At eleven-fifteen she could resist no longer. She picked up the phone and called him. He answered on the first ring, in a clear, unsleepy voice. The mere sound of his hello raised a clamor within her, which she schooled her voice to hide.
“Hi. Did I wake you?”
“No. I was lying here awake.”
“Me, too.”
“Casey in bed now?”
“Yes. We swam, and talked, and listened to CDs, and she had a thousand questions about what it’s going to be like in the studio tomorrow. Did you go to Momma’s and play cribbage?”
“Yes. She whupped me three games out of four, then fed me rhubarb pie and ice cream and sent me home.”
“Did you feel better after getting out of the house for a while?”
“Temporarily. It’s awfully quiet here.”
A lull fell while she pictured him in his old-fashioned upstairs bedroom with the window overlooking the backyard and alley.
“Kenny, about what you said earlier …”
She hadn’t planned exactly what she was going to say, and stumbled into silence.
“It just sort of slipped out,” he said.
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure it’s not just that you’re lonesome tonight?”
“Some, maybe, but the groundwork was laid down long before Casey left.”
“Then maybe it’s because I’m different from Faith, and because I’m helping your daughter, and because I’m rich and famous and supposedly unattainable, and—”
“Of course it is!” he interrupted, his anger flaring. “It’s all those things! If you expect me to deny it, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t divorce myself from the knowl edge of your fame and success any more than you can undo all that for your sister Judy. But if you’re suggesting that’s all I’m in love with—Mac, the public persona—you’re wrong! And by the way, if you think it’s easy being an ordinary guy falling in love with a multimillionaire recording star, guess again. It’s pretty damned terrifying because of everything you just accused me of. But I’ve been doing a little sorting out of my own, and examining my motives, and what I come back to time and again is this great big lump of emptiness that’s lodged in my gut since I said good-bye to you in my office. Tess, it’s like … it’s like … hell, I don’t know.” His anger was gone, and in its place borderline misery. “I have to push myself to go to work in the morning, and there doesn’t seem to be any point to my day. Every day’s the same—no highs, no lows, no laughing, no anticipation. I miss you. And every day I think about driving down to Nashville and ringing your doorbell, and then I think, that’s dumb, because what would happen then?”
“Then we’d probably go to bed together, and that wouldn’t solve anything, would it?”
“No, but it would sure feel good.”
The line hummed while both of them realized they were laying their wishes bare for the other to see.
“I never told you,” Tess confessed, “that I went out with that guy I’d been dating, Burt Sheer, and I tried kissing him, hoping it would chase you from my mind, but it didn’t work. Kissing him was just awful compared to you, and I don’t know what to do about it any more than you do.”
She heard him draw a deep, unsteady breath, then he asked, “Do you love me, Tess?” He paused, and added, “I’d like to hear you say it if you do.”
She lay in the dark, staring at the black ceiling, afraid to say it, knowing it was unfair not to, feeling as if her heartbeat were punching the stuffing out of the mattress beneath her. Saying it was inviting all that turmoil into her life.
“I do … I must, because I’m feeling the same as you, like my life is this chord with one note missing that wasn’t missing before. I always thought … I thought my career was enough, that it would satisfy me in so many ways, and bring so many fascinating and talented people into my life that I wouldn’t need one specific one. But since I came back to Nashville … it’s …” Her throat got thick and she had to stop talking.
“Since you came back to Nashville …” he prompted.
“I miss you, Kenny.”
“But you still didn’t say it.”
No, she hadn’t. She was deathly afraid to let the words out of her heart, because once she had she might begin those insufferable daydreams again, and what if they didn’t turn out the way she imagined? How could they turn out the way she imagined?
“All right,” he said, sighing, sounding tired. “I’ll let you off the hook. It doesn’t mean anything anyway if it’s forced. Well, listen … it’s late. We’d better say good night.”
She rested the back of her hand across her eyes and felt tears gathering in her throat, disliking herself for withholding the words. The minute he hung up it would get worse, and she’d probably roll over and bawl when she had her lift just the way she wanted it. Just the way she’d dreamed it when she was clear back in high school! Mac! Superstar! Millionaire! In absolute control of her career and her future! Mac, who didn’t want to be derailed by a husband, or marriage, or a family, or any of the baggage that went along with them!
“Kenny, I don’t mean to hurt you.”
“It’s okay, I said.”
“But I feel like such a shit.”
“Hey, are you crying again? You are, aren’t you?” She heard a sad smile come into his words. “Well, that’s something anyway.”
“Kenny …” There was appeal in her voice, but she didn’t know what she was pleading for, so how could he answer? “You were right before. It’s time we said good night.”
“Good night, Tess,” he said, “I love you.”
Then the line clicked and she rolled over and did exactly what she’d feared she’d do. Mac … superstar … millionaire … with her prized life mapped out before her, bawled into her pillow.
It was quarter to two the next afternoon when they arrived at Sixteenth Avenue Sound, a converted bungalow not far from Music Row. Tess led Casey inside through a small, unimpressive reception area to a room with sofas, tables and chairs, but no windows. A Pepsi machine threw red light over the L that served as a canteen, and the coffee warmer sent out the smell of burned coffee. Country music played softly from some unseen speakers. A huge man with a receding hairline, flowing gray beard and streaked gray ponytail sat on one of the sofas extracting an electric bass from its case, whistling to the music.
“Hey, Leland! How ya doin’?” Tess greeted. “You’ve got to meet this pretty young thang who’s gonna be doing harmony vocals for me today.” Her intentional drawl made Leland smile. “This’s Casey Kronek. Leland Smith.”
While they were shaking hands a redheaded guy about thirty, with hair as trim as Johnny Carson’s, dressed in neat blue jeans and a polo shirt, came out of the lavatory. He was the keyboardist, Dan Fontaineau, and he shook hands with Casey, too.
“Come on,” Tess said, “I’ll introduce you to Jack.”
Jack Greaves was already in the control room at the con sole, a fifteen-by-four-foot wedge of electronic wizardry with so many buttons, knobs and zinging orange lights it looked like the flight deck of a space shuttle. Beside him the sound engineer was deciding which of the fifty-six tracks he’d use, while the engineer’s assistant sat nearby loading a tape machine. Through an immense window the recording studio was visible, a gray cube of subdued lighting where some studio musicians were warming up playing riffs, which came through the wall-mounted speakers along with their voices as a pleasant cacophony. A couple of the guys noticed Tess and gestured in greeting through the window. “Hey, Mac.”
She leaned over, held a switch on the talk-back, and said, “Hey, guys.”
Jack, a trim man of medium height with meticulously trimmed brown hair, beard and mustache, turned in his swivel chair. Though he smiled and kissed Tess’s cheek, and shook hands when introduced to Casey, it was clear he had business on his mind, and little time to waste. As a record producer he controlled the session, which was costing Tess plenty. He himself e
arned some thirty thousand dollars per project plus a percentage of the royalties; the studio rental ran close to two thousand dollars a day; the sound engineer got eighty dollars an hour, his assistant twenty-five; the studio musicians—all of them double-scale caliber—commanded over five hundred dollars apiece for each three-hour session. Given that today they’d work for six hours, the cost of this day’s session, even before mixing and mastering, would run over ten thousand dollars.
Jack Greaves had been in the business long enough to realize that each minute lost meant big bucks. He wasted little of Tess’s money before asking Casey, “Did you sign your AFTRA card yet?”
Casey looked nonplussed, and replied, “Excuse me?”
“Union stuff,” Tess explained. “American Federation of Television and Radio Artists insists that all singers’ performances be documented.” To Jack she said, “She doesn’t need to today since it’s her first time. She gets one free session, then she’s got thirty-one days to join. Don’t worry about it,” she told Casey, “I’ll have my secretary help you get in touch with the union later.”
Jack went right on with business. “You want one box or two, Tess?”
“One, I think. Might be easier for Casey the first time.”
“You get that, Carlos?” he inquired, turning to the sound engineer while Leland went into the studio and began tuning his bass.
Tess leaned over and whispered to Casey, “Never mind Jack. When he gets in here he’s got a one-track mind. Come on, let’s sit down and go over our parts.”
A row of high-backed leather stools stood behind a desk facing the control board and window. They climbed onto two of them, and Casey whispered, “What’s a box?”
“The recording booth—see?” Tess pointed through the window at a pair of doors leading to two tiny black-walled rooms off the left side of the studio. “Isolation booths to help keep the tracks from bleeding into one another. We can use one or two, but until we get used to each other I figure it’s better if we just use one. You sometimes get better synergy with close eye contact.”
Jack kept the talk-back on so the conversations were audible as they passed back and forth between the two rooms. The musicians kept tuning, occasionally breaking into spontaneous warmup music that would suddenly acquire harmony and rhythm and might run for sixteen or twenty bars, then be broken up by laughter. Conversation, when it happened, was spoken in a lexicon peculiar to musicians—short, brief colorful phrases that would make no sense away from the studio. Somebody said, “You hear that pork chop sizzling in Lee’s bass?”
“Got us a buzz fly here.”
“Try another track.”
“Okay, I’m putting you on sixteen, Lee.”
And after Leland ran a riff, “Hell, it’s still there.”
“Try another patch cord.”
The assistant engineer left the room and appeared on the other side of the window to change the cord.
Leland played once more. “Better now,” the engineer said.
The drummer put in an earplug, ran his sticks across his snares and tenors, hit the cymbals, and sampled a few thuds on the bass drum. Two guitarists were soundlessly tuning their instruments with electronic tuners. The piano player, behind a black grand facing the window, executed a quick smattering of Gershwin that segued into a few bars of boogie-woogie, followed by an arpeggio that took his fingers sailing off the end of the keys. Another guy on electronic keyboards had them sounding like bells. Leland, still monkeying with his bass guitar said, “The humidity’s got my axe going sharp today. I can’t keep it down.” A saxophonist had set up his music stand in the hall between the two rooms and through the open doorway the sound of his bluesy wail added to the noise.
Jack said, “Somebody do the charts?”
“I did,” the pianist said. “Got ‘em right here.”
“What do you say, should we look at ‘em and give this demo a listen?”
Casey took it all in, mesmerized by her first experience in a recording session, still awestruck that she was actually a part of it. Staring at the lead guitarist, she whispered to Tess, “My gosh, that’s Al Murphy. I’ve seen him on TNN. And Terry Solum on keyboards! He used to play with John Denver!”
“These guys have all been around awhile. You’re gonna love what they do. The road musicians are essentially copyists—they can recreate the licks that are put on the albums. But these guys—the studio musicians—are the ones who have the originality to put them there in the first place. And we hire the best. Every one of these guys is a double-scale musician. Wait’ll you hear them work.”
“Double-scale?”
“They earn twice what the regular ones earn and twice what the union demands.”
The musicians all came from the studio and crowded into the control room. Casey beamed with elation as she was introduced to all of them. The pianist passed out copies of the charts—a Nashville number system that transcribed chords onto paper, creating a crib sheet for sessions players who sometimes were unable to read music. The number system had been created in the fifties by a member of the Jordanaires and allowed for improvisation and immediate key change without rewriting the charts. Casey looked at the ranks of 1s, 4s, Cs and Vs, and Tess pointed, giving a quick explanation. The assistant engineer ran the demo tape and it took less than half the song for the chart to make sense to Casey.
Keys were named. Numbers indicated how many lines would be done in that key. V indicated “verse,” C indicated “chorus,” and B meant “bridge.” It was like looking at the frame of a house before the siding was put on: the structure of the song was all there waiting for the musicians to do it their way, with all the improvisation they pleased.
The demo ended and a bunch of musicians voiced approval. “Hey, nice song. You two wrote this together? You ought to collaborate some more. This thing is gonna cook. Lemme hear it again.”
“What key are we doing it in, Tess?”
“F,” she answered.
Everybody wrote F on the top of their charts and the guys took them back into the studio where they sat listening to the demo tape a bunch of times while noodling around on their instruments. At first they paid no attention to one another, turning within to find their own personal musical take on the song, but soon they became aware of the others, discussing licks, intros, runs. Talk and music. Music and talk. It sounded like a jumble.
Meanwhile, Tess and Casey huddled over a lyric sheet, writing in the margins who would sing which lines. Sometimes, from inside the studio, snatches of the song would resurrect in new form, pulling together as the guys got a handle on their individual parts.
“Come on,” Tess said, “let’s go in.” She led the way through the studio into one of the recording booths. It had black walls of acoustic paneling, two music stands with lights on them, and two mikes in stands. A pair of headsets hung over each music stand. The engineer said, “Let’s do a sound check,” and the women clamped them on.
It took a while for the engineer to set the volume levels, then the women did some scratch vocals, working out their parts, annotating their pages here and there. After several minutes of sound and flurry Greaves took control and said into the talk-back, “Okay, everybody, why don’t we do a run-through for nothing?”
Tess could see Casey getting nervous, and said, “Just relax and sing the way you did back at Momma’s house. We’ll do plenty of run-throughs before we record.”
The drummer gave the standard downbeat and the intro began. Tess watched Casey’s face light up as the mix of instruments came through her headset, filling her head with full-bodied sound. Wow, she mouthed, wide-eyed, and Tess smiled as she began singing.
Suddenly Jack’s voice interrupted in her ear. “Oh-oh, what’s the deal? We’ve got vocals in the sax. How can that be?”
The music fell away and the first engineer suggested, “Let’s try taking the direct out of nineteen.”
There was some scrambling around at the console and the problem got solved.
“Okay, let’s go one more time,” Jack said, and they began again with a new downbeat. Tess hit her cue, and when Casey came in it sounded sensational through the earphones. Their two very distinct vocal qualities blended like smooth chocolate and rough peanuts, coming out sweet to the ear, and Tess knew beyond a flicker of a doubt that she and Casey would do many, many songs together after this one.
Watching Casey’s face as she sang for the first time with these extraordinarily talented pros made Tess smile. Hearing the song they’d composed coming to life was incredible. She remembered her own first time, and saw in Casey’s radiant expression her own excitement, years ago, when she’d stepped into a recording studio as a beginner. The girl was good. She had a natural feel for which words to sing and which to drop; which harmony note would sound best; when to crescendo and when to hold back. Nashville had a clever, oft-repeated answer whenever an out-of-towner inquired if a musician could read music: Not enough to ruin the song. Casey was that way; Tess had recognized it back in Wintergreen and it was reinforced again today.
They finished their first run-through, and Casey exclaimed, “Far out! This is way too incredible, Mac! When did I die? ‘Cause if this isn’t heaven, I don’t know what is!”
“It’ll get better.”
“Better! You’re kidding! It don’t get no better than this!”
Chuckling, Tess replied, “No, I mean the music. We’ve got some kinks to work out yet. I was thinking, here where we break into the bridge …” They dissected their parts while the musicians did the same.
Over the talk-back Jack said, “Sounding good, ladies. What would you think about running the last note of the second verse over onto Mick’s solo for a couple beats, then fading?”
And so it went. Jack interacted with everyone, and everyone with him, and with each other, trying various spots in the song, experimenting with rhythm and technique. The quality of the talent in the studio made the work inventive and mercurial as the song started coming together. The blank audiotape alone for any project could cost some three thousand dollars, and Jack didn’t want to waste it recording takes that were too unpolished, but after ten minutes of experimentation, and a second run-through, which sounded far smoother than the first, he said, “Okay, everybody, should we record one?”