“You still got it, Nerdly,” Jake told him when he finished his warmup.
“Fuckin’ A,” Coop said, grinning, a nostalgic look on his face.
“I do still play on a regular basis at home,” Nerdly told them. “Piano is my first love—sorry, Sharon, but it’s true—and I use it to relax, usually with the classics.”
“The classics?” Coop asked. “You mean like Jerry Lee Lewis, Elton John, shit like that?”
“Chopin, Beethoven, and Mozart actually,” Nerdly corrected. “Although I will admit a fondness for the work of Elton John as well.”
“He’s pretty good,” said Charlie, “even if he is a fucking faggot.”
Everyone paused a moment to look at Charlie inquisitively.
“What?” he asked when he noticed their eyes upon him.
Jake shook his head a little. “Nothing,” he said. “All right. You in the groove here, Nerdly? You want us to run through it a few times again?”
“That will not be necessary,” Bill said. “Go ahead and perform the composition. I’ll lay down some fills that I think might be complimentary to the melody.”
Jake smiled, thinking how good it was to have Nerdly pounding the keys again. It was almost like...
He looked at the assembled band for a moment. There was Charlie on the bass, Coop on the drums, Nerdly on the piano, himself with a guitar in his hand and a microphone in front of his mouth. It really was almost like old times. Quite literally. Four of the five members of Intemperance were here with instruments in hand and about to start working up a new hard-rock tune. The only one missing was Matt.
This is heavy, he thought. Really heavy.
He took a deep breath. Heavy, perhaps, but it was also their job, how they made their living, and this promised to be a good tune. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Dark, from the top of the first verse. Everyone ready?”
Everyone was ready. They began once again, and this time, Nerdly threw in some piano just where it was needed. And it sounded very good indeed.
“Hell yeah!” Jake said enthusiastically between his verses.
“That’s the shit, Nerdly!” yelled out Coop as he drummed away.
They ran all the way through the first two verses and then started over, doing it again. Nerdly played out his parts with a little more confidence, a little more flair. They paused for a few moments so Sharon could jot down the notes they were using for the fills on the score and then began to do it again. For more than an hour they worked it up, Jake and Nerdly making suggestions about transitions and timing, about strengths and flow. Coop and Charlie made suggestions on tempo shifts and Coop started to add some drum fills. They talked enthusiastically about all these things between each take of the tune. Celia watched all of this in amazement and played her parts of the rhythm professionally and well, but no one asked her opinion of anything and she did not offer it. The other musicians in the room, Laura, Liz, Nat, simply sat in their chairs and watched, all three feeling decidedly like they weren’t even in the room. Even Sharon seemed to have been forgotten.
“I have an idea for the bridge transition,” Jake said shortly into the second hour of this.
“Yeah?” asked Coop.
“Let’s hear it,” said Nerdly.
“We go down-tempo to about eighty,” Jake said. “The lead guitar will switch to random fills. Nerdly, you’ll take over the primary melody on the piano and I’ll play out a secondary melody clean on my guitar.”
Nerdly and Celia looked at him strangely. “You will play out the secondary melody clean?” Nerdly asked. “Wouldn’t that be Celia’s job? She’s the rhythm guitarist.”
“And how would you play out the melody clean if you’re also doing random lead fills?” Celia asked, speaking for the first time in more than forty minutes.
Jake shook his head, resisting the urge to hit himself in the forehead. “My bad,” he said. “I kind of forgot I was the lead there for a minute.” Because when we do tunes like this, I’m always the rhythm guitarist and Matt is the lead. Jesus. Forgot where I was there for a bit. “Anyway, that’s my thought. C, you think you can drop tempo and switch to a clean sound?”
“I could,” she said slowly, “but I don’t have a pedal set for that currently. I could do it manually by lowering the output on my preamp, I suppose, but then we’d have to soundcheck it and then soundcheck it again to put it back.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little too much for this point in the game?” asked Sharon.
“Yeah ... I suppose,” Jake allowed.
“I think you’re right,” Nerdly said, “In any case, I was just trying to show Liz what Jake was after. Did I do that sufficiently, Liz?”
Liz nodded her head. “I see what he’s after all right,” she said.
“Perfect,” Nerdly told her. “I will relinquish your instrument to you then. Should we go over this a little more with Liz playing the fills?”
But Liz was shaking her head now. “I can’t duplicate what you were doing there, Bill. I can’t even come close.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I’ve never tried to mix my instrument into a hard rock tune before,” Liz said. “You made your career doing that. I may be able to play the notes of the tune, but there is no way I can phrase like you were just doing.”
“What are you saying, Liz?” Jake asked.
“I think Bill should be the pianist on this cut,” she said. “The tune will come out much better if he does it.”
“I can’t be the pianist,” Bill protested. “I’m the sound engineer.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Celia asked. “You played synthesizer for us on multiple cuts and still were able to engineer the sound.”
“That is true,” Bill said, “but this is different.”
“How is it different?” Jake asked.
“Okay,” Nerdly said. “Maybe it isn’t different. But I have no desire to step in and take Liz’s job from her. She is the pianist of this group. She should play the part.”
Everyone looked over at Liz. She seemed a little embarrassed to be the center of attention, but she held her ground. “I know I’m the pianist, Bill,” she told him. “And I know I’m good with my instrument. I also know you’re better, particularly with the genre that Dark is in. You should play the piano on the tune. It’s not going to hurt my feelings.”
“Well...” Bill said slowly, “if you insist.”
“I insist,” Liz insisted.
“I’ll do it then,” Bill said. It was quite clear to everyone that this decision made him very happy.
Two days later the band took a break from the workups so that Jake could fly to the San Francisco Bay area for a week to lay down his guitar and vocal tracks for I Signed That Line, the duet that he and Gordon had composed. G and his boys had been in Jam-On Productions’ studio for the past month now, trying to get the latest Bigg G CD recorded so it could be mixed, mastered, and readied for manufacturing and distribution before G and Neesh’s wedding in July. G wanted to have time for an extended honeymoon with his bride before hitting the road for the promotional tour that would follow the release.
Laura came with Jake since Neesh was going to be there as well. Instead of flying first-class commercial, they climbed into Jake’s plane for the trip. It had been a while since he’d been behind the controls and this seemed a good opportunity to log a few more hours. And there was another reason to fly themselves as well. They could check on the progress of their new home.
“We’ll be out of the class C airspace any second here,” Jake told Laura as they flew twenty-five hundred feet above the coastline of San Luis Obispo County just south of the Oceano Airport. This was the minimum transition altitude through the Class C airspace bubble around Santa Maria Airport to the south of them. Once clear of the bubble, there was a ten-mile gap of comparatively unregulated Class E airspace before the next bubble, the one surrounding San Luis Obispo Regional began. The oceanfront property that Jake had bought was within that gap.