Modern American Memoirs (27 page)

I soon began to retch at the sight of maraschino cherries and orange slices. A stranger dropped into the club late one night, an out-of-town boy by the looks of him—charcoal suit, checked shirt, white scarf—and seeing three untouched Old Fashioneds lined up in front of me, said, “You seem to be overloaded here.” He hefted one and took a generous slug; a contemplative expression came over his face. “I see Guido's still pouring the same old swill.” The next night I asked the bartender to substitute gin rickeys
sans
gin and very light on the lime juice. He had never been overly friendly toward me and greeted my request with mute contempt. I think I can safely interpose a blanket judgment here: bartenders are not enamored of musicians. They begrudge us our short hours—roughly half theirs—and our frequent (union-sanctioned) intermissions. A businessman at Tiny's Carousel once tried to buy the band champagne cocktails. The bartender told him, “Pouring champagne for this crew is like feeding a pig strawberries,” and his accompanying smile failed to conceal the underlying rancor.

After a month backing Amy Avallone I helped her on with her coat one Saturday night as she was leaving. It was either mink or a class muskrat and gave off a fragrance like a moon-splashed field of jasmine. I opened the door for her and blurted, “How about going somewhere for coffee?” She glanced at me in a sidelong, questioning way, smiling and frowning at the same time; a low chuckle rose in her throat. “You tired of living?” I watched her swing voluptuously across the street on spike heels, her breath pluming in the chill morning, and slide into the front seat of a black Chrysler. A man in a dark, shiny suit sat behind the wheel, smoking. At my feet Guido's cocker spaniels were scarfing noisily from the twin yellow bowls. The club door opened, and the elderly mafioso who had flattened my hands on the keyboard a week earlier came out. He breathed deeply of the crisp air, buttoning his overcoat.

“Guido tells me your name is Asher,” he said in his soft hoarse voice.

“That's right.”

“Your father's the judge?”

“Uncle.”

He nodded sagely and gazed down at the busy spaniels; an almost angelic smile crept over the bulbous, weathered face as he stooped laboriously to fondle one of the golden heads. “I see you dogs're dining out again tonight,” he whispered.

 

Guys and Dolls
and
Call Me Madam
opened on Broadway, and eighty blocks north Bird and Dizzy were generating lightning bolts in the night sky over Harlem. I had moved to Boston and was studying with a virtuoso black jazz pianist at the Berklee College of Music (“You'll have to pick up your final credits,” he told me, “in the University of the Streets of New York”), supporting myself by working with Rudy Yellin's Society Orchestra. At wedding receptions, when the newlyweds posed with bright grins, their entwined hands gripping the engraved silver knife, we played the year's hit tune, “If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake.”

On a busy Saturday night Rudy would have a dozen or more combos working in the Boston area's hotels, country clubs, lodges, catering halls, and private homes. From a reservoir or “stable” of musicians he was able to put together units of any size and specification to fit a hostess' needs. This pool consisted mainly of middle-aged professionals, family men moderate in habit and mien, who could both read and fake. (Only in the music business is the word “fake” nonpejorative. People are always asking musicians if they read or play by ear; most do both, but this reply for some reason creates consternation, as if an airline captain were to claim to be both pilot and navigator. A Boston colleague of mine responds to all such queries, “I read pretty good but not without moving my lips.”) Rudy's stableboys, as they jocularly or plaintively referred to themselves, gave Rudy first call on all nights in return for a guaranteed annual income. They were steady and dependable (some had daytime occupations), maintained a repertoire of current pop and show tunes, and stuck close to the melody on their choruses. The younger jazz and club-date musicians scorned them as “mickey
mouse” or “ricky-tick” players, but a good many could have acquitted themselves creditably in a Harlem jam session, and their families ate regularly.

There is less real music to the society-band business than people think; or, putting it another way, the music itself is frequently a minor ingredient. The success of an organization like Rudy's depends to a great extent on contacts with banquet and catering managers, club social directors, society leaders, columnists, and other community
machers
; this entails constant wining, dining, or alternative forms of cajolery. Competition is keen and bandleaders will often vie for engagements by outfitting their musicians in exotic costumes to fit an ethnic or thematic occasion. It's the old sell-the-sizzle-not-the-steak concept. Theme parties are the bane of the professional musician's existence, reducing him, in the space of one night, to the level of the meat-market clerk in phosphorescent green vest and paper bow tie on St. Patrick's Day. With Rudy I found myself working classy hotel rooms and country clubs, attired in striped blazer, Hawaiian shirt (lei optional), serape, Gay Nineties brocaded vest (with straw boater and sleeve garters), balloon-sleeved Greek tunic, coolie shift and hat (endless choruses of “Slow Boat to China”), bowler derby, yarmulke, and accessories coincident to Halloween, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, St. Patrick's Day, Christmas, and the Fourth of July. It is the closest the professional musician comes to prostitution, other than playing the parlor upright in a reconstructed New Orleans whorehouse.

 

With the help of the more experienced stableboys, I soon picked up tricks of the trade: carrying a gooseneck lamp and extension cord on reading jobs (most music-stand lights won't accommodate to pianos) and a pocket chess set or paperback book for killing time during long-winded after-dinner speeches; requesting ice water (heavy on the ice) from bartenders during breaks, drinking off the water, and replenishing the glass from my coat-concealed half pint for a tasty Southern Comfort on the rocks. From a Filipino busboy, of all people, I learned how to bring a piano's flat notes up to pitch by strategically wedging folded cocktail napkins between the strings. I'd lift a cigarette-scorched piano lid and find a note from the previ
ous pianist: “This box is a dirty dog. D and E above high C stick and a couple bass notes don't work at all. If there's a peculiar smell you can't place I pissed in it closing night.”

Complaints to management were usually futile. Catering managers and non-jazz club owners didn't want to hear about defective instruments. The piano was invariably “tuned just last week,” or “Out of eighty-eight notes you got eighty-three in working condition; I wish I could count on that kind of percentage in my end of the business,” or “I'm sick of spending money on the goddamn thing, next time bring your own” (which a generation of pianists would be doing in the Seventies, trundling electric keyboards and fifty-pound speakers down hotel corridors like latter-day Willy Lomans). Keyboards sprinkled with missing notes can take the heart out of you; consider a gardener trying to work with the center teeth missing from his rake. At an after-hours club in Somerville I watched a black pianist dexterously hopscotching a string of non-playing notes using an aggressive stride technique. He called it his Jack-be-nimble style, developed over the years for dealing with “these rotten tomatoes,” and thought of his hands as leaping the candlesticks of dead notes. I expressed my sympathy and admiration for his resourcefulness. “There're times you got to come on like Alexander the Great,” he told me. “You can't let the suckers beat you down.”

The Brigantine Club in Revere Beach was notorious for its rinky-dink atrocity of a baby grand. Ivories were discolored and chipped or missing altogether; the felts looked like they had been chewed by crazed rodents; the strings were coated with a whitish substance that could only be salt (on balmy nights did invisible sea mists waft through the open windows?); and the casing was studded with drink rings and cigarette burns. Early in the evening of my first Brigantine gig I punctured my thumb on one of the ragged ivories and began spotting the keys like a gored bullfighter dripping on the sand. I signaled the leader-saxophonist who was playing the lead on “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”; he wandered over, blowing as he walked; gazed at the keyboard, eyes bulging slightly, and wandered back to center stage, still blowing. (Musicians aren't easily disconcerted; they've undergone too many bizarre experiences, witnessed too much craziness on the stand and out front. I once saw a woman
at a drunken Gay Nineties brawl pour a schooner of beer into the bell of the tuba player's horn. He gazed at her mournfully and kept on blowing—it sounded like frogs in a bathtub.) Between tunes a waitress handed me a bar rag, then quickly backed off. “You contagious?” she asked from a respectful distance. Naturally, I requested an explanation. “TB,” she said demurely. I said I knew I was thin, but not
that
thin. “Well, this movie I saw…” I knew the one she meant and instantly understood: Cornel Wilde as Frédéric Chopin coughing gobbets of red onto the gleaming ivories.

During the break I bandaged my thumb and began wedging cocktail napkins between the salt-encrusted strings. An intelligent-looking bystander asked what I was doing. I explained, and he introduced himself: Dr. So-and-so, a gynecologist from Swampscott. In my inquisitive, small-town way I asked him what gynecologists always get asked by frustrated lechers: Don't you get nervous examining all those beautiful chicks? His answer was eloquent and instructive (and possibly rehearsed): “My work is like that of the piano repairman who can only afford a modest instrument in his own home. When he hires out to a rich man to work on a magnificent concert grand, he does the best job he can and does not covet it. He understands it is beyond his reach.”

I had occasion to return to the Brigantine two months later. Praying that the monstrosity had been replaced, I came fortified with Band-Aids and a liberal stash of Southern Comfort. Black Beauty stood in the window just as I'd left her, massive, bullying, unassailable. Disheartened, I lifted the top and found, Scotch-taped to the underside, a wry and piquant dissertation by a previous tenant: “This vintage instrument has a storied history. It was fashioned for Czar Alexander I of Russia in the fierce winter of 1857-58 by the craftsman Melinkov of Smolensk. Only small pedigreed animals from the czar's private preserve had access to its innards during the long nocturnal hours, and even after a century's lapse their musty fragrance and distinctive nibblings are still detectable. You'll notice the instrument's unusual sonority. Careful examination of the casing reveals the czar's personal crest, an ingenious design of interlocking circles predating this century's famed Ballantine rings and overlaid with a series of vertical grooves, each, by striking coincidence, approximately the size of an Old Gold.”

Bandleaders will sometimes join forces and attempt to shame or coerce managers and proprietors into repairing a derelict. But it is a losing cause: many are beyond salvage and will hold a tuning only so long before reverting to their former primordial state. As Rudy's first-call trombonist said to the Brigantine's owner, “Here's what you should do with this aberration: tune it, clean it thoroughly, refurbish the felts and hammers, polish the casing. Then hire a handyman to chop it up for firewood. And you know what you'd have?” The owner shook his head. “A bad fire.”

 

Paradoxically, I encountered the rottenest tomato of them all at a sumptuous lawn party on a Wellesley estate. “Chinatown” was the motif. Paper lanterns strung in the poplar trees and silvered vessels of barbecued pork, chow mein, et al. warming over burners on red-clothed tables; a pagoda-roofed bar at one end of the wide lawn. We dressed accordingly: coolie hats and loose-fitting pastel cotton garments, intended, I gathered, to simulate the garb of rice-gathering peasants. Indian summer weather had prevailed for the past two weeks—blue and gold days and velvet nights—but on this night autumn fell like a clanging gate: a brisk fifty-five degrees and a good wind blowing. A half dozen electric heaters had been propped in the crooks of the tall trees.

We got out of our tux coats, balled them up, laid them in the drum cases and donned our coolie shifts. The garments came in one size only, fitting the small guys like little girls' dresses and making our beanpole bass player look like a night heron out of water. I played a trial run on the blond Baldwin spinet and—never mind my ears—didn't believe my eyes. The keys went down and stayed down like the plug had been pulled on a player piano in mid-tune. With a sinking heart I took off the front and set it on the grass. The hammers I had struck were cocked back against the strings as if glued there, yet the tripping mechanisms and felts all appeared in good condition. I called over trumpeter-leader Tommy Tedesco, who was alternately blowing into his hands and blasting fat notes on his horn, trying to warm it. I pointed mutely to the depressed keys (
Look, man, no hands
). Tommy lowered his horn, chewed on a corner of his lip, and went off to find the hostess. Less than a minute later a skinny, alert-looking kid of about twelve approached. The
guests were beginning to arrive, strolling through the mansion's rear portal onto the illuminated emerald lawn.

“I'm William. Mom says you have a problem.”

“Watch.” I struck a full chord: ten more hammers shot back and stuck fast like flies on molasses.

“Huh.” The kid stuck his head inside and poked around. “What are these metal things?”

“No idea.”

“But you're the piano player.”

“Right. Not a mechanic.” It was almost farcical; in what other profession are you so regularly sabotaged by the tools of your trade? Four hours of egg-foo-yung tunes on this abomination and I'd be a shattered man, licking my lips and blinking vacantly into the night shadows.