Chapter 6: Playing With Fire
Previously in The Devil’s Duet…
Raven St. Clair has always played with fire, but in Chapter Five, she found herself consumed by it. Under Lucian’s control and spiraling deeper into her hunger, she was no longer just making music—she was making sacrifices. The glitz of the Strip masked something far darker as she realized that the price of fame wasn’t just blood—it was her very soul.
Now, the stage is set for the next act. But when the fire burns too hot, even the brightest stars can fall.
Chapter 6: Playing with Fire
Sunset Sound, 6650 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, 1978
“Imagine,” Mutt Lange said with a clear but gravely voice, “Raven St. Clair goes rock,” as he held his hands up as if picturing an image that I couldn’t truly see yet.
I sat across from the legendary producer in the lounge at Sunset Sound as we talked through ideas for my follow up to Siren. I still didn’t have a title or direction for this album but I was hoping these initial sessions would yield something.
“How would you envision taking Raven from the folk-sy Laurel Canyon scene to the rock scene?” Jefferson asked.
In the intervening years since Siren, Jefferson had become more than a lover, he was my songwriting partner and creative protector in terms of reviewing contracts and protecting my image.
“Well,” Mutte responded running his fingers through his signature mustache, “You’re right to wonder that, Jefferson.”
“I think that even though Raven may have started in a different style, one thing she has always excelled at is having that powerful, clean sound, that I think would translate really nicely to a harder rock sound. I think I could very naturally evolve her style to harder edges, creating a clean yet heavy sound with tight instrumentals, solid rhythms, and soaring vocal harmonies.”
Jefferson listened patiently as Mutte continued to opine on his thoughts, “One other thing I’ve always noticed about Raven is that she sings with this sense of haunting mysticism like she has access to a trove of voices from another era. I would love to see what we could do by layering her heavenly vocals with sweeping harmonies. Even on my harder rock tracks with City Boy really pulled those harmonies to the front as opposed to burying them under drums and squealing guitars,” Mutte said.
“I would really love to give Raven’s tracks a haunting, anthemic quality,” he added as Jefferson nodded clearly lapping this up, two musical geniuses drawing on each other’s experience.
“Ultimately,” Jefferson added, “ I would really envision a sound that balances intensity with technical clarity.”
Jefferson had become the perfect antidote to Lucian’s darkness. I still had to succumb regularly to my basest desires to feed my longing hunger in addition to Lucian’s needs and to keep the precarious balance.
While I recognize that I was a willing participant in this dance of light and dark, the prospect of giving it all up was unfathomable.
And so, the dance would continue but I was stuck with the gnawing feeling of what would happen to this dance when the music stopped. In this way I knew that I was worse than Lucian in that sense, I was my own dark temptress, the things I had done to become who and what I was were not a trick or a manipulation, I freely agreed to the pact for my own greed and avarice. And now more than ever I was keenly aware of how dangerously I danced on the edge flirting with disaster.
Mutte excused himself for a cigarette as Jefferson motioned for me to join him on the couch. I curled up next to him burrowing my head into the crook of his neck.
Pushing my face up to look in my eyes, Jefferson stroked a strand of my hair out of my face, “What’s that face for?” He asked, his voice tinged with concern.
Clutching my notebook, I confessed, “I’m stuck.” Flipping open the cover, I showed him page after page of barely coherent scratchings that hardly resembled any sort of concrete idea.
“Well,” he said stopping me furiously flipping pages, “What about that one?” His hand stopped on an idea I had abandoned long ago called “Running.”
“Not this,” I pleaded urgently, “It was this hippy dippy folk song I wrote on tour ages ago,” I said purposely pulling the wind out of my own sails in a fit of self doubt. “Besides,” I said deflecting his attention, “Mutte would think its silly,” I relented.
Reading aloud from my notebook he said,
“I run with the night, under the stars,
Leaving behind every line and every scar,
The beat keeps me going, the shadows take flight,
I’m free in the dark, I run with the night.”
“I dont know, Rave,” Jefferson said picturing something I could not, “I think there is something there.”
As Mutte returned and ran his fingers through his dark wavy hair, Jefferson thrust my notebook forward, “I think Raven’s got a song that could fit what you’re hoping to do together,” Jefferson said with a proud optimism and I truly loved him for that.
As the men talked and passed thoughts back and forth, I excused myself from the lounge and headed back towards the bathroom as my fingers traced the glass vial in the front pocket of my jeans. Surely if the guys weren’t able to come up with an idea, a little taste of white would help me some.
As I neared the bathroom, I saw one of the studio doors open and felt a strong almost magnetic pull towards one of them. As I poked my head into the studio I saw what looked like a shimmering haze, it looked like glitter falling from the ceiling but suspended in air.
The studio was filled with an oppressive cigarette smoke that seemed to hang in the air and permeate every corner of the studio even though there was no one around.
“Come here often, luv?” I heard a distinctively British accent ask with a gentle, but husky, lilting quality that seemed to pull me deeper into the smoky, darkened room.
The smoke seemed to part as a slight and wiry man emerged as I could see the shimmery lights were actually a sequined jacket festooned with a feathered boa topping off flared trousers. He had thick, dark, curly hair that cascaded in voluminous waves down to his shoulders and moved with a swagger. There was no way that this was who I thought it was.
As he seemed to fade in and out of view in a ghostly spectral sense, reaching out his hand he introduced himself, “Ello, ‘luv,” he said introducing himself with a wicked smile, “Marc Bolan…and you are…?”
Kindly returning his gesture I held my hand out towards the seeming darkness, “Raven St. Clair.”
“Oh yeah, you’re Raven?” he asked knowingly.
“I’ve heard you singing around here,” he said motioning towards the walls of the studio.
I did my best work here, you know,” he told me as he imparted his wisdom to me. “You know he’s using you, right?” Marc asked me as my heart seemed to turn to ice.
“What do you mean?” I asked clutching my chest.
“I think you know who I mean,” Marc said leveling his gaze towards me.
“Jefferson?” I half uttered, half whispered trembling at the implication.
“The other bloke,” Marc said in a voice that sounded like a confessed secret.
“He doesn’t need you,” Marc continued, “He makes it sound like you’re doing this great service for him and in return he makes you famous, right?”
Realizing what he was talking about I nodded meekly.
“He could easily feed on any soul he wants but remember, he can only eat their souls if they’re willing, right?” Marc asked as I felt the pit of my stomach plummeting.
“He gives you this ‘gift’ of being on both sides of the line because you’d never question something that seems so great, right?” Marc continued, “But the trick is he’s giving you a job and hunger to keep you so busy and distracted from the fact that one day, he will come for you. And trust me,” Marc said with an intense gravity, “He will always come to collect. How else do you think this town and this industry survives? This whole town is one renewable source of food. There’s always someone to feed on and someone just as eager waiting to take their place.”
“So,” Marc added, “Don’t end up like all the rest, fight him no matter how hard it is, reject the fame, no matter how hard it is to do, reclaim your soul while you still have one because otherwise you are playing with fire.”
I let Marc’s warning wash over me like a tidal wave breaking against rocks, I felt the weight of his words, the power of his warning as I also felt the weight of my hunger surging, I had to feed and feed bad.
Marc saw me wresting with my soul and my hunger. “Stay strong Raven,” he said as my face continued to betray me. “I stayed on this path, always thinking I’d somehow escape the reckoning, but in the end, it’s not you choosing the fame; it’s the fame choosing you,” Marc told me wisely, “I was once where you are—convinced I was unstoppable, that I’d be the one to beat the game. But there’s no winning this. There’s only survival… or surrender.”
And with that, Marc began to fade into the blackness of the studio as the faint crunches of guitar and the melodies of T. Rex’s "20th Century Boy" faded into the ether with him leaving me somewhere in between.
As Marc disappeared from the studio and began to fade from my mind, the hunger surged and spiked to an almost uncontrollable level before suddenly being replaced by something entirely different. Instead of hunger, I was surging with stunning clarity.
I quickly returned to the lounge. Grabbing my notebook, I started furiously writing with an intensity I had not experienced in some time. As my fingers flew over the paper, Jefferson leaned in peaking over my shoulder.
“Wow, Raven,” Jefferson exclaimed. As I continued to write, I felt the weight of Marc’s omen. While dark and terrifying, I also felt that this encounter was a gift pushing me to fully dedicate myself to create a harder defiant sound. If Marc was right about Lucian, then the only way I could do this would be to turn my music into a raging pyre of defiance. Marc said, “ reclaim your soul while you still have one because otherwise you are playing with fire.”
And in that sense, I was letting his warning become the fire that would light my way.
Tearing out the page, I furiously handed it to Mutte who looked at the page and then said breathlessly, “Playing with Fire,” before saying “I love it, I think we have the beginnings of an album here.”
Sunset Sound, 6650 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, 1978
A month later, Jefferson and I were in studio at Sunset Sound with the live band recording the title track off of Playing with Fire.
Raven St. Clair - Playing with Fire
Working with Mutte, we had already laid down “Burn Slow” which Jefferson took a big part in writing hand in hand with Mutte and a Mutt-ified version of “Run with the Night.” Together with “Playing with Fire,” we felt confident that we were building a strong foundation for the album in addition to a driving rock-driven sound filled with roiling guitars, thunderous drums and epic runs and fills.
Raven St. Clair - Burn Slow
Raven St. Clair - Run with the Night
However, even with the immense progress we had made on the album thus far, the shadow of Lucian still loomed large. Lucian “let” me have my life to Jefferson all to myself but he remained always in my peripheral. And the further into recording we went, the more magic we made in the studio, the more I could feel Lucian tightening his grip.
One night after wrapping up “Ember Queen,” Lucian invited me to one of the private back rooms at Sunset Sound. There I found Lucian looming over one of the session guitarists, Sebastian Moore, who sat in an armchair next to a bucket of champagne and a mirror streaked with claw marks of cocaine.
Raven St. Clair - Ember Queen
“I understand,” Lucian began, “That Sebastian here,” he said motioning to the frightened kid, “Has been instrumental in bringing this new sound of yours to life, isn’t that right?” Lucian asked as he stroked Sebastian’s face with the back of his hand.
I looked into Lucian’s gaze to see what he was playing at here, but all he gave me in response was a cryptic, “You’ve done well Raven.”
“Now,” he instructed waving his hand, “Let’s take a well deserved break,” I watched as Sebastian leaned forward and inhaled a line off the mirror. I joined him dropping ritualistically to my knees as I snorted one line and then another. As I did so, I could taste an acrid, unpleasant taste that stung as it slid down my sinuses and made my head spin. This was not the usual high. I looked up at Sebastian to see if he seemed to be doing any better but as I did, his eyes were rolling back in his head as his body began to convulse.
My eyes darted up to Lucian who offered only a cryptic, “Must have been something he ate,” as his eyes looked at the drugs on the mirror. I knew what Lucian was playing at.
“The only way…” Lucian began, “…that poor Sebastian will survive,” he said, “Is if I offer him the gift of joining us,” Lucian said as he held his wrist up to his mouth preparing to bite it. I knew exactly what he meant and what it meant for me so I stopped him.
I straddled Sebastian’s lap and held his head back exposing his neck. I dug my face into his neck pushing my teeth forward until his skin pierced open and the blood began flowing freely. I drank satisfying my hunger as each gulp, I could taste the acrid poison that was laced with the drugs as I carefully sucked every last bit of revolting poison out of him.But I miscalculated somewhere in my feed. I felt like control was a slippery grip, I was losing my ability to throttle my need to feed versus my ability to suck the poison out while keeping Sebastian drained but still alive. The more of his blood I took in, my hunger abated some and I approached the point of stopping but I let myself lose control and now, I could feel his pulse slow and his blood begin to run cold. I killed him.
I stood and looked at his body as the color drained from him. Lucian looked down at his body as he began to move into place to finish consuming Sebastian.
“You can’t,” I protested, “You promised,” I declared without realizing the trap I had already stepped into.
“Promise?” Lucian sneered, “Cast off your overconfidence and presumption, my songbird.”
“I’ve done nothing,” Lucian said dripping with a sense of innocence before he cast a wave of guilt onto me, “You could have controlled yourself, but you needed to feed and you did, and now you learn the consequences of your insatiable and reckless thirst.”
Wiping Sebastian’s blood from my mouth, I sneered at Lucian, “You poisoned him, you tricked me.” The taste of the blood was wrong, sharp and acrid, almost chemical. This wasn’t a mistake. This was Lucian. He set this up, knowing my hunger would make me his accomplice.
Lucian only offered a smug sneer in response, “My dear, Raven, I don’t need to poison anyone. You do it to yourself. All I do is set the table.”
“I offered him release, and in doing so, I fed you,” Lucian said in his manipulative tone that made me feel ashamed and as if I should have been grateful for his murder.
It was in that moment I heard Marc’s warning come rushing back practically slamming me in the face, How else do you think this town and this industry survives? This whole town is one renewable source of food. There’s always someone to feed on and someone just as eager waiting to take their place.
“You ate, as you are designed to do,” Lucian said making it all sound so logical, “His death is a result of your own hunger, plain and simple.”
“And his death will make a worthy sacrifice, his talent is already becoming a part of us,” Lucian said practically licking his chops as he pressed his mouth to Sebastian’s.
The last time I saw Sebastian Moore was as I brushed his ashes into wastebasket under a flickering fluorescent light as T. Rex’s “Girl” played faintly in my memory.
Osko’s Disco, 333 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 1978
As I entered Osko’s Disco, the rush of the busy intersection of La Cienega and San Vicente disappeared behind me as I passed the iconic grand staircase, lit by colored neon lights, that led to the club’s famed themed rooms across its various levels. I stepped towards the main dance floor, a large, multicolored illuminated floor with flashing tiles that lit up in sync with the music, creating a hypnotic, pulsing atmosphere as “Le Freak” blasted from the unseen speakers.
I sidestepped the night’s first wave of dance floor warriors and slid into the VIP area to find Hollywood stars and VIPs ensconced in the swanky, exclusive vibe, complete with velvet ropes, cozy seating, and attentive table service. Celebrities and LA’s see and be seen crowd could frequently be found gathered here, dressed to the nines in glittering fashion.
Every part of Osko’s was decked out with glimmering lights, reflective surfaces, and luxurious textures, creating an all-encompassing, glamorous escape from reality. The music was a blend of disco, funk, and sometimes even rock, but above all else the atmosphere inside was famously electric and hedonistic verging on a modern day Roman Bath.
Tonight in particular, I was here to see Aurora James, a new artist on the Thorne Records roster who was currently topping the charts with her latest single, “Desire,” I originally came out of curiosity about my fellow label mate but I also selfishly came here to see who Lucian was putting his effort into when he wasn’t keeping me under his watchful eye. I guess you could say this was a result of paranoia but I also was checking out Aurora with my own eyes because I wanted to see if Marc’s warning was as cuttingly true as it felt.
Aurora James- Desire
“Holy shit,” a voice said as I bobbed along to the rhythm of “Thicker Than Water” by Andy Gibb. I turned to see a young girl behind me, “You’re Raven St. Clair, right?”
I politely smiled at the girl who’s face was framed by hair in a luxurious mass of loose waves, rich in texture, flowing past her shoulders in a chestnut brown that caught the light, giving off a hint of a golden hue. Her face was a striking, androgynous beauty with wide, expressive eyes lined with shimmering eyeliner. Her naturally thick, arched brows framed her face, giving her a fierce but youthful energy.
There was something so magnetic about this girl in appearance and in the natural draw and magnetism I felt towards her in addition to the intense glow she was emanating from her which told me all I needed to know about her.
Luckily, I was freshly fed so this striking beauty was in no danger tonight even though her glow and her scent was intoxicating. But I introduced myself nonetheless, “Raven St. Clair and you are?” I asked.
“Seraphina Jones,” she said with such an informed confidence that initially knocked me slightly off kilter. Her confidence was more than a little legendary. “I just wanted to introduce myself,” she said as if it were a foregone conclusion adding even more boldly, “I’m going to be a big singer one day and I wanted to introduce myself so that when we’re playing the same venues and on the radio together one day, we can say that we already know each other.”
I didn’t know if Seraphina was confident or foolhardy bearing on arrogant but I have to say I admired her gumption and forthrightness.