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What is it about retirees and maracas, especially when the old bossa nova tune “Blue Spanish Eyes” is playing? I think maracas were actually invented for this number in order to appease the country club octogenarians who, without fail, spring to life and forcefully gesture an unrelenting desire to provide a spontaneous hundred-man percussion section whenever the tune is called. I have witnessed this time and time again. Blue Spanish Eyes starts playing, everyone starts playing air maracas and does that little hip swivel thing. I remember one time, back in the late 1970s, when I was playing with a society band called Tiffany Brass in Amarillo, Texas. All I can say in comment on that memory is, there are few spectacles in contemporary leisuredom comparable to the adrenaline-pumped 87-year-old retired vinyl salesman in plaid blazer, maroon golfing slacks, and white Hushpuppies sashaying with Phyllis Diller’s twin while surrounded by a maraca-sporting mob of AARP militants.
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This chapter of my life is largely over. I’m more selective about the gigs I take, and fortunately, can afford to be. But you never get fully beyond impressions and memories like these, and now and then a wisp of lounge will make it’s way around the corner. Then you have to decide whether to run, or stick around as a witness so you can write about it later. Curiosity always seems to make me chose the later. You can now read the results in one long, multi-chaptered rant on my blog. Just look for the tab labeled “My Life In Gigs,” or click here.
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“TURN IT DOWN!” is the phrase every musician dreads. It’s expected at a wedding. When you hear it at a nightclub, something is horribly wrong. Something went horribly wrong this night at Cody’s– a ninth-floor fern bar in Houston that was once the place to hang for pop jazz and the singles scene. Our quintet was about one month into this dream booking which guaranteed each of us $500 for 5 nights per week “forever, or into the foreseeable future.” The foreseeable future would meet with the foreboding present on this forsaken evening.
Our leader, a local jazz keyboard legend, was an adventuristic fellow. Here he was on stage, only a few days after major reconstructive knee surgery. His hip-to-toes cast made it difficult for him to find a comfortable position on the drum throne that he straddled, located at ground zero amidst his impressive keyboard arsenal. Whatever painkiller he was relying on had apparently been administered in doses appropriate for a mature bull elephant, and the sensitivity of his hearing was in question.
As the evening progressed, so did the volume emanating from our electric jazz ensemble. Between our leader’s powerful stereo keyboard rig, the guitarist’s acre of amplifiers, and the bassist’s leaning tower of boomdom, we were easily pulling more wattage than allowed by code for the nine-floor building. The meltdown came during the middle of the second set after we had driven a large portion of the sparse population from the room. The percussionist and myself, both un-amplified, had lost all hope of competing with this typhoon of tuneage, and a sarcastic posture toward our work was beginning to settle in. The song Invitation was called – a la Jaco Pastorious, the great electric bassist whose recording of the song is legendary for its speed and intensity. Our version would attempt to make up in quantity what it lacked in quality. The tune got faster and faster, louder and louder. There were so many notes being played that I imagined there was a shortage at clubs up and down Westheimer Blvd with other bands having to mime their musical numbers. At any moment, the Justice Department would order an anti-trust investigation.
Our leader seemed possessed, slamming his electric keyboards with both hands as the metal grates on his speaker cabinets rattled wildly from the impact of 120-plus decibels of sound. The bartender was screaming something at us and shaking what appeared to be a deformed hand sporting a single finger. It was like a musical version of D-Day on Omaha Beach. I couldn’t take it anymore. So, I just stopped playing.
Usually, when drums drop out there is a noticeable hole in the music. Not so tonight. There was no discernible change in the volume or sound at all. I sat, amused for a moment. Then I attempted to attract everyone else’s attention by dropping drum bombs here and there – slamming this cymbal or whacking that tom without any regard for the rhythm of the tune. I did get our leader’s attention. He turned his head my way and yelled, “YEAAAAA BABY!!!” and continued on without dropping a decibel. I was floored. Apparently, sarcasm was ineffective in the twilight zone.
The next day, we were fired from dreamland. Our offense? Management said the drums were too loud.
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This is part of an interview I did with Tony about three or four years ago for a book I’ve never finished on the lounge gig scene. What a treasure chest of humor Tony is. Coincidentally, Tony is recovering from brain surgery, thankfully, not self-performed. So please keep him in your prayers.
Tony Campise
Reedist, vocalist, composer Tony Campise lives in Austin, Texas, much to the delight of the other residents who appreciate the marriage of virtuosi jazz and humor. Campise’s soaring sax and flute work was prominently featured with the Stan Kenton Orchestra during the 1970’s and his solo recordings have received critical praise.
Scott: Toneman. Lounge provides an impetus for your work as a jazz and humor stylist. Am I right?
Tony: I’ve swum in that ocean while seeking to keep my head above it. Humor gives me ballast. Like a sax player buddy of mine in the Houston Symphony years ago who used to keep old hornpads and through them on the floor next to another player right before a downbeat. The otherplayer would look horrified, like “what am I gonna do?”, thinking it fell out of his horn. We were in a show with a really bad comedian onetime and the bass player rolled an old army surplus grenade canister on the stage during the show. Man, people just split!
Scott: He was an anti-lounge mercenary.
Tony: Yea.
Scott: I’m sure you had your fair share of gigs with crazed singers blowing up on stage.
Tony: Oh yea, of course, all of the time. There was Freddie’s Latin Fire Follies…man that was smokin!
Scott: I can imagine.
Tony: One of the more poignant lounge moments I remember was on a gig where we were backing Fabian. Remember that guy from the 60s? It was oh so lounge. And right in the middle of a ballad, during a quiet pause, the lead trumpet player broke wind and it reverberated throughout the Houston Coliseum. It was a show stopper.
Scott: What a contribution.
Tony: No one moved. The audience was frozen, and Fabian just kept going. And there was Bill back there red-faced. We used to call him Precious.
Scott: Did Fabian dock his pay?
Tony: Fabian should have docked his own pay. Speaking of low pay, which is another characteristic of lounge, the lowest paying gig I ever played was with Dan del Santo (God rest his soul) at The Ritz in Austin, Texas. I made $2.75 for the evening.
Scott: I love it when they give you change. I made $10.13 in Greenwich Village one time after practicing with this 9 piece band for a week. We play five sets and the guy says, “good job man, here’s ten thirteen.” I was excited. I thought he meant $1013. It ain’t a livin, unless you get a paper route to go with it. Of course, folks wouldn’t get their paper until late afternoon.
Tony: You have to have a car for that, and a license.
Scott: Tony, how would you define lounge?
Tony: Something that people buy … something that everybody gets into, but it won’t run. It’s full of fluids and stuff, but the motor is broken and the wheels are off-center.
Scott: And it has a faded two-tone vinyl roof that is ripped near the rear window, with rusty metal showing through.
Tony: Yea.
Scott: So what do you think is the attraction?
Tony: It’s wild. It connects with something inside people.
Scott: That is frightening and kind of depressing.
Tony: People like to cry, and laugh. Ya know, I’m getting tired of it all … tired of the lack of remuneration. I say I’m gonna melt my horns down and get my teeth fixed … maybe go back to my original profession — brain surgery. If I made footprints in the sands of time, then they’re all heel.
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Ever so often I play a gig where the sound is unbearably bad. Last night was one example. In short, from where I sat, it sounded like the rest of the band was in another room playing inside an iso booth with burlap bags over the microphones. Reminds me of a gig during my youth that happened in Amarillo, Texas. Here’s the entry from my gig journal –
One of the first bands I belonged to was called AmaJam. Why? Because we were all from Amarillo, Texas (except for one guy from Dumas), and we attempted to jam. Amajam’s first, and third from last, gig was at a local Amarillo park festival on Memorial Day. The local sound shop must have brought out every piece of sound gear they owned and chain-linked the whole thing together. I remember the way it hit me when I first arrived at the park. It looked like a cityscape – endless uneven towers of black speakers. The huge openings on the speakers reminded me of the floodgates at the bottom of many hydroelectric dams.
I’ve always wondered why so many sound people are hard rock fans, and why they think every performer wants to sound like Sammy Hagar. It must be the Jack Daniels. The hard liquor was already flowing with the sound crew as we unloaded and set up our jazz group. I went out front to see how we looked. Well, like Lilliputians perched between the big guns of a battleship is how we looked. When they were ready for a mic check, the guy at the mixer yelled “KICK!” through the monitors and almost blew me off of the drum throne. I have never since heard a human voice amplified to that level.
I was afraid to oblige him, wondering what damage would be done to my body by the subsequent audio explosion if I actually hit the kick drum. So I taped it gently and watched an old cottonwood tree shed its leaves 200 yards away. After that the sound guy said, “OK. You guys are on!” They cared nothing about checking the other instruments. The horns and keyboard would not be heard, and the bass and guitar were, naturally, set to maximum volume.
The downbeat of the first tune felt like a tactical nuke has just been detonated on the stage. I remember very little after that, except for the look of absolute ecstasy on the face of every member of the sound crew as they bobbed their heads and mumbled (I could read their lips) “Rock ‘n roll, man!”
That we opened with Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower” was beside the point. It sounded like Sammy Hagar.
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Austin music magnate Mike Mordecai shared a story with me recently about a famous and colorful Austin musician, the late John Mambo Traynor. Salsa/jazz group Beto y los Fairlanes was about to perform for a big wedding reception and Mambo, a competitive windsurfer, had been windsurfing all day. Mike says he came right off the beach and straight into his tux, no shower or anything, and sat down and played the first set. At the break, Mambo was so famished from the days activity that he descended on the smorgasbord with a vengeance, eating everything in sight with no thought for what was going on top of what. Mike says after 30-plus minutes of aggressive grazing, Mambo was as green as the fairways at Augusta. As they returned to the stage for the second set, Beto called up a requested song, New York New York (which is on most musicians sick-and-tired-of-playing list). Mambo, as if on cue, turned on his stool and threw up into his snare drum case. Without missing a beat, Beto retorted, “OK, then how about Satin Doll ?”
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There are so many. I used to wonder why, and then came the thought that they can’t help it. Power corrupts, more often than not. We see examples all around us in business, politics, religion, sports, and families. Why should music be any different?
There are some provocative audio clips that have been floating around among working musicians for years that include rants by Buddy Rich, Freddie Hubbard, Julie London, and a particularly funny one by Orson Wells who grew irritated with the copywriting for a commercial voiceover he was recording. Most of them are not family friendly, but can be found on the Web with a little work. Buddy Rich had a legendary temper, and in the clip I heard, chewed his entire band out on the bus for some unrevealed misstep, and threatened to fire them all. Apparently, this was a weekly occurance.
I’ve had my share of these experiences over the years and have written about them in my forthcoming short ebook, My Life in Gigs. Here’s another excerpt:
Luis, the sensitive one
Luis used to play with some famous jazz musicians and was something of a name in his own right at one time. But when I encountered him in the early ’80s he had transformed into a Bellevue outpatient with a healthy appetite for that illegal Colombian version of confectionery sugar. Life was one massive scam opportunity for Luis and he treated a number of us Austinites to his special brand of nightmare one muggy summer evening in 1983. Billed as “The Luis’ ***** Big Band,” we packed Austin’s 6th Street Live stage at something like 24-strong. Six saxophones, every trombonist in town, trumpets galore, drums, bass, piano, and two percussionists would provide the background for Luis’ bombastic trumpet playing. To say this gig was overstaffed would be a gross understatement. At our afternoon rehearsal, Luis passed out the charts we would be performing. There must have been some mistake. These were Junior High jazz band charts with all the horns playing in unison. Did he really need 18 brass and reeds playing Girl from Ipanema in unison? But the real fun was about to begin, and the bulls eye was pasted on the drummer. Luis was notorious for reducing grown men to sniffling basket cases with his explosive mindless tirades. On this day he aimed his ego at me. Two bars into Ipanema he cut the band off with a flurry of his arms and sniped in his Cheech Marin-like voice, “More power from the drums! Elvin, Blakey, Max Roach! Kick ass!” I took this to be Luis’s way of encouraging me to play the piece with more strength as he combined the names of famous jazz drummers with an invitation to commit violence on my instrument. He counted us off again…remember now, this is Girl from Ipanema – country club bossa nova favorite.
We made it through two bars before the arm waving commenced, this time accompanied by a shaking face with loose cheeks flapping from side to side. “Come on man! More power! Elvin! Blakey! Kick my ass!” I jacked it up another level, this time playing the piece more like the Ornette Coleman band doing a wedding date. I still only made it two bars in. “Oh man, can’t you play those drums!?! I want you to KICK MY ASS! ELVIN!! BLAKEY!!”
At this point I was about ready to kick Luis’ ass, and maybe Elvin Jones’ and Art Blakey’s as well. But being a nonviolent type I decided to see how far he would take this. Ipanema was counted off for a fourth time and I gave my best impression of Alex Van Halen at Madison Square Garden. “MORE POWER DAMNIT! I WANT MORE POWER! ELVIN!! BLAKEY!! KICK ASS!!!” The band members’ heads were in their hands and I was now on the verge of busting into that kind of laughter that signals the orderlies with the straight jackets to rush in. Luis counted the tune off one last time, shouting and spitting, “ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!,” like Der Fuehrer rehearsing a chorus line of SS troopers. Realizing there was no place for me to go musically, I stood up from the drum stool, leapt into the air, and came crashing down with all my might into the cymbals. I repeated this circus-like move, rapidly, for a solid two bars creating a very loud, disturbing sound (imagine a dump truck driving through a Bed, Bath, and Beyond® store.) I looked up and noticed the dramatic cut off sign coming from our crazed feature performer/conductor who appeared to be brushing away a swarm of African killer bees. “YOU !*$@&#! CAN’T YOU PLAY THOSE DAMN DRUMS?!? I WANT POWER, YOU WHITE @!#&*%$!
That was it. The man was deaf and now he’d gone racial. I stood up from the drums ready to rumble as the little lunatic approached screaming profanities at me and my mother (who was in Amarillo at the time and had not had the pleasure of meeting Luis).
Alas, there was no fight. One of the percussionists stepped in front of me like a secret service agent cutting off access to the President. As I began to pack up my drums the band members implored me to stay on as no one else in town would be willing to step into this furnace. I looked at their pathetic faces and turned to mush, agreeing to finish the rehearsal and play that night’s gig. Luis calmed down and the band promised to dogpile on him if he so much as spoke a vowel in my general direction. A highlight of the evening involved Luis trying to steal a band member’s flugel horn by stashing it backstage between sets.
I still have this nightmare about getting arrested with Elvin Jones and Art Blakey after beating up Luis in some place called Ipanema.
