’re not going to get much done that way.”
“We’re not going to get much done now that I’ve destroyed my guitar,” she countered. “Besides, I’m feeling like someone who died two days ago and just doesn’t know it yet. I’ll go back to bed and get some more sleep and you and everyone else can start working on getting Mary’s tracks down on Free.” Free was Jake’s tune, Free to Choose, an examination of the aspects of making informed and sometimes not-so-informed choices in life that lead to lasting consequences down the road. It featured Jake’s acoustic as the primary melody with Mary’s electric violin playing a mildly distorted secondary and a solo.
“That won’t work,” Jake said. “Not without you there. We only have the rhythm prerecorded, remember? I would need someone on the distorted electric to back me.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to just jump right into Free anyway,” Mary said. “I’d really prefer to get into rhythm with my Lupot before going distorted.”
Celia sighed. “I really don’t feel up to going into the studio today,” she said. “Isn’t there something else you can work on without me?”
Jake gave her an apologetic smile. “Sorry, C,” he told her. “We need you. The show must go on, remember? Neither snow, nor lack of sleep, nor vicious hangover shall keep you from your appointed rounds.”
Another sigh, a deeper one this time, but she finally nodded. “All right,” she said. “The show must go on.”
“I think we should work on Ocean View first,” Jake said, referring to one of his tunes. It was the hardest rocking cut he planned for his second album, a song about his desire to own a huge chunk of land on a plateau overlooking the ocean and live his life in solitude there, away from the hustle, bustle, and smoggy air of LA. It featured two drop-d distorted guitars and a steadily progressing tempo and intensity that led to a grinding solo and a heavy metal style finish. It was a tune that was the closest in genre to Intemperance than anything else he’d done or was planning to do so far.
“Ocean View?” Celia said. “That doesn’t have Mary in it at all. I thought our goal was to get as many of her tracks down as we could while she’s with us for the break.”
“And that is still the goal,” Jake said, “but I’m sure Mom wants to just watch for a bit at first, get back into the rhythm of the studio. Right, Mom?”
“Uh ... right,” she said, quickly picking up on what Jake was laying down. “That sounds like a good idea.”
“You see?” Jake said. “We work on Ocean for the first part of the day to get Mom back in the swing of things. And I really want to try out our little idea.”
“What’s your little idea?” asked Mary.
“Instead of recording each guitar track individually, like we normally do,” Jake explained, “we thought it might help to record both at once, the way we do the rhythm tracks.”
“What is the advantage of that?” asked Tom.
Celia, to everyone’s surprise, fielded this one. “We thought it might better capture the camaraderie that flows between Jake and I on the tune,” she said.
“Camaraderie?” Mary asked.
“That’s right,” Celia said, her face getting a little more animation in it as she spoke of this. “You see, it’s not quite a dueling guitars kind of riff we’re laying down, but we’re definitely playing off of each other as the intensity builds up. It’s kind of a moment by moment thing as we’re playing, each of us responding in real time to what the other is doing. If we record individually, we kind of lose that to some degree and we think it would make the tune sound more mechanical, more manufactured. Does that make sense?”
Mary, Cindy, Bill, and Dexter all nodded quickly. It made perfect sense to them. Charlie and Coop agreed as well. Sharon, Tom, and Stan, however, had no idea what Celia was talking about. Tom actually became a little uncomfortable with the conversation once the beautiful and obviously troubled singer started talking about ‘intensity’ and ‘playing off of each other’ in regards to his son, who was involved in a romantic relationship with a woman he cared very much for. Just how much playing off of each other were they talking about?
“Of course,” said Jake, “whenever you decide to record two tracks at one time, you at least double the likelihood of having to stop and do a retake. I think we can pull it off though. We really click on that tune once we get into it, don’t we C?”
“We do,” she said, a slight smile on her face—the first sober smile anyone had seen her offer in more than a week now.
“Let’s open up the day with Ocean View,” Jake said again. “It’ll be fun, it’ll get you in the groove and take your mind off your hangover and your guitar, and it’ll help Mom get back into the swing of things.”
“All right,” Celia said, pushing a little bit of her scrambled eggs around once again, but making no move to put any in her mouth. “I find you make a good argument, Jake.”
Since the primary rhythm tracks for all songs on both upcoming albums had already been recorded, Coop and Charlie had the day off. They would, in fact, have most of the next month off unless they were needed to come in and do some rerecording in the event that one of the tunes was changed—something that happened frequently enough this time around that neither Jake nor Celia wanted to send the bassist and the drummer home until it was time for the overdubs as they’d done to Ben and Ted.