Zeke closed the door and then sat down in the driver’s seat. “Where to tonight, JD?” he asked.
“Let’s hit the Alturas Club over on the west side,” Jake said. “I haven’t been there in a while.”
“As you wish,” Zeke said. He dropped the car into gear and pulled away.
Before they were even out of the driveway, Jake was mixing himself a potent rum and coke from the bar before him. It would be his first drink of the day. Having his parents stay with him had cut down on his alcohol consumption considerably more than the drastic cut down he had already been undergoing. He still had a beer or a glass of wine at night after coming home from the studio, but gone were the drunken Sunday afternoons. He just didn’t want his parents to see him in the condition he tended to achieve when alone.
The first rum and coke was in his stomach before they even made it out of the neighborhood and down to the main street. Feeling the comforting warmth spreading throughout his body, and the pleasant relaxation of the pre-buzz, Jake quickly mixed up another, not even having to replace the ice as none of it had had much time to melt. He took a few sips out of the second drink and then flipped on the radio set into the panel next to the bar. He quickly tuned it to 98.5 on the FM dial, KRON, one of the local hard rock stations. Without surprise, he found they were playing Who Needs Love?, an Intemperance song from their first album.
As always when he heard one of their songs on the radio, he felt a flash of nostalgia for days gone by, for tour buses and gross intoxication, for endless groupies and endless battles with the evil empire that was National Records. Those had been the days.
“A good tune, JD,” Zeke told him through the open partition. “You guys really were the shit.”
“We were, weren’t we?” Jake returned.
“I hear you’re working on something new though,” Zeke said.
Jake looked at him in surprise. “Where did you hear that?” he asked.
“From Coop,” he said. “We still drive him around quite a bit—especially when he goes out on Saturday and Wednesday nights. He told me you and that Mexican chick had hooked up and were putting something together.”
“Wow,” Jake said appreciably. He had known that Coop had loose lips, of course—that had been the plan, after all—but he hadn’t known they were that loose. He was telling the limo drivers? Jesus Christ.
“I can’t wait to hear it,” Zeke said.
“It’s a ways from reaching the consumer still,” Jake told him, “but I’ll be sure you get a pre-release copy.”
“Signed?” Zeke asked hopefully.
“Signed,” Jake promised. He then took another sip—a sip that anyone else would have defined as a gulp.
Who Needs Love faded out and the voice of Steve “Boom Boom” Callahan, the night DJ, came on. “A little Intemp action for you here on your Sunday night cruise on the Chrone Bone, your station for all things that rock in the greater LA region. And speaking of Intemp, we got a little track here from Matt Tisdale’s upcoming album, Next Phase, which is due to hit the stores in about two more weeks.”
Jake’s attention perked up. Matt’s tune? He knew that the release was imminent, but he had yet to hear anything from the album. This must be a pre-release track that National had sent out in advance to generate interest in the album. Now he would get to hear what the man who had called him a murderer, who had declared he would never play with him again, had managed to come up with on his own. He reached over and turned up the volume a little.
“The tune we have here is called Into the Pain,” Boom Boom said. “It features Tisdale himself on lead guitar, of course, but also on the lead vocals. Give it a listen and tell us what you think. Here we go. Get ready for a ride on the new music train.”
The tune started with a long, drawn-out solo that ramped up from sedate into a screaming, finger-tapping maelstrom. That then evolved into a complex, palm muted riff that was joined by the pounding of drums and the hammering of a bass. Jake noted right away the lack of any overdubs or complex engineering to the tune. It was only those three instruments playing. It was almost as if Matt and his two bandmates were in a studio, playing out a live track into a microphone.
“That’s some heavy sounding shit, there,” Zeke said.
“That it is,” Jake agreed, letting his foot tap along to the rhythm, trying to get into it, trying to evaluate it on its merits and not on his personal feelings for the man who had produced it.
The song played on for nearly three minutes before any vocals were laid down, switching back and forth between the main riff and some hard jamming solos. Finally, Matt’s voice came forth, singing out a series of short verses about the harshness of life and how everything good led to disaster. The chorus was also short and simple, though expressive.
“Into the Pain! It’s inevitable!
“Into the Pain! It’ll suck your soul!
“Always know that whatever ground you gain...
“Will only lead you into the Pain.”
It was a brutally angry tune, of that there was no doubt, a marked change both musically and lyrically from what he had typically written for Intemperance. His voice work wasn’t bad—Matt could definitely carry a tune well—but it, like the instrumentation, was unsupported by any backup singing or vocal engineering. It was as if he were singing the song into a microphone at a club.
“Quite a long song,” Zeke commented about four and half minutes in.
“Yeah,” Jake said, still listening with the analytical ear—the best he could, anyway. For each set of two verses and two choruses that Matt sung out, he would then spend thirty or so seconds laying down blistering guitar work. There were variations on the main riff, secondary riffs, and seething, angry solos, most done by utilizing tempo changes—sometimes slower than the primary tempo, sometimes faster, often interspersed with pounding drum fills that added to the general blackness and mood.
Finally, after what Jake estimated to be more than seven minutes, the tune came to an end in a flurry of drumbeats and guitar notes that were allowed to fade naturally down behind one final scream of “Into the Pain!”
“Well now,” Boom Boom said when it was over, “that was certainly a hard rocker, wasn’t it? And I could’ve totally gone and had myself a little sit down in the restroom while it played, had I been so inclined. Anyway, that was Matt Tisdale’s new cut from his solo album, heard for the first, but surely not the last, time, here on KRON, your rockin’ LA station. And now, how about we mellow down just a bit and get our hearts back to normal. Here’s a little G&R for you.”
Jake turned the radio down as Sweet Child o’ Mine began to play. He looked over at Zeke. “What did you think of that?” he asked him.
“It sounded kind of rough,” Zeke said. “A little rougher than I really care for—and it was long, with lots of guitar and not much singing.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “It definitely wasn’t pop music.”
“I don’t know,” Zeke said. “I like Matt and all, but I’m not sure it’s something I can get into. What about you? What did you think?”
“The guitar work was impressive,” he said. “I’ll give him that. The man knows how to play.”
“No argument there,” Zeke said.
“I can see a definite potential in that song, but he didn’t carry it out the way it should have been.”
“Carry it out? What do you mean?”
“There was no studio engineering or refinement on it,” Jake explained. “Not even minimally, like we used to do when we were laying down Intemperance tracks. Overdubs, level blending, maybe some double tracking of the vocals. Matt was always opposed to all those things, but we always managed to get them in there to some extent. It sounds to me like he didn’t allow any input from the sound people at all, that he basically just laid down the tracks as is and let them stand.”