The Devil of Echo Lake (9 page)

“Oh, God,” Billy said.

“Not quite,” said Rail, pulling the silk rope that dangled over Billy's chest.

Blood sprayed from the pinprick holes in the tin star lantern. The candle sizzled and sputtered out.

Six

“Looking back, I think I sold my soul.”

“To the Devil,” Johnny said.

Billy set his jaw and made a tic that was almost a nod.

“That is one fucked-up tale, my friend. And your producer has probably taken you for a ride in more ways than one, but does he have to be the Devil incarnate?”

“He showed up in my darkest hour and made me a star. Played every hole in my heart like a flute.”

“And now you feel like payback time is nigh?”

“I do.”

“Okay, even if I accept the possibility of a Devil, you still didn’t make a deal for your soul as far as I can see based on what you’ve told me. Did that happen later?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. I think it was subtle, like I was supposed to recognize the moment and what it meant, but I didn’t. I didn’t see anything about a soul in the contract. Sometimes he seems to talk in symbolism. As a songwriter, I hate to admit I don’t always get it. But I never raised my left hand and made an oath. I never signed a piece of parchment in blood.” Billy chuckled nervously at how hokey that sounded. “Maybe just telling him I would do whatever it took... Maybe letting him put this ring on my finger.” Billy rotated the platinum band on his right hand with the thumb and forefinger of his left, a wheel turning on an axle.

Johnny smiled. It was a kind smile, not condescending. He said, “Well I think you’re alright, bro. It doesn't sound like you made a pact. But you’re going up to that studio in a couple of days. Is that to work with this same producer? Satan himself?”

“Yeah.”

“If you want my advice, you should call it off. Just cancel and take some time to step away from all the head games.”

“I can’t. I’m under contract. Last disc didn’t do so hot, and now they say they’ll drop me if I don’t play nice with the King Midas who produced my one hit.”

“Well then, at least get some rest before you drive up. You look like shit.”

“Thanks, Johnny. You always know how to make me feel better.”

Part II

Private Devils

Seven

“For where God built a church,

there the Devil would also build a chapel.”

Martin Luther

Billy Moon came to Echo Lake on the second of November, a perfect fall day. Jake arrived at the church at eleven in the morning, one hour before the session start time. He parked his newly purchased, rusty Pontiac under the stand of pines, unlocked the double doors, and set the heavy black flight case he was carrying on the floor. The vast room was silent from the waxed floorboards and threadbare Persian rugs to the cobwebbed rafters. A hint of Pine Sol and the stronger aroma of fresh brewed coffee hung in the air. He had passed Rita, the head housekeeper, on the road from the main building.

Jake poured himself a paper cup of coffee in the kitchenette. He put a CD on in the control room and patched it through to the monitor speakers in the big room so he could listen while he set up. It was Peter Gabriel’s
Passion
soundtrack, a record that had kindled his interest in engineering in the first place.

He looked over his notes while the coffee and music sparked his brain into work mode. Kevin Brickhouse had requested a pretty standard assortment of microphones for the drum kit, and Jake had them all in the flight case. On the phone, Brickhouse had put Jake at ease with his friendly tone, but he also sounded tired. He had even joked that he would be leaning pretty hard on Jake if he didn’t get some sleep before leaving the Hit Factory, where he was finishing up a Ska record before making the trip up I-87 to Echo Lake on his Harley. “Thank God for Peruvian rocket powder, eh kid?”

As second engineer, Jake’s first priority was to keep the session moving without a hitch, hovering in the background like a good waiter, never voicing his own opinions on musical matters unless they were asked for, and then as diplomatically as possible. If everything went smoothly, he should be seldom noticed and take no credit for the session’s success.

But if things went awry, if equipment failed, as it invariably did in every project, or if the engineer made a mistake in front of the producer, it was his job to step in and remedy the situation, bypassing or replacing the faulty gear so fast no one noticed, or (in the case of operator error) taking the blame to save face for the guy making ten times the pay he was.

In a room lined wall-to-wall with buttons, knobs, and LCD screens, he was expected to be able to patch a sound through any combination of processors in any order without hesitation at two in the morning, in the dark, after three weeks of fourteen-hour days, catering to the whims of ego maniacs and drug addicts.

For this he could reasonably expect to earn rent and gas money and his name in microscopic print somewhere in the CD booklet. That was the apprenticeship his teachers had told him to expect. It was worth it, they said, because if you persisted and made a good impression, the day would come when an artist or producer would ask you to engineer the next one. Or, if you were very lucky, the engineer you were assisting would get sick and put you in the driver’s seat, so make sure you order his Chinese food from the worst joint in town. It wasn’t rocket science, but there were producers who acted like it was open-heart surgery. One mistake could cost you your career. There was the legend about the assistant who had walked off in the night, never to be seen again, after realizing he’d accidentally erased a Steely Dan master tape, or the one about how Paul Simon had vomited upon learning an assistant had erased one of his vocal tracks.

It reminded him of that children’s game Operation where you tried to remove plastic bones from the patient with a pair of metal tweezers, and a buzzer went off if you touched the sides. You were trying to get something out of the artist without damaging it—probing the heart without jolting the nerves. Recording music was a craft that existed somewhere on the borderland between art and science. Terrain that Trevor Rail and Kevin Brickhouse were reputedly very good at navigating.

Brickhouse made a loud entrance shortly after noon. Jake heard the Harley coming long before it pulled up in front of the church. He had once seen a picture of Brickhouse in
Mix
magazine, but the man’s appearance had changed since then. He no longer had hair, for one thing, and judging by the cinnamon and salt stubble that framed his face, Jake could tell he had taken the skinhead option as a rock fashion solution to the receding hairline he’d already had in that magazine shot.

He wore a black t-shirt that said
guttermonkey
in a lowercase logo, under an unbuttoned blue denim work shirt and blue jeans smeared with oil from the hog. An open bracelet made from a metal rod with a ball bearing on each end adorned his left wrist while an athletic wristwatch as thick as a double-stuffed Oreo squeezed the other above the hand that was swinging his Captain America motorcycle helmet by its leather strap.

He smiled at Jake with eyes that were friendly but sunken. Something about that look made Jake think of concentration camps.

“You Jake?”

“Yes. Kevin, it’s good to meet you.”

“I don’t think you were here the last time I was.”

“I’m new here.”

“Brian still work here?”

“Yes.”

“Cool. I’ll have to drag him out for a beer one of these nights. So, I see the drums made it. We won’t set up any mics for them until they bring a drummer in—probably not until next week at the earliest. To start, I think we’ll just be rolling tape while Billy plays around on the guitar and the computer. Just documenting song ideas, but we have to be prepared to use it as a master if he gets anything good down, so I want you to start by printing code on track twenty-four for the first few reels. That way we can lock in with his laptop and even automate some rough mixes later on.”

Jake got to work immediately. He was almost finished prepping the tapes when Trevor Rail arrived. His first look at the legendary producer eased some of the low-grade anxiety that had been plaguing his stomach ever since Eddie had assigned him to the project. Rail had cemented a reputation as a mean bastard, but Jake had been lacking a mental image to attach to the noxious persona.

Steve, one of the other assistants who had worked with Rail in the city before coming to Echo Lake, had done his best impersonation for Jake while they sat in the shop doing busywork. Steve’s English accent needed work, but he had sworn that the content of such priceless one liners as “Talk while I’m listening to playback one more time and I’ll do a razor edit on your windpipe” were taken verbatim from old “Third Rail.”

With a build-up like that, Jake was taken aback when the Trevor Rail he met on November second greeted him with a disarming smile that offset the seriousness of the man’s white-frosted black goatee and widow’s peak. Rail's nose and sideburns were sharp and angular, but his posture and clothes telegraphed the kind of laconic ease that Jake associated with wealth. When he introduced himself, his voice was gentle and courteous, his accent soft and attractive. It was difficult to imagine that voice rising in anger.
What was I expecting,
Jake wondered,
a tail?

But when Trevor Rail curled his fingers around Jake's eagerly extended hand and squeezed it firmly in his own, everything changed. There was a low, droning malevolence transmitted by that hand, and Jake recoiled from it as if he had just opened a kitchen drawer in someone else's house, searching for a butter knife, only to find a handgun instead.

Rail ambled around the big room, chatting with Brickhouse about where he wanted Billy Moon’s workstation set up. More road cases had been delivered by Rock-It Cargo since Jake had opened the building, and Rail said he didn’t expect to get any further than setting up and maybe tracking the skeleton of a song tonight, if Billy was up for it.

“Does he have some strong material this time?” Brickhouse asked.

“I don’t know if he has
any
material. We’re going to write. Together, maybe.”

“No kidding. I didn’t know you wrote music.”

“Well, let’s say I have ideas. I’m more of a concept man. A catalyst,” Rail said.

“So it’s going to be a concept album?”

“God, no. Not like what they used to mean by that. But all of the best rock records have some kind of concept behind them, and Billy is at a point in his career where he could use one. Even Kurt Cobain, who despised all of that pompous seventies crap, had concepts.”

“So what is it? What’s the concept for this record that has no songs yet?”

“Maybe… Love and Death? What has great music or poetry ever been about, but those twin forces that undo a man?”

“Anyone ever tell you, you can be more pretentious than your artists?” Brickhouse said with a smile.

“I won’t deny high ambition. I want to make an immortal record.”

“Immortal, huh? Sure you don’t want to just stick with making
immoral
records? You’re good at it.”

“Kevin, I want to produce something that will still be on the charts in twenty years. A record that will outlive modern rock.”

“I’d say that was grandiose, but these days, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Just make a hip-hop record and it’ll outlive rock-and-roll. Rock is gonna be marginalized just like jazz and blues were. Whatever rock is—guitar music—it’s gonna be the soundtrack for nursing homes when the boomers retire. It won’t be cool anymore. That’s why I’m working like a mad motherfucker while I can.”

“You may be wrong, my friend. A new generation is discovering the first Doors album. They’re buying
Imagine
and
Electric Ladyland
, and in twenty years, new kids will still be buying
Nevermind
.”

“All of those albums outlived their creators because the artists died young.”

“There is something romantic about it, don’t you think? It adds to the mythos.”

“Worked for Elvis.”

“Elvis, you see? His myth outlived the rock-and-roll of his time. He and Bob Marley are on par with Jesus. They’re more than rock stars; they’re spiritual icons. That’s what I want to do: shape a legend.” Rail plucked a red pen from a coffee cup and twirled it in his long fingers.

“But you can’t plan that. You just have to be in the right place at the right time. Those artists are freaks of nature. And who can say why the world was ready for a certain voice?”

“I think some voices would reach an audience in any time. Styles come and go, but a voice that’s telling the truth about sex and death, a voice that’s been shaped by those energies, saturated by them… That’s magnetic. And it's the magic of this business to capture that genie in a bottle and sell it.”

Jake had given up even pretending to organize cables within earshot of the conversation and had drifted closer, fascinated.

“Maybe you can capture that,” Brickhouse said, “but you can’t create it or contrive it. Why do you think all these A&R sluts are always getting laid off and bouncing from one label to another? Those guys can’t do it either. You can’t manufacture gods. You can’t calculate genius.”

“Genius is overrated.”

“Well, the magazines sure do wear the word out. But Lennon, Morrison and Hendrix… Those guys were in a feedback loop with a cultural zeitgeist. Not likely to happen again in this jaded age, if you want my opinion. And that messiah thing? I don’t think that’s genius, exactly. More like a combination of beauty and tragedy.”

“There you have it: Sex and Death.”

“I thought your concept was Love and Death.”

“Love is elusive. Sex can be inspired with far greater precision.”

“And how do you inspire death?”

“I suspect it has something to do with putting the artist in the right place… at the right time.”