Band on the Run

Yesterday, we were dodging the remnants of Hurricane Irma, and for much of that time, I was checking Facebook to make sure that our friends farther south were weathering it all without damage or injury. Once the downgraded tropical storm arrived here in Atlanta, it was a case of staying put and hoping for the best. But in the early morning, while the winds were still rather calm, a high school friend of mine posted a note on Facebook, looking for people who had been in our high school band. That set off a chain reaction of nostalgic posts which ended up putting a nice polish on an otherwise stressful day.

The Treadwell High School Band, 1972-1973

The Treadwell High School Marching Band was an institution in my hometown of Memphis. Under the direction of Dr. Harlo McCall, an accomplished musician who had graduated from the Chicago Conservatory of Music, the Treadwell band had truly "gone places." The band played all around the Mid-South, toured in Mexico, and even played in the Rose Bowl Parade one year. But Dr. McCall, or "Doc" as we called him, suffered a heart attack when I was in ninth grade and ended up leaving his position at Treadwell. Since he was such an icon at the school, the future of the band was somewhat up in the air.

Mr. Wilson took over the band when I was in ninth grade, and for a time, chaos ensued. It wasn't necessarily Mr. Wilson's doing, but some people had taken Dr. McCall's absence as an opportunity to turn the band period into a free-for-all. I distinctly remember one day when an exasperated Mr. Wilson stood on the podium as band members yelled and threw smoke bombs across the floor. The rehearsal had been an unmitigated disaster. Someone must have called their parents, because a few minutes before the end of the band period, one of the band moms suddenly appeared at the door to the band room, and looking on in horror, she yelled, "What are y'all doing to your BAND?" That was a low point, but it was also a turning point.

Mr. Cleotha R. Strong

We finished out that school year, and on the first day of the fall semester, we had a new sheriff in town. His name was Cleotha R. Strong. He was a tall, stylish man who bore a striking resemblance to Richard Roundtree of "Shaft" fame. We were somewhat intrigued by his calm, yet commanding, demeanor. Mr. Strong ("C.R.", the other teachers called him) told us that he played electric bass in what he called a "jazz combo." His appointment to the position so long held by "Doc" was to some students and parents controversial, but my friends and I noticed a few things about Mr. Strong: he was always willing to help any band member, he liked exploring new music, and he could talk about almost any subject.

Our Treadwell cafeteria was adjacent to the band room, so fairly soon into the new school year, several of us started finishing our lunches early and heading to the band room to hang out with Mr. Strong. He would bring all these albums from musicians we'd never heard, but he could discuss the music of any current band we happened to be listening to at the moment: he was equally as comfortable with Led Zeppelin as he was with Blood, Sweat & Tears. Most of all, he seemed to enjoy spending time with us, and fairly soon, the band as a whole began to pick up on this. He was nice to people, and he gained a following among Treadwell students, regardless of whether they were members of the band.

Mr. Strong could be a strict disciplinarian when necessary, but that firmness was always complemented by a desire to make us better musicians. Many afternoons after school, we would line up outside to practice marching, and for some otherwise well-mannered students, the idea of behaving during this time simply proved too demanding. I remember that my friend Mike, an honor student when not in band, would taunt Mr. Strong about staying in line, to which Mr. Strong, from behind his ultra-cool wraparound sunglasses, would reply with some admonition that generally kept the rest of us in stitches. My friend Charles was an excellent trumpet player, but he loved to talk. When this would happen during rehearsals, Mr. Strong, without missing a beat, would say, "Charles, shut yo' mouth." Business as usual.

(L to R) Neil Conner, Charly McClain, Anne Freeman,
Richard Brooks, Tim Howard, Lewis Wright

The long and the short of this story is that we came back as a serious high school band. Under Mr. Strong's leadership, we entered all kinds of band competitions, marched in parades in Memphis and elsewhere in Tennessee and Arkansas, and played at every football game. We played on nights when it was below freezing, and we played on days when it approached a hundred degrees. It was like we never stopped playing.

I was very honored during my senior year to serve as the drum major for the band. I will never forget the experiences I had: keeping track of who was looking faint (and who fainted) during lineups for parades, making sure we knew where we were going when we marched down Main Street, and keeping track of everyone who was supposed to be on the buses. One night late in my senior year, while we were at a band competition in Knoxville, I pulled out my acoustic guitar and started playing in our hotel room. A few other people joined me, and within about a half hour, almost all the members of the band, along with our chaperones, were either in or just outside the room, singing along. Right in the midst of our spontaneous merriment, Mr. Strong appeared, smiling from ear to ear. That moment absolutely made my senior year.

In my time in the band, I played trumpet, flugelhorn (Chuck Mangione's favorite), and French horn. I found, and still find, the performance of music fascinating, but equally as enjoyable during those band years was just being part of that group. People who use the term "band geeks" may be missing out on the true spirit of being in a band. There's a camaraderie in a band that is born of hours of rehearsals, physical exertion and exhaustion, and riding bumpy buses to and from performances. For me, at least, it was one excellent period of my life, and that Facebook post yesterday brought it all back.

To those of you who may be reading this and who enjoyed being part of the Treadwell band, you know what I mean: our shared experiences were demanding, yet incredibly rewarding. In my own case, I emerged from junior high a bit timid, but by the time I completed my years in band, I had the whole social thing down, and I suspect that holds for many of you. The good times we all shared were something that we might not be able to replicate, but in those days we grew, we forged friendships and respect, and we definitely made some memories.

Sending peace to all you Eagles, wherever you may be.

Steeling

I am reading and rereading the Facebook posts of several friends who are talking about Steely Dan in the light of Walter Becker's passing yesterday. It is almost impossible to describe how influential this band was to the music scene of the 1970's. Few musicians before or since have attained their level of technical excellence and originality, but even at the time, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were known to be unabashed perfectionists.

Back in the day, we would sit around and talk about their music, how it so perfectly blended jazz and rock, how it spoke a language, both musically and lyrically, that spanned from the East Coast to the West. No one else seemed to be doing that. I have such good memories:

• Hearing that unbelievable "Reeling in the Years" guitar solo for the first time while driving to high school my senior year and just sitting there frozen in place until the song was over
• Listening to the "Countdown to Ecstasy" album on the roof of my friend Paul's house while sipping cheap beer
• Asking that same Paul to play "Midnite Cruiser" over and over on his Marantz quadraphonic receiver
• Hearing "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" in Klein's car one night on the way to dinner in Chicago and not finding out until twenty years later that the opening keyboard riff was actually taken from an old 1960's Horace Silver jazz tune
• Witnessing my friend Dan's excitement when he burst into my dorm room at Northwestern waving his copy of "The Royal Scam" and yelling, "This is the best thing I have ever heard!"
• Purchasing my very own copy of the classic "Aja" at Peaches Records in Memphis and taking it home, marveling at the glossy cover finish and impeccable music within
• Listening to the cuts of "Gaucho" while driving up and down Manchester Boulevard while working in L.A. in late 1980, thinking how this band had taken me from high school to the working world

The music was, of course, only part of the magic. Consider the lyrics...even if you don't understand them all, which we didn't at the time and may never:

Double helix in the sky tonight
Throw out the hardware
Let's do it right
Aja, when all my dime dancin' is through
I run to you

Are you with me Doctor Wu,
Are you really just a shadow
Of the man that I once knew?
She is lovely, yes she's sly
And you're an ordinary guy

Bad sneakers and a Pina Colada my friend
Stompin' on the avenue
By Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

Got a case of dynamite
I could hold out here all night
Yes I crossed my old man back in Oregon
Don't take me alive

Who is the gaucho amigo
Why is he standing
In your spangled leather poncho
And your elevator shoes?

I suppose I could go on and on, and even now as I type, I'm listening to "Aja" again. Every time, it's like the music is brand new, fresh and sophisticated. It made a difference. Generations of musicians will feel that influence, and we will go on listening. Donald Fagen says he will keep the music of Steely Dan going for as long as he is able. I hope that is a very long time, indeed.

The Willard Swamprats

Imagine, if you will, the year 1973. Paul McCartney was cranking out hit songs without the Beatles, the Vietnam War was still going on even though Nixon had stopped the draft, Oscar de la Renta fashions were all the rage, Watergate was still an unknown entity, and double knit polyester was in full swing. There was a lot to take in, but for me, if was also the year I graduated high school and headed off to college. For many reasons, it was one of my favorite years of all that I remember, and when September rolled around, my life changed rather dramatically.

I left my home in Memphis and headed to my freshman year of college at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Evanston is a suburb of Chicago, but it does not look like one in the traditional sense -- it is located immediately north of Chicago, and its border is contiguous with the city. If you've been to Chicago and have taken the El trains, you may know that the Howard Street station marks the border of Chicago and Evanston. These days, it's not such a big deal, but I when I lived there, Howard Street was the "libation destination." Evanston was a much more reserved and conservative community than its urban neighbor to the south; for example, you could not buy alcohol at a restaurant unless over half the tab was comprised of food. This made for lots of unusual orders at local cafes: heaping plates of french fries with a pitcher of beer, for example. And so, it was into this environment that I matriculated. I had family in California and so had done some traveling, but this move was my first time living up North, and it was initially quite an eye opener.

Our dorm was named Willard Hall, in honor of Frances E. Willard, who had served for almost twenty years as president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and was a notable champion of women's rights and labor reform. The WCTU itself battled in her words "the devastation caused by the legalized traffic in strong drink." The cause was admirable and garnered widespread support. For our part, our dorm hosted an annual Frances E. Willard Birthday Party, at which a different beverage was served on each of our six dorm floors. Even though the legal drinking age in those days was 18, and especially because of that, I'm certain that Frances would not have condoned our celebration. (I still remember that time during the 1974 Party when in a state of artificially induced paranoia, Pete Birschbach and I thought we had seen a government spy.)

So, let me bring this back home. Here we all were, tossed from afar into this malaise that we called New Student Week, looking to put down temporary roots and find some direction before classes started. I believe it all started one evening when a group of us started talking and realized that the dorm name was the same as that of the 1971 horror movie "Willard," about a young man who has an unnatural fascination with rats. The theme song of the movie, "Ben," was sung by Michael Jackson and was essentially a love song to a rat, which in itself was weird beyond belief but was endlessly amusing to our young, malleable minds.

And that's when the idea hit.

Looking for something to bind us all together, someone suggested that we call our loose association of freshman males the "Willard Swamprats." One of our group, Rogoff, was an amateur cartoonist, and he sketched a dodgy-looking cartoon of a rat in a trench coat, wearing sunglasses, and that was it: we had an instant mascot. A few days later, my roommate Klein (some of us went by first names, others by their last) and I went to Chandler's stationery shop in Evanston and had custom t-shirts made. Klein's was dark green, and mine was orange. I still have mine, and it is pictured here.

There were seven Swamprats: Klein, Scott, Rogoff, Ron, Cliff, Danny and yours truly. We came from all over the eastern United States and brought our own idiosyncrasies with us, which we happily shared amongst the group. For a few months, almost everything we did was with the Swamprats or some subset thereof. We attended movies, lectures (well, we did have a somewhat genuine intellectual bent), went shopping, greeted the omnipresent Krishnas with "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama" when we would see them, and generally enjoyed each other's company. In many ways, it was like the cast of "Seinfeld," in that we would go off on some tangent and explore it to the point of ridiculousness, then move on to something else.

The Swamprats were a diverse group: among us we had pre-meds, pre-law students, journalism majors, radio/TV/film majors, and even a philosophy major, so honestly, we could, and did, discuss just about anything, and it was indeed a learning experience, albeit a casual one. Northwestern did not offer food on Sundays, so we were left to our own devices, and one Sunday, my fellow Rats decided that we needed to visit Askkenaz Deli on Morse Avenue in Chicago. This was only a 20 minute train ride, so it worked out perfectly. That first night that I went to Ashkenaz (there were to be many others), I had to study the menu. All the other Swamprats were raised in Jewish families, and since I was the lone Protestant, I was not familiar with many of the items offered on the menu. My fellow Rats were more than helpful: they steered me away from dishes they knew I would not like, and suggested that I stick with corned beef, which to me sounded perfect. Our waitress, a sweet older lady, presented me with an interesting beverage option:

Waitress: "So what would you like to drink, honey? Have you ever had a phosphate?"
Richard: "No, ma'am...what is a phosphate?"
Swamprat Member: "It's like syrup with fizzy water."
Waitress: "I'll tell you what, honey...you order it, you don't like it, you don't have to pay."

Perfect. I ordered my first chocolate phosphate and was both intrigued and delighted. The sandwich was one of the best I'd ever put in my mouth. Ashkenaz became a fast favorite of mine.

We went through the fall quarter, an inseparable bunch, attending movies, talking until all hours, and making runs to Howard Street for cheap beer. We all went home for the holidays and returned in January to an ice cold dorm that always took a day or so to heat back up. This Swamprats thing was quite the life, and unlike anything I had experienced in my only-child upbringing in Memphis, but it was good.

One afternoon in February, 1974, we decided to go to the movies in downtown Chicago. We wanted to see "The Exorcist," which had only been released a few days prior. Scott had a friend in town, so we took him along. I remember waiting in line outside the theater when suddenly, out of nowhere, a Chicago Police paddy wagon came down the street with its siren blaring. Within seconds, a group of policemen emerged from the van and approached an older black man. For what seemed to us no apparent reason, they began striking him with billy clubs, then threw him into the back of the paddy wagon. I was startled and upset by this, because he reminded me so much of one of one of the older men who hung around my dad's store in Memphis, carrying home groceries for the ladies. Within a minute or two, the van had driven away, and we moved on up in line to take in the trials of Father Damien Karras, but the incident we had witnessed was unsettling.

That night, we came back to the dorm and talked about the movie. Some of us had been scared out of our wits, and others had been amused, but it had made an impression on each of us. We stayed up until about 3:00 AM, imbibing and talking by the weird glow of a single desktop fluorescent light, and as we sat there, I began to notice that I didn't feel quite right.

The next morning, I awoke with a searing sore throat and headed to Searle, the student health center. Searle was always staffed with a group of physicians who looked as if they'd rather be anywhere else, but on this occasion, it made no difference to me -- I just needed a doctor. I was admitted immediately to the infirmary and shortly thereafter diagnosed with mononucleosis. I missed three weeks of classes, and even though I tried to keep up by getting notes from friends, staying in touch with my professors, and reading all the assignments, those three weeks hurt my grades, and it took a while to catch up.

When I returned to the dorm after my ordeal, the Swamprats were of course still there, but the wind had been taken out of my sails, and the group as a whole had frayed a bit as we all started to assimilate ourselves into college life. Danny had friends way up on North Campus, Scott had debate team gatherings, and others, including me, were going this way and that. We continued to get together for dinner or the occasional movie, but the Swamprats as a group had served its purpose, and I think we were all ready to move on.

In this age of social media, it's interesting to see where everyone has landed: one of the Swamprats is a public relations executive and published author, another is a teacher, and two are attorneys. One, sadly, passed away several years ago. I've seen a couple of the guys in recent years, and we still have that bond that came, strangely enough, from being a freshman Swamprat (although I would have to say, I think we've cleaned up fairly nicely).

Ashkenaz suffered a destructive fire in the 1980's and is no longer a presence on Morse Avenue, but I still think about that chocolate phosphate. I ended up paying for it.

Oh, also...we attended classes.

The Imitation Game

I have this thing for accents. I love listening to them and imitating them, sometimes in my own head, sometimes out loud. I have to be careful when I use them in the latter context, so as not to offend anyone, because that is never my intention. I simply find speech patterns a fascinating subset of sociolinguistics. I've done this for so long now that our daughters call it "doing The Voices."

I've tried to remember when this habit started. I don't recall imitating accents as something that I did in my high school or college days; rather, I believe it began when I was traveling for business in the early 1980's. In those days, I was the information technology manager for a Chicago company with five regional offices across the country: two in Chicago and one each in Boston, Los Angeles and Atlanta. I spent significant time on the road, typically visiting each location several times a year for the better part of a week at a time.

My job was very interactive. Unlike today's IT jobs, which are largely defined by remote access to servers, cloud-based applications and toolsets, much of the work in those days was done on site or over the phone. I was in charge of the company's systems development and operations, so I spent tons of time talking to people, and aside from the knowledge I gained by sharing in the day-to-day experiences of my fellow employees, I also began to appreciate the stories they would tell at lunch or after work. The essence of some of their stories simply could not be communicated without occasionally using their own words, with their own inflections.

I learned that every region has an accent and cadence that is particular to its manner of speaking. It's actually quite humorous to witness those situations when the speaker denies that he or she has a regional accent, because we all do. There's nothing wrong with it, because truly, there is no right or wrong in speech patterns. But I still marvel at the fact that people in some parts of the country believe themselves to be accent-less, while many others, although fully appreciating their own lingual specificity, believe that there is one bonafide Southern accent. I mean, we must have over a hundred Southern accents, dag-nabbit.

Back when our daughters were younger and we were taking extended car trips to places like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Vermont, I would occasionally lapse into an accent typical of the region to which we were traveling. I saw it as my bounden paternal duty to give our children a taste of what to expect so that they wouldn't arrive at their destinations as strangers in strange lands. This technique alternately delighted and horrified the girls.

On one particular trip, as we drove through central Mississippi on our way to New Orleans, I began speaking with a Justin Wilson accent. Wilson, as you may recall, had a long, successful career on public television as the host of "Louisiana Cookin'," a show that we watched almost every Saturday. His favorite expression was, "I gar-on-tee." I spent the larger part of our drive to "Nawlins" that afternoon sprinkling my language with faux-Cajun talk, which came to me somewhat easily, since a) it was something my dad used to do, and b) I had watched so much Justin Wilson. Anyway, Sarah, who was 16 at the time, finally had enough of it and said, "Dad, stop it. They don't talk like that down there." I knew better, but I acquiesced.

Several hours later, we pulled into New Orleans and checked into the Pontchartrain Hotel, road-weary but with still enough energy to do some exploring. Our younger daughter Hannah and I went one direction, while Sarah and my wife Karen headed the other, and after about an hour and a half, we reconvened at Jackson Square. Sarah pulled me aside and said, "Dad, I apologize for what I said earlier...they do talk exactly like that down here." I laughed and for a moment felt that rush of endorphins that accompanies every successful parenting effort.

Hannah also has a regular line about my habit, and it never fails to make me laugh. We'll be walking somewhere, or maybe sitting down to dinner in a remote location, and I'll break into an accent. She'll say, "Stop it, Dad! People actually talk like that here!" This causes me to either immediately cease or continue at an accelerated pace, depending on the situation and/or local population density. I do try to exercise discretion in these situations, however, because Hannah has a very good sense of timing and has probably kept me out of many a sticky and potentially life-threatening linguistic confrontation.

Probably at no time did this habit of mine provide more delight to my family than one Christmas season about ten years ago, when the girls, Karen and I visited the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina. After a grand tour of the beautifully decorated mansion, we opted for dinner at a local Carrabba's Italian restaurant. Although we were in an artsy town in the middle of the mountains, something made me use (unconsciously, I might add) my Old Jewish Man accent, which I learned from my friends in college at Northwestern, many of whom were Jewish and would lovingly imitate their older relatives all the time. Every time the waitress would stop by our table to ask how the food was, I would answer with phrases like "Such a lovely meal" or "It's unbelievable...I can't get enough of it," always intoned in the style of Jackie Mason or Henny Youngman.

We finished our dinner shortly before the restaurant closed, and our waitress made one last loop around the dining room to pick up everyone's check. As she stopped at each table, she said, "Merry Christmas!" Finally, it was our turn, and as she approached the table, she paused for a moment and, obviously thinking twice, said, "Happy Holidays!" The girls looked at me with this "Oh, my God" stare, but all I could do was laugh. The story has since become a classic in the annals of our family history, and I have to admit to being somewhat proud of myself for sounding so convincing.

At any rate, I have this habit, and I don't know if it will ever stop. When Sarah brought her new boyfriend Tom to our house for dinner one night in 2008, she asked me to do The Voices. I was a bit hesitant, because I didn't want to do anything inappropriate, but she assured me that Tom would like them, and he did. They've now been married almost five years, so I guess I'll keep doing them. Besides, my own accent is somewhat distilled and needs a little spicing up now and then.

The Biltmore House

I wish I could say that the neighborhood has weathered the years well, but it hasn't. This morning, I used Google Maps to find my grandparents' old house on Biltmore Street in Memphis, and then I zoomed in for a street view. I almost wish I hadn't looked. I'm certain that the "Beware of Dog" sign affixed to the chain link fence surrounding the front yard is there for a reason, and from the looks of things, I'm thinking that these days, having an aggressive canine in that neighborhood is not so much an option as a necessity. But it wasn't always like this.

In the early 1960's, my grandfather Leslie, a grocery store owner, suffered a massive stroke which left him confined to a wheel chair. Five years later, he would suffer a second, even more serious stroke. It was sad, because Leslie was a rather quiet, calm man who always had something nice to say and was something of a practical joker. Some aspects of his life were quite interesting; for example, he had married his wife Estelle when she was 14 and he was 26. I didn't find that out until years later, when my grandmother told me that 14 was, in her opinion, just way too young to get married.

Because of my grandfather's condition after his first stroke, he needed to move back into Memphis from his country house to be closer to good medical care, so he and my grandmother (with some financial assistance from my father, I believe) moved to a tidy white frame house on Biltmore Street in North Memphis. The house was typical of many in the area, three bedrooms, a bath, a generous kitchen, and a big front porch that spanned the width of the house. Swings hung from each side of the porch, and an array of comfy chairs were placed alongside them. We spent a lot of time on the porch.

It seemed that everything happened at the Biltmore house. Whenever my aunt, uncle and cousins would visit from California, Biltmore was their headquarters. On one of their visits, my uncle, a Methodist minister, baptized me, since I had only been christened as an infant when we lived in California and was still left religiously hanging, so to speak. It was also the house where I "gently" persuaded my grandfather to surrender the TV to me for a few minutes so that I could watch The Beatles in their American TV debut on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Biltmore was where I would play with the next door neighbor Billy, at least until that one day when we were exploring under the house and Billy, in his words, "broke" his head and therefore became somewhat wary of any future associations with me.

It was the house where I played with my dear friend Sandy when she was visiting with her family from the West Coast. Sandy died from leukemia in her mid-teens and was one of the sweetest people I have ever known. I still remember the afternoon we spent spinning Duncan tops on the sidewalk on Biltmore.

Not only had I first seen The Beatles at Biltmore and collected John/Paul/George/Ringo trading cards with my cousin Debi during one of her visits from California, but on one memorable day, the daughter of my grandparents' next door neighbor, a girl six or seven years my senior, spontaneously donated to me all her Beatles albums. I hadn't asked for them, but she just did it. I thought that was amazing, and I still have all those albums in my collection.

It's funny how a house, a place built of bricks, wood, and mortar, stitched together with plumbing and wiring, can mean so much and carry so many memories, but truly, a home is of course much more than a physical structure, it's what we make of it. I would have to say that given their limited means, my grandparents kept a pretty nice house for us all. They sincerely loved us, and we sincerely loved them, and that's what the house on Biltmore was all about.

So, it may not be the prettiest house at the moment, but then again, I don't know the whole story. I'm just glad I own a piece of its history, and I hope that its current residents are making memories of their own, because that, my friends, is what seems to me to constitute living.