Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

The sheet is yanked back. My lungs swell with air, the room with daylight. I’m lying in my bed, panting.

Sara’s hand touches my shoulder and I spin toward her. She is resting on her elbows, jet-black tresses covering the side of her face. “Are you okay?” she asks, then drops back onto her pillow. I edge over onto her side of the bed and fold my face into the hot, moist smell of sleep.

A few moments later, my heart is still throbbing furiously against my ribs. It wants out.

The lead guitar was a little too prominent in the mix, and Warren was pounding the kick drum so hard that my dead Scottish ancestors had a headache. I raised my hand and the disorganized brew of sound stuttered to a halt.

Warren leaned into the microphone that slanted over his kit like a fondue fork. “Sibilance,” he enunciated. “Sssssibilance. Check, check one. My mic is doing something funky. Too much hiss.” He frowned and proceeded to tap on the fuzzy black spit guard that cloaked the mic’s rounded grill. “And my p s are popping. Pop. Pop. Popping.”

Jumbo spoke up. “I can’t hear me.” He cranked up his amp and played a grating blues riff so loud it sent our index fingers into our ears.

“Down! Down!” I howled. “Way too loud!”

Mack seized the chance to suck down a bottle of Evian, then said, “I’m playing a B flat right before we go into the chorus, but I feel as though I’m the only one.”

“You are,” Jumbo confirmed. “It’s an F. But that doesn’t mean the bass can’t hit B flat there.”

Mack contemplated the implications of accenting the fourth note in the F major chord. “I think it does,” she decided.

“Anybody think we’re playing it too fast?” I queried the group.

As keeper of the time, Warren took the question personally. “I guess I gave it a little bit more giddyup this time through,” he allowed, mopping his glistening forehead with a white hand towel. “It felt like it wanted to be played faster.”

We were working through “Goodbye to Myself,” a straightforward midtempo slice of rock, a species of song that, despite its conventionality, often proved, at least to me, stubborn and tricky. Even nestled in the reliably uninventive verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus composition structure, such songs worked only when the exact pacing was struck, the precise speed that kept the song both from dragging into sluggishness and from hurrying away into some anxious scramble.

“I’m good with playing it a little up-tempo,” Jumbo volunteered. “Kind of swings a bit when it’s faster.” He was holding his ’52 Telecaster Reissue away from his body and fanning the front of his shirt, trying to ventilate the drenched black tee that bore the words “This Girl’s Got Bieber Fever!” in hot-pink bubble letters—an accidental purchase, he would have us believe.

This was Tremble, a reinstituted band of aging, ailing, sagging, and limping hopefuls grittily readying itself for the world.

Sonny Rivers had called in a favor to Bic, an old friend with a shabby studio in the semigentrified town of Manayunk, a short drive from downtown Philly. Nobody had booked his East Side Studios for the summer months (although I doubt its lack of appeal was seasonal), so Bic turned it over to us for the dog days of July and August. He greeted us on day one in a tank top and white knee-high socks, handed over the keys, and never made an appearance again. And it wasn’t that the rotting wood paneling, the mildewing carpet, the murky lighting, the prehistoric stench of drummer sweat, the dusty sound board, and the Weavers-era recording equipment made you feel unwelcome. It just explained why Bic didn’t seem terribly overprotective of the place.

The state of the facility was hardly our most daunting obstacle.

Conveniently, the season afforded greater flexibility for those among us who still clung to their day jobs. As for me, I’d crossed the Rubicon with Morris & Roberts. I had emptied my office of my diplomas, my photo of Sara, and my Ron Jaworski autographed football, thereby inking a permanent hiatus.

When Jumbo arrived at the studio, honking his horn with cheery oafishness, Warren looked up from the trunkful of drums he and I were unloading and appeared dispirited, as if up until that point it hadn’t dawned on him that he’d actually be working with Jumbo again. When Warren saw Mackenzie, they both slid into laughter—­perhaps at the folly of the universe, perhaps out of mutual embarrassment for having shown up. They exchanged tidy digests of the years, Mack scrolling through Warren’s phone and gushing over photos of his wife and son. Jumbo swept Mack up in a bear hug and swung her around until Mack nicked her ankle on a table and needed a Band-Aid. While these reunions unfolded, I busied myself plugging cables into the sound board and transferring guitars from cases to stands. But out of the corner of my eye, I witnessed old friends sizing each other up, noticing the changes lurking beneath the familiar faces as they doled out loose compliments and claimed to have missed each other.

Eventually, we got around to what we came there for and started filling the dingy space with music. In the interest of artistic integrity, and to prevent that unseemly college-band-regrouping-at-the-­cookout vibe, we spent the first few weeks in rehearsal with no parental supervision. Sonny would show up later to impose discipline and vision. As a foursome, we rediscovered the places where our contours met, and through both harmony and discord, over hot afternoons, we got to know each other again.

Jumbo, instinctively attuned to the flavor of a song, splashed textural seasonings and exhilarating flourishes all over the music, just as he’d done with the demos. The rhythm section locked in tight almost immediately, and Mackenzie and Warren, true professionals, winked and grinned at each other when the groove was just right. I’d forgotten how easy it was to fall in love with the crisp sound of an open chord on a telecaster, or how a rich harmony vocal, kicked up in the mix and riding shotgun on a soaring melody, could make you shake your head and marvel, I didn’t know music could sound like that.

I did my best to step out of the way and allow old dynamics to resurrect themselves. I behaved toward Mackenzie in precisely the way I would have had there not been multiple White House occupants and a Von Dutch trucker cap craze since the last time we’d recorded together. Everyone had shown up; the least I could do was not make things weird.

One particularly sweltering day, we flung open the door to take a water break in the parking lot. As we stood there with stains on our shirts that would’ve made us look like triathletes had we not looked so unlike triathletes, an old woman came ambling down from the porch of her row house. She was moving toward us snail-like but determined, her rigid osteoporotic hunch suggesting peeve, and we prepared ourselves to catch hell for noising up the neighborhood. There was no telling how long this prune had lived across the street from a quasi-professional rehearsal space, how many bands she’d bawled out for disrupting her midmorning siesta. She labored onto the sidewalk and jutted out her wrinkled face to get a good look at the hoodlums who were making such a racket, at which point it crossed my mind that we were a little old to be getting yelled at for being loud. For the longest of moments, she stared at us, and just as I was poised to jump in and preempt her reprimand with an apology and an empty promise to keep it down, the old hag bleated, “You people are pretty fucking good.”

We took it as a good omen—Lord knows we were looking for them—and gifted our first new fan with a bottle of water for her long trek home.