Before the Flock

by David Inglish

The snaking slow road leads past the Marlboro man billboard—a cutout cowboy emerging from the trees behind the Chateau Marmont. They pass Tower Records, wind up the hill, and drift in front of the Rainbow Room. Fifteen insolent poodle-headed rockers glare at the Eldorado. “That guy just gave me stink eye,” Kurt says.

  “I think they all just gave us stink eye,” Eric says.

  “Fuckers.”

  The action on Sunset soon stops. Spewing needs a place to turn around. He pulls the Eldorado into a Beverly Hills neighborhood. “No respect,” Kurt says. “I got a record deal, but I get no respect at the Rainbow.”

  “Don’t worry about those guys, Kurt,” the Jovi says. “Those guys can’t even get into the Rainbow Room. That’s why they’re on the sidewalk.”

  “Did you see the way that guy looked at me?” Kurt says, and clinches his fist.

  EJ leans forward into the front seat and says, “Pull over, Spewing. I think I just saw something.”

  Spewing parks the car in front of a stately Beverly Hills Spanish-style mansion. “Follow me,” EJ says, “and be quiet.” They hop out of the car and walk a few houses back toward Sunset. “Do you see it?” EJ asks.

  “I see it,” the Jovi says.

  It’s dark green and dotted with color, a color that seems to bring its own light. No one says a word. The five members of the band attack the orange tree, filling their hands then their shirts with baseball-sized oranges. They sprint back up to the car and pull onto Sunset Boulevard heading east. There is much less traffic in this direction, but the Rainbow Room and the poodle rockers are now on the other side of the street. Spewing pulls over.

  “Alright. On the count of three,” Kurt says. “One…two…three.”

  The volley is launched. Arching high over Sunset, the luminescent orbs land with pulpy explosions, two on the sidewalk, one on the brick wall, and one directly in the chest of a poodle rocker. He falls backward against the wall, then to the ground. He grabs his heart beneath his Dokken T-shirt and screams, “WHAT THE FUCK?” Another volley is launched, the poodle-headed rockers scramble for cover; one is hit in the neck, another in the back, and one rips off his shirt and goes into a Tai Chi posture.

  “That one’s mine,” the Jovi says, and winds up a perfect pitch that hits the Tai Chi poodle in the center of his forehead.

  Getting to his knees, the first victim points across the street and yells, “OVER THERE! GET THEM!”

  The remaining rockers look across the street.

  “WE’RE THUNDERSTICK! DON’T FORGET IT!” Kurt yells.

  Spewing hits the gas and the Eldorado rumbles east.

  “Nothing’s going to happen tonight,” Felder says, when the band gets back to the studio. “The digital machines won’t work.”

  “Let’s throw down a track on the analog decks,” Kurt says.

  “Yeah. They sound better anyway,” the Jovi adds.

  “That would take hours to do that. Come back tomorrow.”

  Kurt presses his fingers into his jaw and stares at the floor. “I really need to play right now.”

  The next night is Monday, June 27, 1988. Months of hype and weeks of commercials are about to culminate in fisticuffs. Michael Spinks, 31-0, former heavyweight champion of the world, is set to fight Iron Mike Tyson, 34-0, in Atlantic City. It is widely believed that Spinks is the only man on the planet with a chance to beat Mike Tyson.

  Jesse the Giant and EJ are pumped for the fight. They’ve had the A&M runners go out for pizza and beer and pretzels. They’ve set up chairs and a couch in the Studio A lounge so that everyone can have a look. Kurt, the Jovi, Spewing, and Eric want to see what should be the greatest fight since Frazier/Ali.

  Two days in the studio, and Thunderstick has yet to lay down a track. Kostas is still tinkering and toiling. He is trying to make his archaic tube preamp and the futuristic digital tape deck friends.

  Upstairs, the band has assembled, eaten, drank, and waited through the undercard —two hundred-and-ten-pound Latinos punched at each other in flurries like hummingbirds. All of that is done. This is it. Wearing blue and white striped tube socks pulled up to his knees, weighing in at 214 pounds, in the white shorts with black trim – Michael Spinks. In the black on black trunks, wearing no socks, only 21 years old, 4 inches shorter and 4 pounds heavier – Iron Mike Tyson. They meet in the center of the ring. Tyson scratches his head with the seam of his boxing glove and looks at the mat. Spinks stares down his long, bent face at Tyson. “Both of youz touch gloves. Good luck to both of youz,” the referee says.

  Kostas interrupts. “I’m ready.” The little frenetic man walks in front of the TV and hops up and down. “Let’s do one. Let’s lay down a track.”

  “But the fight is just about to begin,” EJ says.

  Kostas turns his whole body to look at the television. “Those guys are gonna be fighting all night. Let’s do one take. I can check my levels. You guys can come back up and watch the rest of the fight.”

  Kurt has been waiting for years to go to work. “Let’s play rock, that’s what we’re here for. C’mon!”

  Everyone leaves the room and walks downstairs.

  Michael Spinks takes a knee in his corner and prays. Tyson’s trainer hugs him desperately, his little white arm around an enormous black neck. Tyson pushes him away and beats his own chest. The bell rings. Tyson skips toward Spinks, starts throwing big punches. The announcer exclaims, “TYSON SHOWING NO FEAR, NO RESPECT AT ALL!”

  Sixty seconds of no respect. Spinks dances. Tyson punches. Several land, one, a short right hand into the middle of Spinks’s chest just below his heart, reverberates through his stomach, through his kidneys, into the bundle of nerves that make up the solar plexus. One of Spinks’s legs buckles, and it seems like he’s praying again but now at the feet of Tyson. Tyson cocks his right arm, looks at the crown of Spinks’s head, and resists the instinct to kill. Instead, he hops excitedly back to his corner.

  There’s a standing eight count.

  Tyson marches over from his corner, throws two punches so short and fast that they are almost invisible, and Spinks springs backward onto the mat, his tube socks above his head, his head behind the ropes. The whites of his eyes are frozen. His elbows are planted in the mat. His hands sway in a nonexistent wind.

  Spinks slumbers upstairs. The members of Thunderstick are quarantined downstairs. The Jovi and Eric are each in their own large glass enclosure. EJ and Spewing are together in the main room with Kurt’s guitar amp. Kurt is by himself in the vocal iso booth. .

  Kostas presses a button on the Neve and says, “Let’s do one!” His voice sounds distant and echoey.

  “What song?” Kurt’s lips are inches from the mic. He sounds close, personal, inside your head. Every smacking of saliva, every breath, is audible.

  Felder speaks into the Neve and says, “The money song—’I Wanted You.’”

  EJ counts out four on his sticks, then four silent, then the band jumps in remarkably together for being so far apart.

  After the song, Kurt asks, “How was that?”

  “Not bad. Let’s do it again.”

  They do.

  “And that one?”

  “Good, let’s do it again.”

  Thunderstick plays the four-minute-and-twenty-second song three more times.

  “How was that one?”

  “It was like the third one. Give it the oomph of the first one with the smoothness of the fifth one,” Felder says.

  They play it again and again and again.

  “How was that?” Kurt asks.

  “Still think the third one was best,” Felder says.

  Kostas shakes his curly head. “No, we liked the first one.”

  “No. That wasn’t radio-ready.”

  “I think Spewing is holding back—like he doesn’t want to make a mistake,” Kostas says.

  “No, bro. I’m giving it all I got.” Spewing’s voice is dim. It’s only being picked up by the ambient mics.

  “First one,” Kostas says.r />
  “No, third one,” Felder says.

  “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT! I WANT TO FUCKING HEAR THESE PLAYBACKS!” Kurt yells.

  “It takes a half hour to switch the digital machines to playback,” Kostas says. “You still want that?”

  “Yes.” Kurt throws down his headphones. He stomps in and sits at the Neve like he knows what the buttons do.

  Eric walks in the control room and says, “I’m hungry.”

  The Jovi walks in and says, “Dude. This iso-booth thing is like sex with a condom.”

  “Yeah. Like taking a shower with a raincoat on—not for me, bro. I want those pussy juices to run down my leg,” Spewing says.

  “Spewing may be right,” Kostas says, scratching his chin. “Go watch the rest of the fight. Ernie the engineer will set up the playback.”

  “What do you mean Spewing may be right?” Felder asks.

  The band walks upstairs. In the lounge, Jesse is on the couch watching MTV, smoking a joint. “What happened to the fight?” EJ asks.

  “It’s over,” Jesse says.

  “Who won?”

  “Tyson. First round KO. He almost knocked Spinks’s head into the third row.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. Awesome.”

  “So,” Kurt asks, “what do we do for a half hour while these guys switch out the decks?”

  “Eat,” Eric says. “Or sleep?”

  “Smoke-out.” Jesse nods.

  “Get some chicks over here,” the Jovi adds.

  Downstairs in the control room, the Sony decks are set up for playback. Kostas hits PLAY and works the faders to get a rough mix.

  “Why do my drums sound like that?” EJ asks.

  “Like what?”

  “Like shit. Sounds too echoey.”

  “That’s the room.”

  “And it sounds kind of brittle too,” the Jovi adds. “Like the high end hurts.”

  “That’s the digital decks.”

  “And why are we using them?” the Jovi asks.

  “With digital, I can punch in and punch out whenever you want. I can take one great bass line and duplicate it through the whole song.”

  “We don’t need that,” Kurt says. “We don’t need studio tricks. This is a real band.”

  “It’s not the digital decks,” Felder says. “It’s the takes. They need something.”

  EJ rolls his eyes, puts his hands on an imaginary statue, and says, “Yeah. It needs some tits.”

  “Maybe it needs a bumblebee buzzing in a jar,” Felder says.

  “Are you for real?” the Jovi asks.

  “Just a little something to throw it off, give it mystery.”

  “Jesus! What are you talking about?” Kurt yells.

  “I’ve got it,” Kostas says. “I want this guy”—Kostas points at Kurt—“in front of his band. Just to get the energy back for basic tracks. Just to get the feel. We can always do overdubs later in the iso rooms.”

  “Look,” Kurt says, “we’re a professional band. We can do it any way you want. But I like to feel that energy coming off of EJ, coming off of the drums.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay, Lunky, Jesse, Talksley, Ernie! Switch out Kurt. Set him up in the big room. The Jovi too,” Kostas commands.

  “What about keyboards?” Lunky asks.

  “Leave ‘em in the iso room. There’s no time to waste. Let’s get a track before sunrise!”

  Ernie the engineer moves the vocal mic from the iso room to right in front of the drums and bass. Kurt plugs directly into his amp. The Jovi’s amp is rolled in and mic’d up. The four of them look at one another. EJ taps out four.

  They walk back into the control room. Felder asks, “Do you hear that?”

  Everyone listens to the silence. “No.”

  “That’s the sound of cash registers ringing. That’s the sound of ten-thousand-seat stadiums. That’s the sound of radio. See you boys tomorrow.”

  The Jovi and Eric walk outside into the parking lot. Eric says, “Look at that,” and points at the gray rim of light along the ridge of the mountains and the tops of the buildings. “It makes the whole filthy city look like a cardboard cutout, like a movie set.”

  “You should write that down.”

  “No. I feel like I’ve been doing gaggers of whitey all night. I need to get back to the Cokewoods and get in bed before first light, before those damn birds start singing and ruin everything. What are you gonna do?”

  The Jovi stretches his arms above his head, hops on his chopper, looks at Eric, and says, “I was made for sunrise.” He kick-starts the machine to life and rides off into the silver light.

  “Dude. I just took a piss next to Bono!” Eric says as he walks into the control room.

  Felder and Kostas and the Jovi laugh.

  “No way!” Spewing says, and offers a handshake. “Did you look at his dick?”

  “No, man. I looked straight ahead and acted like it happened every day. He said to me in that leprechaun’s accent: ‘Well, you seem to have turned A&M studios into a gay raj.’”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Kurt asks.

  “It took me a second to realize he meant ‘garage.’ He thinks we’ve turned A&M Studios into a garage.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I smiled, stared at the wall, and agreed with him.”

  Kurt leaps from his seat at the Neve and stops himself an inch from Eric’s face. “YOU SHOULD’VE PUNCHED HIM! WE’RE NO FUCKING GARAGE BAND! HE INSULTS US AND YOU JUST TAKE IT!”

  “It wasn’t an insult, Kurt! He just means that we’ve got energy. He means that we’re not afraid to invite our friends and relatives and have jam sessions and take photos! We’re not afraid to enjoy how killer this is.”

  “Look. Until those guys come in here and show me a little respect—nobody talks to them. You hear me?”

  “Kurt, you can’t do that,” the Jovi says. “Those guys sold out the Coliseum for four nights in a row. Do you have any idea how huge they are?”

  “And do you know how much money they made?” Felder asks. “Two hundred and fifty grand per show per guy.”

  “They got other shit going on than wondering if they’ve made friends with Thunderstick or not,” the Jovi says.

  “We’re gonna be bigger than that.”

  “Kurt, I know you like them,” Eric adds. “Their music is soulful. They’re Christians. That music helped me through some hard times—and I told Bono that.”

  “THAT’S EXACTLY IT! IF THEY CAN’T HEAR THE LORD IN OUR MUSIC AND COME OVER HERE AND ACKNOWLEDGE IT, THEN I’LL FIGHT ALL OF ‘EM.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re not fighting U2,” Felder interjects. “I’ll put together a little meeting. If they like us, it could be the best thing ever for this band. Maybe we’re the first band on their next tour.”

  “Those guys should be opening up for us!” Kurt says, still glaring at Eric. “Don’t ever do that again!”

  “What? Piss next to Bono?”

  “TALK TO THEM!”

  Each night is a Thunderstick show. If Felder meets a young girl, he tells her and her friend that he’s a producer now. To prove it, he brings them to watch his band record at A&M Studios. Many come and go. Two girls turn out to be pros—the Blonde and the Redhead. They watch Thunderstick lay down basic tracks—drums, vocals, guitars, bass, and keyboards. They clap and say, “Inspired!” They watch the Jovi sit by himself in the big room and rip leads. They clap and say, “Hot!” Kurt gets out his guitar and shows them what he’s got. They clap and say, “Oh my God!” Felder tells the band he’s gonna nail the Blonde, but it never quite happens. Like all the best party girls, these two can sense when it’s about to get boring and they go down the hall and introduce themselves to U2 in Studio D. A few hours later, they appear in Studio A again. The Somali security guard and the receptionist get to know them, and they become regulars.

  The band records no matter who is sitting in the
control room. If the band finishes early, before 3 A.M., they go to an after-hours club. If they finish late, they go to the twenty-four-hour Jewish deli on Fairfax for breakfast.

  A week goes by, and Kurt still hasn’t heard a word from U2. He wonders what the hell is going on. It lingers in the back of his mind until he gets up early on Monday and washes the Mustang Fastback and parks it proudly right in front of the door, right in front of the receptionist. He tosses the keys to the valet, flashes a five, and says, “Keep her handy.”

  He comes back out to get a pack of smokes from the glove box and is shocked. The Mustang has been moved ten cars over and Bono’s rented ‘57 Chevy convertible is parked in its place. It’s a two-tone prop from American Graffiti. Kurt calls the valet over. “What happened here?”

  “Yes. Is Mr. Bono’s car.” He smiles and nods.

  “And my car?”

  “Is right there.” He points to the car.

  “Did you know that my parents were married right there?” Kurt gestures toward the Valley. “On HOLLYWOOD FUCKING BOULEVARD.”

  “No. I did not know that.”

  “And those guys are from FUCKING IRELAND.”

  “Yes. I did know that.”

  “Okay. Don’t forget it.” Kurt struts back into A&M straight into the Studio A control room. The Blonde and the Redhead are sitting at the Neve, running their fingers over the controls. “Those guys in U2 are ASSHOLES!” Kurt yells. “They moved my fucking car. My parents were married on HOLLYWOOD FUCKING BOULEVARD and they moved MY car!”

  The Blonde gets up from the board, walks over to Kurt, rubs his shoulders, and says softly, “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “They think you’re good.”

  “Good?”

  “Yeah, good.”

  “Good. That’s nothing. Those guys are a joke— ‘Alright, Edge, play the blues!’—that guy couldn’t play the blues if his life depended on it.”

  “Don’t be all mad.” She puts her finger on Kurt’s lips. “They’re into you guys—what you guys have done to this place—brought in some energy. Bono told me you’ve turned it into a garage.”

  “He said that to my keyboard player too, and Eric should’ve fucking knocked that guy out. We’ve been together for FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS. And we get no respect.”