Standing On Top

Chapter 2b

The session went reasonably well. The first two hours was spent taking their instruments out of storage cases, cleaning them up, plugging them into the sound system, and tuning everything. The instruments were not the same ones they used on stage. Jake used a top-of-the-line Brogan Les Paul knock-off because its components were superior and it recorded better. Matt used a newer version of the Fender Stratocaster. Darren had a different version of the same Brogan bass guitar. Coop had a different, though identical drum set. Nerdly had an electric piano instead of the Grand he normally used.

After getting everything tuned in and sounding good they then went through the ritual of smoking marijuana out of a water bong. Though there was a long-standing rule about using intoxicants of any kind prior to performing or rehearsing, this rule did not apply to jam sessions when they composed new music. They had found that being stoned during the composition phase actually seemed to help with their creativity.

Matt introduced them to his first new song first. It was called Can't Chain Me. Like pretty much everything Matt wrote, he had composed the main guitar riff first and then wrote the lyrics to match it after. The riff was a grinding, powerful, and complex five-chord progression that Jake and the others were immediately impressed with. They lyrics were quite good as well, dealing with how various people — women, managers, record company executives — tried to control Matt and how he refused to be controlled. It was a more mature version of a typical Matt Tisdale tune and Jake was already thinking that it might just be the title cut of the next album.

They worked on it for almost three hours without a break, refining the rhythm, finding ways to insert the piano and Jake's backing guitar, learning the lyrics and composing when the harmony of the rest of the band would come in. Since this was a subject that Jake could relate to well he had no problem finding and conveying the emotion of the lyrics as he sang them, of getting across exactly what Matt was trying to say.

"Off to a good start," Matt said as they smoked a few more bonghits during their break.

"I agree," said Darren, who, to the surprise and delight of the others, had taken an active and enthusiastic approach to the composition process in a way they hadn't seen since back in their D Street West days.

After the break Jake introduced them to his first effort, the song he thought of as the best of the three he'd composed so far. It was called Cold Reality, a song about how the things you've always dreamed of and anticipated always seemed to be less than expected, sometimes even evil, when you achieved them. Jake wrote his songs by composing the lyrics while strumming out a basic rhythm on his acoustic guitar. In this case — much to Darren's chagrin — he envisioned multiple tempo changes. The main verses would be played with a ballad-like air, heavy on acoustic guitar sound and piano with only supporting solo-chords from Matt's electric. The choruses would be a bit heavier, with Matt doing a distorted electric version of the main riff while Jake played a little heavier acoustic. The bridges, on the other hand — and there were two of them — would be played in classic heavy metal with two grinding distorted electrics and no piano at all.

The complexity of the song meant that they were only able to get the very basics of it settled in the three hours they worked on it. Darren grumbled about the fucking tempo changes, of course, but seemed to remain good-natured about them. Everyone else really liked the tune and was enthusiastic about working it up. The suggestions flew back and forth as to just how fast the tempo should be at each point and how dominant each backing instrument should be put across. Matt, Bill, and Jake, as was usually the case, were the ones to make most of the suggestions.

Before they left for the day Matt plugged back in and showed them the new heavy palm-muted riff he was working on. Heavy turned out to be just the word for it. It sounded nothing like Kirk Hammett's work on Master Of Puppets — Matt, as promised, had adapted the technique and changed it to his own style — but Jake continued to have his doubts about it.

"You got lyrics to go with that yet?" he asked Matt.

"Not yet," Matt replied. "I'm still working on the basic riff. I can pull some lyrics out of my ass later. What do you think?"

"It doesn't quite sound like an Intemperance riff," Jake said.

"What the fuck does that mean?" Matt asked.

"Well... where are we gonna fit Nerdly's piano in with that riff? I don't think it will mix well."

"That's true," Bill said. "It's too fast of a tempo for a piano to keep up. And a riff like that needs to be the domineering sound on the recording, just like Metallica does it. My piano would just be lost in the noise. I don't see any way to mix it in."

Matt grumbled and even threw out some profanity, but he was musician enough to know that Jake and Bill were right. There was no way to mix a piano in with a heavy palm-muted riff without it sounding like shit. "I'll work on it some more," he said. "Maybe I can find a way to slow it down some."

And that ended their first session.

"See you all tomorrow," Matt told them as they headed for the door. "Same time, same fuckin' channel."

They went out to the parking lot where a limo from Buxfield Limousines was waiting to take Coop and Darren home. Jake had his Corvette and Bill had a brand new Ford Escort he'd bought shortly after coming off tour ("It's practical, economical, and environmentally friendly," he'd explained when Matt had called him a fuckin' faggot for buying such a pussy car). Matt had a new car he'd just purchased the week before. It was a silver 1987 Maserati Biturbo that he'd paid $75,000 cash for. It was obvious that he loved the car almost as much as he loved his Strat.

"Anyone wanna grab some dinner?" Jake asked.

"Not me," said Matt. "I've got some bitches coming over tonight and I'm gonna have a little orgy."

"How about you, Nerdly?" Jake asked.

"Maybe tomorrow," Bill replied. "I'm going to go take a shower and then head over to the Flamingo. I feel the need to engage in some meaningless fornication. You gonna come tonight?"

"Naw," Jake said, "I'm still a little burned on the meaningless fornication after the tour."

"That didn't stop you from pounding that little punk rock chick in New York," Matt said.

"I didn't say I was stopping anything," Jake said. "I just said I'm not up for it tonight. I'll see you guys."

They said their goodbyes and Jake climbed into his car. He headed toward a little restaurant he'd discovered last year while rehearsing the Balance Of Power tunes.

The Brannigan Station Café was on Wilshire Boulevard at Gayley Avenue in the Los Angeles district of Westwood. It was just a few blocks south of the sprawling UCLA campus but the UCLA students rarely patronized the establishment. Instead, the target clientele were workers from the huge Veterans Administration complex just across the San Diego Freeway and from the Federal Building just two blocks west. Both of these groups routinely trooped to Brannigan Station for breakfast, lunch, and, to a lesser degree, dinner as they headed home for the day.

Jake had discovered the place one day after leaving the rehearsal warehouse on nearby Olympic Boulevard in Sawtelle. He had wanted to stop for a bite to eat before heading to a bar frequented by UCLA students where picking up a nineteen year old slut willing to do anything for Jake Kingsley would be easy to accomplish. The restaurant was everything he looked for in an eating establishment. First of all, it was family owned and run and not a chain restaurant. Second of all, the time he tended to be there — around four o'clock in the afternoon — was the slowest time of the day for Brannigan Station since lunch had ended and dinner had yet to begin. Often he was the only customer in the place at this hour. The most significant reason — the reason that kept him coming back — was that even if there were customers in the place, they tended to be older people in their late-thirties to mid-sixties which meant that very few of them even knew who Jake Kingsley was and had no desire to talk to him if they did know who he was. It was a place where he could eat good food in peace without constantly having to make small talk with fans or sign autographs or deal with religious freaks wanting to tell him he was going to hell for his corruption of America's youth.

He pulled his Corvette into the parking lot at 4:16 PM and walked in the front door. The restaurant was completely empty of customers except for an elderly couple in their seventies — probably patrons of the VA Hospital — sitting in one of the booths near the front. They looked up as he came in, gave him a distasteful look when they saw his long hair and tattered jeans, but otherwise showed no signs of recognition.

Jo Ann Brannigan, the owner of the restaurant, was manning the hostess podium. She smiled delightfully when he walked in.

"Jake," she said, beaming, walking up to give him a hug. "Welcome back. We haven't seen you in ages."

He hugged her, feeling her large, surgery-enhanced breasts pushing into his chest. Jo Ann was quite attractive, appearing to be in her late twenties or early thirties instead of the forty-four years of age she actually was. She was an astute businesswoman who had leased the building and opened the restaurant ten years before using money from her second divorce settlement. She ran it like a well-oiled machine, taking advantage of her location and catering to her projected clientele by hiring well-schooled and well-skilled cooks and friendly, eye-pleasing but non-slutty looking waitresses and waiters. This had allowed her to be financially stable in the upper-middle class when the alimony payments and child support finally ran out.

"It's good to see you, Jo," he told her as their embrace broke. "You're looking hot, as usual."

She blushed in a way that was quite erotic. "Oh you," she said, slapping at his shoulder. "That's nice of you to say but after all those young things you hook up with out on tour I'm sure I look like a sack of old bones."

"Not at all," he said. "You look like a sack of young bones. I promise."

She giggled like a schoolgirl. "It's good to see you, Jake. You up for a little dinner?"

"Do you still have the Philly cheese steak on the menu?"

"You know it," she said. "We wouldn't get rid of our most popular item."

"Then I'm here for some dinner," he said. "You think you can squeeze me in?"

She looked around at the empty dining room. "I think a table just opened up," she said. "Go pick your spot and I'll send Rachel over to take your order. Anything to drink?"

"Corona with a lime," he said. "And keep 'em coming."

"You got it," she said.

He sat down in a booth near the back of the room, the place where he would receive the least amount of notice if a crowd suddenly showed up unexpectedly. Soon Rachel Madison, Jo Ann's daughter from her first marriage, came over carrying a bottle of Corona with a lime in it. A student majoring in English at UCLA, Rachel worked afternoons and evenings at her mother's business. She was nothing but a younger version of her mother. She was naturally blonde (so it appeared anyway), petite, quite cute, and looked considerably younger than the twenty-two years of age she actually was. She could have easily passed for a high school student had she wished. She was wearing the standard uniform of Brannigan's waitresses — a simple pair of tight jeans and a bright red T-shirt that was tucked into the waist. Her medium breasts bulged quite alluring beneath the restaurant's logo.

"Hi, Jake," she said, setting his beer down on the table. She then leaned down and gave him a big hug, pushing those breasts into his shoulder, and a short kiss on his cheek. "It's good to have you back. I was starting to think we'd never see you again."

"I just couldn't stay away," Jake said. "Ever since the tour ended I've been craving a good Philly cheese steak sandwich and a gander of you in your Brannigan's T-shirt."

She blushed in a manner very similar to the way her mother had just minutes before.

"How was the tour?" she asked. "I saw what happened in Cincinnati. What a horrible place that must be."

"I don't think I'll be moving there anytime soon," Jake said. "The freakin' villagers would probably show up at my house with battering rams and torches."

She giggled. "I saw on the news the other day that the judge dismissed the charges against you. At least someone there has some sense."

"I'm sure he didn't like dismissing the charges," Jake said. "He just knew that the first court I appealed to would overturn him and probably issue a reprimand."

"So the system works?" she asked.

"Well, I've been arrested three times now for a variety of charges and so far... yes, I'll have to say that the system works. At least if you're rich and have expensive lawyers like I do."

"Justice for money," she said with a smile. "What can you say? We all know it's the American way."

He laughed. "Styx," he said, impressed with her musical knowledge of an obscure tune and her ability to quote it in correct context. "Half-Penny, Two-Penny. A good lyric."

"Not as good as yours are," she said. "You never did tell me if you really did it or not."

"Did what?" he asked, although he knew what she was talking about.

"You know? Did you really snort coke out of that girl's butt?"

"That would be a total violation of the health code if I'd done something like that," he said.

She slapped at his shoulder again. "You," she said. "I bet you actually did it. You seem all nice and sweet but I bet you have a wild side."

"I'll have to plead the Fifth here, hon," he told her. "That's what my lawyers suggested."

"Someday you'll tell me," she vowed. "So anyway, what can I get you? Mom already said you want the Philly. Anything with it? You want a salad or some soup maybe?"

"Naw," he said, "just the sandwich. That'll hold me until I get to my next coke sniffing from the butt-crack session."

She disappeared long enough for Jake to drink a third of his beer and light a cigarette. When she came back she had a glass of diet soda in her hands. She sat down next to him, uninvited, knowing that Jake liked chatting with her when he was in.

"So how's school going?" he asked her as she sipped from her soda. "Are you taking complete and total advantage of the educational opportunities that California offers you?"

"Now you're sounding like Nerdly," she said. "But school is going okay I guess. I haven't been able to pull a full schedule this last year because I'm working here a lot in the afternoons, but I'm more than halfway to my degree."

"Good for you," he said. "You still want to be a teacher?"

"More than anything," she said.

"Follow your dreams," he told her. "That's what I did and look at where I am now."

"You're in our restaurant now," she said. "Is that where your dreams brought you?"

"This is the culmination of years of dreaming," he assured her. "So how about Stan? How's he doing?"

Stan was her boyfriend, a fellow UCLA student majoring in World History. Like her, his dream was to one day teach high school kids in a public classroom. Jake had met him a few times on his previous visits. He was a nice kid, maybe a little nerdy (not that there was anything wrong with that) but obviously quite in love with her. She had obviously been quite in love with him as well, which was one of the reasons why Jake was able to maintain a friendly relationship with her — since she was already spoken for there was no sexual tension between them, just the normal flirtations. The frown she displayed when he mentioned his name told him immediately that things had gone sour in the relationship.

"You broke up?" Jake asked.

"Yeah," she said with a wistful sigh. "About three months ago. It just wasn't meant to be, I guess."

"What happened?" he asked.

"He asked me to marry him," she said.

"Oh, well I can certainly see how that would put a damper on the relationship."

"Not funny," she said with a pout. "I turned him down."

"How come? It always seemed like the two of you were meant for each other."

"Lots of reasons," she said, obviously not enjoying talking about it. "Mostly I just wasn't ready to get married yet. I'm only twenty-two, right? What's the rush?"

"I suppose," he said. "I'm twenty-six and I haven't done it yet." He coughed. "Uh... get married that is."

That brought another giggle to her lips. "Anyway, I have a new boyfriend now. He's a fourth year med student at UCLA. I don't get to see him much since he's always in classes or at the hospital, but he really seems to like me."

"And do you like him?" Jake asked.

She shrugged. "Paul's fun — when he's around. And Mom really likes him. She says it never hurts to have a doctor in the family."

"Didn't she marry a doctor once?" Jake asked, recalling a random piece of trivia Jo Ann had mentioned once about one of her ex-husbands.

"Yeah," she said. "He was her second — the one whose alimony and child support payments got us this place. Mom was his trophy wife for about ten years while I was growing up. He adopted me, you know?"

"No, I didn't know that," Jake said, suddenly getting uncomfortable with this conversation.

Rachel seemed to pick up on this. She immediately turned the subject to something else. "Anyway," she said, "are you going to be stopping by more?"

"Probably," he replied. "We're back in the old warehouse, trying to come up with some new tunes for our next album. We'll be doing that at least five times a week for the next few months. I'm sure I'll be inclined to stop in a few times a week for some good food." He looked at her, his eyes lingering on her cute face. "And good company, of course."

She blushed again, a shy smile on her face. Jake smiled back at her and then took another drink of his beer.

The band got together in the warehouse for the next nine days straight and worked on developing their new music. They worked straight through the Christmas holiday without so much as a phone call home to their families. For the most part, the camaraderie they'd once enjoyed while composing new music to play at D Street West in Heritage returned to them and was even enhanced some as they knew they were now composing for a much larger audience. Darren, as he'd promised, was as productive a member of the band as he'd ever been, offering suggestions that were occasionally even useful and hardly grumbling at all when Jake introduced a piece with tempo changes in it. They were able to perfect both Cold Reality and Can't Chain Me and started working on three more songs — one by Jake and two by Matt.

There were a few sour points to the composition sessions. Matt was unable to modify the heavy palm muted riffs he was working on into something that would mix well — or at all, in fact — with a piano. No matter how much he slowed it down, it was still too fast.

"This is fuckin' ridiculous, man," he complained to Jake one night as they drank a few beers at Jake's place after the session. "These palm-muted riffs are some of the best things I've ever done. They fuckin' rock, man, you know what I mean? Ain't there some way we can squeeze in at least one song that has 'em?"

Jake was not a big fan of the palm-muted riffs, from Matt or from anyone. He thought them unnecessarily heavy and even a bit simplistic, taking advantage of what was little more than an exploitation of an already common guitar technique. They also limited the musical accompaniment and forced the singer to vocalize in a narrow range. "We're Intemperance, Matt," Jake explained to him. "And Intemperance means we have to have Nerdly's piano in the songs in some way. That's one of our signatures, one of the things that makes people buy our albums, that makes them play them on the radio."

"Yeah," Matt said. "I suppose." He shook his head angrily. "One of the best riffs I've ever come up with and I can't do shit with it because we have a signature sound."

Jake had a hard time commiserating with him at first. And then the same thing happened to him. He composed a song called As You Will on his acoustic guitar over a two-night period. The lyrics were a rich examination of the give and take that went with a male-female relationship. The underlying rhythm of the song was a complex melody that was fingerpicked out on the acoustic and accompanied by a background of piano. Unfortunately, when he introduced it to the rest of the band, only Nerdly liked it.

"How the fuck are we supposed to translate that into a lead riff?" Matt asked him after hearing it for the first time.

"Well... we don't," Jake said. "We'll keep the song basically acoustic and you'll accompany with short chords in the high range and then an extended solo after the bridge."

"No distortion riff at all?" Matt asked, appalled.

"And where do my drums fit in?" Coop wanted to know.

"You'll just keep the rhythm in the background on the chorus and the bridge," Jake said.

"No fucking distortion riff?" Matt said again. "That's beyond ballad, Jake. That's well into the land of easy-fucking-listening shit. That's not Intemperance any more than leaving out the goddamn piano on my palm-muted riffs."

Jake had to admit that Matt was right. As great of a song as he thought As You Will was, there was no way to convert it into a song that would fit with the Intemperance style of play. He was forced to shelve it.

And then there was another song Jake introduced called I Am Time, which was a dark tune about the insidious nature of time passage and how a mere mortal could do nothing to stop it or even slow it down. The base rhythm he strummed out was fast and powerful but again, did not seem to translate well into an electric riff without becoming overly repetitive and boring. And even if it was mixed up a bit — as Matt had a gift for doing — there was no room for a rhythm guitar to accompany it, especially not with piano backing thrown in. Everyone in the band liked the song — even Darren thought it was badass — but as much as they tried to make it sound good using all of their instruments they couldn't seem to pull it off. The closest they came was having Jake play the main rhythm with loosely distorted electric and having Matt play an almost constant solo in the background that matched the rhythm. It was a novel concept but it came off sounding a little harsh because the tempo of the song forced Matt to play too fast, thus drawing attention away from the rest of the instruments with his guitar.

"It's a great song, Jake," Matt said after they'd worked at it for more than six hours, "but I just don't think it's gonna fly, not with all of us playing."

"Yeah," Jake said sourly. He had come to the same conclusion more than two hours before. "I think you're right."

"Any chance you can use those lyrics with a different rhythm?" asked Nerdly.

Jake and Matt were both shaking their heads before he even finished his question.

"You just can't do that, Nerdly," Jake told him. "They lyrics go with the rhythm. They'd sound shitty if I tried to slow it down any or speed it up and put it to a different riff."

"Yep," Matt agreed. "You can't compose the lyrics independent of the song. It just doesn't work that way."

Jake reluctantly agreed to shelve that song as well. They cut out a little early that day, too strained and too burned out to start working on anything new.

"That's a shame, man," Matt said as they assembled in the parking lot before going their separate ways for the evening. "I really love that fuckin' tune. Seriously, I do. It's got a kick-ass tempo to it and the lyrics are some of the best you've done. I just wish there was a way we could pull it off."

"Yeah," Jake sighed, feeling a tension headache in the back of his skull. "Me too."

He left the warehouse and drove immediately to the Brannigan Station Café, which was, as usual at this time of day, almost completely deserted. Both Jo Ann and Rachel lit up with smiles as he came in the door and gave him friendly hugs of greeting.

"You know the routine," Jo Ann told him. "Find yourself a seat."

"Corona with a lime?" Rachel asked.

"You know it," he said. "And a couple of Tylenol if you've got them."

"On the way," Rachel promised, disappearing into the kitchen.

Jake sat down in his usual booth near the back. Ever since that first visit he had been back four more times after the jam sessions to eat dinner and have a few beers before going home. Jo Ann always treated him with the sort of warmth due a family member and Rachel was downright flirtatious with him. When she wasn't being flirtatious, she was complaining about Paul, her fourth year med student boyfriend. Jake, for the most part, enjoyed the flirtation and returned it stroke for stroke. He didn't take it very seriously since she had a boyfriend but she was a very pretty girl and after months of extremely short term relationships in which he sometimes didn't even talk to the girl in question before fucking her it was nice to pretend he was a normal human being instead of a celebrity, that he was engaging in a normal flirtatious relationship with a normal girl.

"How was your Christmas?" Jake asked her after she took his order, brought him his first beer, and then sat down across from him in the booth.

"It was all right," she said with a shrug. "Mom and I went to visit my aunt and my grandma in San Diego. It was a long drive up and back."

"I made it in an hour and fifteen minutes last month when Matt and I went down there."

"Oh yeah?" she asked. "And how many times did you get pulled over for speeding?"

"Only once," he said. "The cop let me off in exchange for my autograph on his notepad."

She laughed. "How about you?" she asked. "How was your Christmas?"

"I didn't really have one," he said. "We worked straight through it. I didn't even realize it was Christmas until I came here after the session and you were closed."

"Wow," she said. "That's dedication."

He shrugged. "Or maybe it's obsession," he said. "We are having a good time though. Putting the music together was always one of the best parts of the job — right behind performing it before an audience."

"What about recording it?" she asked, her blue eyes shining. Rarely did they talk about his music.

"That bites ass," he said. "It's a long, tedious, boring, and incredibly repetitive process. By the time we're done I'm so sick of all the songs I could almost puke. Nerdly's about the only one who likes recording."

"I never would've thought that," she said.

"That Nerdly would like it or that it's boring?"

"That it's boring. I always thought it was kind of glamorous, you know?"

"It was for about the first week of the first album," he said. "After that... well..."

"It bites ass?"

"Exactly," he said, taking a sip of beer. "So what are you doing for New Year's Eve? Paul taking you to some cool party somewhere?"

She frowned quite severely. "He's not taking me anywhere," she said. "He's working in the hospital again."

"On New Year's Eve?" he asked. "Don't they give those guys a Christmas break?"

"From the classroom they do," she said. "They still have hospital rotations for them. He actually volunteered for New Year's Eve duty. He says it's one of the busiest nights of the year and he doesn't want to miss it."

"Oh well," Jake said, making an attempt to defend a fellow male. "Eventually this will all pay off, won't it? He'll finish school at the end of the year and you'll have more time together."

"Hardly," she said. "He'll start his residency right after school is over and I'll never see him after that. They make them work thirty-six hour shifts with only twelve off in between."

"That does cut down on the together time a bit, doesn't it?"

"I can always come over and watch him sleep, I suppose."

"Yeah, I suppose," Jake agreed. He took another drink. "Listen," he said, "I'm going over to Matt's place on New Year's Eve. He's throwing kind of a private party, just a few people we know having some drinks and maybe smoking a little weed. If you're just going to be sitting home alone anyway why don't you come with me?"

She looked stunned by his invitation, her face flushing, her eyes finding it hard to look at his face. "You want me to come to Matt's party?" she asked. "At his house?"

"If your boyfriend won't like it that's cool," Jake said. "I just thought maybe you'd like to get out for a night and hang out. It's no big deal if you can't. You won't hurt my feelings."

She seemed at a loss for words. "Uh... well... what about your date?" she finally blurted. "Wouldn't she get mad if you brought me with you?"

"I don't have a date," Jake told her. "I haven't been seeing anyone lately."

"Really?" she asked. "But you're Jake Kingsley."

"That's what they call me," he confirmed. "I've had a few dates and a few casual encounters but I haven't been seeing anyone since I was dating this female cop last year."

"You dated a cop?" she asked, wondering if he was making that up.

"It's a long story," he said. "And not a very happy one either. So what do you think? I'd hate to go to Matt's party stag. The other guys would make fun of me for it."

"Uh... well... sure," she said. "I'd love to come."

"Very good," he said. "And you can tell Paul it's all platonic."

"I don't think I'm going to tell him about this," she said with a giggle.

"To each their own," he said. "Write down your address for me before I leave and I'll pick you up about eight o'clock in the limo."

"The limo?" she asked, paling a bit. "You mean... a limo?"

"I don't like to drink and drive," Jake said. "Is that okay?"

"Of course... but... but... what should I wear?"

"Anything you want," Jake told her. "It's a very casual affair."