Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [22]
“It’ll be hard to stay in time without the click track,” cautioned Ed. “The acoustics here aren’t the same as in the garage.”
I couldn’t help thinking that these kinds of issues must arise for most bands the first time they record in a studio, and that Baz would know what to do. But having rejected his earlier suggestion, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for advice now. This was my band, and my problem. I needed to fix it myself.
“What about Ed’s metronome?” I said finally. “It has a flashing display. You could all watch that.”
Ed shook his head. “It’s LCD. We’ll never see it.”
“What if I relayed it to you from the control room?”
“You mean . . . you’re going to conduct us?”
It was so completely insane that I expected everyone to laugh. But no one did. Instead, Ed reached behind himself and pulled the little black box from his bag. He moved a dial, set the display flashing, and handed it over. Then he ran out to the hallway and grabbed a broom.
“Take this,” he said. “Make sure the handle hits the ground in time with the light. It’ll make the beat really clear. But you’ll need to go back to the control room, or the microphones will pick up the sound.”
A minute later I was standing behind the window once again, smiling anxiously as Baz watched me banging my broomstick up and down. He could have said something sarcastic, but to his credit, he didn’t. If anything, I felt like I’d won him over in some small way.
For the next hour I pounded my broom, and Dumb pounded to the steady beat of “Let Go, I Feel Crappy.” I felt the broom’s beats jarring my body like mini-earthquakes. Blisters formed on my thumb and palm, but I never took my eyes off that stupid flashing display. If Dumb could play through the pain, so could I. When else would I get to feel it too?
At 2:55 Dumb finished the twentieth and final rendition of the song, making it abundantly clear that their favorite version was number 17. At 2:59 Baz burned a CD of it, ejected the disk, and signed off for the afternoon.
“They need to practice harder,” he said. “If they’re really going to do this, they need to work much harder.”
“They will,” I assured him. “But they got better, right?”
Baz laughed. “Are you going to stand in front of them during their gigs too? If so, make sure you get equal billing. People will pay a lot to see the girl with the broom.”
Tash kept up a running commentary for the three miles back to her house, but I didn’t make any attempt to listen, or to catch snippets of her monologue by lip-reading in the rearview mirror. I could make a wild, stab-in-the-dark guess about what she was saying, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled with how things had gone either.
Eventually it was just Ed and me, but he hesitated when we reached his house. I could see in my peripheral vision that he wanted to say something, so I turned to face him, hoping it wouldn’t be too critical.
“I’m sorry, Piper,” he said. “I let you down today.”
Okay, that was the last thing I expected him to say. “What are you talking about?”
“I made so many mistakes. One of the times the song broke down, it was my fault.”
I had to keep from laughing. “You feel guilty because you screwed up once? Wow, if that’s our new standard I should be looking to replace Tash and Will ASAP.”
Ed smiled at that. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s just . . . I don’t want to sound cocky, but I’ve had a little more experience than them, you know? But that session was so new. No audience to distract me. Nothing but one song and a microphone that’s waiting for me to screw up.”
I held out my hand to stop him. “Look, Ed, if anyone should be feeling dumb right now, it’s me. I was the one banging a broom handle on the floor.”
“No, you did great! You held us together. Besides, that’s how people used to conduct orchestras before batons: They just hammered a staff into the ground.” I laughed. “No, I’m serious,” he protested.
“But not real musicians.”
“Absolutely,” he gushed, gaining momentum now we were back on his favorite topic. “You’re following in the illustrious footsteps of composers like Lully.