Dan Fontaineau said, “Hell, yes, we’re professional musicians. We can knock this thing.”
“Okay, Tess, Casey? …”
“We’re set.”
Dan gave the downbeat and the second engineer started the tape running. The first engineer operated the board, and Jack concentrated on listening, one finger crossing his lips and a scowl on his eyebrows—his usual expression when he was concentrating. The music was sounding very smooth, but, unfortunately, halfway through the take Dan’s earphone fell out of his ear and he stopped playing. The sound swooned and the song fell apart. Naturally, the guys—they had a great collective sense of humor—gave him some shit.
“Hey, way to go, Dan.”
“Yeah, we’re professional musicians,” someone mimicked. “We can knock this thing.”
“Knock that earphone into his head, you mean, so it’ll stay there.”
“Anybody got some Super Glue?”
Everybody laughed and relaxed as Jack, ever the overseer and prompter, got them back to business. “Let’s save what we got and start again. Whenever you’re ready, Dan.”
This time they completed the song, got it on tape, and afterward everyone piled into the control room to give it a listen. The women sat on the leather stools, leaning forward with their elbows on the slanted desk. The men gathered around the control panel and while they listened some played air guitar, some studied the floor, some mouthed words. Everybody in the room had a knee, a foot, a head or a hand keeping time to the music.
The playback ended and chatter broke out.
“It’s solid.”
“What we’ve got here is a fresh ballad with a heart.”
“Nice way to start a career, Casey.”
Though they liked the start they’d made, they had a long way to go. Everybody exchanged ideas. “You think that solo was too Las Vegas? … In the fourth bar of the intro the sax is resolving too fast … I wonder if we should pull back the tempo a bit.”
They worked this way for two and a half hours, back and forth between the studio and the control room. Record it again. Listen again. Record. Listen. Record. Listen. Finally one run-through seemed to ignite a specific spark in everyone. They’d got it: they all felt it simultaneously, and the charged atmosphere was palpable as the playback ended.
“This one’s got the edge.”
“We finally filled that deep pocket.”
This was the best cut so far, and everyone felt the diminished tension and a sense of self-satisfaction.
“Time to break bread,” Greaves said. “We’ll pick up again at seven o’clock.”
While they’d been recording, a caterer had come in and set up food buffet style on a large table in the lounge. As most of the group headed toward it, Mick Mulhall asked Jack, “Can I put a fix on that line where Tess sings, ‘Say good-bye, mustn’t cry’?”
He went back into the studio to rerecord the section while the other musicians wandered out into the lounge, put quarters into the Pepsi machine, loaded plates and sat around on the sofas talking mostly about the song in progress.
Casey was so fired up she found it hard to sit.
“Jeez, this is wild! I never had so much fun in my life!”
The others remembered what it was like to be breaking in, hearing yourself for the first time, and they humored her.
“Hey, Mac, you’re gonna have to tie an anchor to this one’s tail or she’s gonna float right on outta here, she’s so high.”
Tess smiled, and said, “Better eat something, Casey. We’ve got three more hours of work before we call it a night.”
Mick finished his fix and came back into the lounge area with Jack, who was so intense he didn’t take time to eat. Instead, he told Tess, “We’re still getting a little creep in the vocals. You want to come in tomorrow and lay down a new track, just in case?”
“Sure, if you think we need it. What about Casey?”
“Casey, too. I think we’ll get a cleaner sound if we use two boxes. Okay with you, Casey?”
The girl’s eyes were so wide and excited, she couldn’t believe she was being asked to come back again. “Yeah, sure … heck, yes!”
Tess told Jack, “We’ll be here.”
They sat around eating grilled shrimp, rice pilaf, salad, green grapes and watermelon, all of it served in very utilitarian fashion: this was a work session, not a party: remaining in the studio was essential to keeping the musical urgency alive and pulsing. Leaving to eat elsewhere, they all knew, sometimes managed to subdue that drive. When that happened, the lifelessness came across on tape.
Jack barely ate. He remained in the control room, working with the first and second engineer on the tracks they’d already recorded, listening for anything that might possibly need fixes.
Tess left Casey visiting with the guys and went into the control room to speak privately with her producer.
“Can I talk to you a minute, Jack?”
“Sure,” he said, turning from the control board on a rolling chair, hooking another with his foot and inviting her to sit.
The engineer and his assistant went out to catch some supper, leaving the two alone.
“I want your opinion, Jack,” Tess said when the two had the control room to themselves.
He could tell from her demeanor that whatever she was going to ask was important.
“That’s what I’m paid for.”
“It’s not about the album, it’s about the tour. Carla’s throat problem’s not going to be straightened out anytime soon. I want to ask Casey to go on tour with me and sing backup vocals.”
He considered for a moment, then said, “She’s young.”
“She’s talented. And she knows my music. Jack, we were playing my old albums around the house yesterday and she’s got the backup cues cold on every one. Every lick—exactly like the record! I know she’s inexperienced, but we don’t have much time left for rehearsals, and sometimes the hungry ones are willing to work even harder than the experienced ones. Besides that, I like her and we get along like two cats in a litter. What do you think?”
“Shouldn’t you be talking to Ralph about this?”
As her road show producer, Ralph Thornleaf would have the final say. “I will, but I wanted your opinion, too. I just got the idea last night and I haven’t had a chance to call him. So what do you think?”
“You know what I think. I trust your instincts, Tess. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be letting you coproduce your own albums. I like the girl’s voice.”
“How do you think it would blend with Diane’s?” Diane Abbington was one of Tess’s other two backup singers.
“Her voice is actually a lot like Diane’s. I think they might sound all right together.”
“And Estelle?” Estelle Paglio was Tess’s other harmony singer.
“Estelle can blend with anybody. Why don’t I see if I can get those two in here tomorrow when you and Casey are coming in, and we can dream up some excuse to get the three of them singing together, then you’ll know. If you want to, we could use them for a little additional backup vocal on “Old Souls.” I’ve been thinking about it anyway, like maybe if we drop some three-part harmony into selected spots we could get a little deeper sound. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a good idea. While we’re at it, I’ll see if Ralph can casually drop around, then we’ll all know what the four of us sound like together. Be a good chance for him to meet Casey.”
Tess returned to the lounge to join the others. The sax player went home and a fiddle player arrived to work on the next song. Everyone returned to the studio for the evening session. “Don’t Leave Me High” was the last song, the spare one they’d record for the new album. The session followed the same pattern as the earlier one—charts, demo, working on parts, laying down tracks until finally, around nine o’clock, the last fixes were put on and Jack called the session over.
When they were driving home, Casey said, “That’s the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”
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br /> Her adrenaline was still pumping, Tess could tell. Casey threw her head back and stretched herself out like a surf board against the car seat. “I want to do this till I’m ninety.”
Tess laughed. “You’ll need some bionic parts if you do it till then. Like a larynx and lungs, for instance.”
“I feel bionic right now! Like I could go all night! Tess, I love you!”
“Well, that’s good. I love you, too.”
“What can I ever do to pay you back?”
“The truth is you won’t pay me back. Someday when you’re forty years old and a superstar you’ll give some other beginner a break and pass along the tradition. That’s how all of us handle our paybacks.”
“I’ll remember that. I promise I will.”
When they got home Casey called her dad immediately. She used the phone in the kitchen while Tess leafed through the mail that Maria had left on the counter.
“Jeez, Dad, it was so great! I mean, when I heard the sound coming through my earphones it was like, wow—I mean this really major rush, you know? And we recorded it again and again and again, and everybody was really nice to me. Dad, the studio musicians were guys who played with Ricky Nelson and Graham Nash and everybody you could think of! The best talent in town, and they treated me like …” Casey went on and on, filling her dad’s ear while Tess moved in and out of the kitchen, to and from her office. After about ten minutes she heard Casey call, “Hey, Tess, Dad wants to talk to you!”
Tess was sitting in her office so she answered there.
“Hi.” She grinned. “How’s your ear?”
He laughed, and said, “That’s one excited girl.”
“Hey, I wish you could’ve been there. She did great. Our voices are really good together.”
“I know. She told me. And told me and told me.”
It was Tess’s turn to laugh. In the living room Casey started a CD playing and the sound of Tess’s voice spilled through the house at high volume. “Just a minute …” She swiveled around in her chair and turned it down on the wall speaker. “There, that’s better. Your daughter likes her music loud, plus she’s making herself right at home.”
“Hey, if she’s too—”
“No, don’t worry,” Tess interrupted. “Casey and I get along just fine.”
“Well, thanks again for today, for everything you’re doing for her.”
“Kenny,” she said, and tipped her chair forward, elbows to the desktop. “I’m going to try something tomorrow. We have to go back into the studio to lay down another vocal track and I’m going to have Casey sing along with two of my backup singers—I mean the two who go out on concert tour with me. There’s a third one, Carla, but she’s got a thyroid condition that’s taking her out of commission for maybe as long as two years. The long and the short of it is, if Casey’s voice blends as well as I think it will, I may be asking her to go on concert tour with me, starting at the end of June.”
The line went silent.
Finally Tess asked, “Do you have any objections, Kenny?”
“You’re moving kind of fast with her, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she admitted honestly, and waited for his response.
“This scares me, Tess.”
“I imagine it does.”
“Too much too soon.”
“She knows every word of every song I’ve ever recorded, and not only that, she knows the backup vocals to a T. The plain truth is, she’d be doing me a favor. I wouldn’t have to go through all those tedious rehearsals to train a new girl. We could do it quite easily in a week or two.”
Silence passed again, and she wisely let it.
After a long time, he released a pent-up breath … then nothing.
“We open the concert tour at Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim on June twenty-eighth. The first concert is already sold out, so we’ve agreed to do a second one on the twenty-ninth. Can you imagine your daughter singing in a place with eighteen thousand ticketholders filling the seats? I have this fantasy, Kenny,” she went on, “it’s of you, sitting in the front row of Arrowhead for Casey’s first public performance, then coming backstage to hug her and congratulate her and drink champagne with us. What do you think?”
Again he let out a breath, then an uncertain laugh. “You’ve caught me so off guard here.”
“Think about it. I’ll send you tickets for the gold circle. Maybe you can bring Momma, too. She just might be persuaded to come, if she could travel with you and Faith.”
“Faith, too? You want Faith to come?”
“Well … no, not especially, but how could I send tickets to you and not to her?”
“Tess, listen, it’s … I don’t know what to say. Besides, you haven’t even heard Casey sing with the others.”
“No, but I have an ear. I think I can tell what she’ll sound like. Tell me yes, Kenny, so I can ask her with your blessing. It’s important to me.”
“All right, then, yes. Hell, what am I saying?”
Tess smiled. She knew when she’d see him again!
“All right, then!” she said with excitement in her voice. “Save June twenty-eighth and I’ll see you in Anaheim!”
“Tess, wait!”
“What?”
“Call me tomorrow night. Tell me how it went in the studio.”
“Of course. Do you want to talk to Casey again?”
“No, just tell her good night. And one more thing …”
“What’s that?”
“I think I love you. Last night I was sure. Tonight I’m not so sure … depending on what happens to my daughter’s life because of you.”
She laughed, and said, “I’m not going to let anything happen to her. I love that girl.”
“Oh, you love her but not me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So you love me, too?”
“I didn’t say that either. Good night, Kenny.”
“Good night, Tess.”
She was smiling as she hung up. And, actually, she was pretty sure she loved him.
The second day’s session went the way Tess expected. Casey’s voice blended with the others so well that there was never a question she was the right choice. When they all sang together it clicked. Tess could tell by catching the eyes of Diane and Estelle that they, too, liked what they heard. When the song ended Diane said with engaging sassiness, “Whoa, you cook, girl!”
With the approval of Jack and Ralph, Tess asked Casey right there in the studio if she wanted to go on tour, starting at the end of June. It was fun watching her face suffuse with shock.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“But … but why?”
“Because you know my music. Because your voice blends. And because you’re easy to get along with.”
Casey dropped onto a chair, and whispered, “Holy shit.”
And so began one of the busiest months of Tess’s life. June was traditionally a wild month in Nashville anyway, kicking off with the Summer Lights festival—a three-day street fair down by the capitol—and a celebrity softball tournament at Greer Stadium. Then came the TNN Music City News Awards, followed by the most intense week of contact with fans to happen anywhere in the world, namely Fan Fair, when twenty-four thousand of them paid admission into the Tennessee State Fairgrounds to pay homage to their idols at close range, at booths set up in the cattle barns; to shake their hands, have snapshots taken with them, bring them homemade pies, tell them their babies were named after them, buy T-shirts, caps, coffee mugs, and albums, and have all these moneymakers signed, signed, signed!
There were times during Fan Fair when Tess did nine or ten radio interviews a day, plus a three-hour stint at her own booth and sometimes another at the label’s booth. There were also newspaper and TV interviews, autographings at record stores and, of course, some performing. She lost track of how many times a DJ with a tape recorder stuck a microphone in her face, and asked her to say “Hi everyone! This is Tess McPh
ail coming to you from KMPS, Seattle!” Or perhaps he was from Tulsa, or Albuquerque or Sweetwater, Oklahoma. Wherever the DJs were from, during Fan Fair, when they asked you to give them a recorded message to take back home to your fans, you did it. There were meetings with fan club leaders from all over America, even special awards for some of them, dinners with disk jockeys, and special get-togethers with managers of record shops.
It was a grueling week, but Casey stayed beside Tess through its entirety, and Tess was grateful to have her there. She ran errands, brought cold Cokes, sold T-shirts, made phone calls, took snapshots with the cameras the fans handed her so they could have their picture taken with Tess. But most importantly, she smiled through it all and brought along her boundless energy to lift Tess’s spirits when, at the end of an eighteen-hour day, the overworked star wanted nothing so badly as to cry with weariness.
For Casey it was novel, exciting. Every new experience was reason for rejoicing: she was getting a firsthand look at the hard work of being a country music star, and deciding it was definitely what she wanted for herself.
When Fan Fair ended, conceit rehearsals began.
Mac’s stage show was an extravaganza of lights, costumes and equipment requiring a dozen semitrailers to haul it all, and fifty employees to make it work, as well as another twenty local hands in each concert venue. Everybody worked hard preparing for the tour, and Casey was no exception. Since time was tight and workdays long, she continued to live at Tess’s house.
She called her father every night, or he called her, and at the end of each conversation he asked to speak to Tess. Often the two of them were on the line longer than he’d been with his own daughter, and it seemed they never lacked for things to talk about.
He told her about his business.
She told him about hers.
He talked about the church choir.
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