Four For Friday - A Coke World Record - Anniversary Month

One of the things I have never grown to love or even like is sitting in a recording studio watching people make music. When you are producing or writing or recording it can be entertaining, but if you are there and simply watching it is one of the most boring things to do. So, it was with a very large sigh that I agreed to go meet a producer friend of mine who was in the studio and asked me to drop by the studio for a bit while he was working with a singer.

I was in Miami and we were supposed to hang out, but the hanging out got delayed because of the recording. Did I tell you that recording sessions always run behind? Always. Have you ever sat waiting for a flight that is delayed for hours? If you want some practice dealing with that, schedule a meeting with someone who is coming to meet you after a recording session. There are a million things always going on at a recording session and in my experience, very few of those things are the process of actually recording. I remember back in the day I actually had to go to a session and for three days, despite, everyone involved being there the ENTIRE 72 hours, maybe two hours of recording was completed. It felt like 40 people were jammed into a tiny hotel room and the only ones able to escape were the food and drug delivery people. Everyone else was there, in that room. It was awful.

Anyway, back to Miami. I arrived at the studio soaking wet. The 50 yard dash across the parking lot was through one of those Miami downpours that make you wonder how there could possibly be a drought anywhere on earth with the amount of water that I was just subjected to.

Do you know that smell of cigarette smoke and wet clothes? That attraction smoke has to wet clothes? As soon as I walked into that studio it was like Dementor smoke knew there was someone new in the room and attacked. I burned the clothes. Normally I would donate any clothes I don't want any longer, but that would have been unfair to the rest of the clothes donated by other people that came into contact with these. You know what makes me mad? I was wearing what was my favorite shirt at the time.

I walked into the studio and saw my friend. I looked into the recording area and as I expected no one was in there. who should have been in there was this A+ list singer in his corner of the singing world who all of you know.

I asked where he was and apparently he was in another room paying off his dealer. Our singer went big. He bought almost a kilo. Yep. One skinny person and one big kilo of coke. When he came back in the room, he just set it on a coffee table in front of a sofa and helped himself. To be honest, he was more than willing to share, but that is just not me. It didn't stop the guys that are with him all the time or the four women (none of whom was his wife) from helping themselves. The singer and his entourage spent the next hour just gorging. During that hour he made all the women get topless and made sure to do some lines off their breasts. When one tried to put her top back on, one of the guys with the singer started yelling at her and looked like he was going to hit her. She backed down and stayed topless.

After the coke it was time to get some champagne delivered. Our singer used the time before its arrival to chain smoke right there in the room. He said it was good for his singing voice. One of the women said she was bored. Apparently, even though, I totally understand where she was coming from, this was not the proper thing to say. The guy who had been rough before yanked the woman up and ripped off her dress. He then dragged her out of the studio and told her to go be bored somewhere else. I never saw her again.

Another guy in the group made a call and at the same time the champagne arrived, so did two more women, both dressed almost identically to the remaining other three women. With the arrival of the women and champagne, everyone celebrated by doing coke for another hour. Apparently things had progressed to the point where the women now had to do lines of coke off the men and remove coke from their genital area by using their mouths.

This led to some sexual activity in the room right there in front of everyone although the singer took a woman he was interested in to a side room where he had previously paid his dealer. Thirty minutes later he came out and said he was ready to record. He went in the booth and sang for a good five minutes before he decided he didn't like it and came back out. He needed to take a break he said so everyone did some more coke and smoked some more cigarettes and rotated the women. At this point, almost half that kilo was gone and there had been five minutes of recording. I couldn't take any more and told my friend we could just catch up next time I was in town.

A few hours later I got a text from him saying that the whole group of them had flown to Puerto Rico on a private jet because the singer felt like he would get more inspiration there.

The next day my friend texted me and said maybe another 20 minutes of recording had been completed during the 24 hours but they ran out of coke so went back to Miami.