Pipes - 1st Chapter

 

 

My hands were pressing a pair of headphones so hard against my ears I could feel the suction to the top of my spine. I mumbled under my breath, “Fuck you, Mikey. Fuck you.” The chorus started, loud and insistent.

I breathe the same air as you all do,

I feel the same pain as you do.

It was an ethereal, haunting song. But the voice, that voice- it cut right through me. I felt bare and laid open and was more than a little pissed off about it. It was my own fault. I had insisted on hearing the new demos.

I already knew that the man who owned that voice had no recording contract, no upcoming tour, no way of letting his music do what it was meant to do. I knew all about that pain. I knew everything anyone could possibly know about not being able to do what you were born to do. Maybe that’s why Mikey and I connected from the start.

But none of that mattered at the moment, lost as I was in the music. His was the best  voice I’d every heard, a voice that could put most, if not all, of rock’s premier front men from the last three decades to shame. It soared, finding even the highest notes with no buildup, it just arrived, perfectly on pitch, perfectly on cue. The notes he sang were full of tonal resonance and something else, a thing totally lacking in today’s music scene- passion.

When the demo tape was over, I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands doing my best to pretend I was merely rubbing them. I slowly slid the headphones off. Fuck you, Mikey. He looked at me quizzically.

“How come you keep saying ‘Fuck you Mikey’”, he asked, raising his chin slightly in challenge. I guess I’d experienced the I- have-loud-music-in-my-headphones-so-every-word-I-say-will-be-five-times-as-loud-as-I-think-it-is syndrome.

I didn’t hesitate. “I would trade places with you in a second to have that voice.” He digested that for a moment, then nodded vaguely as if he understood part of it. I slowly came back from where the music had taken me. I put the headphones on the table.

We were in a bunker-like photography studio, the workplace of rock photographer Neil Zlozwer. The studio was located smack on Vine Boulevard, in one of the worst areas of Hollywood and there are some oppressively bad areas in Hollywood. That was undoubtedly the reason why there were thick prison-like iron grills on the door and single tiny window. Even through the bars on that tiny window, I could see the tubular Capitol Records building. We were literally in the shadow of it.

I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands, this time to help them focus.  The studio was essentially a single large room with a fifteen foot high roof. There was a portable wall of sorts dividing the room into two sections. On the near side of the wall was a hodgepodge selection of file cabinets and flat desks with glossy photos spread everywhere. Tucked in the farthest corner was Mikey’s “studio”, a rack mounted tape recorder and eight track mixing board, some microphones, a twelve-string acoustic guitar and a black Les Paul. On the far side of the wall lay the much larger portion of the room, mostly just a lot of concrete. There was an old Harley against one wall, flanked by its disembodied exhaust system. Near it was a rusted universal weight machine that looked like the one I had used in high school, right down to the frayed cables. On the far back wall a black screen hung from the roof, a variety of tripod mounted fanned photography lights pointed toward it.

I whirled as someone out on the street yelped, “Praise you brother” and pounded on the door before mumbling something incoherent. I glanced at Mikey, who either pretended not to notice or was too lost in his work to care.

The only decorations of any kind were photographs, glass-framed black and white eight by tens. There were dozens of them, snaking in a line across the two walls of the smaller “room”, all of them pictures of rock stars. There was Van Halen, decked out in pseudo-military garb, pretending they were pushing up the American flag at Iwo Jima. Just to the left of that was a black and white of a young Ted Nugent, every muscle on his loin-clothed body standing out in lean, sculptured relief. Motley Crüe was looking… Motley, Alice Cooper had a snake draped over his shoulders, David Lee Roth pursed his lips. An early Guns N’ Roses was decked out like drag queens and on and on. There was even that famous photo of Jim Morrison, his cheeks sucked inward, taking a huge drag on a cigarette.

I couldn’t help wondering what they all thought, looking down at Mikey while he practiced and created here every chance he got. Did they approve? Were they intimidated by such an enormous talent? Or did they only mutely watch, knowing that talent alone is never enough?

The ones who had been photographed here, which was nearly all of them, were all still here. A tiny piece of them was anyway, even if it was only a few skin cells mixed with the sandy L.A. dust. Maybe there were even a few colored splinters from the souls of the dead ones. Then again, maybe I was little off balance from the plane ride and the music and meeting a rock star. But I couldn’t deny that this place had a feel to it. It felt desperate, like a place to get drunk and go outside or on the roof and scream your lungs out at Los Angeles.

“You ready to go?” Mikey asked. I nodded. We headed out the door into the blazing orange of an L.A. afternoon.