Blowin' My Mind Like a Summer Breeze, page 13
Mid-sentence, I sit up and set my journal down, then hurry down the rope ladder, which is hard to hurry down, but I try, and run over to my dad, who’s sipping a can of Bud in the sun with his axe balanced perfectly against his leg.
“Hey, Rain Man.”
“Hey, Dad. Can I borrow some recording stuff?”
“Sure. Like what?”
“Just a microphone. And a guitar cord.”
“What are you recording?”
“Nothing.”
He laughs gently and wipes sweat from his brow.
“I see your internship with John Cage was influential.”
John Cage is this minimalist composer who’s famous for a piece of music that’s somebody sitting at a piano in silence.
“Nothing important, I mean. Just some songs. Kind of demos.”
“Songs you wrote?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great. I didn’t know you were writing songs. Can I hear?”
“Um. Maybe. I kind of want to keep them to myself for now. If that’s okay.”
“Sure. That’s okay. Do you want me to get you set up in the studio?”
I explain my plan, which sort of flew into my head fully formed while I was writing to Juliet, telling Dad I’m planning on using Walden’s 4-Track portable recorder and recording in the treehouse.
“So, I need to borrow some extension cords too, I guess.”
Dad seems doubtful about many parts of this plan. First, whether Walden will lend out his precious Tascam 4-Track recorder, which he bought with his own money. “You know how he is about stuff like that.” Second, whether he has enough extension cords to reach from the nearest power source to the treehouse, a distance of well over a hundred feet. “Though I might.” Third, whether I’ll even be able to make any decent recordings up there with so much ambient noise. “I hope you like the sound of crickets.”
But, to his credit, after he’s said his peace, he opens the studio door, and we walk inside.
The studio is actually our old two-car garage, which my dad began turning into a recording studio around the time I was born, and just finished a few years ago. He calls it Paradise Avenue and carved the name into a sign that hangs above the doorway. Behind his back, Mom calls it The Money Pit.
The studio is split into two rooms, a control booth/kitchenette/lounge side, and a recording space side. We’re in the control booth side, although with the pull-out sofa open, dishes piled in the sink, and Dad’s clothes everywhere, it looks more like a bachelor pad than a working recording studio.
“Sorry, little dirty,” Dad mumbles, tucking away Budweiser cans and Domino’s pizza boxes.
Through the sound-proof glass, I can see Dad’s white 1957 Telecaster on the floor, a banjo and a dobro beside it. A Fender bass is propped in a stand. Even Dad’s pedal steel guitar is out. There are cables everywhere, snaking around one another.
“You’re recording.”
“Little bit.”
“What?”
“Nothing important,” he says, and winks at me. “Just kidding. I’ll give you a sneak peek.”
Dad plays me a little bit of what he’s been working on, and I’m shocked to hear that it’s Christmas music. Jingle Bells. Silent Night. The Christmas Song.
“It’s a present I’m making for Mom,” he says. My mom has a soft spot for Christmas music. He puts his fingers to his lips. “But you can’t tell. It’s a surprise.”
Dad helps me muscle the gear into the treehouse, then I go into the main house through the sliding back door. I smell coffee and see a grapefruit rind on the counter. Mom’s back from her run. Django, our million-year-old dog who has a huge growth on the side of his left eye and hobbles more than he walks, gets off the couch and comes over and licks my fingers until I let him out. Still spry enough to follow his instincts, he chases a pair of squirrels up a tree then stands there mystified, his nose darting around, wondering where they’ve gone.
I pour myself some coffee, add lots of cream and sugar, then peel a banana.
There’s a pile of mail on the counter, and I hope to find a letter from Juliet, but there’s nothing for me. Just the new National Geographic, some junk mail, a postcard from a family friend, and a bill from Mastercard stamped “Final Notice” in bright red ink. In her bathroom, I find my mother putting on make-up, applying something with a brush to the high parts of her cheeks.
“Did I get any mail?”
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. She’s always annoyed at me lately. Everything I say and do is wrong.
“Hi Mom, how are you, how was your run?” she says. “Oh, I’m fine Rainey, run was great, thanks for asking, how are you? Oh, that’s good. Lovely day out, isn’t it? Yes, it is quite nice out there.”
It’s as if there’s all this new etiquette I keep forgetting about. All kinds of new rules I have to follow no one told me about.
“Sorry. How was your run?”
She dabs a brush into a small jar of powder and lightly brushes it over her puffed-up cheeks. Still not looking over, she says, “No, you didn’t get any letters from Juliet.”
“You look pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Yes. I’m having lunch with Aunt Becky, and then I have a job interview.”
“A job interview?”
“Uh huh.”
“For a job-job?”
“For a job-job.”
What? I want to ask more, but she’s so distant and focused that instead I make a hasty retreat for my shared bedroom with Walden down the hall. Lately, though, I’ve been sleeping in my sleeping bag up in the treehouse. The privacy is well worth the discomfort.
Walden agrees to let me borrow his 4-Track, though ever the entrepreneur, says there’s a two-dollar per day usage fee, as well as a five-dollar tutorial surcharge.
“I don’t need a tutorial,” I say. “It can’t be that hard. And I’ll use the manual to help me if I get stuck. I’m pretty sure I can figure it out.”
“No go,” Walden says. He’s in the corner of our bedroom practicing on his drum pad. He sets down his drumsticks and wipes his brow with his T-shirt. “I’ll need some insurance.”
“Insurance against what?”
“Your stupidity,” Walden says. “I can’t risk you breaking it.”
“I’m not going to break it.”
“You say that, but how do I know? I saved up for six months to buy it.”
“Fine. Can you show me now?”
“Without payment? Surely you jest.”
I give Walden a five and four singles, which leaves fourteen dollars left from my tour earnings. Maybe I should get a job too.
“Two days of recording, plus your stupid tutorial.”
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Walden says. “What are you recording, by the way?”
“Just some stuff. Nothing important.”
“Wow, sounds amazing.”
I sit down on my bed. In some ways, I’m still mad at Walden for getting my mixtape confiscated, but the sad truth is that Walden is my only ally and confidante in this bizarre and secluded life, and I can’t stay mad at him forever.
“Is Mom okay?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, she seems kind of weird and edgy. She just told me she has a job interview today.”
“At T.J. Maxx,” Walden says. “That clothing store.”
Of course, he already knows. He’s always been closer with Mom. More in sync with her moods. I’ve always been closer with Dad. It’s not The Civil War or anything, but there’s always been this quiet division in our family. A sense that if things got really bad and we had to split up, the sides have already been chosen. “She’s under a lot of pressure. I think she got a notice from the bank. Something about the mortgage payment being way late. She holds all of this together with pretty much no help from Dad. It’s really hard on her.”
“I know. I live here too.”
“And all your stuff about wanting to go to school doesn’t help much.”
I shrug.
“Do you still want to go?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t believe you want to go sit in some room and be part of a system designed to homogenize your thinking and steer you toward an average life.”
“I just want to see what it’s like.”
“I’ll tell you what it’s going to be like. The classes are going to be too slow. The kids are all going to be assholes who think homeschooled kids are aliens. There’s going to be bullying and backstabbing galore. And now that you have a nose ring and wear purple lipstick, believe me, you’ll have a lunch table all to yourself.”
I’m not even totally sure what this means, but it’s definitely time to change the subject.
“Are you going to show me how to use the 4-Track, or what?”
Walden stands up. “I’m a man of my word. But I swear to God, if you break it.”
“I won’t! Jesus, I’m not an idiot.”
“That’s debatable.”
Track Three
A Partnership is Born
This just in from the front—recording is way harder than it looks. Not so much the playing music part of it. That’s the easy part. Microphones don’t really scare me. But I’ve always recorded after my dad and Walden have set everything up and my only job is to do take after take until they say it’s right. The hard part, I’m learning, is getting the stupid microphones positioned properly and the levels right.
The Tascam 4-Track isn’t complicated to use. In theory. Plug in. Hit record. Play. Listen. If you don’t like what you record, do it again. Easy enough. But no matter how much I toy with the angle and position of the microphone, the volume of the amplifier, the treble and bass knobs on the control panel, or my singing dynamics, my demos come out sounding imbalanced, fuzzy, and pretty much terrible.
And my songs are not complicated. That’s what’s killing me. They’re the opposite of complicated. And it’s driving me crazy that I can play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, but I can’t get a two-minute rock song with only six chords to sound right.
It’s not that I want perfection or polish, either. Hardly. Some of my favorite songs from Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze, like “Joyride” and “Deeper Than Beauty,” have a just hit record and let’s see what happens kind of feel about them, which is what I’m after. But my demos just sound sloppy.
Which means I have no choice but to ask Walden for help. Again. Which he loves.
He follows me into the back yard, then, one at a time, we climb the rope ladder and step into the stiflingly hot and cramped confines of the tree house.
“I’ll help you if I can hear what you’re recording,” he says, plopping down on the loveseat, which is covered by my sleeping bag.
“Why does everything have to be a transaction? Can’t you do something nice for your sister without anything in return? You’re such a capitalist.”
He doesn’t respond, but his face relaxes a bit, and as he scratches at the thin layer of stubble on his chin, I can tell I’m getting through to him.
“I’m not sure you should be spending so much time up here,” Walden says, fanning the air, “you’re going to fry your brain.” Slapping at a mosquito on his neck, he adds, “Unless you die of malaria first.”
“It’s not that bad,” I say, “the heat doesn’t really bother me.”
This is a lie. It totally bothers me. I’m slowly being roasted like a chicken on a spit, and I barely slept last night it was so hot.
I tune my guitar, watching as Walden surveys my recording set up. A small Fender amp with a microphone lying on the floor in front of it. A vocal microphone on a stand pointed off to nowhere. My cherry red Telecaster.
He chuckles to himself. “You are aware that there’s a real recording studio right over there, right?”
“Are you going to help me or not? For once in my life, I want to do something that doesn’t involve Mom and Dad, okay?”
“What are you recording, anyway?”
“Just some songs I wrote.”
“I didn’t know you were writing songs.”
“Well, now you know.”
Cracking his knuckles loudly, pop-pop-pop, he ponders the auditory possibilities. He’s always been a gear head, my brother, at ease among tangles of wires and adjustable knobs. Like my dad, there’s something about the recording process that thrills and excites him.
Pointing to the floor, he says, “Well, for one thing, you’re never going to get a good sound with the mic in that position. It needs to be on a stand. Plus, you don’t want to put it dead center. Off to the side is a little better. And I’ll get a pop screen for the vocal mic.” I don’t understand all the details of what he’s saying, but I can feel his excitement. “And maybe a compression pedal so you can control the volume better on the guitar and it won’t come through as hot. That amp is pretty bright.” He adjusts the amp’s tone knobs. “And let’s get some more midrange too. Play me a little sample of what you have so far.”
Reluctantly, I play him around thirty seconds of my latest attempt, the nineteenth, if my math is correct, at bringing “Ordinary Girl” to life. I hit the stop button halfway through the chorus.
“Did you record the vocals and the guitar at the same time?”
“Yes.”
Walden slaps his forehead.
“You don’t have to?”
“Rainey. No. That’s the whole point of having multiple tracks. You can put the guitar track on one, and then sing over it on another. Doing them separately, you can get a way better sound, and then you can focus on singing without having to nail the guitar part at the same time. You’re not making a live album. Were you paying any attention to my tutorial?”
“Yes,” I say. But, if I’m being honest, most of it sailed right over my head.
“Believe it or not,” Walden says, tapping the Tascam, “this isn’t too far off from what the Beatles used to record Sergeant Pepper’s.”
“Really?” I look at the Tascam, which is about a foot by a foot-and-a-half and about as thick as a tray of brownies.
“I mean, this is way smaller and simpler than what they were using, of course. But it’s just four tracks like they had.” He sounds excited. He’s hooked. “Play me the rest of the song.”
“If you make fun of it, I swear,” I say, but he holds up his hands in surrender.
“I will withhold all judgment. I am merely a humble engineer.”
Standing there while my high standards brother listens to my song makes me want to vomit. It feels like being looked at naked. When the song is over, he smiles and nods his head.
“I remember this,” he says.
“What?”
“The lyrics. When Mom said that to you at school that day. When you said you didn’t want to be homeschooled anymore, and you guys had that fight about being ordinary. I guess art borrows from life.”
I shrug. I guess it does.
“Did you play to a click?”
“No.”
“Would you?”
I wonder for a moment if Nirvana recorded Nevermind using a metronome.
“I guess.”
“What else do you want on here? Bass?”
“Yeah.”
“Drums?”
“Eventually. And backing vocals. I have the arrangement in my head.”
“Okay,” he says, standing up, “let me run over to the studio and grab a few more things if it’s okay with Dad. You’re sure I can’t talk you into doing this over there? Or in the house? Even if we record in the bedroom, it’s going to sound ten times better.”
I shake my head and point toward the floor. Walden is halfway out the door when he stops. “That’s a really cool song, Rainey.”
I think this might be the best compliment I’ve ever gotten, and I can’t stop a huge smile from taking over my whole face.
A partnership is born.
Track Four
The Treehouse Tapes
Within a week, we’ve recorded three full songs. Walden insists I record my guitar parts using a click track, which I object to at first because I’m nervous my guitar playing isn’t steady enough. But Walden promises it will make it easier to add drums and bass later—which it really does. When you play to a metronome, all the parts fit together more neatly because everything is locked into the same tempo. What surprises me the most is how much Walden seems to want to make it sound like I want it to sound—not how he wants it to sound. I was afraid his taste and musical preferences would sabotage the sound I’m chasing in my head, but they don’t.
Going on and on, he talks constantly about classic recording sessions, especially The Basement Tapes, which are these legendary recordings made by Bob Dylan and The Band in a basement somewhere in upstate New York. He plays them for me, and though I’ve never been able to stand the sound of Bob Dylan’s voice for some reason, it’s exactly the sound I’m going for. A little rough, but in a good way. Loose, but tight.
“The thrown together feel is what’s so cool about it,” he says. “But it’s kind of an illusion. And it’s harder to get that sound than it might seem. Especially in a damn treehouse.”
One of the first tools he adds to the mix is a distortion pedal, a bright green Ibanez Tube Screamer he got from my dad’s guitar pedal stash.
“What’s that do?”
“You said you wanted the guitar to have more edge, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Check this out. Play something.”
I strum a G power chord.
“Okay, now stomp on the pedal and hit that chord again.”
When I drop my black Chuck Taylor on the silver stomp pad and hit a fresh G, I’m greeted by a blast of crunchy distortion that sends a thrill raging through my belly and out my fingertips. I can’t stop smiling. I think I’m officially in love with distortion.
“Whoa.”
“Told you.”
“That was awesome.”
Contrary to my assumptions, Walden isn’t actually president of the Anti-Distortion Society. “It just has to be used right.”
