The monster at the edge of the music

A disturbing true story.

“Look at their eyes,” I said urgently. “I’ve never seen a brainwashed person before—but I know they’ve been brainwashed. Look at their eyes.”

I was talking to my then-boss, the owner and founder of the recording studio I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere. This would have been sometime in 2001 or 2002. One of the bands I’d recorded some months prior had just walked back into the facility, along with several of their parents, to meet with my boss. They’d turned to him for help after what would later be described to me as a bone-chilling nightmare with such bizarre overtones it tilted into the surreal stuff you’d find in horror films.

Most of the bands I recorded during my two-and-a-half year studio stint were locals in their early 20s—kids, basically. The first time I’d met these particular guys, they were youthful and full of energy, humor and life. Now they seemed… off. Just by catching a glimpse of them, I sensed they’d been deeply traumatized, that something had been done to them on a mental level. Like they’d been psychologically invaded — pried-into — somehow.

As they greeted me in passing to sit with my boss in the separate “studio B” area at the back of the building, something about their demeanor reminded me of the vibration we find in people who’ve escaped cults. Even though they sound lucid and rational, like they’ve broken the spell they fell under, there’s something around the eyes—a permanent imprint on the psyche—that can’t be un-done.

At that point, I’d only been given fragments of detail, odd-sounding things my boss had said in haste when he called me out of the blue a few nights prior.

“Do you still have that catalog?” he asked somewhat frantically. I could tell from his voice that this was serious.

“No,” I answered. “I felt like had to get rid of it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. There was just something about it. I knew I had to get it out of my house.”

“Funny you should put it that way. You won’t believe what I’m going to tell you…”

I would come to find out that, after recording at our studio, this band had been wooed by a local manufacturer of [I’d rather not say]. He expressed interest in taking them under his wing and working with them as their producer. He offered to finance their next album and set them up at his factory outside of town. They would basically dorm there, where they would be able to hone their craft full-time and record whenever inspiration struck. It sounded like a sweet deal, the answer to every band’s prayers.

In the early 2000s, the music-business infrastructure was still such that there were countless young bands like this, all across the USA, who thought they had a legitimate shot at making it. For any artist during any period, though, the prospect of being propped up to work at one’s art—to even taste the sensation of your creativity becoming your legit job—is such a dream come true that it’s nearly impossible to resist. So it’s hardly surprising that these guys signed on the dotted line, having no way of anticipating what they were getting themselves into.

During recording sessions, I would typically connect most with one member of band. In this case, I’d developed a friendly rapport with the drummer, whose exuberance and taste in music I found endearing. Some weeks after the group meeting with my boss, who offered the band and their parents legal advice on how to extricate themselves from the contract they’d signed, the drummer returned to the studio to work on some of music of his own. It was just the two of us, a fairly subdued affair.

If I remember correctly, I think my boss just gave him the time for free, so all he had to pay was my engineer’s fee. My boss was a sweetheart like that. One of the most important lessons I took away from working for him was his edict: “If the clock strikes and an artist has reached the end of their allotted time, we’re not going to nickel-and-dime them. We’re not going to be sticklers. We finish the job even if it takes us a few extra hours. We want them to walk away feeling good about the experience—and we’ll feel better too.” He was absolutely right and (within reason, of course), I still think that’s a good code to live by, both personally and business-wise.

During this one session with the drummer, he’d certainly smiled a bunch. And that brightness—that undeniable zest for music—had shined through. But he clearly looked worse for the wear, like he’d really been through something. I don’t remember which one of us broached the elephant in the room. My guess is that I discreetly waited for him to say something or create an opening for me to test the waters. I do, however, remember us sitting and talking at the console (the same one, btw, that had been used in the making of Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All, long before my boss purchased it).

As the session wound down and we waited for the studio computer to process the work we’d done, this kid—who now looked to me more like a young man facing the rocky cliffs of adulthood after a tribulation—unpacked it all. He echoed the almost-inconceivable things my boss had said over the phone: that this self-styled producer and aspiring svengali had forced this band into slave labor at his factory. The drummer told me that he and his bandmates worked around the clock, pushing way past healthy endurance levels. But it was even worse than that.

He told me he was sure their rooms had been bugged, and that they’d been drugged in order to boost their ability to handle the work, but also to incapacitate their cognitive faculties. So they fell into a kind of zombie-like state—not far from home as the crow flies, but imprisoned both physically and mentally so that they felt there was no escape. They may as well have been a million miles away. The drummer told me that this would-be mogul had bought-off the local police. So he and his bandmates knew they were cut-off from having anyone closeby that they could turn to. He spoke of the eerie, hypnotic influence this man wielded over certain people, and how he openly claimed to practice “ritual magick.”

“I know it sounds strange,” he said, “and nobody would believe me, but it’s true,” recalling his first-hand accounts of what sounded like a form of mind control.

“If I saw him walking towards me right now,” he added, “even from a block away, even if there were people around, I would run.”

I was always fuzzy on the details, but eventually this kid’s stepfather showed up at the factory with a shotgun and managed to get his stepson and his bandmates out of there. From what I understand, only the drummer’s parents followed my boss’s legal advice. I’m not sure whatever came of it.

“But here’s the strange part,” he continued. “Even with all that, he was interested in producing us. We did actually work on music. And he did turn out to have chummy relationships with bands like Aerosmith and Def Leppard. So he wasn’t making that part of it up.” I could see in his expression the desire to grasp for answers — to make some kind of coherent sense of it all — as he considered the incongruity of the whole thing…

Music, alas, has a way of attracting a certain element. There’s such a strong sense of hope, of a willingness to do anything that certain people tune-in to the fact that they can feed off other people’s dreams. In fact, the entire industry is built as a kind of bloodsucking machine.

I remember a session recording three brothers who were barely in middle school. Their dad had corralled them into a band. These poor kids had that wan, lifeless-performer look that you see in circus animals. I didn’t feel like their dad was intentionally exploiting them, but you could tell how much he had staked his ambition on his kids. You could tell that, for him, this was a do-or-die prospect. He was going to push them until the wheels fell off. I actually felt bad for him. Still, it was all I could do to hold back from screaming right there in the control room.

While recording a song titled “Hey Momma” I watched as these kids got dragged through take after take after take, passively trying to please the adults in the room. My sense of alarm raged inside like a tornado. I remember storming at my boss afterwards: “What the FUCK does this kid know about ‘hey Momma.’ He can barely tie his shoes yet his dad puts him up to singing a blues song about some lady he wants to get with. He doesn’t even KNOW what he’s singing. These aren’t HIS feelings. So there’s no HEART in that music. It’s lifeless! How can anybody DO that to their kids? It’s just WRONG.”

“Okay man,” my boss answered patiently. “Now that I know you feel that strongly about it… I won’t put you on sessions like that anymore.”

From that moment on, I’ve been unyielding in my stance that steering kids into the gears of the entertainment business—on any level—is a crime. And that parents need to exercise the utmost care when they project their own dreams onto their children. Obviously, the band who got waylaid into becoming slave laborers were of an age where they were more than willing to jump-in with both feet. But I bring up the “Hey Momma” example to illustrate how the desperation to succeed in music makes people targets for those who would eat them alive—or can’t stop from being eaten from within.

My first exposure to the person who did this unimaginable thing to this drummer and his bandmates came during yet another session where I was recording another band of twentysomethings. There was an older guy who dropped-in one day and spent most of the time hanging around on the control room couch. I didn’t have any issue with him being there. This kind of thing was rather common. The band identified him as “someone who’s helping us out.” And I thought he was humble when he scoffed at the idea that he was their manager.

He offered his opinions to the band, but only when they’d ask him. It’s a cardinal rule of mine that artists should never solicit critiques from outside parties about their work in progress. I’m pretty much a hardline fundamentalist when it comes to this rule. I see making things as a kind of mortal pact with one’s creativity. Once you pull the ropes in and set off from the harbor, you’ve made the commitment to be at sea. The only voices that make any sense at that point are the other voices on the ship with you—i.e: your co-writer, producer, editor, etc.

But this older guy wasn’t intruding. He was being asked for his opinion by a musician who was obviously hungry for validation. In fact, it was the expression on this musician’s face—that palpable sense of “tell me if I’m on the right track”—that sealed the deal on this becoming a rule of mine: No matter how much you might doubt your instinct, no one else is going to get us back to shore. Whatever it is we’re making will only make sense to us at that point—when it’s too late to change anything. So the only choice we have is to see it through.

As we wrapped up the session, while exchanging smalltalk with the pleasant-enough man at the back of the room, he handed me a catalog—the same catalog my boss referred to on that phone call months later. I wasn’t interested, but I politely accepted it and didn’t give it a second thought when I put it in my backpack. In the moment, my attention was elsewhere. The catalog, as you’ve surely guessed, was a listing of products made in the factory where my drummer acquaintance endured one of the most harrowing ordeals of his life.

When I got it home, I thumbed through the catalog. After taking-in a few pages’ worth, a sharp feeling hit me with unpleasant force. Like I said to my boss later, I just knew I needed to get it out of my house. I can’t pin it to anything concrete about the text, the images, or the products themselves. Sure, the graphic design was terrible, and there was an amateurish quality about it that wasn’t charming at all. The whole thing exuded a strange combination of ineptitude and boastfulness. But that wasn’t quite what I was reacting to. It was just an overall sense. I wouldn’t have described it in terms quite as strong like “evil,” but it was like… being washed-over by a wave of hubris.

Later, it was hugely validating to find out that there had been a source for that feeling, that I had picked-up on something that proved to be real, and that I could trust my instincts. That was the second time in my life that I’d perceived what we might refer to as… information from an object. The first time, just a handful of years before, had been way more dramatic—so pronounced, in fact, that I consider it one of the defining moments of my life. This second time, though, was a lot more subtle. But on hearing about what happened at that factory and imagining the fear and despair these guys must have felt, I knew that I possessed an awareness I could rely on to steer clear of… of what exactly? I guess you could call it that thing that roams and inhabits the hearts of those it consumes.

Aside from its more disturbing and outlandish qualities, it still perplexes me how this person who thought of himself as a music producer did seem to have a sincere passion for music. Over the years, on more than one occasion, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has spoken about how being in a famous band attracts (in his words) creepy people. Plenty of musicians have spoken about how bands attract drug dealers, but Reznor was talking about something different—nefarious elements who are drawn like moths to the glow of music.

Sure, hangers-on may want something from the artist, but I don’t think their behavior is entirely self-interested: they also, I imagine, simply crave the feeling of being close to something special. The band who lived to tell the tale I relate to you was by no means famous. But, by the account I heard, the producer put attention and, in his own twisted way, care into their music—into developing them as a band. How strange…

In the end, I don’t even know if there’s a lesson to be drawn from this story, other than: be careful. And, of course: trust your instincts.

<3 SRK