“Listen to the guitar arrangement,” I said. “There’s a mix of acoustic and electric, but when it gets going, it sounds like there are fourteen electric guitars overdubbed. It’s like an orchestra with all the different sounds and rhythms in the background.”
“I like the march-like snare drum rolls,” Marlene said. “Could we work that into ‘Never Seen, Never Heard?’”
“It would sound a lot better if we had a real drummer.” Silas triggered an electronic drum kit and matched the sound. “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” Silas said. “Or should I say the tip of my mouse?” He continued to experiment with patches and went back to one of the electronic snares he passed on and seemed content with his choice.
“Let’s cut the vocals before we go any further,” Silas said. “I don’t want to make this so thick that the song doesn’t come through.”
“It sounds cool even without the vocals,” I added. Marlene scowled at me.
Marlene headed into the booth and recorded her vocals in less than ten minutes. They were meant to be scratch vocals, used only for building the song around and then later discarded and re-recorded, but I didn’t see a need to replace them. Silas raised the airy synthesizer pads up an octave and added a simple bass line using the same sound patch an octave below. I would have never come up with these ideas myself. It seemed revolutionary.
“Damn this is great,” Marlene said. We all nodded in agreement.
“Your turn,” Silas said, turning to Robin, who was changing the string on his electric.
“All my ideas have changed now,” he said. He got out his box of pedals and started playing around. Silas allowed him to experiment with the box effects. He recorded the experimentation and later used snippets of riffs here and there to add drum fills. We were in awe of the result.
A week later, Silas bounced from foot to foot, as if he were about to burst while we were all settling into his studio for another recording session. “Come on, come on,” he said.
“Keep your pants on, sister,” Robin joked, as he plugged in his red electric.
“Marlene and I’ve been keeping this a secret all week. I know this guy who knows another guy who knows yet another who’s directing a documentary about a guy who belongs nowhere. It’s called Find My Way Home. He wants to use “Never Seen, Never Heard” in the movie.”
“Is there money involved?” Robin asked, undoing the buckles on his leather biker boots.
“Yeah, but I’m not sure how much yet,” Silas said. “The more important thing is that we’ll get some exposure. This documentary has a mid-sized budget and will probably have a good chance of getting into some festivals.”
“And that means what?” Robin asked.
“I mean, just be glad we’ve got this opportunity,” Silas said. He stood and turned his back to Robin, pacing toward the wall. He turned back around. “They want this to be the main theme song of the movie, so they’ll want different arrangements. They love the instrumental parts and the long outro and want me to extend that and keep the groove going so they can use it as background music when they don’t want the vocal part playing.”
“Oh, I see,” said Robin. “I can come over on Thursday if you want to work on it without Marlene and Duncan.”
“Yeah, that’s perfect,” said Silas.
Marlene did a mock dusting of her hands. “We’ll be out having cocktails while you two boys finish this thing,” Marlene said.
I walked into the office the next Friday morning and headed straight for the stale coffee. Silas was already in the office kitchen, looking chipper.
“You look like shit,” he said. He was right. I stayed up late the night before songwriting and was paying for it now. “Either you haven’t gotten laid in a week, or you were up all night fucking.”
“Neither. Haven’t been in the mood to meet new guys because of…” I faltered before I realized Silas didn’t know about Kenny, at least I didn’t think so. “Why do you look so happy?”
“Robin and I rearranged and extended ‘Never Seen, Never Heard’ last night and it’s the coolest thing we’ve done,” he said. “Check your email for the MP3. It will blow your mind away.”
I sat down at my desk and scrolled through my emails. Silas’s email was the only one I cared about. I opened the file, turned up the volume and entered a state of shock. It was as if a wall of sound hit me. As in the previous mix, there were a bunch of overdubbed guitar parts, but now he added overdubbed synthesizers in both sustained and rhythmic patterns, not to mention percussion everywhere. I couldn’t even tell how many bass lines there were. Silas must have added some additional backing vocals. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before.
I hustled over to Silas’s desk. An email wouldn’t be sufficient. He sat waiting at his desk for me, smiling and reclining with his hands behind his head.
“I think we’ve found a niche,” I said, catching my breath. “We need to recreate this for other songs.”
“I know. It’s the movie soundtrack market. They’ll eat this stuff up. I want to see this movie.” I wondered what type of movie would require a song this dark.
“And Marlene? If we released an album with this type of sound, it would set her apart,” I said. I could see him nodding before I finished. “So what’s the key? Where does the magic lie?” He droned on about audio recording lingo, and I nodded my head to pretend I understood what he was saying.
“I need more simple songs like this from you. They need to be less wordy. Punchy lines to the groove come through under the melody. You don’t have to change your writing style forever, but let’s go in this direction for a while.”
If I had already given up my Bob Dylan style for Marlene’s pop songs and The Big Apple Tarts, it wouldn’t be a stretch to go a little further in a different direction.
“Having this song placed in that movie has given me faith in our work again,” Silas said, sighing. His face went slack. “It’s difficult doing this work without seeing results.”
I walked back to my seat and pulled my notebook out of my bag. I glanced through some of my half-written songs and wondered which of them I could make more straightforward. The lyrics to “Never Seen, Never Heard” only had four sentences. Most people thought it’d be easier to write a song with fewer lyrics, but it was much harder to get my point across. I would have to find inspiration somewhere.
I had the laptop, the keyboard, and Robin’s amp as I sat in our apartment. They were my responsibility to move into Silas’s van. She was sitting on the couch singing scales and arpeggios and couldn’t be bothered with manual labor while her nails dried. Why Robin needed four guitars for the gig, I had no idea. It would’ve made sense to just have an electric and an acoustic. I also didn’t understand what Silas was planning on doing with those forty cables. Instead of asking, I again volunteered for the role of the “press play guy.”
We drove across town to Club Bottomless in Wicker Park, all of us packed into Silas’s van with the gear. Silas parked in the alley, and we unloaded.
A buzzed-cut guy with a wife-beater showing his faded tattoos appeared as we opened the doors. “Opening act gear goes directly on stage,” he said.
Silas took the keyboard out once we got inside and plugged cables into it. He also plugged in the laptop to the club’s sound system.
“We have a separate room for cases,” said wife-beater guy. “Leave the guitars on the stands. You have a five-minute sound check.”
We finished about forty-five minutes before the advertised show time, and I wondered what we would do with ourselves till then.
“We’re not like other clubs,” he said. “When we say the show starts at 8:30, we mean 8:30. Be ready.”
Silas taped a piece of paper with the set list posted on the laptop where I would be sitting. “Let’s run through the list and start each song to test the levels,” Silas said. We did so, and Silas made a few adjustments on the laptop that I didn’t understand, but I trusted his expertise. I worked my magic—I p
ressed play and “Touch My Soul” came on. After eight bars, Silas gave me the signal to cut, and we ran through the rest of the songs.
The crowd thickened as 8:30 approached. Beer bottles clinked, and the patron’s chatter grew louder than the recorded music pumping through the system. Marlene waited next to the stage with her wine spritzer in hand while I chewed my nails. I wanted this to go right for her career to get a jump start. I wanted to press play at the right time and not screw it up.
The wife-beater guy jumped onstage and grabbed the mic. “Opening for Dream Dawg tonight,” he enunciated, dragging his words out and holding them for effect, “is an artist new to this club. Countess Marlene.”
Marlene got on the stage and bowed, which I thought was pretty lame because the show hadn’t even started. I’d seen her do this before and always told her to stop.
“1-2-3-4,” she yelled.
I didn’t know we were starting with 1-2-3-4. That wasn’t how we started every other time. My job was to start a click track for pre-recorded tracks. If she wanted to make a show of it, she should have said it along to the click track.
The click track played a click on every beat to let the musicians know the tempo of the song. It could only be heard onstage, not the in the audience. With a full band, the live drummer would yell 1-2-3-4, and everybody would start. Our drummer was a set of tracks on the laptop, so it played for a couple of bars and then disappeared since by then, the rest of us had a feel for the tempo.
I nodded four counts and pressed play. Marlene caught on, and I wasn’t the bad guy. After “Touch My Soul” we followed with “Radiate My World.” People continued to talk with each other and laugh while the music played, and there was plenty of laughter. I scanned the room to see if anybody was watching her. Nobody. Marlene forged ahead bravely. The first four songs were usually crowd-pleasers, but they weren’t working. I could tell that Club Bottomless had a tough crowd.
“Thank you,” she yelled to the clapping that should follow when she finished a song. She walked over and leaned into me. We still had twenty minutes. “I don’t know what else to do,” she whispered in my ear.
“We have to change the set list,” said Silas, appearing behind me. “Do one of your sultry ballads and sink into the low notes.”
She put her hands on her hips. “You mean the ballad that Duncan wrote but wasn’t supposed to write because he’s not supposed to be writing ballads for The Factory?”
“Bingo,” Silas said. “It’s pre-loaded on the laptop.”
I pressed play and Silas grabbed me to walk offstage. It was only her voice against the pre-recorded tracks. She sang the song in all its sultry glory. She knelt on the floor and whipped her arm around while making love to the microphone stand. Nobody noticed. As she hit the high A, she humped the floor, thrusting her pelvis in and out. Nobody paid attention as she sold the song with everything she had. The good thing about songs is that they eventually came to an end. What a train wreck. I tried to slink off, but Silas grabbed my hand to lead me back onstage after Marlene said her fake thank-yous.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Silas said, as he grabbed the laptop and pressed play. Marlene was expressionless as she turned and looked back at him. My cheesiest song started playing, and he tapped her on the butt to get her moving with the music. She grabbed the mic again and belted out the lyrics:
I want to
Pump your body, pump your body
I want it
In my body, in my body
After a while, we felt grateful for the laughing. At least she was getting some reaction.
It was clear that my songs weren’t pumping up anybody. They didn’t like the cheesy pop sound, but they didn’t like the more soulful, bluesy songs either. Would they like my song about semen that Robin found to be so funny? We’d never find out because wife-beater came on-stage after only six songs and cut the set short. We stared at him in shock and skulked offstage.
A moment later Dream Dawg stepped onstage one by one before Marlene and I were even off. With one loud electric guitar strum, the crowd roared. At least we didn’t have to feel embarrassed by their stares as we left the building. Robin followed us out the back door. He had been in the crowd watching us. He put his arm around her, and she turned away.
“It’s okay. Even if your career doesn’t pan out, we still have the demos from The Factory.”
She used all the strength in her 105-pound frame to shove him to the ground. Without helping to carry the equipment back, she got into the front seat of the van and slammed the door behind her. She didn’t say another word the whole night.
Chapter Twenty-One
NEVER SEEN, NEVER HEARD
The Factory attended the premiere of Find My Way Home at the Chicago International Film Festival two weeks later. We took a little break after the Club Bottomless fiasco, and it was nice to get back together. We couldn’t believe the documentary had gotten this far. None of us had seen the film yet so we couldn’t wait to see how our song fit in the movie. We were special guests at the premiere at the Landmark Century Theatre and sat in reserved seats. I felt like Cinderella.
That Marlene’s outfit got plenty of attention didn’t surprise me. It wasn’t even one of the most outrageous outfits in her closet. It looked like somebody had taken a gold satin bedspread and wrapped it around her, cinching it with a wide, shiny, black belt around her waist. She wore matching gold lipstick, and gold barrettes and clips pinned her hair in place. I figured she’d needed to come up with something special for the occasion.
The lights dimmed after we sat down and the trailers for other movies started playing. I felt like bouncing out of my seat. As soon as the screen went black, the drums for “Never Seen, Never Heard” started up. Then the bass track came in, followed by numerous synthesizer pads, as the opening scene started. I loved that the main character rode on the train to the Belmont stop, the same place where the words “never seen, never heard” were spray painted on the side of a building. I wondered if Silas had told them the story of where the idea came from.
The character got off the train and walked down the stairs to the street, passing many people on the sidewalk. This was a throwaway tone-setter for the movie, but with our song playing, I could identify with his loneliness. After two minutes I realized that the vocals hadn’t come in yet.
The movie was about an unnamed character searching for himself by reliving his past. Every time he visited a place in his history, a different section of our song came up, sometimes with a different arrangement. The protagonist walked in front of his childhood home, stopping in front of the driveway and staring for what seemed an eternity. After hesitating, he walked up to the front door. He lifted his right arm to knock but stopped, and his arm went limp. Right at when he turned around and walked away from the house, the first verse of “Never Seen, Never Heard” poured through the theater. The scene grew blurry at that moment, revealing scenes from his childhood and his days on the streets. After the first chorus finished, the song dissolved straight into the big guitar solo. Silas gave the producers permission to splice parts of the song so that they could use it throughout the film. The end credits were the only time they used the vocals.
“Oh my god, you guys,” I said. “Mind blowing.”
“Guys, we owned this,” Silas said. “There’s no reason we can’t replicate this.”
“What the fuck?” asked Marlene, loud enough for the people exiting the surrounding rows to hear. “Do they hate my voice?”
“Relax, everybody likes your voice,” Robin said, waving his hand in front of her to calm her down. “They needed to make certain parts of the song fit the movie to give it suspense. The instrumentals just worked better.”
Marlene crossed her arms and tried to calm herself down. “Still, it’s mind-blowing to hear your own voice coming from the big screen. I just wished they used more of the vocals.”
I walked out of the theater feeling satisfied. Nobody in the audience woul
d ever know I wrote that song, but they all heard it. The money we got for the song was pretty minuscule, but it made me think of all the possibilities. When I remembered how easy it was to write that song and how quick it was for The Factory to record it, I thought I was wasting my time creating pop songs for young pop artists. Perhaps the movie soundtrack scene was where it was at. How many times did Marlene’s voice need to show up in different movies before people recognized her as an artist in her own right?
What would a movie about my life look like? The hours of fumbling with a guitar that resulted in jumbled chords. The bad songs. Meeting Marlene. Meeting Jesse. Meeting Robin. Meeting Silas. Kenny? I wondered how the song would sound at the moment I had made the wrong decision of going home with Kenny. What synthesizer module would signify Jesse’s disapproving stare when he found out.
“Stop, Duncan,” Marlene said, putting her arm around me. “I know what you’re thinking. Stop. Life is good.”
Our comfy living room couch enveloped me in relaxation when my cell rang.
“Drop what you’re doing,” Marlene said to me before I could say hello on the phone. Once again, I would follow orders from Sergeant Marlene.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Robin and I got into a fight. A deal-breaker. How soon can you make it to Pancake Heaven?” She had a wilt in her voice that I’d never heard before.
“It’ll take me thirty minutes to put on my face,” I said. My sarcasm was met with silence.
When I got to the restaurant, she was already eating the new Cajun pancakes slathered in honey butter. She wasn’t crying then, but it was obvious she had been earlier. Guilt engulfed me for having such a good day myself. I nixed my plan of ordering a veggie omelet to save on carbs, but felt that would be insensitive in her time of need. Any good friend would eat sympathy pancakes.
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