CHAPTER ELEVEN
A day or so later, I was in the studio again. According to Jules, Alex had stayed late the last time, listening to the tracks with Jack, going over everything. It was actually starting to look like we might have a real album to put out--and it was coming together before the label could think to ditch us, to pay us off and let us go.
“Yo,” Nick said, coming into the live room where I was checking on my kit.
“Think we’ll actually get anything done today?” I tightened one of the wingnuts on a cymbal. “Or do you think Alex is going to fuck around with vocals on that pet song of his?”
“Ron’s come down on him pretty hard,” Nick pointed out. “More than the rest of us--more than you, and you’re the big reason we initially had such a fucking delay.” He grinned to show me he didn’t actually mean it--or at least, that if he meant it, he wasn’t taking the delay as a serious issue anymore. “So I think he’s doing all that fuckery after hours now.”
“Good for him,” I said. I sat back and surveyed my kit. It hadn’t felt quite exactly right ever since I’d played the festival gig with Bent Bridges; it was familiar, and everything was the way I’d set it up, the way I’d always set it up, but I had the feeling like I was missing something. “Mary can’t be too pleased with that.”
“I hear they’re fighting,” Nick said. He pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows. “By which I mean, Mary’s been bitching to Liv about it, and Liv’s been pointing out that Mary owes Alex some space after last month’s debacle at the treatment center.” For a while, Mary had had a job as Alex’s life coach, keeping him sober--or at least off of hard drugs, even if he still occasionally drank--on the label’s payroll. But she’d gotten tired of only having one client, and had managed to use her connections to get a new job at a mental health facility once again.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t her fault,” I pointed out to Nick. “She didn’t ask to be trapped in a week-long lockdown.”
“Still,” Nick said with a shrug. “Whatever it is. Alex’s boxers are fucking bunching in his crack.” I rolled my eyes. That would make Allie’s suggestion that I talk to our lead singer one-on-one a little harder to follow through on.
“Allie wants me to talk to Alex,” I told Nick. “She’s still spooked at Alex’s insistence that she only hooked up with me to get access to the band and pad her career.” Nick snorted and rolled his eyes.
“You know, for a guy who doesn’t smoke weed anymore, he sure is fucking paranoid,” Nick said. He lit a cigarette and walked over to his gear, looking at it with almost the same amount of affection as I’d seen on his face when he looked at his girlfriend. “Liv is setting up to work with your girl, by the way--she’s keen to get started on the project. Maybe you can dodge both bullets and Allie will be too busy to even think about doing studio pics.”
“Maybe,” I said, hoping against hope that that would be the case. It would sure as hell make my life that little bit easier.
“You know, maybe you should talk to Lex,” Nick said after a moment of making sure that his guitars had come to no harm while he’d been away.
“What do you mean?” I started checking to make sure I had enough fresh drumsticks to last through the session.
“I mean, he’s being an asshole, but it’s kind of understandable,” Nick said. “You said it yourself months ago: everything is changing to fucking fast, none of us is really in control anymore. That bugs the shit out of Alex more than anything else in the world could.”
“So, what is me talking to him supposed to accomplish?” I lit a cigarette of my own. Nick flicked ash off the tip of his into an ashtray and shrugged.
“It’ll give him the illusion that something is under his control again,” Nick said. “That people care about his opinions beyond just going with them to stroke his ego because it’s easiest that way.” I laughed. It was true and not true; we had a kind of democracy in the band--we never made a move that we didn’t all agree on--once upon a time. But as things had changed, from Alex going to rehab, to Jules starting a solo project with his girlfriend, and then the massive shit show that the current album had started out being, we’d lost sight of that. Nobody had single veto power on anything anymore. Alex’s opinion was still important, but we’d all kind of grown more independent in certain ways.
“His poor fucking ego,” I muttered.
“It’s served us well before,” Nick countered, smirking. “Anyway, I think it’ll help things if you make him think his opinion about your love life matters.”
“What do you think?” Of the members of the band, the only two whose opinions I really cared about--at the end of the day--were Nick’s and Dan’s. So far, I thought they seemed pretty on board with me dating Allie, but some little voice in the back of my head insisted that they were just going along with it because it made things more pleasant.
“I think she’s a talented photographer, and a fun person to be around,” Nick said with a shrug. “I think she’s good for you.” He looked at me and stubbed his cigarette out, blowing a plume of smoke out through his lips. “I also think that if she is just using you to get ahead, we can easily destroy her career in a week.”
“You think it’s possible?” I stared at Nick. He shrugged again.
“Anything is possible,” he pointed out. “It’s possible that the only reason Fran hooked up with Jules was to further her chances of a solo career.” He paused and strummed a quick chord. “I don’t think it’s that likely. If Allie was just interested in getting access to the band for career purposes, she wouldn’t be hanging around for what--a month or more?” Nick paused. “Unless she’s super patient, she’d have dashed as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to work out quickly for her.”
“What if she is super patient, though?” Jules had come into the room without either of us hearing him.
“Then Mark gets some grade-A ass for a while and when she makes her intentions clear we destroy her in the industry,” Nick replied matter-of-factly. I looked at my bandmates, a little shocked.
“Destroy her?” Jules smirked.
“If she’d been just using you to get access to the band, would it really bother you to ruin her livelihood for a while?” I thought about that--I couldn’t help it--for a few moments.
“If she were just using me, then I guess…” I sighed. “If she’s just using me then she’s putting on an excellent fucking front.”
“I don’t think she’s using you,” Jules said, sitting down next to one of the monitors. “But like Nick said, it’s a possibility. You can’t ignore it.”
“I’ve been trying to,” I told him. “Because if I treat it like it’s a thing then everything she does is suspicious as hell.”
“That’s a good point,” Nick said. “Are we getting started soon, or what?”
“Alex is on the phone with Ron,” Jules told us. “I figure another fifteen minutes or so before he gets his ass in here. Dan’s grabbing a beer in the break room. Jack is setting something up in the control room.”
“Feel like jamming for a few minutes while we wait?” I looked at Jules and Nick. They shrugged and picked up their instruments, made sure they were plugged in properly to the monitors.
We started out playing an old Strokes song, loose-goose, just following the movements, and after we’d gone through it, Nick took the base note of the melodic line and started into a new groove, and I followed him for a few bars until Jules came in. It felt good--it felt almost like playing with Bent Bridges had: fun, low-stakes, and spontaneous. I thought to myself a big part of the problem with Molly Riot, why we didn’t seem to be gelling as much as we used to, at least at the beginning of the recording process, was that we just didn’t do shit like this anymore. We went into rehearsal spaces to work. We went into the studio to work. We got down to business and stayed on task--which was what the label tended to want. There wasn’t any of this fooling around, no playing with melodies.
Dan came in, and then finally Alex, and I felt the tightening in my gut that told me that playtime was over; it was time to get to work. “What are we working on today?”
“We’ve got another two or three songs,” Dan said. “And then we can send the first rough crop to the label.” I looked at Alex for a moment, safely concealed by my drum kit.
“Let’s get down to it, then,” I said, taking a deep breath and stretching my shoulders a bit. At least the little jam session had been fun.