Passing Through the Flame (47 page)

“Yeah,” Bill Horvath said. “We need an audience.”

Bobby dipped the small golden spoon that hung around his neck into the box of white powder, took a hit of coke and and offered a spoon to Horvath. Horvath nodded and snorted the coke, tasting its foul bitterness at the back of his throat. “The songs you’ve written are okay,” Bobby said, “but the tracks we’re cutting in the studio are dead-ass stuff. We can’t get our shit together without playing for
people.
We’re just jerking ourselves off.”

Horvath felt the truth of it, bitter as the taste of the coke, inevitable as the rush of energy now surging through his tired body. We can keep going like this, we can probably even get an album out, but it’ll be shit. He took out a comb, ran it aimlessly through his hair. Anything to avoid going back to the recording studio, to avoid facing what sooner or later I’m going to have to face. “You know what the scene is, Bobby,” he said.

“Sure, man,” Bobby said softly, turning to face him. “I know what’s on the line. A live performance and maybe Susan flips out and stays there. But if we can’t perform live, we’re not the Velvet Cloud. We’re finished.”

Bobby turned away, then began pacing the men’s room in small arcs focused on Horvath. “Look, Bill,” he said, “Jerry and Mark and I have been talking this over. Sooner or later, we’re gonna have to shit or get off the pot. We want you to know that if you decide to break up the Velvet Cloud, there won’t be any hard feelings.”

“You saying you want out?”

Bobby stopped his pacing and gave Horvath a look of such warmth that Horvath could have bitten his tongue off for leaping to the conclusion he had. “Hell, no. All I’m saying is you and Susan shouldn’t figure you owe us. We owe you. You and Susan are what made us something special. We’ve had a good long ride together, but we’re good musicians, we can get other gigs. If you’re finding the trip too heavy, nobody will blame you if you pass.”

“I still don’t quite get it....”

“Jeez, Bill, I’m saying that if we don’t perform live soon, the Velvet Cloud is dead anyway. But if you want to break the group up now, there’ll be no bad blood. We know what you’re going through. The decision is yours. You’re the man.”

“Thanks,” Horvath said sourly. Thanks for putting me on the spot. Bobby’s face screwed up into a wounded pucker, and Horvath once again found himself ashamed at his own reaction. The boys aren’t putting me on the spot; I was on the spot to begin with. “Thanks,” he said again, in an entirely different tone of voice. “Really, I appreciate what you’re saying.”

Bobby touched his shoulder. “You just worry about what’s best for you and Susan, the rest of us can take care of ourselves, okay?”

“Okay,” Horvath said. But he’s right, we’ve either got to try a live performance or break up the group. Anything else just keeps us hanging in limbo. We’ve got to finally decide.

“Want another hit before we go back?” Bobby asked. Horvath sighed, drained of psychic energy. “Don’t mind if I do.”

“You’re like a horny fifteen-year-old virgin dying to kick out the jambs,” Jango Beck said. “Jesus, Susan, it’s all there waiting to come together, why won’t you let it?”

Susan Schiller took a nervous drag on the joint Jango had given her, but it wasn’t a negative tension; it was something positive, enormous energy trying to break free. He’s right, she thought. Of course he’s right. We’ve got the material, we’ve just got to go out and do it.

Jango took back the joint, took a puff, leaned against the wall of the recording studio. Jerry was fiddling with his drums, and Mark was smoking a cigarette in the far corner of the room. Bobby and Bill were still in the john. Susan leaned closer to Jango, said softly, “It’s not me, it’s Bill.”

“Bill seems to be holding up his end,” Jango said. “He’s writing good stuff now, real Velvet Cloud material.” He glanced through the control room glass at the engineers relaxing behind their consoles. “You think I’d be wasting all this money if I didn’t think the material was good?”

“Wasting money? We’ve cut five songs for you, Jango.”

“What I’ve got on tape is dreck, and you know it, Susan. I don’t mean the songs, I mean the performances. Oh, sure, we’ve got good instrumental tracks laid down, but let’s not kid ourselves, your stuff is dead. You’re not into it. Sure, we can grind out an album like this, and if we have to we will, because it can’t help but make money. But you’re singing like a corpse wired for sound. We’ve got a girl singer named Susan Schiller on the lead vocal track, not Star.”

“Bill wants to get off that trip. You know that.”

“What do
you
want, Susan?” Jango said.

“What do I want? I don’t know what I want.... I want to stop having to think of what I want....” It’s getting hard to figure out who’s doing what to whom. Bill’s writing good stuff now, stuff that deserves real Velvet Cloud performance, but I just can’t put it out in these studio sessions, singing to a glass wall. I’m not into it, and it’s not into me. And Bill knows it as well as Jango does. But he won’t let me perform live... or I won’t let him let me... or... Fuck! We’ve got to get
out
of this place we’re in!

“All right, let’s try one more vocal track and then call it a day.” Bill and Bobby had come back into the recording studio. Bill was brimming with nervous energy, but Susan could see from the redness of his eyes that the energy came not from within, but from coke.

“You think about it, Susan,” Jango said on his way out the door. “You think about what you really want.”

Wanting to blot the whole question out, Susan walked up to her standing mike and put on her earphones. Bill and the boys were already donning theirs, and she watched them tune their instruments while she heard nothing, swathed in the cotton batting of silence, plugged into a private schizoid universe. We’re all here together, close enough to touch, and yet in another way, we’re not here together at all. Our mikes feed into the control room and we hear each other filtered and mixed through a thousand miles of electric circuitry. There isn’t any Velvet Cloud performance, just five, or eight, or ten, or however many tracks Jango decides to use—cut separately, mixed, augmented, put together on a master tape, and then onto albums. It’s dead, it’s unreal, we’re not making music together. We’re electronic ghosts of ourselves.

“Level, please, Susan,” Jango’s voice said in her earphones. “Level... level... level...” she sang dully in her mike. Finally, Jango gave the high sign, and his voice said, “Ready to roll tape... rolling....”

Bill locked eyes with her for a moment, then burst into the opening of “Lazy Saint” with a flare of dissonant notes that glided into a rhythmic, moaning keening. Bobby’s organ rolled into a sensual throbbing behind it, and Jerry beat time with his brushes. It was a loud, flash opening, but she heard it muted by Jango in her headphones, a spectral band playing far away across some electronic ballroom of the mind. The music settled into a slow syncopated rhythm, and behind the glass, Jango cued her visually with a chop of his arm.

Sometimes I can ride it, and sometimes I don’t Sometimes I’ll do anything and sometimes I won’t Sometimes I’ll dive into any flesh I see. Sometimes I’m chained to life and sometimes I’m free....

The words came out of her mouth loud and clear; she heard them through the phones against the muted background of the instrumental tracks. Then her own previous vocal track, overdubbed four times, so that she sang the chorus to her own lead, a sardonic blues beat commenting on herself:

Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint!

And then singing her own solo counterpoint to her own overdubbed chorus:

Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t!

It was weird and depressing, singing complex counterpoints to herself like that. As if I’m just some cog in a big machine, she thought, a canned voice played back on command. The five of us in here making music we don’t really hear, not the way we’re really making it. Damn, I hate recording this way, I hate it, I hate it!

There was a short instrumental riff, and she found herself looking at Bill as if he were a Disneyland robot of himself. That’s what we are, a Disneyland diorama of the Velvet Cloud, canning our own music for playback. And then her voice was called for again:

Sometimes I feel the power of the sun

Sometimes I feel that I love everyone

But there are times, gray fog rolling in

When my life seems trapped inside the prison of my skin

And the stars are like holes in the tinfoil of the sky

And it seems like such an effort just not to die

And I cannot breathe without knowing why! why! why!

The song came out of her mouth and dropped straight into a dead, soulless electronic void; what she heard on the headphones might as well have been another person singing. I’m singing to a machine, she thought. I’m singing like a machine.

Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint!

Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t!

I’m perfect. I’m sharp and clear and dead on key. I’m not wavering. This is going to be a take. And so what? So damn what? She found that her mind was utterly disconnected from her mouth. While she sang, she watched Jango sitting in the control room with a sour look on his face, Bill staring at the ceiling while he played trying to work some passion into it, Bobby looking dead on at her with a flat look in his eyes; she was everywhere but in what she was doing.

You can ride the fire, baby, you can ride the cloud,

You can be the phoenix, lover, you can live out loud,

You can ride the bird of night to the mountains of the sun,

You can be anything as long as you don’t run, run, run....

Someone else was singing in a clear, ice-cold voice. It’s like a bad lay on a bad day, she thought, when your body carries on, and you moan, and roll, and grunt in physical reflex pleasure, and all the time, the whole time, you’re staring at a crack in the ceiling or remembering the cereal you ate for breakfast.

As long as you don’t try to grab the water in your outstretched hand

As long as you can’t turn it on or try to understand

As long as you remember, baby, that you are not the One

That effort is illusion, baby, that the night of might is done

That all that shit is may a, flyer, and you are just a dream

That life is such illusion, daddy, that you’re just what you seem....

Thank God it’s over, Susan thought, as the band broke into a final instrumental riff. It was
exactly
like an endless, unfelt, dead-ass lay.

“Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint!” came the chorus of her own voice in the headphones. And for the first time in the take, a line of the song synced into where her head was at, took the shape of her own meaning as it emerged from her mouth: “Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t!”

Jango Beck loped into his office and threw himself down on the big circular water bed. “Let’s face it,” he said, “what we’ve got is as good a version of ‘Lazy Saint’ as we’re going to get in the studio. We’d better mix what we have and settle for that.” He leaned back against the curved headboard like an Arabian pasha, arms spread wide. The light of the setting sun streaming in through the huge window turned the very air rose, cast reddish highlights on Beck’s eyes.

Bill Horvath paced back and forth around the periphery of the water bed, feeling like a wild animal in a cage of his own making. Susan stood hesitantly at the foot of the bed for a moment, then sat down on the edge. At Jango’s goddamn feet!

“You know damn well what we have on tape, Jango,” Horvath said. He’s taunting me. He’s playing with my head. I know just what he’s doing and why, but he’s still getting to me. Because he’s right, damn it,
he’s right.

“Yeah, I know what we have,” Beck said, extracting a long, thin cigar from a rosewood humidor. “We’ve got five dead-ass versions of five pretty good songs. About one side of a dead-ass album. And we can grind out the other side the same way.”

“And it’ll be the same crap.”

“True,” said Jango Beck, rolling the cigar around in his fingers, then drawing it into his mouth with a sinuous motion of his tongue.

“You can say that and still say you’re going to release the album?”

“You’re not giving me much of a choice, Bill,” Beck said, lighting his cigar. “I’ve invested too much studio time to contemplate shit-canning the album. Besides, we know that any new Velvet Cloud album will sell right now, no matter how lousy it is.”

“And the album after that?”

Jango Beck smiled a cruel little smile. “You were counting on an album after this one? I wasn’t. I thought we’d call this one
Swan Song.
Might hype the sales.”

Horvath stopped his pacing and stared directly into Beck’s eyes for a moment; only the sunset flashing off the irises looked back. “What do you want, Jango?” he said softly, knowing all too well where all this was leading.

“You know what I want, Bill,” Beck said.

Horvath folded himself onto the foot of the water bed beside Susan. He took her hand. The red light of the dying sun made her hair flash and glisten and kindled pinpoints of fire in the depths of her green eyes. She smiled at him, squeezed his hand, and he felt a surge of energy go from her to him as the center of gravity of the situation slid away from the figure of Beck toward some point halfway between them.

“Yeah, I know what you want,” Horvath said, feeling a new strength in his own voice, a strength born of the sudden acceptance of the inevitable, of the leaping ahead past the nuances of the game to the core of the matter. “You want us to record the new material live at Sunset City.”

Beck sat stone still like an Aztec idol. Only his lips moved. “
You
want to record the new material live at Sunset City,” he said. “I’ve just told you I’m willing to go with a studio album.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Am I?” Jango said. “You two are at a nexus of your lives. Unless the Velvet Cloud can perform live, it’s finished. You can choose to let the group die, and I’ll do nothing to stop you. Or you can step into the flame and ride your own destiny wherever it takes you. That means live performance. We all know that, don’t we?”