Tonight, I am in a band. I am only a guest musician. But the guys on stage are my friends.
It’s a great night. Bright lights are shining in my face. There are happy people in the audience. And I can’t think of many things I love more than playing music with my friends.
Bruce is on the harmonica. George is on the lap steel. Jack is on bass. Steven is on the drums. Another Stephen is on Hammond. Jerry is tearing the keys off his saxophone. Mike is playing congas. And I am playing piano.
There’s an old saying about bands. The quickest way to get the band to sound good is to shoot the piano player.
Old joke. One I’ve heard many times. But then, I’ve heard them all throughout the years.
Q: What do you call a piano player without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless.
Q: What do you throw a drowning keyboard player?
A: His amplifier.
I’ve been playing piano since age 9. The way I started playing piano was, my father bought an old spinet from the classified section.
One December afternoon, Daddy and three of his fellow ironworkers hauled the piano into our home and put the instrument into our dank basement, just beside the water heater, beneath the framed embroidery which read:
“Watch ye therefore: ye know not when the master of the house cometh.”
My father bribed his friends to help him move this piano by paying them with beer. His friends were feeling no pain. As a result, by the time the piano got to the basement, the thing looked as though it had fallen down three flights of stairs. Because, of course, it had.
But it sounded great. I was over the moon to have MY VERY OWN PIANO.
Mama asked Daddy whether he was going to buy me piano lessons. He replied, “If the boy wants to play bad enough, he’ll play.”
Because that was the old-school way. It was an “if you build it they will come” sort of mentality. Daddy supplied the piano, it was up to me to do the rest.
So I started practicing a lot. I read books from the library about how to make chords. I listened to a lot of records and tried to copy what I was hearing.
I became an ear player. At least that’s what the old timers in our church called it. This meant that I used my ears instead of written notes.
Soon, I was playing for church services each Sunday. I used no printed music. All I needed to know was which key the song was in. Then, using the miraculous power of my fine-tuned ears, I proceeded to ruin the entire church service.
Because, of course, I was a 9-year-old, and all I knew how to play was “Chopsticks,” and a dirty song my uncle taught me about the farmer’s daughter.
Often, in the middle of church service, veterinary clinic employees would make emergency calls to our church because they’d heard there was a dying cat on the premises.
But members within that little church suffered along with me until I eventually sucked less. You could say they truly believed in me. And that’s not nothing.
After my father died, I kept playing in church. But I branched out and started playing in country-western bands for cash.
Our bands played in joints with neon signs in the windows. I played in rooms so laden with smoke, all you had to do was breathe and you inhaled four packs of cigarettes.
But I loved playing music with my friends. I loved playing Hank Senior, Willie Nelson, George Jones, and Merle Haggard in places so foggy you couldn’t even see your bandmates.
I loved learning the melodies of Louis Armstrong, Sam Cooke, and of course, Ray Charles, who is the fourth figure of the R&B Trinity.
Music got me through some very hard times in my life. Music is what distracted a grieving boy whose father had passed. Music was the diversion that helped this child find joy in a sad universe.
Music has at times been my only connection to the outside world. Music has been a connection with other human beings. Music is what has linked me to beer drinkers, cigarette smokers, and hymn singers alike.
Music is what made me cry when I needed a good cry. Music is what pricked my soul, when nothing else could.
But above all, music was the last gift John Dietrich gave me before leaving this world.
That’s a cool story, Sean. What a blessing to enjoy that gift. I don’t have it. I am hopelessly tin-eared. I tried. We got our piano when I was 6 and Mom arranged lessons immediately. My dear ol’ Dad was ear trained and played boogie woogie riffs that you couldn’t help bopping to. Mom played the guitar left to her that had been a wedding gift to her grandmother. I had this treasure until I passed it to my daughter who DOES have the gift, thank God.
As for me I practiced the piano every day. I could mimic the sound, my timing was good, I could read and play the correct notes, but I couldn’t make the music come out.
The school band was a total washout. They selected flute for which I was happy. Things went well at first because I was ahead of the other students learning to read music for the first time. Then I got braces. That made playing the flute a little trickier. Then the sadistic orthodontist cemented a head brace into my mouth and around my head. He claimed I wasn’t wearing the torture device the prescribed number of hours. I was meticulous. Mom tried to tell him. He didn’t believe us. The issue was an unusually difficult orthodontic issue and he was a sadist and a ham-fist. You can’t play a flute that way. Mom begged the director to let me change instruments; she recommended the glockenspiel from my piano experience. He said he had no spot for such an instrument or any other instrument in his 7th grade junior high band. I was kicked out. I am still crushed by this and I’m well on into my 60’s. I managed to survive the trauma and found other talents and entertainments.
Along comes my child. By the time she was 3, we could tell she had an affinity for music. She could sing and dance and any musical toy got a lot of creative use. She wanted a guitar, not a toy, a real one. We held out until she was 6. I still had my trusty old piano that I still attempted to pound into producing music. I announced we’d get her piano lessons. My husband said that we should get her a guitar. I argued that music theory can be much more completely learned on the piano, and we argued about this noisily for some time.
Finally my husband said, “We need to get her a guitar and I have 2 good reasons.”
I crossed my arms ready for battle and said, “What?”
He said, “First she WANTS to play the guitar. The piano has been sitting there her whole life. Do you ever see her play with it?”
“No,” I grudgingly conceded. I still had the bigoted theory about music theory and pianos.
“Second,” my husband continued, “when she goes to college, she can’t take a piano with her like she can a guitar.”
He had me there. The little I knew of the piano sat and staled while I studied at college, then as I got busy with my career. I got a piano a few years later but I never did get back the little I’d left home with.
Fine. We got her a guitar, getting advice on her young size, but the importance of the neck to be standard, while she needs to be able reach around the head to strum or pick as called for. The notion of her starting on my great grandmother’s Martin from her 1899 wedding was not an option.
We got a right-sized guitar and some digital lessons. We decided I would drag out the Martin and learn with her. I’d never gotten very far on my own, maybe the motivation of her learning with me would get me over my own musical hump. We started practicing and learning.
I traveled for a living. After we’d had 2 lessons together, we were ready for lesson 3 as I came home. She couldn’t wait and it was reported that she faithfully practiced the exercises from the second lesson.
I put my hat down and sat with her to attend lesson 3. It this lesson, we learned our 3rd chord which makes up the main compliment of chords for a whole bunch of songs, as you probably know. The lesson was working on changing chords and putting a rhythm to that and dexterity to the changes. I stuttered. I was ham-fisted and having trouble with the exercises. My cherubic little girl said, “Like this, Mama,” and proceeded to do the exercise perfectly. Then she changed it up slightly, then she added a varied rhythm, then she jammed with herself for a minute or so while I watched amazed and entranced.
She said, “Oh! I just wrote a song, Mama!”
I smiled at her and said, “So I hear! Can you play it again?”
So she did. 😳 I immediately put my guitar away, went out to where my husband was and announced, “We need professional help.”
We found a guitar teacher who was a PhD in the local college for such, but taught young kids and did weddings and such on the side. He was a classical concert guitarist and he was a true blessing to our musical dilemma. He taught our little girl music theory. A lot of music theory. She blew through book one so fast he didn’t bother with book 2. By the 3rd grade, he encouraged us to purchase a much better acoustic guitar because, “She’s that good.” We showed him the Martin and he nearly drooled on it, but admitted she should wait a bit for that. In the 4th grade, she played “Dust in the Wind” with a very complicated picking pattern and every adult in the place was brought to tears. When she asked me why everyone was crying, I said, “You nailed it, Honey.”
A couple years later she was playing these wonderful Spanish selections that showed more than ten notes to be played at once. I asked, “How do you play that? It’s showing more than ten notes and you only have ten fingers!”
She snorted at me and said, “Oh Mama.” I shut up and let her play.
She played this one piece that almost always got to me. I was quietly dusting while she practiced, and as she finished, she caught me standing there with my dust rag in mid swipe, completely mesmerized with tears glistening both eyes.
She impishly said, “I nailed it, didn’t I, Mama?” Sometimes she had an edge of sass to her, but the kid had talent.
Off she went to high school where she played clarinet in 2 different bands. She picked it up like she’d always played it. I commented on this and she said that the clarinet was so easy because you only had to play one note at a time. Well, I guess.
Off to college where she brought along her clarinet for band necessities.
A few weeks in she called and excitedly informed me that she had made it onto the marching band.
I was confused. I knew the “marching band” at that institution was a drum and bugle corps. I questioned this.
She said, “That’s right! I’m playing the mellophone.”
Mellophone?! I’d been hanging around marching bands with her for years and I’d never heard of such a thing. She explained that it’s used in drum and bugle corps to bring a sound like a French horn, different from a trumpet.
I tried, “Well how do you know how to play one?”
She told the story of the band weekend where the leader asked her if she could play it. She was sure she could. He gave it to her and a beginning book and told her to go work on it and come back in a couple hours for him to assess.
She said she returned to her room and paged through the book.
She said, “The first song was my old fave, ‘Hot Cross Buns,’” the first selection in most music training books by her rather large experience.
She flipped to the back of the book and studied the fingering chart. Then she got out her clarinet music she had to this point and taught herself to play the national anthem and the school’s anthem on the mellophone, adjusting as necessary for the mellophone from the clarinet.
The leader had said 2 hours. She’d used a half hour. She set an alarm and took a nap.
She went back out and the leader asked her if she could play. She told him she could. He asked to hear it. She proceeded to march up and down in front of him in perfect cadence to the two selections she’d practiced.
He said, “The girl has skills.” She was the only freshman selected for the corps.
Hearing this I asked, “But you never played a brass instrument before. How were you do sure you could?”
She said, “You won’t like this, Mama, but I’ve played every instrument in the band since 6th grade. We traded all the time. I can play a lick or two on everything.”
I responded, “Ew! Gross, but a mellophone? You never saw a mellophone before. How did you know?”
She said, “Well, they told us it was like a cross between a trumpet and a French horn. I’ve played both. I knew I could figure it out.”
I shut up.
She married, an engineer at a car manufacturer, and plays the violin now. I enjoy a couple recital concerts each year. She got the Martin as a wedding gift and she gets it down and lovingly plays it now and then.
My kid has skills. I, sadly don’t. You’re lucky, Sean. Your gift is a blessing not everyone enjoys, except your listeners. I’d tap my toes, but don’t ask me to sing along. I can’t do that either. It was the 3rd grade music teacher who instructed me to mouth the words but don’t sing for the Christmas concert. The wounds are deep, but those tormentors did not lie. Some have it and some don’t.
I would say your father gave you many gifts. Too numerous to count. Amazing really considering his short lifespan.