I posted a different version of this a few weeks ago. This is much shorter and is accompanied by a live read at The Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop Retreat in Grand Lake, CO, July 2024
Please consider a subscription. This is independent publishing and it means a lot when you sign up! Paid subscriptions help me pay the rent, especially. All subscriptions are appreciated.
We had only three days.
We had practiced enough. With the metronome, without it, running the bass lines again and again, remembering to bend the guitar string on the and of the 1. Growling and strumming, harping and raging through our parts.
But the recording studio is different. The massive board in the control room. The organ. The Marshall Stack. A wall of vintage synth. The refrigerator stocked with top shelf booze and unhealthy snacks.
The headphones.
The microphone.
The microphone that Fiona Apple just finished using for her Shadowboxer album. The microphone which the producer claimed was telling the truth but made me sound like a purring miracle. My voice, which I could send out over screaming guitars in front of crowds of sweaty people, was suddenly very intimate: me amplified directly out of my mouth and back into me. Every vibrato vacillation a butterfly wing of impact in the universe of our songs. The songs which had long been friends, were unsettling strangers in the booth.
The owners of the studio were in the middle of a divorce while finalizing production on Incubus’ first record and producing other hopeful rockers, like my band Gush. Kathy was divorcing Jim.
Jim, of the golden, long hair and rock-star adjacent sex appeal. Plus, you know me, good hair and you have my heart.
Jim’s voice was so close to me, alone there in the vocal booth. He instructed me through the headphones, but he was in my head. The rest of the band had ceded control to Jim when it came to my vocal performance. Fiona Apple and all.
He grated my eardrums with new ideas until they bled from pure vulnerability. He begged instructions. Whispered demands.
Imagine spending years in singing lessons, graduating to opera lessons, graduating to performing oratorios with orchestras in Dubrovnik and London, at every major cathedral in France graduating into the early 90s and banging on a guitar writing a hundred songs, which led finally to a studio in Santa Monica California, in a silk slip of a dress, air-conditioning and nerves, hard nipples and a vintage Neumann Microphone.
Jim was in my ear. In my head. And (in my imagination) in my bed.
He flirted with me mercilessly.
I thought he loved me.
(He didn’t, but I think he would have if our record had charted.)
My future ex-husband, the band’s guitarist, was sleeping with our devout lesbian benefactor. I had been in love with him for a year or two, only to be spurned in favor of useless fan-girls who came around after our shows flaunting fake cleavage and fresh lipo. Plus, he had recently broken up with the bass player, Lisa, whose own sapphic tendencies inspired the best song she ever wrote: Wrecking Ball. The song we needed to finish recording in the last hours of our last day in the studio.
As a vocalist I had spent most of the first two days supporting everyone else in the band. Finally, on day three, it was time for vocals and we didn’t have a moment to waste.
These were the people in the control room: Lisa-bass player & part-time sapphic and John’s ex, John- who played guitar, & future ex-husband, the wealthy lesbian benefactor (who only played John’s instrument, if you know what I mean), Jim the divorcing producer, Gray, assistant engineer and metal guitarist extraordinaire, plus Drummer Dave and his speedballs. Oh, and Kathy, co-owner of the studio who would show up now and then to stand in the back and shoot death lasers at me with her eyes. She wanted a divorce, sure, but she also didn’t want to share. But we were GUSH. We shared.
There was a grand piano in the studio - Fiona Apple and all. I had lost my touch on the piano, having not played for years. But Jim insisted. He believed in me! He pluncked me down on the leather bench, placing my hands on the keys, and left me to sit like a curiosity while the entire entourage watched from behind the glass. I squirmed in the darkness of the song with my fear of improvisation, and the walls steaming with all of our unmet desires. I played along with the track in the dark until I was half mad with the effort to find a melody to counter the guitars, until finally I was startled by Jim right in my headphones shouting. THAT’S IT! DO THAT AGAIN. That is how we ended up with a piano part in Wrecking Ball despite our purist bass/drums/guitar rock and roll devotion. But that was just the beginning.
Jim moved me into the isolation booth. Facing a golden microphone, alone. He wanted me to sing an operatic roar over the grungy, tom-tom driven climax of the song. Something I had not anticipated or practiced. We were recording straight to a Neve two inch tape machine.
Everyone had ideas and instructions! “Just lose yourself in it” “I’ve heard you sing higher notes!” “Can you give it a little gravel at the end of the note?”
As a band we had poured the intensity of our absurd romantic fluctuations and searing hurt, into our songs. Apparently our perpetual state of heartbreak needed some unattainable high-notes to be understood. I might as well have been stark naked in that vocal booth.
In GUSH Lisa and I sang al our songs together, in unsettling harmonie. On Wrecking Ball we held nothing back from the forsaken unison melody which then broke into two parts, smashing every harmonic rule my composition professors worshiped. We reveled in it. We wanted to be Bowie, Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Brahams all at once. We overdid things pretty regularly, to be honest.
I laid down the track by 9pm, our final hour. It was hard singing. Not perfect. It was rock and roll on tape without auto-tune, and it shows. It was glorious.
When we finished the young engineer Gray shared his demo with us titled Fuck the Devil’s Cock. It was insanely catchy and well performed. We were all transfixed and shocked!
The lyric was prescriptive, as indicated by the title. And within the song there was a lyrical question posed about 14 times:
Since when does the woman do the fucking in the ass?
To which the forty-something lesbian benefactor, with her Jennifer Anniston haircut, insisted on raising a point of contention to the young engineer/composer. She spelled it out for him, exactly since when: Since forever.
Then we all went to the Troubadour to see Incubus and hang out in the green room afterwards where Tom Morello was chilling at the corner bar. I decided to head over to saddle up next to him and casually order a drink. I took ten deep breaths before making my approach.
But there was a rope around the bar area. Who ever heard of a roped off area in a green room? There was a man there looking very serious about his manning. Manning the rope. Tom was the only one behind the rope.
So I was like, “Fuck you I won’t do what you told me!”
Just kidding, I took the long drive home from Sunset to Long Beach, singing to myself alone, in the original isolation booth, where I did so much of my songwriting, without an audience. Without a microphone.
The Isolation Booth