Road Rash (18 page)

It sounded weird when I listened to it playing back, because I had this lame guitar part along with Glenn’s killer stuff. But then I pitch-shifted my entire part down an octave, and that did it. Instead of hearing two guitar parts, there was just the one hot guitar part, supported by a bass part underneath it.

Doing it this way really made me miss Kyle. He was great at this sort of thing—he would have come up with something way better that would have added more sophistication to the track. But the part I played worked well enough to drive the tune along and beef up the bottom end without getting in the way, and that’s what mattered right now.

Next up was backing vocals. Compared to patching together a bass part, this was easy money. I set up a mic in the room
and ran it in flat and dry—I could always process it later if I needed to.

The first thing I did was double the parts Glenn sang on the choruses. I tried to clone his phrasing and sing as much like him as possible, in unison. Once I did that, I put down an actual backing track. I’d started to think of the tune as “Every Day,” because that was the hook line. So I went back and hit all those
every day
parts, singing a fifth above Glenn. And I didn’t try to be real smooth about it this time—I sang those with a little more rasp in my voice to help give it an edge.

All this took a couple of hours, so I saved the session and shut down my computer before the others came back. I didn’t get a chance to work on it again until Helena, but that was the part I was really looking forward to—the final mix.

There are a hundred different approaches you can take to mixing a song, but for a high-energy tune like this I usually start with the drums. My feeling is that they’re the bedrock—if the drums aren’t happening,
nothing’s
happening.

I only had four tracks of drums—kick, snare, and two overheads—so I had them dialed in pretty quickly. I went for a simple but hard-hitting sound. But I wanted them to have some punch, so I compressed the kick and snare, giving them more impact without totally drowning out the other stuff.

Then I brought up both of Glenn’s tracks—the guitar and lead vocals—which were the heart of this song. But guitar and vocals occupy the same space, frequency-wise, so you have to be careful or they’ll start competing. I had the guitar pretty hot in the mix to showcase that killer riff at the top, but then I pulled it back when his voice came in. Things are funny that way. Once
the listener gets used to a certain part, you can pull it way down (or even off) and they’ll still hear it in their head. Weird, huh?

So once I had a balance between the vocal and guitar, I brought in the bass to warm it up and fill in some gaps. Then I brought up the doubled vocal, which made the mix sound bigger and … I don’t know … more
urgent
, if that makes any sense. Then I cranked in the backing vocals on the hook lines, and that brought the energy level even higher.

After that, it was just a matter of playing with the balance, going with my gut until it did that same hair-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck thing that it did the first time I’d heard Glenn sing it. I was pretty happy with it at that point, so I burned a copy on disc, then saved and shut down. But I wasn’t quite finished yet. I’d done all this on headphones and my little computer speakers, and while I’m pretty familiar with how things should sound on them, you never really know until you listen on something a little more … substantial.

So I took it over to the club.

It was early afternoon and the club was empty, so I fired up the PA system and played the mix through it, cranking it up pretty freakin’ loud. Then I sat in the middle of the room and listened with my gut. I was trying
not
to think
Does the kick have enough compression?
or
Should I boost the mids on the guitar a little?
I was just letting it pump out of those big fat speakers at me.

I ended up with a big-ass grin on my face. It may not have been perfect, but that thing
slammed
. I got an unsolicited second opinion, too. There was a scruffy kid cleaning glasses behind the bar, and after I’d listened to the song a couple of times and shut down the PA, he called over.

“Hey, is that you guys?”

“Uh, yeah,” I admitted. Close enough, anyway.

He nodded three or four times slowly. “That song kicks
ass
, dude.”

That made up my mind.…

He took out his earbuds and shook his head. “No way.”

“Huh?”
I guess I really
am
stupid, expecting Brad to have an open mind about one of Glenn’s original songs.

“Doesn’t do anything for me at
all
. Plus, no one’s ever heard it, so it ain’t gonna fly at a club.”

“But if we started playing it, and maybe some other originals, then people
would
hear it. You can only get so far covering other people’s stuff.…”

“So you’re not happy with ‘how far you’ve gotten’ in the last couple of months? Last I remember, you were tossed out of some little high school band that wasn’t so hot to begin with. If GT hadn’t convinced us you were the second coming of Travis Barker, you’d still be back in Los Robles shoveling manure or whatever.”

Whoa
. “Okay, I was just asking if—”

“Yeah,” he interrupted. “And I was just answering.”

And that was the end of that.

I guess I’d had some dumb vision of Brad and Danny and Jamie loving the song and wanting to learn it and of us surprising Glenn with it or something. I knew Brad would be the hardest to convince so I’d tried him first. And last, apparently. There wasn’t any point in showing it to Glenn. I tossed it in a nearby wastebasket. All that work for nothing …

Then I stopped.
Okay
, I thought,
so the score’s one to one
. That didn’t mean it was game over. So far it was No-Name-scruffy-dishwasher-dude versus Mr. Semipro-Rock-God. (My vote sure didn’t count.) I took the disc back out of the trash. What I needed was a third-party opinion. From someone who had half a clue but who didn’t have their ego involved.

And I knew just where to get it.…

The Four Leaf Clover was actually better on the inside than it looked from the outside—the decades-old stench in the place was 60/40 beer to urine, as opposed to the other way around.

The first thing we did was check in with the guy behind the bar. Well, we
tried
—he was a surly dude who wouldn’t make
eye contact and didn’t say more than five words to us. We got a grunt and a nod, “No,” and “Alex is in back.” Okay, the last was accompanied by a thumb jerked over his shoulder to indicate the supposed location of the supposed owner, so maybe I should give him credit for six words. Eight, if you include the
FU
phrase tattooed across his throat right below his Adam’s apple. Nice …

Of course there was no house system involved, so we had to haul in and set up our own PA. Same deal with stage lights. We didn’t carry much lighting, but the situation was so poor that our six little LED PAR 64 cans would probably double the onstage brightness, so we dug them out and set them up.

After we got our gear loaded in, we went through a quick sound check. Everything sounded fine, but the response from the few people working there was a little underwhelming. As in, absolutely
nada
. Not
Hey, you guys sound pretty good
, or even,
Man, that guitar was loud
. (Hell, I would have been happy with
You suck!
—at least that would have indicated they’d actually noticed that a live band was playing in the same room.) But it was like they’d seen it all before and just couldn’t be bothered.

After sound check Alex, the owner, finally appeared behind the bar and waved us over—apparently, it was too much effort to actually come to the stage and welcome his new band for the week.

“Here’s the deal,” he grunted by way of greeting. No handshake, no
How was the trip?
or
Can I get you anything?
and certainly no time for introductions. We were obviously expected to know who
he
was, while he obviously didn’t give a shit who
we
were. “Start at nine o’clock, fifteen-minute break at ten-thirty and midnight.”

“Wait—we’re going until one-thirty, aren’t we?” asked Brad.

He looked at Brad like he was an idiot. “Yup” was all he said.

Four sets was the usual minimum. Heck, a lot of clubs set it up where you’re on for forty-five and off for fifteen, every hour, giving you five shorter sets. Better for the band, and anyone with half a clue will tell you that the time when customers buy the most drinks is during a break. But apparently this guy only had a quarter of a clue, and he was going to wring every last minute of music out of us.

“I’ll start a tab for you,” he continued, totally ignoring the implied question about what happened to our third break, “and it’ll come out of your paycheck at the end of the week.”

“Okay,” Brad said. “What’s the policy on meals?”

Alex gave him that I-don’t-have-time-for-idiots look again and said, “Like I said, you run a tab and everything comes out of your pay.” In other words, they weren’t comping us for
anything
.

He slid three keys across the counter. Each one was wired to a grimy length of cut off broomstick, like when you ask to use the restroom at some funky gas station. “Rooms are upstairs.” He turned to leave, then thought better of it and turned back. I don’t know, maybe his higher math skills finally kicked in and he realized there were two guys for every girl in our little entourage. “We ain’t runnin’ a free flophouse for locals here, either,” he grumbled. “You get a bunch of sluts who wanna party with
the band, you’re either gonna pay extra or you get a room at the Super 8 across the street.”

And with that, our official welcome to the Four Leaf Clover was brought to a close.

“Holy crap!”

“Welcome to the other side of the road,” Glenn said.

We’d just walked into our room above the club. The funk was so bad that it felt like a movie set from one of Mr. Langley’s films on the Depression.

There was a pair of saggy twin beds separated by a beat-up old dresser in a small room with a high ceiling. Dangling from the cracked, yellowed plaster over our heads was a single bare bulb on a cord, with a pull chain. Across from the beds was a thrashed sofa that literally had a spring sticking out of it—I honestly thought they only had those in cartoons. On the floor was this rug that looked like they’d taken some old rope that’d been lying in a barn for a hundred years and coiled it into a big oval. If you kicked it, little clouds of dust arose.

But hey—bonus! Our window looked down on the gravel lot behind the bar, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the pukefest that almost certainly occurred there every Saturday night after closing time.

The idea that anyone would actually bring a girl back to a place like this was just sad. I had half a mind to go get a room at the Super 8 myself, just to make sure I wasn’t carried off by roaches in the middle of the night.

“You know,” Glenn said, “suddenly I have this urge to go somewhere. As in,
anywhere
.”

“Ditto,” I said, dropping my duffel on one of the beds.

“So let’s go get some coffee or something.”

“Okay, just a sec …” I held up my phone. “I’ve gotta get some pics of this place, or no one will believe it.” I took some quick shots of the room and the view. “Okay, I’m good to go.”

We ended up walking uphill, toward what looked like the original downtown.

“This okay with you?”

We were going by a coffeehouse a few blocks from the club. Bert’s Best Brew. Kind of a funky, organic version of Starbucks. It smelled
great
from the doorway. “Sure, looks perfect,” I said.