Hallelujah Ch. 01

Note: There really is a Blackbird studios in Nashville, and I used it (or my memory thereof) for much of the physical description of the studio here. However, the characters I placed within it are in no way representative of the people who actually work(ed) there, and are in fact partially inspired by individuals I met at an entirely different time and place.

"I remember," says August Cooper, the weathered lines of his face framing a red-rimmed stare. His lips are pulled back a little, exposing the tips of his teeth. It's a face he often makes, grimacing out the final fragile years he has on this planet. He glances over at me, but I only nod. I'm waiting for him to continue, because I want to hear it.

Because I believe him.

"I remember the trains." He looks down at his hands, or at the cup of coffee he's holding in them. I can't tell which. His swollen knuckles flex softly. They look painful, but he's never mentioned any discomfort to me. He wouldn't. That's just not who he is. "They came through town, carrying soldiers east. Seemed like every day they came. Big, long trains full of men going to war. I was twelve years old. We would go down, my friends and I, and sell them newspapers." The grimace softens into a grin.

I nod. I don't say anything. I've heard this all before, but I want to hear it again. I enjoy hearing this story. And this might be the last time.

"They always wanted cigarettes," August sniffs. "Well, we didn't have cigarettes, we had newspapers. Usually they bought them. They came back on trains, too, later on. Going west, of course." He stops for a moment, telling a dozen other stories with his silence. Then he says, "I took a train home, you know. After Korea."

I do.

"Got off on the wrong stop. Not on purpose, though. We got off the train, me and...and some of the other guys." Neither of us acknowledges that he can't remember the names. "We got off the train to buy cigarettes. Well, there you go. We left our bags on the train and everything. It took off, and we," his laugh is a wheezy, breathy thing, "we didn't have but one dollar altogether. All our money was in our bags, on the damn train. Never did get mine back. Anyway, we were about a hundred miles from home, yet, so we had to hitch hike the rest of the way. That turned out alright, too. Took a day and some change, but it turned out alright." He shakes his head. "You couldn't do that, now."

August Cooper smacks his lips, his story over but his mouth not yet willing to stop talking. Eventually, the lips give up and it's time for me to tell him my own story.

"Grandpa," I say, "I'm going home. I'm going back to Nashville."

He raises his eyebrows, but its amusement rather than surprise. "Is this for sure?"

"It is."

"Well," he smiles, "It's about time. You know I'll miss our visits. Not many people have the time for a man my age. Your mom used to listen." We share a moment of silence. He looks at me sideways. "You gonna be okay? You know, if you run into the people you might run into?"

"Yup," I lie.

"Even Jasmine?" he cuts right to the point.

"It's been long enough that I can handle seeing her, if that should happen. And it's a big enough city that it might not."

"You'd be surprised. It's not such a big world, not at all. Your car work alright?"

"It runs fine, yeah."

"Good," he nods thoughtfully. "The trains aren't what they used to be." He coughs, the way someone coughs who is well used to it. "Is there anything I can do for you, before you go?"

"I'd like to hear another story, if that's okay."

He smiles, and I wonder if he's as aware as I am that we may never see each other again.

"Alright. What was I talking about. Korea. You know I wasn't supposed to have to go."

I nod. "You were at a base in Kansas, weren't you?"

"Yup. And I was due to stay there until my friend and I decided we needed a weekend off. We couldn't get passes off the base, so we took the only vehicle that would get us out guaranteed: the colonel's jeep."

He goes on. I don't do anything. I just listen.

Part One: The Minor Fall

CHAPTER ONE

She has one of the all time greatest moans.

My hand slides down her stomach, and her hips lift to encourage my approaching fingertips. They pass over a cesarean scar, faded and soft like a pale smile below her navel. I slide right past it; my attention lies further south. Her head tilts back and her mouth opens, and I can see the dark hints of too much work and not enough sleep under her eyes. She's got to have at least seven years on me, and obviously there's at least one kid somewhere waiting for her to get home, but he, she, or they will just have to wait. I'm only getting started.

I slide two digits down her wetness and then gently enter her. It's easy; hell, at this point her whole body is a living, breathing invitation. She makes a sound, and I won't try to define or describe it, but suffice to say the basic message is "keep going."

I do.

I pull back from kissing her neck and lean down to take a nipple into my mouth as my hand explores her. That's more for me than for her. She's an attractive enough woman, with an inviting smile and flirtatious eyes, but her breasts far outshine her face and I can smell a cigarette on her breath.

I twist my wrist so that the base of my palm is pushing against her vulva, applying some pressure to the area surrounding her clitoris as my fingers move inside her. That's more for her than for me. It's not the most comfortable position for my arm, but she obviously approves. I imagine the moaned response as a song she is singing only for me.

Her hands go to my shoulders, fingernails digging in a little bit as her lower half rolls against the movements of my hand. She hasn't exactly been the most giving lover so far, and she's only getting more selfish as we go on, but to be honest right now she's giving me exactly what I'm looking for. After a six month dry spell, I just want to know I'm still capable. I want to affect somebody, to make them react and to feel the accomplishment of their pleasure.

The noises increase, and I can't help but grin when her hands start pushing down on my shoulders. Pretty demanding for someone who hasn't so much as touched me below the waist. But who am I to complain? I lower myself down between her legs for a taste and she gasps, gripping me with two hands. One goes to the back of my head and one on top of it. She doesn't want me going anywhere for a while, and that little seductively insistant movement is all the foreplay I require. Go ahead and lay there, lady. You had me at hello.

Later, when I reach down and pull a condom out of the heap of clothes by the bed, she seems almost disappointed to see it. That's a bit of a surprise to me. I'm not sure what to make of this woman who was apparently prepared to have unprotected sex with a man she met at the gym little more than a week ago. Nothing in the eight days since I approached her in the treadmill area had suggested she was a slut or easy. If I wasn't busy trying to get laid right now I might pause and worry that she could become one of those women who you never quite get rid of, the clingy ones that fall too hard into relationships they should know better about.

As it is, I do the worrying without the pausing, and simply sink myself into her body with a single thought: "what the hell is her deal?" Pretty erotic moment, I know.

I get my answer twenty minutes later when, after the act is over and done, she reaches up to caress my cheek and I notice the band of pale skin on her ring finger. I double-check it as her hand falls back to her chest, but there's no need to.

Definitely married.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit!

She sees me looking at it, and misreads my expression. She gives me a wink, like I must be proud to have bedded another man's wife. Like she approves. "He's out of town," she says with a smile. "He barely notices me anymore."

And there it is.

I could just kick myself. I really should have seen this coming.

See, I have this theory about infidelity. I know that statistics will tell you that more men cheat than women, and the scientific theory is that men are more inclined to cheat, but I don't buy it. Most of that stuff is self-reported, right? As in anonymous questionaires, statistics pulled from divorce filings, or something like that. But I think it comes down to the way the sexes think, talk, and measur. What appears to a man to be a yes-or-no, straight forward question, will appear as something entirely different to a woman. She finds a lot more implication in the phrasing than he does. It's a language barrier. Where a guy reads that as a simple question, "have you ever cheated on a partner or spouse," which is a simple yes-or-no, a woman reads the underlying judgement ("are you a cheater?"), and that's where it all goes wrong.

I suppose I could be totally off, but if I'm skewed it's down to experience. In my brief lifetime, I've personally known four people who were caught cheating. All four were women. That could very easily be coincidence, and I accept that, but if you put that anonymous questionaire in front of those women I suspect that they'd be classic cases of what you might call 'informed self-reporting.'

Example one, and the one I find the most upsetting: when I was in my teens, my mother had a long term affair. Apparently it continued for more than a year before she kicked my dad out and married her boyfriend. At the time my adolescent brain processed this event as being both their faults, and I divided my anger equally. She never bothered to correct this misperception, which bothers me to this day. What my father must have gone through.

If my mom was ever asked if she ever cheated, though, I am absolutely sure she checked the box for 'no.' See, my parents had gone through a couple of rough years prior to the divorce, and they were frequently fighting over anything and everything. I usually found someplace else to be when that happened. I'm sure my mother's thought process would be that she didn't cheat, "not really," because the marriage was over and dead and my dad just hadn't realized it yet.

Both my parents died young. My dad passed from cancer twelve years ago, and my mom died in a car accident a little after my twenty-first birthday. By the time I was done being angry, they were both gone.

Another example, though: my best friend since high school, Sam, was engaged for a while to a girl he absolutely adored. Everything was right in his little world until she sat down across from him one day and admitted that she was seeing someone else, the engagement was off, and could he please have his things out by the end of the week so Shawn could start to move in. It seemed crazy, like a switch just flipped in her head, until months later when we learned that Shawn the boyfriend got the exact same treatment. Turned out that this girl would cool on a guy, lose her interest, but not tell him until she'd found a replacement. Why? I swear to god, it was just because she needed someone to help pay the rent. I shit you not. She couldn't cover it on her own. That's literally why.

But in her mind, I'm sure she's not a cheater.

In high school I worked at a local Walmart-style pharmacy store. This woman worked there who somehow managed to dodge the divorce bullet after her husband found out that she'd had a brief affair...while pregnant with their child. I don't know much about it or her, but I remember her crying with her friends in the break room about how mixed up and confused she'd been lately and how the guy seduced her. How she hadn't even wanted to do it. She even put some blame on the hormone shifts from the pregnancy. Put that questionaire in front of her and take a guess what answer she puts.

And then there's Jasmine Jones. Fuck. I don't even know what happened there. One minute we're in love and the next I'm replaced. I wonder what Jasmine Jones would say about cheating. I really do.

And now, apparently, there's this woman. He barely notices her anymore, he doesn't make her feel sexy. It's his fault. Don't even try calling her a cheater. She won't hear it.

It's a little jaded, I know, but please don't think I'm trying to paint all women as criminal. I just figure that they're probably as inclined to break their promises as men are. The needs we seek to meet by entering into a relationship, if they can be called needs, are vast. I don't doubt that they have to power to fuck all of us up in some way or another. Temptation probably strikes some at just the right time. The difference being that a man has to set out to cheat, since he usually has to be the one actively wooing and attracting his prey, where a woman's temptation often comes to her.

Like I did.

Fuck.

She's sitting up in the bed, now. In my bed, far from where her husband thinks she's sleeping. She stretches and yawns, her arms reaching out above her head. The movement pulls her breasts upwards a little, making them appear fuller and perkier, and I'm almost turned on. No, I am turned on. My morality suffers even greater defeat when she stands and shuffles into the bathroom. It's not a model's scrawny ass...it's a woman's, and that's fantastic.

The next morning we go out for breakfast. She seems like a nice person. She seemed like a nice person before. Unfortunately, that doesn't matter anymore. I'm furious with her for what she let me become. She used me to cheat on her husband, and that just breaks my heart.

After breakfast I turn down a chance at more sex, and in fifteen minutes she's in her car and on her way home. I call the gym and cancel my membership. Three weeks in Nashville and I already have a place on my "must avoid" list.

I sigh and check the time. Almost eleven. That gives me an hour before I need to be in the studio.

-

The place smells like a construction site. That's pretty typical of big studios. I'm not sure if it's the acoustic treatment, which can smell very much like fiberglass, or something to do with all the cables and cleaner. I just know that they tend to stink a little.

Bennie, the station manager, is talking to me, and I so want to tell him to shut his fucking mouth.

"Jake," he says as he ushers me out of the hallway and into his office, "this is going to be a great month for Blackbird." He said that last month. I'm sure he says it a lot. "Hell, just today's sessions include..."

And, no, he doesn't trail off there. I just stop paying attention.

I could tell you the long rambling version of how I got around to being a recording engineer, complete with lists of records that "changed my life" and famous artists I've gotten to work with, but let me just say that I fell in love with music very young and I couldn't play guitar. Or piano. Or drums. Or sing. So, deflated, I started considering the guys sitting on the other side of the glass, and that was that.

It was always my intention to record in Nashville, if for no reason other than I grew up there and the city is extremely proud of its musical history. It rubbed off on me, I guess. Even now, as disappointing as my homecoming has been, the whole town retains a bit of a magical quality in my mind. This place is like Disney World for people who want to make records. I want to believe in the magic.

Blackbird studios, however, is doing what it can to ruin that.

I took the job there...the first time I've ever contracted exclusively with one studio...for little reason other than that nothing else was available. Want to know what it feels like to try and sneak into a country club? Try getting a job in the recording business in Nashville. Fuck, it's almost impossible.

The climate at Blackbird reflects this. Elitist, without much youthful exuberance, the whole place is populated by what feels like a professional paint-by-numbers work crew.

But to be honest, it has some pretty great qualities to it. Studio A, the biggest one, is just gorgeous. It's a giant, open room like the kind the luckier bands in the 60's got to use. Huge, huge, huge, with twenty-five foot ceilings. Looking down from the control room you can imagine the Beatles tearing up She Loves You while female fans storm the premises in pursuit of their idols. The whole thing gives me a hard-on to cut some records.

It also has a pretty great gear list...a lot of older and vintage stuff in there with the modern digital junk...and a laudable client list. Working there gets me in the door, adds to my resume, and gets me meeting people who might eventually be able to help me land someplace even more impressive.

In the meantime I have to deal with Bennie, who almost manages to make it not worth the effort.

Bennie is a true southern boy, a bit of a racist, and a man with very little interest in music. He's also the guy who hired me.

I've spent the last few weeks following him around, getting used to the protocol and dynamics of the studio. Not recording anything. It's been eye-opening; there's a much more regimented, business-like approach here than any other studio I've ever worked in. There are a lot of country records being churned out factory-style, and Blackbird isn't a shelter for creativity so much as it is a business with a dull-eyed middle-aged maturity to it.

I am way out of place.

The equipment in this place isn't quite as impecably high end as it had been when I worked at Ladyland, where only the best would do, but there is an abundance of vintage potential. Compressors and tape reels that hadn't been in heavy use since the mid 70's coat studio B, all of it clean and well cared for. Studio A, the big one, has a Neve mixing board so glorious that I can't help flexing my fingers when I look at it. I bet it has a history. It was the kind of state-of-the-art toy in 1975 that might have been used by engineers recording Springsteen's Born to Run sessions or Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. In the smaller rooms some of the other gear is more mid-range in terms of cost and quality, but I tend to think that such gear is often the best, and can be used incredibly well by someone with a clear understanding of its quirks and qualities. Some of the best sounds can come from using bad gear in a great way, and I have a feeling I could find sounds I've never managed before if I could just get Bennie to shut the fuck up and put me on a session.

I've got another feeling, just from watching Bennie and the others work, that the cheaper gear is cheaper because it rarely gets used. They seemed to have a system down, with very little variation between one session and the next. A bass guitar I watched them record for a country song yesterday was recorded almost identically to a bass guitar recorded for a folky pop song a week ago. I suppose that's part of that legendary Nashville consistency, or whatever, but it isn't the way that I think or work. Make no mistake, I intend to find out the limits of this studio if I can get away with it.

For now, it's Friday afternoon and I'm sitting in Bennie's office. He's still talking. I tune back in.

"You're set for Monday morning," he mumbles to his computer screen.

"Sorry?" I ask.

"First part's nine until noon, then you'll be back to finish at one thirty. You'll wanna get in there a few hours early to start setting up and turning on the machines." Bennie taps on his mouse a few times. "It should be easy money. One track, and Walter Russell is producing. He's good, though he'll be out in the morning. He's got a more important session in Studio A running until lunch. All you'll be doing in the morning is laying a rhythm track. He's already sat down with the band and talked arrangements, so they know what to do."

I blink, confused. Walter Russell isn't a name I know, but that's no big deal. Producer's names tend to float by me, never really sticking. I find it incredibly odd that Bennie would give me such a no-frills rundown of a session booked in his studio, though...and especially that he wouldn't even bother including the name of the artist!