"Right," Matt said. "Now how about we start the next song? We still have three hours left in this session.
The next song they decided to work on was called My Life. Written by Matt a few months before — before all the shit had seriously started to hit the fan — it was an intelligent, well-constructed piece in which Matt pontificated about the lifestyle of a hard-partying rock star in first person perspective. In the verses, he talked about his expensive house and his expensive car and the fact that he could no longer drive his expensive car because the state had revoked his privilege to do so. He talked of getting wasted and having any woman he desired just because of who he was. He talked about being worshiped by fans and how he sometimes liked this and sometimes wanted to hit them. The chorus sections of the song all started with my life is... and then used a variety of other lines to illustrate that point. For instance, the first chorus, after Matt's house and car and life of luxury were described, was:
My life is lavish. Yes, I'm better than you
Money? No object. Got no bills overdue
Got more rooms in my house than I ever could use
Got servants, got limos, can afford substance abuse
And the second chorus, after the verse describing Matt's wild sexual abandon and constant womanizing, was:
My life is sleazy; can have any bitch I want
Models, groupies, porn stars; I've screwed Miss Vermont
The mile high club? Got a gold member's card
The bitches want me, I use 'em, and then I discard
In general, Jake liked the song. It was fairly classic Matt Tisdale work in lyrics and was actually a step forward for him in musical composition. The basic musical backing for the lyrics started with a medium tempo power riff on Matt's guitar and backing by the acoustic sound of Jake's. Unlike most of Matt's songs — and most Intemperance songs in general — the rhythm guitar would not be playing all the time. It was to be mostly silent during the verses and would kick in strongly in the spaces between the verses and the chorus and feature strongly in somewhat of a dueling format during the instrumental portion after the second verse.
"I like it, Matt," Jake told him after Matt led them through it the first time — singing into his own microphone and playing unaccompanied on his guitar — and then explained the basic backing philosophy he was after. "I think it'll pound out really good."
Matt didn't acknowledge the praise. "I'm gonna go through it again," he said instead. "Let's start working the drums and bass in for the basics and then we'll work on the acoustic and piano later."
"Right," Jake said. "You want me to start singing it?"
"No, not yet," Matt said. And with that, he hit the first riff again.
Things went fairly smoothly for the rest of that day and they departed the warehouse, not exactly on good terms, but at least without cursing at each other. The problems started up again early the next day when it came time to start working on the transitional portions of My Life — the part that involved Jake's rhythm guitar and Nerdly's piano. Every time Jake or Nerdly would suggest some way of putting their instruments into the song, Matt would automatically veto it.
"I don't want a fucking G to F switchover in this part," he would tell Jake. "I want a fucking D major to C major alternation, just like I fucking wrote it."
Or when Nerdly would suggest an enhancement of the basic piano rhythm Matt had laid down, he would bark: "We ain't doing no fucking flourishes in this song. Just play the goddamn notes like I told you to."
Matt seemed to think that Jake and Nerdly were trying to take over his song when, in reality, they were simply trying to do what they'd always done on every Intemperance piece dating back to the pre-D Street West days. They were offering simple suggestions based on their musical knowledge and talent — the sort of things that had always enhanced their music in the past and made it what it was. When Jake or Nerdly or even Coop tried to explain this to Matt, however, he wanted to hear nothing about it.
"This is my fucking song!" he would yell. "Just like Cut Me Loose was Jake's fucking song! We will play my song my way. Is that clear?"
It was clear. And after another wasted day of constant bickering and precious little progression at their task, the band was finally forced to come to a basic accord on the dispute.
"All right," Jake said toward the end of the day, "it's obvious that there's only one way we're going to get anything done around here and make our submission deadline."
"And what might that be?" Matt asked cynically. "Put you in complete and total charge?"
"No, not exactly," Jake said. "We put whoever wrote the song in complete and total charge."
Matt looked at him suspiciously. "What do you mean?"
"I mean we do six of your songs, six of mine," Jake told him. "The songs you wrote, you tell us how to play and we'll play that way. We won't offer any suggestions on anything. When we do my songs, the same thing holds true — with one exception."
"What exception is that?" Jake asked.
"Unlike you, I do like input from the rest of the band so I'll still take suggestions. I will have ultimate say-so on whether or not to accept those suggestions and what I say is what ultimately goes. Is that fair?"
"What about when the time comes to put our playlist together for the album?" Matt asked.
"We generally put ten songs on the album," Jake said. "I'll pick my best five and you pick your best five and that'll be the album."
"What about the order of play?" Matt asked.
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Jake said. "Quite frankly, I'd be thrilled as hell to have that to worry about right now."
As much as Matt wanted to argue about this plan, he simply could not. He knew it was not the optimum way to put things together, but he was also a realist enough to know that, at this point in the game, it was the only way things were going to get done. "All right," he said with a nod. "Deal. And I expect every one of you traitorous motherfuckers to stick with it."
They all stuck with it. And, admittedly, the bickering and fighting had been reduced considerably, if not entirely eliminated. They worked out My Life to an uneasy perfection and had then gone to work on another of Jake's songs, a tune called Lines On The Map, a fairly poignant and typical Jake Kingsley multi-tempo piece that discussed the fact that there were more than 185 separate governments on the Earth and that perhaps this was partially the reason why there was so much war and why nothing made any sense.
It was when they started the next set of songs, one by Matt and one by Jake, that more problems cropped up. In this case, both of the primary songwriters were equally guilty of the strife. Since it had been agreed that each of them were in control of their own tunes, they both wanted to record a song that did not really fit the Intemperance signature sound.
Matt's song, Faces At Dawn — basically a hard-driving piece about the ravishes of liquor and drug abuse on the body — was composed by using a heavy palm-muted guitar progression. It was essentially the sort of piece Matt had been trying to push on them for years, ever since hearing the Master Of Puppets album by Metallica. Granted, he had become the master of the palm-muted technique, developing an entirely new style that, if the song were ever recorded, would spawn an entirely new generation of imitators. The problem was that a modified palm-muted piece was still a palm-muted piece, which meant it was too up-tempo to mix well with a piano, which meant it would not fit Intemperance's signature sound.