"Moon," says my father, shaking me awake on a school night. I have a brief What now? reaction, then see he is in a good mood. "Come downstairs," he says. "We’re gonna record a song."
* * *
I AM STILL GROGGY, WITH unbrushed teeth, as I follow my father to the studio and the soundproof vocal booth. I slip on the headphones and he adjusts the mic to my height. It’s starting to dawn on me—he read my letter, we are doing my idea, it’s actually happening.
"You’re just going to talk and improvise as that funny voice," he says.
"Okay," I say, like we do this all the time.
Then he exits the booth and heads for his state-of-the-art control room. From there he makes sure I can hear him in both ears, that I can hear myself and the track, that the levels are right, and that I can see him from where I am standing when he gives me his hand signals. "Listen first so you can hear where you’ll come in, between the choruses." Then my ears are flooded with the instantly catchy bass line. I "hear/see" the talking section as a bracketed space I am supposed to stay inside of before and after the shorter sections where the band sings, "Valley girl, she’s a Valley girl . . ."
I smile and I feel a swell of happy energy. He really did listen to me.
I easily jump into the character I do that he likes. I exaggerate the way girls at my school speak and just imagine what they would talk about, blended with riffing on my own experiences in my house. My dad snortlaughs from the control room after the first take, then asks me to extrapolate on the stuff he remembers me saying that he thinks is funny. "Say more about the cat box."
"Okay," I say, laughing too.
"Talk about bagging your face," he says. "Try to work in ‘gag me with a spoon.’"
"Got it." I find it fun and easy to pretend I am this other person and just make up something silly on the spot. I also enjoy the fun challenge of trying to include his requests in a natural way. It is a form of acting. I feel playful and professional, seen and heard. I let myself say anything that comes to mind.
"Throw in a ‘tubular,’" he says. I do. And so it goes, me blabbing on and on in a stream-of-consciousness way and my father laughing and urging me on with his little prompts. Bass line, bracket, chorus, bracket, chorus, bracket, outro, pause, prompt, repeat . . .
Then he makes a hand motion that lets me know it’s done, we got it. Then I hear his voice in my ears asking me to come into the control room to hear a rough version from start to finish. Then a hug. It all goes by in a blink. Then I am back upstairs in my bed wishing we could keep recording and that the hug lasted forever.
aus Moon Unit Zappa "Earth to Moon. A Memoir"
