MUSIC DAYS—THE VILLAGE OF LANDECK

The Landeck Tavern was my second gig.

The first one had been a dream-like stroke of luck. A fortuitous fluke. A drummer had backed out at the last minute and, desperate, the band leader had drafted me. I worked with him at a music store in downtown Lima, Ohio, and it was like a drowning man latching onto the lifeguard come to save him. He was in his tiny studio waiting for a student and fretting about his drummer’s defection. He saw me going by his door toward mine carrying my drumsticks and was like a lightbulb had come on in his head. “Hey kid!” he said. “You working for New Year’s Eve?”

“No,” I answered.

“Yes you are! You’re playing with me at The Milano.”

I was beside myself with pride and joy. I told myself he’d chosen me for my talent. But he hadn’t. He’d chosen me because I was there. Truth be told, it was an almost foolishly audacious move to book an inexperienced kid for a gig in the biggest club in the area, but when a union sideman backed out on you at the last minute for New Year’s Eve, you were pretty much screwed. Everybody made sure they were booked for that night, because it paid at least double the rate for any other night of the year.

“Thank you so much!” I gushed. “You won’t regret it!”

I headed on toward my studio to keep my appointment with a private percussion student, but the guy stepped out of his own cubbyhole into the hall and barked behind me, “Don’t you want to know what you’re gonna make, kid?”

“Oh yeah, right,” I said blushing as I turned to face him, since I would have played for free, if he’d asked. But not talking money was, I realized, so unprofessional! And these old union guys were really serious about professionalism.

“How’s fifty bucks for four hours sound?”

“Great!”

“Tough negotiator, I see,” he said, then added, “It’s a four-hour gig, ten to two. Give yourself time to set up. Don’t be late.”

As I say, The Milano Club was the premier nightclub in the area. They could have used it as a shooting location for a typical fifties mob club in a movie—plush but not stylish, heavy on the ornaments, lots of luxurious dark red and glitz, with patriarchal portraits near the entrance as a finishing touch. It was known for its Italian cuisine, but also for its steaks. Mostly, however, it was known as the playground of local high society—or of those who were spending what they didn’t have pretending to be.

Fifty dollars for four hours was a lot of money back then. In fact, I used that fifty bucks to buy my first car, a rust-laced ’57 Dodge Royal. But the night of the gig at The Milano, I didn’t even have a license yet. I was a high school sophomore and still riding the fifteen miles up to Lima from my hometown of Wapakoneta to my job at the music store with my high school band director who gave lessons there, and then driving back home on my learner’s permit with my ol’ man as my compulsory passenger when he’d come pick me up after work.

This was a big deal in itself. Whitie, my dad, had never been anything like supportive of much of anything I’d ever done. I guess, in this case, it wasn’t my music he was supporting but my willingness to work and make money in my chosen field. He respected work and money. He had no hobbies and couldn’t figure out, for the life of him, why anybody would do something for free. He considered work and money a sort of ground-cable for life, with everything else being acts of wishful thinking. So his willingness to pick me up from work was a pleasant surprise. And the ride home with him, with me driving, during those few weeks until I could get my permanent license I remember as one of the few times he and I really bonded while I was growing up. Usually back then, he didn’t get me and I didn’t get him, so we just sort of lived our separate realities. This, then, was a real treat for me, something we actually did together.

The Milano Club was run by Big Joe. Joe was a tough guy and looked the part. But I reflected that he really wasn’t all that big. When a guy was called “Big Whatever”, you half-expected him to be impressively, imposingly large. Joe wasn’t. But I would later meet and also work for Big Joe’s cousin, Little Joe, who ran another Italian club called The Alpine Village. If Big Joe wasn’t really all that big, Little Joe was indeed quite little, so suddenly the Milano Joe’s moniker made sense to me.

But anyway, after that stunning debut at The Milano, I wanted to go right on playing. I wanted to join a jazz band, but they all were well established, or they got together for specific gigs with the band leaders choosing from among guys they already knew. But musicians got sick, went on vacation, had to go out of town and died just like people in any other human group, so there must be some call for relief drummers, right? And somebody must know how to get me in.

So I asked my high school band director, who was president of Local 320 of the American Federation of Musicians. He’d already gotten me into the union, despite my still being a minor, when I excitedly told him about the Milano gig.

I think he probably gave me a hand more out of dogged loyalty to union labor than because of any personal feelings for me. I mean, he wouldn’t have tolerated a non-union musician playing in a major club, which would have meant sanctioning the band leader who hired me and banning union musicians from playing The Milano by way of punishment. And he was a regular at The Milano. It was just easier for him to call up the union secretary-treasurer and get me signed up. Which meant that on my first gig I didn’t have my driver’s license yet, but I was already a card-carrying member of the AFM union.

Anyhow, I asked him if he knew of any groups that were looking for a drummer. He said he didn’t but that he’d keep his ear to the ground. So then I asked if the union got requests for relief drummers. He said they did, but that the person to ask about that was Lippy. Lippy managed the piano and organ department at the store. But he was also the local business agent for the musicians’ union. He’d liked me from the outset and was always very nice to me.

If Lippy didn’t like you, you knew it right away. He was a stocky little red-faced man with a nice head of neatly combed silver hair. He had a hilarious sense of humor, a real bad-boy reputation, and a temper that was even quicker than his mordant wit. But me, he liked.

So I went to him and asked if he ever got calls for relief drummers.

“All the time,” he said.

“Think I could maybe get a gig now and then?”

“I’ll get you gigs all the time if you want, kid.”

“Great!” I said. “I’d really appreciate it.”

“No sweat. What do you want to play?”

“Uh...drums?” Although I was rather accomplished at it, that was all I knew how to play and he knew it.

Lippy laughed and said, “No, kid, I mean what kind of music do you want to play?”

“Any!” I answered quickly. It sounded presumptuous, I realized, but I meant it.

“You’re on, pal,” Lippy said. “Any calls I get for relief drummers, you’re the first one I’ll call.”

I thought he was kidding, but as it turned out, he wasn’t. And in my first year as a union musician, between the ages of sixteen and seventeen, I ended up playing with a score of different bands in just about every bar, club and lodge hall in the area that hired live music.

The first gig I got after The Milano, Lippy fixed up for me directly over the phone. He was back in the office at the store talking on the telephone when I came in to work. By this time I was driving my own car—my rusted out, two-tone, gold and black Dodge—up to work after school and was getting a lot of driving experience by taking all of the different alternative routes: I-75N, the North Dixie, State Route 501, and the so-called “back way”. All roads led to Rome, or Lima, as it were, and I wanted to get as much driving expertise under my belt as I could. And I wanted to get it as quickly as possible.

I had parked in the music store’s parking lot out the back door and across the street and was coming in from the loading dock past the office when I heard Lippy say to the person he was talking to on the phone, “Ah, here he is now, just a sec.” Covering the mouthpiece on the phone, he said, “Hey kid, wanna play this Saturday?”

“Sure!”

“Great!” he said, and then went on talking to the person on the phone. “Bob? Yeah, he’s free.”

I went on along the corridor onto the sales floor, said hi to everybody and then took up my normal place behind the small goods counter. It wasn’t long before Lippy came out of the office and brought me one of his business cards with the job information on the back.

“The Landeck Tavern,” I read. “Where’s that?”

“Landeck,” Lippy said.

“Never heard of it.”

“You going from Wapak?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, it’s maybe twenty-five miles. Take One-Ninety-Eight to where it merges with Ohio Sixty-Six. Take Sixty-Six to Landeck Road. Turn left on Landeck and it takes you right into town. Tavern’s on your right. If you pass a big church on your left, you went too far. Turn around and go back. But don’t worry, you can’t miss it. It’s the only club in town. Careful not to blink when you drive in, though, or you might miss Landeck altogether.”

It took about half an hour or a little over to get to Landeck on two-lane roads, the last one a narrow country road named for the village that had grown up there around the Lutheran Church. It served the surrounding rural community as a place to get supplies and visit the post office as well as to send their kids to school. It also served as a watering-hole and source of entertainment. I was headed to the watering-hole and I was part of the entertainment.

Now, half an hour or so seems like a short trip, especially along bucolic country roads. But for me it was a real adventure. I had never driven anywhere but to Lima and back, so Landeck might as well have been Timbuktu.

The job was three hours, from nine to one. I left myself plenty of time to get there and get set up. And I’d put my bass drum, snare and ride tom in the trunk of the Dodge and my floor tom, cymbals and stands in the back seat by five in the afternoon, so as to be sure not to have any last-minute rush to contend with before the trip up. Then, I shined my black wingtips, and later bathed, shaved, slapped on Russian Leather, and dressed up in my blue blazer, my grey wool dress pants, a starchy white shirt and a red and blue striped tie. It was winter and freezing cold out, so I also put on my hound’s tooth topcoat, my brand new Mallory of Fifth Avenue snap-brimmed hat and black leather gloves. I looked a little too serious for my age, like I might want to sell you a life insurance policy or something, but I was ready to go.

I refused the supper my mother, Reba Mae, offered me. I only accepted coffee. I was way too nervous to eat. I couldn’t wait to get into my car and out on the road where I could have a smoke. I wasn’t smoking at home yet then, but my pretending not to smoke and Reba Mae’s pretending not to know I smoked was, by that time, merely an unspoken formality that we both maintained. By a little later that year, the cat would be out of the bag.

It was winter-dark already when I left home. As my headlights scoped out the terrain on my way to Route One-Ninety-Eight, everything in my home town looked different, new, alien. But I was what was new. I was no longer a high school kid. I was a professional musician. One with his own car, and a license to drive it.

The trip would have been exhilarating if I hadn’t been so nervous about the job. But I tried to enjoy it anyway, rolling down the driver’s side window part way to let in the fresh, cold air, tuning the radio to the coolest music I could find, and smoking my sophisticated Salem menthols.

I navigated my way along One-Ninety-Eight past Spencerville to Sixty-Six and then northeast to Landeck Road. No problem. And my travel nerves were allayed. I sailed along the narrow darkness of Landeck Road, my punctured muffler lending the Chrysler eight-cylinder a satisfying roar, with empty fields and woodlots unfolding on either side until, up ahead, I could see the lights of the village.

I arrived way early at the tavern. I felt strange walking in there and, at first, the bored bartender and regulars at the bar looked at me like as if I were a Martian.

“Uh, hi,” I said. “I’m the drummer with the band tonight. Where do I set up?”

The bartender pointed with a shot-glass he was drying. “Over there on the bandstand, chief,” he said. And I went back out to my car and started hauling in my drum kit and setting it up at the back of a large-ish wooden platform, next to a worse-for-wear upright piano that already stood there.

In his celebrated Piano Man, Billy Joel sings:

It's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday
And the manager gives me a smile
'Cause he knows that it's me they've been comin' to see
To forget about life for a while
And the piano, it sounds like a carnival
And the microphone smells like a beer
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, "Man, what are you doin' here?"

That’s the kind of place the tavern in Landeck was. Friendly, unsophisticated, a gathering place for folks wanting “to forget about life for a while.” And Bob Reed and his raucous band of senior musicians helped them do just that on Saturday nights.

Reed showed up just as I was finishing setting up. He introduced himself and said, “Welcome aboard.” He was a wiry, nervous sort of guy in his fifties, a trumpet player brought up on Dixie and swing.

“You all set up?” he asked.

When I said I was, he said, “Want to give me a hand with the chairs and stands?” and I realized that he and his guys had had to tear down after their last gig so their regular drummer could get his set off the stage and I could get mine on. He and I quickly got the music stands and chairs out of the corner where they’d been stashed and set them up on stage just as the rest of the guys straggled in. In the meantime, more regulars and out-of-towners had started filling the place up, and my feeling of invading a private party from when I first walked in quickly melted away.

Reed and his guys had a huge, fat “fakebook” full of every swing, Dixie and polka tune imaginable. And Reed was the youngest among the band members. The others ranged from sixty-some to late seventies. It was a blast playing with those guys because they were long past being up-tight about their music. They were relaxed with themselves and their instruments and that’s how the sound—a decidedly Dixieland sound—came out. The people in the tavern loved it. It was a pretty big band for those times when most jazz gigs had been scaled down to trios and quartets or just a piano man. This one had piano, bass, trumpet, sax, trombone and drums. It was a big, blasty, raucous sound and I was in heaven.

The piano player was the only one I knew by sight and reputation. Jimmy Ell—a tottering man in his seventies with a pencil-thin moustache and dark-dyed hair, whom you never saw that he wasn’t at least slightly drunk. And when he got really snockered he was always good for a riotous story.

For instance, the day job of another bandleader, Haydn Snyder, was piano tuner. Whenever a bar called and asked him to tune their piano, Haydn would always ask, “Did Jimmy Ell ever play it?” If they said yes, Haydn would politely decline to take the job. Why? Because Jimmy Ell always had a mouthful of snuff while he played and whenever he felt the need to spit, he would stand up, open the top of the upright piano and let fly on the action and strings of the instrument. It didn’t make a lot of difference to the sound on those battle-weary eighty-eights, but it sure played hell with the work of the piano tuner.

And then there was the time he was playing a wedding at the upscale Shawnee Country Club. The father of the bride invited the band to partake of the wonderful hot buffet when they took their break. Jimmy Ell and another member of the band were blown away by the homemade beef and noodles with mashed potatoes. They ate a big plateful each and washed it down with beer, which Jimmy reinforced with the lip-wash he carried in his hip flask. When they’d finished, Jimmy Ell says, “I think I’ll get seconds.”

“Forget it, Jim,” the other guy says. “We’ve gotta get back up on that stage.”

“No sweat,” says Jimmy, “I’ll get it to go.” And with that, he walks over to the buffet table, grabs a big handful of mashed potatoes and stuffs it into one side-pocket of his dinner jacket, and then he grabs an equally big handful of beef and noodles and stuffs it into his other side pocket.

Wiping his hands clean with a linen napkin, he turns to his astonished fellow band member and says, “Okay, Jack, I’m ready. Let’s swing, Daddy.”

He was a wailing piano man when he wasn’t playing in the cracks between the keys, and that’s why he kept getting union gigs. But this night, like others, he got more and more inebriated as the evening went on. At one point, during a solo, he played right off the high end of the keyboard and fell off the bench onto the floor. The people on the dance floor thought it was part of the show and laughed and applauded. The rest of us just went right on playing until Jimmy picked himself up, climbed back onto his bench and caught up to us at the bridge.

Later on, he was playing The Beer Barrel Polka in one key while the rest of the band was playing it in another.

“Jimmy! Jimmy!” Reed hissed, but oblivious and apparently deaf, Jimmy Ell played on like nobody’s business in a key of his own. Then I was astonished to see Bob Reed pull a small, black revolver out of a mute bag under his seat and aim it at the piano-player. Apparently, no one else was surprised to see this, because I was the only one who seemed alarmed.

Then Reed cocked the revolver and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening bang even as we kept right on playing. Only then did Jimmy Ell turn toward the bandleader who was still training the smoking starting-gun on him and Reed hollered over the polka music, “You’re in the wrong goddamn key, Jimmy!”

But it hadn’t made a lick of difference to all the red-faced farmers and their dates out on the dance floor. They were literally polka-ing to beat the band and couldn’t have given a tinker’s damn whether we were in tune or not.

Out of the hundreds of gigs I would play from then on, this was one of the most fun and most memorable, and I was truly sorry when the three hours were up and Reed handed me a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Hey, ya done good, kid!”

Outside, as I was loading my drums back into the Dodge, it was starting to snow. On the way back home I stopped at a lonesome truckstop and had cherry pie and coffee to celebrate. I’d driven myself to my first real professional gig. I was on my way. I sat there smoking a cigarette and drinking the strong black refill the waitress had brought me, watching the snow coming down, blanketing the roofs of the tractor trailers parked beneath orange lights outside. Finally, with trepidation because of the snow, but with joy at being my own free agent, I headed back out to my car and into the night, along country roads back home.

I lit another cigarette and tuned the radio to a jazz station. I was excited. I couldn’t have guessed then just how busy a musician I was about to be. All I knew was that my music days had begun. And I never wanted them to end.