Roman checked his phone again. Two hundred Twitter DMs. Which was unimportant. Someone was very interested in getting in touch with him. Or, more likely, a lot of someones were.
More importantly, no messages. Which was a little more upsetting. He was supposed to get a call from Mary, at some point. He’d told her to give him a call in the morning. But she apparently hadn’t bothered to do so. Maybe she’d decided that she didn’t like him all that much.
It was understandable. She had a lot going on. There was a lot of baggage involved with getting friendly with a musician. Never mind when he wanted to be a little more than friends, and he wasn’t that subtle about it. There was no reason to hide it, at this point.
She was allowed to walk away from him. But it didn’t make a whole lot of sense that she would do it without even saying anything. He let out another long breath. No need to get all upset about it, though. He was smarter than that, at least. He hoped he was.
His eyes scanned the lyric sheet. It was okay. He wasn’t going to win any awards for this stuff. But then again, he was past the part of his career where he thought about getting tons of awards. He had adoring fans, some of whom thought that it would be very interesting for him to see their breasts.
Which, for a while, it had been. But at this point he was old enough that some of those girls could very realistically have been his own daughters if he’d settled down and gotten a real job. Which really put a damper on the whole thing.
Now it was a bunch of songs he didn’t care a whole lot about and a lifestyle that he had grown used to more than grown fond of. A manager who he could almost stomach, and a record contract that paid out enough money to touch God. Enough that he couldn’t really justify walking away from it in spite of himself.
The session guitarist finally got in. Everyone else, apparently, had the time to go in and take a break. After all—the band wasn’t called The Greeks or something. The band wasn’t the draw. Roman Townsend was the draw, and as long as he was around, the rest of the band was transient.
“You ready, kid?”
The guy nodded. “You got a sheet?”
Roman sucked in a breath and dropped the phone on a table. No, he didn’t have a sheet. That would be professional. That would be proper. And it would take time. For example, the month that he’d been promised before they even started working on the damn album.
“Bit of short notice, I’m afraid. Your part is pretty simple, though, so I guess there’s that.”
The guy nodded. His long hair fell into his eyes, making him look like the very picture of Kris Kristofferson as a young man. But the guitar in his lap wasn’t an acoustic, and they weren’t about to play country music, so there were at least a few differences. If it was, then they’d have to go grab something from the shelf, or worse, he’d have to let the kid play his, which there was probably some kind of law against.
“Okay, so we start in C.”
He moved quickly. These session guys tended to be quick on their feet. Had to be. If he was anything like any of the session guys anywhere else in the country, he’d have taken a quick look at the sheet if they had one and more or less gotten it right.
The riff wasn’t complicated, and it played without much trouble on the fourth and fifth strings. The only thing that made it any more difficult than what a beginner could play was the chord changes that waited for no man, and that was something that any guitarist got used to quickly.
He played through it once, real quick. A twenty-four bar progression only takes thirty seconds or so to go through. Then the kid played it back. It wasn’t a perfect recreation. It never is. But Tommy didn’t pay these guys for perfect recreations. If that was what they wanted, then they could just have Roman record every guitar part on a loop.
It was good enough that Roman was happy with it. And if the kid found something magical in it, then they would probably hire him on. If he didn’t, well, it was enough for a demo recording.
Then they went through the chorus. It was the same process. The chords, the riff, then play it all out. Altogether, the whole conversation took about ten minutes away from Roman Townsend’s life and added very little to it on the balance.
But when they started to play together, it must have been pleasant for the kid because he had a halfway sort of smile on his face, and then they added the drum track on loop and Roman started to count them into the demo recording proper.
Drums are important to a band. Rock and roll practically lives off of them, and that’s not even getting into really rhythm-led genres like R&B. But for a demo, you could get away with a pre-recorded track, and he’d already sat through the conversation with the session drummer that he was having right now with the guitarist.
It took five takes to cut the whole thing to Roman’s liking. They took a sixth just in case, at Tommy’s request, and then it was all handshakes and goodbyes and thank yous. When he got into the control room, it would be all here’s your checks and then the kid would walk back into obscurity just like most session guys did.
What didn’t happen in the hour they spent talking, recording, listening, talking, and re-recording was his phone ringing. And he knew, because he was sitting on a stool holding a guitar he’d played for fifteen years and considered more a part of his body than some actual parts of his body, but his mind was entirely focused on the phone not ringing.