Julian scrolled through all my downloaded tracks, his heavy-lidded eyes glowing green in the monitor light. “The Clash,” he said with an approving nod. “Blur. Pavement. Nirvana’s In Utero sessions?”
I nodded.
“The original Albini sessions?”
I nodded again.
“Not sure how you found those,” Julian said. “Don’t want to know.”
I sipped my bourbon. Even if Julian had wanted to know how I got the In Utero sessions, I wouldn’t have told him.
“Journey?” Julian asked. It looked like he was trying not to sneer.
I felt blood flooding the vessels in my face. I could have played off having Journey in my collection as a hipster’s slumming lark, or cited the difficulty of finding any track-by-track recordings on the web—a sort of beggars-can’t-bechoosers defense. But the truth was that finding Journey’s “Faithfully” had been the culmination of a yearlong search. By coincidences of vocal quality and range, I could sing just like the band’s lead singer, Steve Perry.
The previous week, in the privacy of my studio, with my eyes closed and the mike in both hands, I had belted out “Faithfully” with the full band (minus Perry) playing in my headphones. When I was done, I moved my own vocal track, a horizontal, hot pink image of intermittent sound, just below Steve Perry’s neon green original and magnified both one-hundred times. At that size, a vocalist’s performance looks like impossibly steep summits and unfathomable glacial crevasses between flatlands of silence. I spent an hour comparing the visual representations of the two vocal tracks, noting tiny discrepancies and savoring the fine details of each similarity.
In another situation, the whole thing might have made for a funny story. But given the abomination we had witnessed at Whirly Gigs a few hours before, I had no intention of appearing to be in league with karaoke nation.
“Journey are people, too,” I replied, trying to laugh off Julian’s question. I took a sip of my drink. When I saw he was still waiting for an explanation, I said, “I was desperate for some new tracks, so I took them. I checked out the drum track and the lead guitar track and called it quits.”
Julian opened his mouth in surprise. “You downloaded ‘Faithfully’ and didn’t even give Steve Perry a look?”
As Julian turned back to the monitor with the mouse in his hand, I said, “No! Don’t!”
He must have thought I was putting him on, because he smiled and kept going. When he started playback, the neon green vocal track was still silenced. The hot pink vocal track was not.
My voice sounded like Perry’s but, unmixed and unmastered, the vocal was obviously not the original. Julian looked confused at first, but when the furrows on his brow began to flatten out, I couldn’t look at him anymore. I covered my eyes with my left hand and swiveled my seated body toward the stairs. The idea of singing in front of people made my hands shake, but I would have rather performed at a packed Carnegie Hall than witness my recorded voice being absorbed by this audience of one.
After Julian stopped playback in the middle of the second verse, I heard him picking up the mouse and putting it down over and over again like a bull pawing the dirt. I turned back toward him when he stopped scrolling and started clicking. At the time, I believed that Julian did what he did next in solidarity, so that I would have company in being embarrassed. Now I think that he probably did it to one-up me, to show that if there was a performer in the room, someone with talent and charisma, it was him. He opened the individual tracks of “Do You Feel Like We Do?” from Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! and put on the headphones. Then he picked up the microphone and held it at his side.
I wheeled over and checked the computer monitor as the song began. “Julian, you’ve got Frampton’s vocals set to play back in your headset.”
“I know,” he said.
I figured Julian was using the original vocals as a crutch, either to help him remember the words or hit the right notes. But when the thin black line swept over the image of Frampton’s lead vocal, Julian didn’t sing. I looked at him, then scrolled through the two-dozen tracks. When I got to the lead-guitar track, I saw what he had in mind. I just didn’t believe he could do it.
Julian kept the mike at his side throughout the intro, three verses, four times through the chorus, a short guitar solo and a keyboard solo. Only he could hear the music. I watched it all on the monitor. Then, after six minutes, he began to imitate the sounds of Frampton’s most famous guitar solo. A skilled amateur with the right equipment could have played the solo note for note on the guitar. But Julian was playing it with his voice. With each passing second, Julian’s blue vocal track mirrored the size, shape and pattern of Frampton’s silenced red guitar track, like a string of genetic material being gradually cloned.
For the second movement of his solo, Frampton had employed a talkbox, which compresses the notes from an electric guitar and sends them as vibrations through a piece of plastic tubing taped alongside the lead-vocal microphone. By taking the tubing in his mouth and shaping the sound, Frampton had created the aural illusion that his guitar was singing to the live audience. Julian created the same effect without a talkbox, and without a guitar.
Then Julian dove into the fiery concluding movement, bending the notes through mouth shapes that ranged from the oval to the trapezoidal. His Adam’s apple pulled almost out of sight on the high notes and descended into view only when he approached the depths of his range. Another person giving voice to Frampton’s notes with a series of “no,” “nare,” and “wah” sounds might have aped the sort of histrionics that traditionally accompany guitar heroics. But Julian kept his eyes open, his hands on the mike, and his performance free of air guitar.
At the end of the song, Julian tore off the headphones and leaned in toward the monitor. “Let’s give it a look,” he said.
The discrepancies between Julian’s vocals and Frampton’s guitar were greater than those between my vocals and Steve Perry’s, but smaller than they might have been had Julian played Frampton’s solo on an instrument. His precision astounded me.
When we were done analyzing the visuals, Julian got up to leave. I didn’t want him to go.
“Wait,” I said. “You should do that next week.”
Julian looked at me and sat back down. “What?” he asked.
“Sing the guitar part of some song at Whirly Gigs. On Karaoke Monday.”
He laughed through his nose, shook his head and stood up again. “I don’t think so.”
I stood up with him, wobbling a bit. “Think about what a great last stand it would be! A karaoke crowd wouldn’t know what to do with a performance like that.”
Julian looked at me as if I were losing my mind or, at the very least, too drunk to drive him to the El. I bent over the console, took the mouse in my hand, clicked once, twice, then double clicked. Cued to its final minute, “Do You Feel Like We Do?” erupted through the speakers with Julian’s vocal track in place of Frampton’s guitar. As accurate as they were, Julian’s unmixed notes sounded ridiculous backed by the instruments recorded live at San Francisco’s Winterland in 1975. Julian smiled and we both laughed out loud, though our laughter was nearly drowned out by the playback. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I wrapped my left arm around his waist and pulled him toward me.
Then the basement door opened.
“Brian?”
Julian and I pulled apart immediately.
“Brian, it’s three in the morning,” my mother said. “Can you keep it down?”
“All right,” I said.
As I turned the volume down, my face flushed. I hadn’t called her mom, and she hadn’t called me son, but there could have been little doubt in Julian’s mind to whom that voice belonged. Her