Chicken has been the subject of songs and humor since, at least, the advent of the blues. It’s even a funny word to say, especially when you go with a lazy, suthun pronunciation with more of a “g” sound in the middle — “chiggen!” Great New York sax player, Bob Berg, used to do a tune he called “Live at the Chicken Shack.” It was a totally groovin’ shuffle. Any song about chicken has to be a shuffle.
One of my favorite moments in chicken humor is the dinner scene in Blake Edward’s 1968 film, The Party.Peter Sellers is sitting low at the long, crowded table because they were out of chairs. As he struggles to cut into his Cornish game hen, his chin just above the table and elbows high in the air, the roasted bird slips off his plate, takes flight, and lands with a perfect perch just inside the tiara of the beehive-haired woman sitting across from him. She has no idea it is there, goes on with dinner conversation, and Sellers gazes on in horror. The first time I say that movie, and that scene, I laughed so hard you’d have thought I was choking on a chicken bone. It was the movie that ran after the evening news, back when that was common in the pre-cable and VCR days. My parents were asleep in the next room, and I laughed hysterically into a pillow so I wouldn’t wake them up.
During my college years I created a lot of silly phone answering machine messages with my brother, Doug, and good friend Paul McKee, a great jazz trombonist and Woody Herman alum. Seems we were preoccupied with chicken then as well, with half of our answering machine songs featuring chicken-inspired titles and lyrics. Rainbow Trout seemed to find its way in there a lot as well. I cannot explain this affliction, but here’s a sample.
A nice demonstration of how I have more experience as a drummer than as a camera operator. Although having my face hiden by a pole is useful in the event that I fall off the stool or encounter some similar musicial mishap.
Talk about Chicken is more post-impressionist, antediluvian than The Laundry Burglar. A large potion of these crazy answering machine messages from the early 1980s included my roomates at the time, great jazz trombonist Paul McKee and my brother, Doug Laningham. This one features Paul and I multitracking chickens doing atonal swing. Paul supplies the lovely mallet work, I play brushes on snare, and there are other things going on in the background that I now find hard to discern.
One of my great pals from Austin, Texas, Beverly Spicer, is a deep and expansive thinker, and happens to love this one. Go figure. We must be communicating something beyond what we realized at the time.
I know we pushed the boundaries of our callers’ patience with this one. I don’t remember anyone ever leaving a message after this, or making it to the beep.
I’m about to retire my paper planner. I know I’m behind most people in this move. I was OK being behind the times for a while, but when people start to laugh at you when you carry a zippered paper oranizer, that’s tough to take. Someone said to me, “Man, that is so 1990s!” Being behind a little is OK, but being in the last decade is not cool. I used to hear that about my haircut, and then I finally decided to keep my hair so short that hurricane force winds could not cause it to move. Since then, I’ve had no comments about having dated hair.
It’s hard to let a planner go that has been so stalwart and brave. Mine has been sat on, kicked, dropped in mud, and left on top of the car. But this last episode made me feel it is time to give the little guy a break. A dude flagged me down on the interstate to tell me that the planner was riding on my bumper. When I pulled over, not only was it safe on the bumper after enduring parking lot speed bumps and accelerating up the onramp to Texas Highway 183, but it did it all while perched on it side instead of laying flat. That is one awesome planner. Show me a Blackberry or iPhone that can do that?
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.
(Excerpted from my forthcoming ebook, My Life in Gigs)
The second set (commencing at 11:45pm) was already painful. This was a “I wanna go to sleep” pain, nurtured by stacking on this fourth gig in a day after three separate outdoor festival sets with different artists in the sweltering Austin, Texas summer heat. At least I was indoors now. But the fatigue was intense, reminding me of those poor British officers who were made to stand for hours in The Bridge Over The River Kwai. I was thirsty. I could taste the dust in the air of this rat trap of a basement railroad bar.
Somehow I made it through that second set upright and found a chair to slump into for a short nap, unconcerned about the possibility of falling asleep and sprawling onto the bar floor. As I dreamed of a Posturepedic sleep I was finally awakened by the bassist. “It’s 1:10, man! Time for our last set.” Yea, right. Because there are so many cultured listeners who must hear jazz at that hour. Because the trained ear prefers jazz at 1pm when the players are on the verge of dropping into a coma. Because no one ever has the wherewithal to say, “why?”
So I said, “why?”
They laughed at me with that “I know you’re just kidding” face and the “because it’s always been this way” hand gesture. Three tunes into that third set I was fighting off sleep less and less effectively. Now our leader calls Sentimental Journey and applies the “watching the grass grow” tempo. One minute in I was sound asleep, somehow balanced perfectly on the drum throne arms dangling limp at my sides. I heard the sticks click as they hit the floor but thought I was dreaming. They sounded like chopsticks, and I imagined the aroma of a nice stir fried rice cooking in the distance. Wasn’t that a nice little tune playing on the jukebox? Sentimental Journey, I think. It must have been a minute or so before the quasi-slumbering bassist spoke to me.
“Scott! Wake up!” came the urgent whisper. “Wake up, man!”
I opened my eyes to the dim light of the cave and realized that, no, I was not in a comfortable bed sleeping in the middle of a quiet Oriental restaurant, as I had imagined. I was still on the gig, my sticks on the floor, saliva on my snare drum, and a clueless band leader who later commented on the beautiful and unexpected space I had applied to the middle of his solo.
I’m enjoying watching my young ones bang on a set of rented drums today. There’s something about a drum set that brings out the experimentor in all of us. Our four-year-old is the funniest today, up on the stool with legs dangling, reaching out for a tom or cymbal, always the one furthest away from him. He’ll make contact with a few and then slip off the stool and drop out of sight. I had a similar experience a few times as an adult, at least the falling off the throne part. Falling off the back of a stage was the worst one. I was so worried about how stupid I looked that I found no time to worry about getting hurt, and didn’t. And it must have been a doozy from the audience. I went off the back of the drum riser and stage and half the drum set went off the front. You could not script better live music comedy.
