Shaka Da Do Na Day

 

    Who wants to be a musician? Not just air guitar, not that air guitar isn’t good. Reverb and feedback on air guitar just send me flying. Not just lip synch, though lip synch is a tool I wish I had known at a tender age. All those snide remarks from my brothers on the way home from church would have been avoided. If they couldn’t tackle melody, why on earth should they be qualified to criticize heavenly harmony?  Lip synch could have saved us all.

 

    Mother’s side of the family were preachers and wonderful musicians; father’s side made their best musical efforts with the noise of their well drilling equipment. Mother wrung her hands every time her children opened their mouths to sing. Her children were croaking out tunes like their father. She fought to turn the DNA tide.  She rented us musical instruments. She sent us downtown once a week on the bus to our private music lessons, even though there was barely enough money for food by the end of the month.

 

   One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’. Oh how right she was.  While we children had her family’s love of music inside us, and her family’s desire to express the love of music, it was only coupled with the ability to bleat like a bloated sheep. What a sad evolutionary disaster. She refused to give up. At her continued insistence, we sawed on and blew into our instruments through grade school, with our high and low notes of success and failure rivaling the tune of   ‘Dixie”.

 

    But then Rock’n’Roll intervened.

 

             Boom da da da.  

             Blam da da da,   

             Boom da da da.  .

 

     Even the most rhythm compromised tin ear can follow the Big Beat.  Bless the rhythm, lyrics and the melody of rock and roll. If you heard the song 5200 times, as was always the case, the melody, the Big Bleat, was, snap, easy to sing.

 

            “One fo the money, two fo the show…three to get ready an go cats, go….

              But don chew, don chew, don chew……Ba da da da  …. Step on my….

 

    Melody. Melody. Honest to God. There was Melody in music. We, the musically impaired, actually sang the melody to the songs in the good old days. Soon we were R&B back up singers in our dreams. We played air saxophone.

 

           Shah sha sha  Shah shah sha shah sha Shah

            Whaaa wa wa Whaa wa wa wa wa Whaah        

 

     That was the life. But somehow, always, the musically challenged are never happy until they embarrass themselves publicly in a band. This is why there are so many garages.

 

     I finally got my chance, the fabulous opportunity to attempt to play in a band.  When the musician, who foolishly agreed to give me music lessons, asked me to introduce him to some friends of mine who were real musicians, I said no problem, but if you play music with them, I play, too. He grimaced and shook his head back and forth while nodding yes. What an expressive guy. He could have been a real actor.

 

    The real musicians were actually interested, because a music teacher was involved. Oh, they didn’t need an instructor, they were natural, played by ear, built instruments, too. Trouble was, their kids, also musically gifted, learned in school, reading charts, and had no idea how to play music with their folks. The four kids were a horn section. Some parents raise a hockey or baseball team. These parents  spawned a reed and brass backup  section extrordinaire.  The folks played acoustic bluegrass. Something had to give.

 

    The folks agreed to play banjo, tenor sax , read charts and learn all the odd jazz chords. The kids agreed to associate with their parents and use mutes in the trumpets. We picked up a kid who played drums. We got old Dixieland  Jazz charts from the twenties. We practiced. Basin Street. Tiger Rag, Muskrat Ramble. Livery Stable Blues. Tin Roof  Blues. It was summer. We were a porch band. The clarinet lines floated out onto the warm breeze. It was heaven. We should have quit there.

 

    The band leader started pitching the band for gigs.  We played the old folks home. They set us up in the Alzheimer ward.  We played a street fair. They put us outside the city limits. We played a school function. The kids actually played with us there. We played the county fair. At first the cowboys looked puzzled, then they started drifting away. They must have been hoping for Willie Nelson.

 

    Critics be damned,  I hit my musical stride in that band. I was always shuffled to the back of the stage when we played, but  I liked to think of it as the second line. What did I play? Well, we didn’t have a bass or a tuba. We slacked up the strings on an old viola, lowered the sound as far as it would go, amplified it with a pickup and I bowed a “bass line” on it. It was funky. It sounded like a bleating bloated sheep at the bottom of a well. Father would have been proud.