Time to dive back into jobs that I’ve had over the years, and I’ll focus on two that I really enjoyed and one that’s been an on-again/off-again thing since the time I was about 15 years old.
Before I get started, I’d like to interject here that I finally figured out what the song is that’s been running through my brain for the last month, when I heard it playing in the background during a scene in Family Guy. It’s Erich Korngold’s theme from Sea Hawk, and it rocks. Wonder if there’s a brass band arrangement of it:
So. Now that that’s out of the way (feel free to play it as you read, but it probably won’t match the narrative), back to the matter of my employment history.
I was a switchboard operator for 4 years in college. It was a work/study job that I actually started a few weeks before beginning my freshman year, and it was longest I ever worked at one job until I eclipsed that record with BellSouth in 2003. Maybe I’m just really enamored of phones or something. I enjoyed the job for several reasons, not least among them being my boss and her assistant, Cheryl Ellis and Phyllis Green, respectively. Cheryl was probably in her late 30s when I started, and Phyllis was maybe 10-12 years older. Both of these ladies treated me like an adopted son almost from my first day on the job. While I haven’t heard from Phyllis in many years, Cheryl and I still trade the occasional email and catch up with each other. Sweet ladies who had my back on more than one occasion.
It was also a fun time to be involved with phone systems, as they were really just starting to take off. You may have read stories about how the original computer hackers were hacking phone systems. This was right around the time that I got involved with things at the switchboard. AT&T was being broken up (ironically, with the purchase of BellSouth a few years ago, “Ma Bell” is pretty much back to where she was to start with), and the college was expanding its phone systems, tinkering with options, just getting computerized, putting phones into students’ rooms for the first time…in short, it was cutting-edge stuff and a lot of fun. I had an aptitude for computers and networks and my two moms really did not, so I was able to help them keep up with the technology while they taught me about dealing with people on the phone and handling billing complaints and other interpersonal crap.
I also got to spend one extremely interesting weekend working on the original switchboard, which was housed in the attic of the campus science building, when there was work being done on the new computerized switchboard. I’d always thought that the days of operators sitting in front of punch-down boards, pulling cables from one section and connecting them to others in order to transfer calls, was something that disappeared before I was born; but that’s exactly the way things worked on the old switchboard. I’d take incoming calls on a headset, find out who wanted to speak to whom, and physically connect the incoming calls to the port on the switchboard that went to the requested phone. It was boring in a completely fascinating way – and yes, I made my share of mistakes.
By the end of my sophomore year, the new system was fairly stable and I new it inside and out, so I began to train new operators (I was the first student who worked on the switchboard) for the day shifts, and once they could handle things, I took more night shifts – which allowed me to do my homework, as there were very few incoming calls after the college administration left for the day. I also used the college’s matriculation file, which we had a copy of for billing purposes, to learn details about girls that I liked – what their parents did for a living, what their social security numbers were, etc. I didn’t use this information for anything malicious: I’d just start up a conversation with them by saying something like, “If I can guess the last four digits of your home phone number, will you go to the coffeehouse with me tonight?” You’d be surprised how often that worked. I guess they liked that I took enough interest in them to, basically, stalk them.
During the summer after my junior year, I was a fake pianist, singer, bus driver, handyman, babysitter and gopher for a rock band homed just outside of Washington, D.C. My brother Larry got me this gig. He was the regular pianist and manager for a band which had scheduled a D.O.D. tour in the middle east at the same time that they had a scheduled American tour, so the band found a bunch of people to replace themselves for the American tour and I got to play the part of Larry. The real band’s founder, lead singer, and financier – a man named George King – stayed at home to rehearse the new band, line up dancers, and sing lead vocals. In addition to me, we had a guy named Mark on drums (he was an excellent set player, by the way), and a guy named Shaun on rhythm guitar. The three of us, along with 3 dancers, were – theoretically – backup singers. As far as the singing went, however, it was totally Milli Vanilli. This is because my real job as a piano player was to run our 4-track tape system, which contained all of the real backup singers along with lead guitar, keyboards, and bass tracks. Before each song, I’d fire up the tape, Mark and I would get a click-track in our headphones, and then everyone except Mark and George would more or less fake the entire show.
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| Playing with George King in PA. That’s me behind the upright piano on the left. |
Now I need to point out that it wasn’t completely faked. Going along with that statement, I’d also admit – to anyone who asked me – that the music they were hearing in the audience was, by and large, not coming from the people they saw on the stage. I did play the keyboard parts and all of us did actually sing; but we were completely covered up by the recorded tracks. When a guy asked me after one gig how I made my little Casio keyboard sound so much like a Rhodes, I cheerfully told him that I had a Rhodes setting on the keyboard – but that what he was hearing had been laid down by a kick-ass keyboardist two months earlier, and that that guy was currently on an aircraft carrier in the Dead Sea. When people asked me what I was doing with the tape recorder, I told them that it was our bass player…and keyboard player…and lead guitar….and backup vocalists. Nobody seemed to mind.
The only near disaster we had on stage happened during the gig which is pictured in this blog entry. We were playing at a mall in Pennsylvania, and when I started the track for the first song….nothing came through Mark’s or my headphones. He and I stared at each other for a few seconds and then I frantically pressed buttons on the 4-track, not having any idea what was wrong. As it happened, the cassette wasn’t seated firmly enough on the spindles and, when I started banging on the buttons, I managed to jar it enough to make it settle down fully. Music instantly blazed out of the speakers – about 6 bars into the piece. I don’t remember if I stopped the thing and rewound or if we just went with it. I do remember that, after that, I made sure that everything was working correctly before every other show.
When we weren’t playing (I don’t recall how many gigs we did or where they all were – D.C., MD, PA, IL, FL, and other places), I drove the band’s bus, helped George around his house – I recall spending the whole summer trying to make his pool water not be green – and explored Washington, D.C. nearly every day we were in town. I found a great parking spot outside the Department of Agriculture that I used just about every time I went into the city, and I generally would drive to town, park the car there, and walk around for several hours in the evenings. Georgetown was a great place for live bands, the mall had something going on just about every day, there were concerts by The President’s Own Marine band every Wednesday night and polo matches near the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday mornings. I must’ve spent a total of two full weeks wandering around the Smithsonian Institute that summer, and I rode the Metro to every stop at some point or another. For many years after that summer, I’d go back to D.C. at least once a year – it was sort of a second home for Jenny and me.
One of the dancers, Chris, I think had somewhat of a crush on me – truth be told, I sort of liked her, too, even though she was probably 10 years older than me. Neither of us ever admitted this to each other, and nothing ever happened between us, though we did have a fairly intense conversation, fueled by a bit too much wine, in a hot tub in Miami one night; and we traded a few letters and phone calls after the band broke up. The picture above was actually sent to me by Chris in one of those letters.
I should point out that the Chris of that summer is NOT the same Chris who is frequently mentioned in these blog entries.
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| The 9 O’Clock Brass Quintet held together for about 5 years in the early 1990s, and played quite a few gigs of all kinds. This one was actually on the back of a flat-bed truck in a July 4th parade. |
The last job that I’ll talk about in this entry isn’t really any particular job, but rather a source of sporadic income and memories that I’ve had since I played my first professional gig on a tuba when I was 15 years old. On that day, I filled in for John Sizemore, a great tubist and the first adult who seemed to realize that I might be good at it, with the Foothills Brass Quintet. We played a lollipop concert in Greenville for some elementary school classes, and I’ve been hooked on brass quintets ever since. I played in one with my brother Greg for the last two years of high school, formed one (using some of the same musicians) for four years at college, had a relatively successful one for several years after I moved to Atlanta, played with another (pretty bad) one until about a year ago, and I’m always on the lookout for 4 other brass people who want to get together and play quintet literature – for money or just for fun.
I don’t know what it is about the 5tet that appeals to me so much. Maybe it’s that I can get opportunities to shine as a soloist without feeling nervous about it. Maybe it’s because, by virtue of my horn, I can have a bit of control over tempo and style for the group.
Or maybe it’s just because I dig brass quintets.
TWD