Squaredance

In the 1890s, march king Phillip Sousa was looking to replace the hélicon--an outdated small-bore instrument in common band usage at the time. Sousa wanted a beefy instrument with the range of the tuba and a massive horn that blasted deep sound over the top of the other musicians. In outdoor use, the original Sousaphone had an upright bell that was good only at catching rain or tossed peanuts. But manufacturers responded to Sousa's request for a bell that pointed forward, toward the audience--a change that revolutionized marching music, enabling the player to carry the weight of the tuba on his shoulder as he (or today, she) plowed along a parade route.

The sousaphone has a bell with a 26-inch diameter, is played by buzzing your lips into a huge metal mouthpiece, and you change notes by pressing a combination of three piston valves. Consequently, the horn eventually fills with moisture from condensation, which the musician can drain by opening a small valve called a "water key" at the bottom of the curve where the horn wraps around the body.

The b-flat sousaphone I carried weighed close to 30 pounds and after you marched five miles in a parade, your left shoulder hung noticeably lower than your right and it had a wicked throb. If you actually played the horn--which I could not do--the circular end of the mouthpiece left a red ring about your lips, as if you had spent hours French-kissing a harpy.

I had been in the San Fernando Valley Youth Band, an independent collection of kids from junior high age to college, who practiced Monday nights on difficult classical orchestral charts that had been arranged for brass band, then we went outside the last half hour and marched in place while blasting out Sousa marches. We held an annual, formal concert playing overtures and symphonies by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovitch, Holst, and others; but the balance of the year we performed at Christmas festivals, played for July Fourth celebrations, and marched in parades around California.

The trademark performance in the street was a Texas squaredance where the band separated into two facing lines while the sousaphone players skipped between like mad dervishes, wheeling about as the music rose to its finale. Unfortunately, there weren't enough trained tuba players to handle all the squaredance parts for the marching band, so tall and stocky woodwind players were pressed into "ringer" duty. That meant carrying that lacquered brass monster like a heroin habit for hours in parade formation, pretending to operate the valves, and wheeling around in the squaredance on asphalt roads covered with slick, green horseshit.

I didn't mind the attention it brought me--relished it, rather--but, frankly, the horn created a metallic vacuum around your face when you put your lips to the mouthpiece. I knew not a note, but blew into it anyway. The sousaphone had an odor of its own, a hint of iron and years of spit, and an alchemy of sour chemical tastes I had never since experienced.

We sousaphones marched in the last row of the band, musical pariahs in the fashion of today's exiled cigarette smokers. We were the last to know about a turn in the road, last to hear the drum major's whistle over the din of the percussion, the only musicians who went bare headed in the mid-day sun of so many summer's parades. But five or six times over the length of march, we strutted to the center of the squaredance formation and spun like behemoths from the iron age.

And, blissfully, no one was ever hurt. We fell plenty of times, denting the bells or earning a bruise the shape of the horn on our obliques and backs, or simply plopping on our asses, legs spraddled on the ground, the horn still coiled about us like a cobra, the bell glinting in the sun. In all my time as a ringer, I never saw anyone truly embarrassed, for it was all perfectly wonderful theater in its sheer idiocy.

Sometimes I think of my dance partners. I wonder if Matt Garbutt, now a symphony conductor in tails and tux, ever recounts the squaredance to his peers. I wonder what happened to Russ Quisenberry, too, after he went to Silicon Valley with his family to work in technology.

After the marching season ended and we were seated again on the orchestra risers, I took my place among the clarinets and, one Monday evening during a ferocious symphonic passage, I looked up in time to see Russ, red faced and blowing his heart out, topple backwards, his sousaphone bell leading the way as he plunged off the riser and onto the floor with an ugly clatter and bang.

Undaunted, we roared towards the finale as he struggled to his feet, playing like life depended on volume, chasing the final notes with the unleashed fury of lovers.

The Marrying Kind

It takes leather balls, read the bumper stickers of the golden age, to play rugby. More rightly, I was to learn at my own peril, it took the willingness to receive a blinding scissors kick to them and keep running as if your village--its wooden towers just peeking up over the horizon--had been set aflame by Vikings and you carried the only bucket of water.

At San Jose State I was, for God's sake, the drum major of the marching band, not a football legend. But we met on Saturday mornings at the ROTC field with our heavy cleats and bottles of orange juice laced with vodka, and taped up to celebrate touch football between the scribes of the school paper and the tuba section. I was always matched up at guard or blocking back against the short and fleet Gary Rubin of the Spartan Daily, who would rush the quarterback with the finesse of a junky finding a smoldering roach on the turf. I was never quick, but I loved to get in Rubin's way if I could and deliver a glancing blow.

After one muddy battle, a trumpet player came up to me and said I might make a good candidate for the rugby club. In the mid-1970s, colleges on the West Coast fielded rugby sides, but were prohibited by the rules from competing as NCAA teams. That meant you formed a collegiate "club", an informal team that under any other moniker were madmen who loved to pull hair, gouge out eyes, and take a tasty bite of an opponent's ear all in the name of the local colors. Incentives included after-match drinking parties that involved opening kegs in team cars as you sped to the local sorority house to gather spoils much like the Mayans disrobed their opponents following ball games and tore out their hearts.

The game of rugby, legend goes, was born in 1823 when a soccer player at England's Rugby School, William Webb Ellis, plucked up the round ball "with fine disregard for the rules of football" and raced with it in his arms. Nice mythology if you would have it. As far back as the Middle Ages, villagers across the English countryside beat each other senseless in games called mob football or Shrovetide footie, finding every manner of habit in dragging an inflated pig's bladder across a felicitous boundary. These were the people who invented culinary delights such as blood sausage, kidney pie, and haggis. Even the Vikings (evoked earlier) had a their game of knattleiker in the 9th Century, a rite where you passed a stone, ball, or anything else that would bounce using hefty sticks. Who needs both eyes, anyway? Isn't that why the good Lord gave you two?

My civilized brush with rugby came at a time when universities allowed you to wear rubber tooth guards, shin guards (if you were a true wimp), and you could wrap athletic tape round your head to pin down your ears so an opponent couldn't rip them off in a single attempt. We met on the south campus fields at San Jose State, far from other organized sporting conclaves, on freshly mown grass on fields that ruggers called "the pitch".

The very first practice I was beset with dry heaves that left my ribs aching. You ran the pitch like a soccer player but slammed into each other with the ferocity of American football athletes. You ran, then ran with the ball, then ran laps around the pitch for an hour, then ran some more, and when you had worked on your conditioning for a while, the coaches would blow a whistle and you'd scrimmage the game. Unlike brutish American football, you just didn't go around hitting somebody on every play. Rather, you only hit the fellow with the ball, and then fought like two hundred paupers over a feeble penny to win its possession. This was called a "ruck".

When a ball carrier was struck or tackled, he immediately released the ball, in a gentlemanly fashion that clumsy Americans would consider a fumble or horrific loss of ownership. But in rugby, the two sides would converge on the fallen ball, bind themselves together by gripping loose uniform parts or (quite without shame) any available limb or muscle, and attempt to push the other team off the ball.

I would go home after play to the billowing pot clouds of Allen Hall and climb the stairs to the second floor in my cleats, clattering especially loud to announce that I had survived another practice, and sit on my bed, my heart pounding madly, so much grass in my clothes and receding hair that I resembled a chia pet with bruises. I looked with great fear and wonderment toward Saturday matches, always playing with the knowledge that I was smaller, slower, and an easy target on the pitch.

Because we were a club, a sad step-child to organized college athletic teams, we played the universities around the Bay Area, regardless of their distinct NCAA athletic affiliations. Translation: we were a small, eager side from San Jose State that routinely held matches with gorilla monstrosities hailing from Cal and Stanford, sides that regularly were comprised of pre-steroidal banshees that played on Stanford's Rose Bowl football squads, or on Cal's national championship rugby sides or, worst of all, out of work professional football players who maintained affiliations with their alma maters and thoroughly enjoyed turning us into muddy pancakes across the pitches in Cal's Strawberry Canyon or in Stanford's sprawling fields.

Dave So-and-So, a backup linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers took great relish one Saturday afternoon of punting the ball in a "up and under" with a vicious slice of his leg, following through without impediment into my right thigh. For a week, you could trace the cleat pattern from his shoes in the blue-cum-yellow Rorschach of blood pudding beneath my flesh.

Week after week, it was like watching from on high while the man who possessed my body kept going back for more, driven by some unseen force to seek glory in a game that fled back through time to when angry villagers cracked each other on their crowns with Shillelaghs in some pagan dance of idiocy.

There were enough morons to go around, apparently, so we fielded three sides at San Jose State, and I was never good enough to play for the A-team. I was happy to play the position of second row for the B's. It was a thankless position. Sides began play with what was called a scrum. You lined up facing your opponents in an inverse pyramid: three men in front, two behind, and a final man at the rear. The two largest men, called props, held the third man--a swarthy dwarf with quick legs-- between them. Then the rest of us crouched low, and pushed the entire pyramid against the opposing side. Confused yet? The referee would wait until both pyramids joined in a brutal smack and tossed the ball on the ground where, at once, the little guy held aloft by the props would rut around for the ball with his legs, winning possession.

Of course, you were kicked. It was like bedding down with a team of mules in rut. And by the time the ball was won, you ran off as a pack, chasing the ball carrier, your eyes tearing and head afizz from receiving more than your share of kicks in the leather.

Our last match of my rookie--and only--season, we were bussed down to southern California were it was said we would play Occidental College at the Rose Bowl. I was buoyed by the prospect of playing ball on this halcyon field where John Wayne, Frank Gifford, and O.J. Simpson toiled for the Trojans in the glory of their times. But when we arrived, it became crushingly clear that we were to play our match on the uneven grass of the Rose Bowl parking lot where the pitch was measured out and our narrow goal posts erected.

No matter that the lot was strewn with jagged rocks and bits of broken glass left behind by tailgating revelers. No matter that the stadium towered behind, rather than around, us. We set to work against our adversaries from, as we joked, Accidental College, and afterwards, our gashes stitched in unprofessional creases by volunteer trainers, so many pebbles yanked from shins and raw-rashed buttocks, we shared a keg with our new-found Occidents. We had won by two tries.

I never scored a try in my abbreviated career, taking the ball across the line and touching it down in the act that gave American football the name for a score. But I played out every game, ignored the raging voice that said to play possum, sit on the sideline nursing a faux injury against the beefy ruffians of Cal or Stanford, and when the year was out, I had really done something that none of those fellows from the Saturday tiffs between band and news-rag could even imagine. Only once, concussed in practice, did I pass out and tumble down the stairs at Allen Hall.

You may wonder (though I doubt it) about the title for the spindly fellow who would kick like a newborn demon for the ball in the midst of the scrum. He's called the "hooker." He hacks for the ball like the weekend chef with a barbecue fork who jabs at tri-tips; and after all is said and bruised, it's the hooker who leads us in song at the post-match drink-em-ups, igniting a tune that doubtlessly has been crooned drunkenly for ages on the pitches of Marlborough, Cheltenham, and Shrewsbury:

"If I were the marrying kind, and I thank the lord I'm not, sir,
The kind of man that I would wed, would be a rugby hooker.
and he'd strike hard and I'd strike hard,
we'd both strike hard together,
we'd be all right in the middle of the night
striking hard together...."

The High Register

If there is anything potentially more embarrassing than, say, the admission of a amorous proclivity for farm animals, it's the confession that I play the clarinet. In the early 1960s, it seems, the clarinet, easily portable and more abundant than tympani or sousaphone, was the instrument of choice for families who had children in Los Angeles County schools. There were three sections of clarinets in band--adding up to more than 20 musicians--compared with the random bassoonist or trio of euphonium players. For a boy who measured his entire life on being mentally and bodily different from his fellows, the clarinet promised little more than anonymity and an opportunity to create screeching sounds that would scare off all sentient creatures with ears.

To wit: in my last year of elementary school, I was issued an silvery clarinet--save for its wooden mouthpiece--that was forged from a single piece of metal. It went whole into its carrying case. I'm sure it was crafted from surplus World War II aircraft parts, soldered and shaped, then had nine holes punched into it for the keys. We stored our instruments in lockers in the music room where other students had a chance to blow into them during the day.

By the time I entered Porter Junior High in Granada Hills, I had graduated to a wooden clarinet, which broke apart into two main sections, along with a barrel, bell, and mouthpiece that you sorted into proper slots in the velvet-lined storage case. It took months to learn how to play it without hitting one of those bone-chattering screeches. The instrument was powered by a slender bamboo reed that you soaked in your mouth for five minutes before assembling the clarinet. Once moistened, the reed vibrated evenly and if you built up an embouchure (training the muscles of your face to clench securely about the mouthpiece), you could avoid unwanted notes that diverted highway traffic for miles.

My father used to ask if I took requests, to which he'd add, "Can you play "far, far, away?"

Whenever relatives came for a visit, my mother (who had been a successful child violinist) trundled me out to abuse them with squeaks and screeches. I was proud--and horrified.

Day by day, semester after semester, I rose to the challenge. With 25 clarinetists in Mr. Schackne's band, it always came down to Howard Goldberg and I. We fought like dogs for the first chair of the section. One semester he'd sit at the top, the following semester I wrested the honors away. We played musical leap-frog for several years, rising to Schackne's challenge to play complicated parts from Ralph Vaughan Williams Folk Song Suite or Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor --a death battle of woodwinds while our band-mates looked on.

In our last year of junior high school, I joined the Porter Polka Dots as principal clarinetist. Russ and Bruce played trumpet and Matt played tuba. We wore white dress shirts onto which we carefully pinned red polka dots cut from construction paper--and green-felt tyrolian hats with feathers. Proud then, I can only look back with horror. We sawed our way through "The Beer Barrel Polka" and other delights.

Following graduation, mom and dad took me on a visit to relatives in New York City. It was an astonishing trip for a 12 year old. We visited Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, Radio City Music Hall, Chock Full of Nuts, Coney Island, and the Empire State Building. But the highlight of the trip was a visit to the crowded district in Manhattan where merchants sold musical instruments. In one store, the clerk showed us a new Buffet clarinet. It was made of rich, brown pearwood and the quick action of the silver keys took your breath away. I nearly died when we walked out, the black leather carrying case in my hand.

But the following fall I entered high school and all would change. I improved my playing, but at the same time, it was clear that the clarinet was decidedly not a sexy instrument. We were listening to "Eight Days a Week" and "White Rabbit" on our .45 rpm records. Moving to saxophone was an option, but really, anyone who was "boss", "bitchin'", or "cool" was studying guitar.

I had a brief flirtation with bass clarinet, a horn more than twice the size of a clarinet with low notes that shook your whole body when you played. Since bands and orchestras only had a single bass clarinet, it was my only chance for distinction, and for a while I played for the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic, rumbling out bass clarinet parts written by Shubert, Mahler, and Brahams. But in a world that orbited about the blazing sun of rock and roll, it simply would not do.

In the marching band, I turned to bass drum, since there was only one of those, and I could wear a kilt at half-time shows. Then, when I graduated and went off to college, I became the drum major, leading the band on to fields at Stanford, Cal, and the Rose Bowl. I twirled a five-foot long mace and high stepped in front of more than 50,000 drunken fans, which made more sense than playing that squeaky clarinet. But it still was not the same as mastering the guitar cords to Disraeli Gears.

For the better part of a half-century, the Buffet Crampon languished in its case, toted about the globe through my many professional incarnations. It found a home under my bed in towns like Fairbanks, Norfolk, Champaign-Urbana, and Tuscaloosa. It hid in the closet up in the Olympic Mountains and near the bustling airport in San Jose. I held onto it through times where selling it would have helped pay a month's rent, or when I thought it would finance a road trip.

I held to the notion that someday it would make sense to take it out and play something. And I was plagued by guilt whenever I recalled the day my mother and father walked me out of that store in Manhattan.

Recently I borrowed a guitar with the idea that I would finally learn the cords to Thunder Road. But my fingers hurt and I could barely eke out a note. I boxed up the guitar and reached beneath my bed for the clarinet case. The cork that lined the barrel and bell had curled off in decay and the pads that secured the tone holes were dry and cracked. It cost $150 to have it tuned up to playing condition, and I brought it home, tapping the case on the seat beside me as I drove.

Reeds are made of plastic or bamboo composites now, but you still have to lay them on your tongue and soak them before playing. I fitted the reed into the mouthpiece and tightened the ligature. My fingers knew exactly where to go, and I started in on Rhapsody in Blue, with that long glissando that rolls way up into the high register as if I was born for it.

I played for a good fifteen minutes before my embouchure collapsed. And I'm proud to say that I didn't squeak, even once.

Music Lessons

Mr. Schackne's beginning band class met during the third period. The way we butchered standards like Sousa's "Liberty Bell" and Mancini's "Pink Panther" would make the deaf wince. When Schackne was sick and they called in a substitute, we swapped instruments. I'd hand my metal clarinet to the drummer, and he'd hand me his tympani sticks. We almost sounded better playing unnatural instruments.

At the time, one of the more sadistic junior high fads involved curling a girl's hairpin, pretzeling it around into a wicked tool that--when pressed against the victim--snapped the skin and raised an angry welt. The trombone players found a way of inserting the modified pin into their spit valve. The valve was strategically located at the end of the slide. On a long glissando, the trombonist ran the slide all the way out, popping the loaded hairpin into the ass of any one of the musicians sitting in the row ahead laboring furiously against the logic of the printed music. The flautists usually sat in that row, punctuating the end of the glissando with a agonized yelp. It was, using the parlance of the time, bitchin'.

I have long since forgotten her name, but in reflection I am delighted that she had been the recipient of choice along that vulnerable row of pre-adolescent fannies. Two years before I joined Mr. Schackne's slaugherhouse, my mother had taken me on an errand of some urgency in our '54, powder-blue Bel Aire. There was a huge crowd in the parking lot at Valley Plaza--one of the first large shopping centers in booming suburban Van Nuys--and when we got out of the car, my mother took my hand and we wedged through the throng to a stage that had been erected in front of the row of shops.

Walking with stiff confidence (no doubt owing to a bad back), candidate John Kennedy was making a point of shaking hands, and he took mine for a moment as my mother beamed. I remember the look on her face with greater clarity than I do the man on the stage. Even so, the event is colored more by what happened in Mr. Schackne's music room two years later.

There was a substitute teacher that day and we were grinding out a medley of Christmas tunes for the coming season, when the loudspeaker in the hall cackled to life. It was the principal. Kennedy, he said, had been shot in Dallas and we were to assemble in the schoolyard for directions to go home early. The room buzzed. Some of us were more excited about the prospect of getting out of school than stunned by the news. We hurried to put our instruments in their cases.

In the center of the hubub, the flautist rose with a flourish. She sorted out her dress around her, then proclaimed how bitchin' it was that Kennedy was killed. Good riddance, she said.