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.

VIGNETTE THREE: DOC—THE TANGO KING

The first time I played with Doc, it was by pure coincidence. I was working as a relief drummer, but with a band I often played random gigs with, whenever their regular drummer couldn’t make it. They’d had a piano-player who, when he played solo gigs, played the Cordovox instead. One night they’d played a place that didn’t have a piano and he’d taken his Cordovox along instead, and they’d loved the fresh new sound that, in his able hands, the strange instrument gave to their dog-eared gig book and they’d decided to incorporate it full-time.

So anyway, one night when their keyboard man couldn’t make it and neither could their drummer, they called me—because I was available—and Doc, because Cordovox-players were scarce as hen’s teeth in the roster of Lima Ohio Local 320 of the American Federation of Musicians, and that was Doc’s exclusive “axe”. Their guy was an extraordinary Cordovox-player, but Doc had nothing to envy him. He had all the technique, but with a slightly different, more melodic, less aggressive style.

It was a jazz and swing sextet. Everybody was a little nervous at first with two subs working the gig, but after the first couple of tunes, we were cookin’. I had been a relief drummer for the better part of a year when I was seventeen, and now was back at it. I was used to accommodating myself to the different styles of the different bands, and Doc was a natural, a guy with an ear and a feel for every tune, every style, every tempo. This cat had listened a lot and everything he’d listened to had sunk in and become an integral part of him.

The Cordovox was a crazy instrument. Unfortunately, they quit making them, because they had a unique and wonderful sound. To the uninitiated, it looked like an plain accordion, but it was so much more. It was practically a synthesizer in “squeeze box” format.

It was by chance that I had earlier worked with a Cordovox player when I landed a steady gig while I was still in my senior year of high school. That was when I was with an outstanding band called The Doug Price Trio, the trio being thrilling Berkeley Jazz School-educated trumpet-player and front man Doug Price, myself, and an absolutely amazing Cordovox-player called Gene Wallenhaupt, a veteran musician who was also a high school band director. Wallenhaupt’s exciting and multi-faceted sound eliminated any need for a bass-player (part of the usual trio format: piano, bass and drums) and added an incredible range of accompaniment and rhythm capable of giving us the sound of a much larger musical ensemble. Put that together with Doug’s absolutely wailin’ trumpet and the band was amazing. The final touch was added by Doug’s brother-in-law, Tom, with his easy-listening style voice, who sang a few songs a set between instrumentals.

Anyway, Wallenhaupt used to get really irritated when anyone mistook his mega-versatile Cordovox for a simple accordion and was always dumbfounded when we’d just done an eclectic set of everything from Miles Davis and Duke Ellington to Herb Alpert and Burt Bacharach, with a smattering of sophisticated fusion music thrown in for good measure, and some drunk would stumble up to the bandstand and ask, “Hey guy, can you play the Hoop Dee Doo Polka like that guy on the Lawrence Welk Show?” It drove Gene insane and at the end of each set, when we’d take a break, you could hear him mutter, “Next sonuvabitch that asks if I can play Lady of Spain or the Beer Barrel Polka, I’m deckin’ ‘im.”

I had quit the trio at the end of the year before and traveled to South America to visit the exchange student I’d fallen in love with during my senior year. That’s why, now that I was back, I was just gigging again on the weekends with whatever band needed me and attending classes a couple of hours away at the Ohio State University music school during the week.

But back to Doc. It wasn’t until the first break on that gig with the sextet that I first noticed that Doc was blind.  It was when we all bellied up to the bar and Doc and I ordered Cokes (he because, I assumed, he didn’t drink, and I because I was still underage for hard liquor and never even drank three-two on a gig), while the rest of the band ordered beer or whiskey. I know that nowadays it’s PC to say “vision impaired”, but Doc wasn’t vision-impaired. He was lights-out blind. I noticed when I talked to him and he looked toward my voice but seemed to be focusing on a point somewhere over my shoulder. Before that, I just thought he was one of those musician-types who liked to wear shades even in the low lights of a nightclub.

But no. The super-dark shades were to cover his disability. Still, they made him look cool, with his trim well-groomed, dark Italian look and sharply-pressed dark blue suit.

We liked each other right off and started feeling each other out and matching each other’s licks on the thirty or so different tunes we played that night. Doc lent a new feel to the band. He knew every tune we played like he’d learned them in the cradle, but since he couldn’t read the fake book, he gave a new dimension to the arrangements, a new skillfully-improvised feel that sought to blend, even as it modified the sound.

It turned out to be a really fun gig.

After the show was over and we were tearing down our equipment, Eddy, the trumpet-player, came over to me and said, “Hey Danny, you and Doc are both from Wapak. Would you mind taking him home?” and I said sure thing.

I went over to Doc and said, “I didn’t know you were from Wapakoneta, so am I,” and he asked me my last name and I told him and he asked, “Are your folks Whitie and Reba Mae who owned the Teddy Bear restaurant.” And when I said they were indeed, he said he knew them well.

But it wasn’t until we were back in Wapakoneta and I’d pulled up to his house and recognized it that I realized that, besides being a helluva musician, he was also the well-known chiropractor that both my dad and my grandfather had gone to for their sciatic pain. Granted, Whitie and I didn’t talk to each other much back then, but I was surprised I’d never heard him mention that his chiropractor was blind.

Anyway, it was as we were unloading Doc’s stuff from the backseat of my ’63 Chevy Nova—the trunk was full of my drums—and taking it inside, that Doc said, “Hey Danny, I like how we play together. I’m about to start a gig every Saturday for the summer, and maybe beyond, at a place in Bellefontaine. I thought maybe we could form a duo if you don’t have anything better to do.”

And that’s how I started working with Doc for a string of Saturdays, the summer before I turned twenty. 

Doc and I didn’t share the usual musical relationship, where you meet up at the site of the gig, say, “Hey man, how’s it goin’?” and just about all communication after that is through the music. No, in this case, I spent a lot of time with Doc. I drove us there and home, obviously, every Saturday night and on two-lane roads back then, it took the better part of an hour each way, so we talked—a lot. But I also always arrived a little early at his house to pick him up and his wife, who was also his nurse and receptionist, would invite me in to wait for him to finish getting ready.

She would show me into what was essentially Doc’s waiting room for his chiropractic patients. But honestly, it felt a lot more like a comfy sitting room with overstuffed armchairs and a big old couch of the type that we called davenports back then. The house itself was of the rambling old two-storey type with a dark varnished staircase up to the second floor and wall-papered walls, like many other of the turn-of-the-century places that formed the core real-estate in Wapakoneta, with the more modern ranch and modified A-frame houses being relegated to peripheral neighborhoods known as “additions” in those days.

Doc had a pretty German shepherd seeing-eye dog called Pepper, who would always find her way into the waiting room when I was there. We got pretty friendly after a few Saturday evenings. I was a young wise-ass and so naïve that I actually thought if I could keep Pepper from going to Doc when he came downstairs into the room, he wouldn’t know I was there. So when I’d hear the stairs creak, I’d hold onto Pepper and pet her to see how long it would take Doc to figure out that I was in the room. I was always amazed that he was never more than halfway down the steps before he’d call out, “Hi Dan!”

Once I said, “How the hell do you know I’m here, Doc?”

And he said, “Well, let’s see...you smoke both pipe and cigarettes. Not sure of the brand, but the cigarettes are menthol and the pipe tobacco’s probably Sir Walter Raleigh.”

“How do you know that when I never smoke in your house?”

“Well, hell, Danny, I’m just blind, not dead! I can smell it on your clothes...And then there’s that English Leather cologne you wear that Pepper and I can smell a mile off. You know, Dan, you shouldn’t be so friendly with Pepper. She should only be friends with me.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious,” Doc said. “A pilot dog’s no good to a blind person if it’ll make friends with any Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along.”

Adolescent that I still was, I was hurt, but after that, Pepper and I never shared anything more intimate than a handshake. Doc didn’t take her along on the gigs, so he had to teach me how to be his guide dog.

I always remember Doc when I see the Al Pacino version of Scent of a Woman, the scene where Pacino’s character, Lt. Colonel Frank Slade, who has lost his sight, turns on a street-corner to his weekend chaperone, a private school kid called Charlie Simms, and snaps, “Are you blind? Are you blind?”

“Of course not!” Charlie says.

"Are you blind? Then why do you keep  grabbing my goddamn 

arm?"

“Then why do you keep grabbing my goddamn arm? I take your arm.”

Well, Doc and I had that same conversation on a street-corner in Bellefontaine, Ohio. “Don’t grab my arm,” Doc said. “You’re not dragging me anyplace, see. Just let me rest my elbow in the palm of your hand, as if you were my dog’s harness, so I can feel when you step up or step down. And for chrissake don’t go telling me, 'Careful now, there’s a step here or a curb there.' I’ll feel it by how you move. It’s like when I’m on a plane and ask for a cup of coffee and the stewardess comes and says, ‘Here’s your coffee, sir. Careful now, it’s hot!’ Well, of course it’s hot! If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t want the damn thing!”

He was always telling me that I was a terrible guide dog. Pepper had me beat all to hell, he’d say. When we got to know each other better, if he bitched and told me what a bad dog I was, I’d lead him into a parking meter for spite and then laugh about it. I was easily entertained back then.

“Funny Dan. Really funny,” he would say with half-mock anger. “Playing tricks on a blind man. Real nice!”

Once when I showed up early, I was amazed to find Doc sitting cross-legged on the floor, rewiring his Cordovox sound mixer. This, I figured, would take ages with a blind guy doing it.

"Hey Doc," I said. "What gives?"

"Hey Danny," Doc answered, "a minor wiring problem...And you're just in time! What color's this wire? And how about this one? And this one over here?" And just like that, bing, bang, boom, he had the complicated circuitry rewired and the cabinet put back together.

Once I asked him about being blind. Thinking aloud, I said I didn't know what I'd do if it were to happen to me. I was sure I'd be desperate.

"Look Danny," Doc said, "being blind's a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world.You can't see, so you just learn to do other things a lot better." 

The hour-long drive was always interesting. I remember having an attack of hay fever one summer evening, as we were driving along with the windows down in my non-air-conditioned car, and having a sneezing fit over near Indian Lake.

“What are you allergic to?” Doc asked.

“No idea,” I said.

“Because back there where you started sneezing there was ragweed, golden rod and ryegrass among other things.”

Another time, we’d ridden along in silence for a long time, when all of the sudden, Doc said, “Coming up over the next rise, there’ll be an S-curve. Coming out of the second one, you’ll see a big white farmhouse with a barn right up close to it.”

Sure enough, as I pulled out of the second curve, there was the house.

“Damn!” I said. “You’re right!”

“Don’t sound so surprised. Of course I’m right. Listen, if we’re still playing this gig in the wintertime and get into bad weather coming back, we can always stop there for the night. They’re old friends of mine.”

The place we played on the main drag in Bellefontaine was a bit “divey” and was frequented by beer-mellowed rednecks and belligerent rural roughnecks as well as a crazy-quilt mix of local regulars. But they tended to be an appreciative crowd and Doc and I enjoyed their applause. Still, we enjoyed playing together even more. It never felt like “a job”. It was always fun.

The only time things got dicey was once when this mean drunk came up to the tiny bandstand (on which Doc with his Cordovox and speakers and I with my full drum set barely fit), and wanted to sit in on the drums.

“Sorry, pal,” I said, “Doc here’s real touchy about who he plays with, and I never lend my drums to anybody.”

I thought that would end it, but the guy was back every few tunes to ask to sit in and every time, I tried as nicely but firmly as possible to get him to understand that it wasn’t happening. Finally, I said, “Look buddy, how about going back over to the bar and having a beer and coolin’ it. Just stop annoying us before I ask the bartender to throw you out.”

The guy had a few choice words for me, but in the end, turned and weaved his way across the barroom and out the door.

“Good riddance,” I thought, and figured it was over.

But as we were playing the next set, I was riding the high-hat and looking toward the wall when I heard a whoosh and whistle and then the clatter of a tire iron hitting my ride cymbal and then the floor. Doc’s right arm was over his head blocking the skull-crushing blow the mean drunk had tried to lay on me, and now, with his left he was punching the guy in the face with a haymaker that knocked him off the stand onto the barroom floor, where the bartender and a couple of other men were already picking the guy up and giving him the bum’s rush into the street, opening the door with the top of his skull.

“What the hell are you doing for eyes?” Doc turned and shouted at me. “You almost got your goddamn skull split!”

All I could say was, “Thanks for the save, Doc. Man, you are amazing!”

There was this one very special night. On the way to the gig, I had told Doc about the time I’d spent in Buenos Aires. He knew I had a “foreign girlfriend” but I’d never told him about the adventure of traveling on my own to South America when I was only eighteen.

He asked if I liked tango and I said that I loved it, but that “nobody in the States knew how to play it.”

He didn’t say a word in response. But that night, during the second set, he said, “Let’s do a tango.”

And I thought, “Oh god, get ready for Hernando’s Hideaway.”

But then he said, “Sit back. I’ll play this one solo. And with that, he played an amazing version of what was practically the national anthem of tango, La Cumparsita, and followed it, almost DJ style, with La Canción de Buenos Aires, Caminito, Sur and Adios Muchachos. He followed those with a couple of progressive tango pieces by Astor Piazzolla, Adios Nonino and Oblivion and I could have sworn that he had turned his Cordovox into that quintessential instrument of tango, the bandoneon. I just sat back and listened, dumbfounded.

After that, I would always think of him as Doc, The Tango King. He was nothing short of incredible.  

We did indeed get that gig for the rest of the year and even played New Year’s Eve. But I decided not to go back to school that spring. I wanted to travel a while. What actually happened wasn't what I had in mind, but travel, I did. By March, I'd been “invited” by the US government to serve in the Army. I joined instead of letting myself be drafted and for the next three years played with Army Bands in the States and Europe following Basic Combat Training and a stint at the military school of music.

I couldn’t have imagined at the time that I’d never see Doc again after that Bellefontaine gig was over. Never imagined that warm, friendly relationship Doc and I had formed would end with a handshake and a “see ya” after our last night on that steady gig. But sometimes that’s just the way things work out.

NOTE: It's really hard to find anything on the Internet even remotely close to the way guys like Doc and Wallenhaupt played the Cordovox but the closest thing to their style from when I was in the duo with Doc and or the trio with Gene is the jazz style of Wynton Marsalis and Richard Galiano. Take a listen:

https://youtu.be/dVxBDEqmwSA

https://youtu.be/Dtd4OhP8rvg
https://youtu.be/Tl21YlEVkl0

SMOKE RINGS: PART 2 — A NEW KIND OF SOPHISTICATION

By the time I started smoking openly at home, the habit had become, I fancied, an added mark of sophistication in the new life I was suddenly setting out for myself. During the summer before the winter in which I would turn sixteen, my high school band director did me the honor of asking me to give summer private percussion lessons to beginners and junior high kids who were in the band. I could use the band room at the high school, he said, and earn a little extra money.

I was thrilled to say the least. But that wasn’t the end of the honors bestowed on me. The director also came to me during the following school year, and said that, if I wanted it, there was a part-time job for me at the top music store in the nearby city of Lima, Ohio, Monday and Friday evenings and Saturdays from nine to five, teaching whenever I had students and working as a sales clerk in between time. They’d let me have the use of a studio free of charge and the money from the lessons would be all mine. They would pay me about a dollar an hour (certainly not awful pay for a part-time high school kid employee in the mid-1960s) for the hours I accumulated on the sales floor, where I’d be expected to do some light maintenance and inventory as well.

Everyone...

I explained that while I’d love to say yes, it’d be another few months before I could get my driver’s license and even then, I’d have to see if my parents would lend me one of their cars to be able to commute the twelve or so miles that separated my home town of Wapakoneta from Lima. The director said not to worry, that he lived in Lima and on Monday and Friday evenings when the store was open until nine, he would take me, since he also taught there. Until I got my license, then, I’d only have to have my parents drive me home those two nights and take me in to work and pick me up on Saturdays.

Shaking my head, I said that my mother was too busy and I really doubted if I could talk Whitie (my dad) into coming to get me after he’d worked all day. But he insisted, saying it was a great opportunity that I shouldn’t miss. He was a regular customer at Whitie’s restaurant, the Teddy Bear, and evidently considered that would count for something in convincing my father, so he added, “And leave your dad to me.”

To my surprise, Whitie accepted the deal. Not only that, he had me take out a learner’s permit, and on the way home when he would pick me up after work, he would have me get behind the wheel of the big nine-passenger Olds 98 station wagon that he was driving at the time. Other than a certain penchant for road rage, Whitie was a more than competent driver and, surprisingly, since patience was not usually one of his virtues, also a serene and patient teacher.

I admired...

I recall one late-fall Monday evening, when I already had numerous trips under my belt, driving home to Wapakoneta from Lima, via the old North Dixie Highway, with Whitie in the passenger’s seat. It was raining pretty hard and visibility was far less than optimum. By this time, however, Whitie was no longer watching my every move and we were relaxed enough to chat a little as I drove, on topics beyond the scope of the myriad instructions that he had given me in the beginning. At one point, Whitie was sitting sideways, turned toward me on the broad bench seat—there were no seatbelts back then—and having just made some point in our conversation, had paused to pluck the hot cigarette lighter out of the dashboard, and was just then lighting up a Pall Mall, when suddenly, on the left, I saw a pick-up truck pulling out of a roadside tavern parking lot onto the two-lane highway in front of me as if I weren’t there.

I hit the brakes and lay on the horn simultaneously, saw Whitie fall sideways, shoulder first, against the dashboard, felt the big Olds start to fishtail, let off the brake, saw the pick-up’s brake lights and knew he’d stopped mid-lane, dropped two wheels onto the berm and gunned the engine to pull out of the slide as I slipped ever so closely past the side of the truck, still blasting the horn, before easing back onto the road.

Back under control on the pavement, shaking from head to toe, I saw Whitie calmly push himself back up onto his seat. He then went ahead lighting his smoke and after a deep drag, he said, “See that’s good training. And you handled it well. Know what the lesson is?”

“Be on the lookout for drunk assholes?”

“Nope. It’s that you have to drive defensively. You can’t take for granted, ever, that the other guy will do what he’s supposed to. In fact, you have to figure he won’t, that every other driver on the road is a stupid jerk, and know at all times what you’re going to do if the other guy screws up. It doesn’t matter who’s right. You’ll be just as dead if you’re right and the guy who plows into you is wrong.”

Smoking, to a certain almost imperceptible extent, changed, somewhat, my usually semi-hostile relationship with Whitie. Our feelings about everything from politics and sports to those about work and culture, our views and preferences were almost diametrically opposed and I’d come to find that avoidance was the best way to stay out of troubled waters. So at this stage, we seldom talked. But like boxing—one of the few passions and surely the only sport we shared as avid fans—smoking became a point of shared neutrality between us.

It wasn’t as if my father was glad I smoked. On the contrary, he early on told me it was a mistake to have taken up the habit. Afterward, however, he no longer preached about it. And as I say, there was a sort of tacit bond between us as smokers. It wouldn’t seem like much to anyone seeing us from the outside, but I could feel it. Like when I’d come home from somewhere and find him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a smoke and I’d serve myself a cup as well and sit there with him in brief, uncontroversial communion for the length of a cigarette or two.

...smoked

A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, and thus only days away from having my driver’s license, the band director said he had the solution for my travel problem. He had a car to sell me. A ’57 Dodge Royal that had belonged to his son, who was currently in the Army, serving a hitch in Vietnam. I said I was really grateful but didn’t have the money to pay for a car right now, since I was buying a new drum set in installments from the store where I worked. If he could, perhaps, wait a while...

“How much do you have to spare right now, Danny?” he asked.

“I don’t know...like maybe fifty bucks.”

“Done, fifty bucks and I’ll throw in tax and title fees.”

It was like a dream come true! I had a job as a musician. I was no longer being treated like a high school kid but as a responsible adult. And one of the old hands at work, a locally renowned organist in his sixties had just said, “Hey kid, my sax player and I are booked to play a four-hour gig at the Milano Club and our drummer just backed out. It’s a New Year’s Eve gig so it’ll pay fifty bucks for four hours. You free?”

Was I ever! My first pro jazz gig. I was in heaven. And now I had wheels! The very first day I had my license, the band director drove his son’s Dodge to school and had me drive him to work at the music store and then home. The car was now mine. Leaving his house, I flicked on the radio, dialed to a jazz station I knew and lit up a smoke. I felt like my whole life was changing and it was all good.

On the way home, I stopped off at a truck stop, ordered pie and coffee, put a quarter in the juke box and as Reg Owen’s rendition of Manhattan Spiritual started playing, I sat there with my coffee, pie and cigarettes feeling like a character from a movie about the Beat Generation. The menthol cigarette smoke and the strong black truck stop coffee felt like fluid happiness as they entered my gullet. It was a brand new world, and it was all mine. I was suddenly somebody.

To be continued...