Real Music & Real Estate . . .

I used to shop at the West Side Market to see humanity.  I didn’t care about the food; I was looking for real, working people.  I ran the gauntlet of Italian produce vendors, who would say to me, “Hey, how about a couple peppers?”  I wouldn’t answer. I didn’t even like vegetables.

I liked meat — greasy meat.  I picked up a couple links of Farkas’ hot Hungarian kielbasa.  That stuff could kill you, unless you were 25 and immortal.

Now the produce vendors are mostly Arabs, and I’m no longer looking for humanity.  It comes to me.

I was at the market with time to spare; I was waiting to meet a tenant across the street at the Cleveland Mediation Center.  I had a delinquent tenant who was also delinquent in showing up for the meeting.   So I went to the market.

The market was, still, a good cheap exotic trip.  A vendor carried an eviscerated goat over his shoulder.  You don’t see that at Heinen’s.  I bought a loaf of bread and returned to the mediation center, which was in a dilapidated 1920s office building.  There were stenciled signs on the office doors for abogados (lawyers), bail bondsmen and Middle Eastern doctor / Welfare Patients Accepted.  My delinquent tenant, Mr. Rice, hobbled in to the mediation center on a cane.

He spent $400 per month on prescription drugs, he said, and couldn’t afford the rent.  Apparently, he didn’t know anything about Medicare’s supplemental prescription plan.

The mediator — “I’m Bob” — told Mr. Rice he could address neglected building repairs.  Bob had just set me up.

Mr. Rice shook his head and said, “The man wants his rent and I don’t blame him.”

You had to like a tenant like that.  A stand-up guy.

I put up with Mr. Rice and his late rent payments because, among other reasons, I liked his accent.   He was an old black from Gallatin, Tenn.  I said, “My mother was from the South.  I could listen to you all day. That’s why I’m here [at the mediation center].”  Another reason was he owed me $890.

Mr. Rice skipped out several months later. He left behind ratty furniture, Playboys, old clothes and a stove that looked a piece of fried chicken.

You want that stove original or extra crispy?

Mr. Rice said, “Don’t put me out.”

I didn’t put him out.  He left on his own.

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Tomorrow (Thurs. July 29)
Driving Mr. Klezmer
Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Hts., 7 p.m.

My son Jack, suddenly, will be in the show.  He’ll play the iPhone, beat-box, play drums, and do a comedy sketch.

$20 in advance, $23 at the door.
$2 off for 60+ and students.
216-371-3000 or www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is Bert Stratton, Alan Douglass and Jack Stratton.

The meanest, baddest landlord in America is John T. Reed, a West Point grad in Alamo, California.  In Reed’s world, if you’re a day late with your rent, you’re on the curb with your cat and kitty litter.

Reed lost a ton of money in real estate, and made a lot of money writing about it.  I’ve read most of his books; he’s a good writer and smart.  (There are many savvy landlords but not many can write.  They’re too busy at target practice.)  Reed shows you how to twist tenants’ arms until they say: “Here’s the rent, sir, and it’s a day early!”

Reed claims you can mail it in — not the rent, but your on-site supervision.  Reed, living in California, owned apartments in Texas, so he sent postcards to his tenants, instructing them to drop dimes/postcards on his custodians and their job performances.

That long-distance supervision doesn’t work.  If I don’t check my buildings  at least once a week in person, the buildings will turn into dumps — Magic Marker on the mailbox labels, the exit lights burned out, and 100 cigarette butts on the stoop.

Nothing gets done if I don’t show up.  The painter, his back goes out until I show up.  I’m better than a chiropractor.  The Yellow Pages directories pile high in the lobby until I show up.  The grass doesn’t get cut until I show up.  I understand all that.

I say to my building managers: “You need to take care of this right away.”  And I show up.

I conduct exit surveys. I ask my former tenants if my buildings and managers are good.  The ex-tenants, long gone, are totally honest because they face no repercussions from building managers.

Here is a sample of  former tenants’ replies:

The apartment flooded.  It was not my fault!

I didn’t know I would need air conditioning in Ohio. And there wasn’t any!  [From a Californian.]

Water pressure — terrible.

Workers parked in my spot, and I was paying for it.

The marijuana smoke from the alley was very strong, and spending the summer with the windows closed was not acceptable.

The favorable comments, you don’t want to hear.  Too self-serving, too bubbly.

Maybe I should write a Nice Guy Landlord handbook.  That’s a niche John T. Reed won’t fill.  My title: How to Manage Apartments and Jam with Your Tenants, with accompanying CD featuring the songs “You Tore Out My Window Screens, Now my Heart?”, “I’d Like to Go Month-to-Month with You, Baby” and “I Can’t Find the Handle (To Your Refrigerator of Love).”

John T. Reed could be my sound man at real estate conventions.  We could share a booth. Do a good cop/ bad cop thing and split the profits.

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1 of 2 posts for 7/21/10.  Please see the post below too.

Yiddishe Cup is the house band at the Lake County (Ohio) Heritage Festival.  We play there every July.  Twenty years in a row.

Why don’t the organizers get somebody else?

Because we talk.  Bluegrass bands and old-time musicians don’t talk.  They just pick.  Folk musicians, they’ll talk, but it’s pabulum about trees and trysts.  Polka guys, they talk — to each other.  And they mumble.

Lake County, just east of Cleveland, is a stronghold of Italians and Slovenians.  Many are retired railroad and factory workers.  They like to hear “Eaton Axle,” “Fisher Body,” and “Collinwood Railroad Yards.”

Those aren’t songs.  They’re just words, and I like to say them. For instance, I’ll say, “Who remembers the Collinwood Yards on East One-hundred Fifty-second?”  There are a couple klezmer train songs.  There’s a hit from Russia: “7:40.”

We do “Gino,” an Orthodox Jewish tune with an Italian-sounding name.  We also do “That’s Morris,” a parody of “That’s Amore.” We introduce it with: “This is by that great Ohio Jewish composer Dean Martin.  His name in Hebrew means ‘flying tiny octopus.’”

You have to be there.

The Slovenians like to hear “Slovenian” pronounced properly: Slovene-yun, not Slovene-ian.

I explain Hebrew is loshn kodesh, the holy tongue, like Latin. Yiddish by contrast is mama-loshn, the mother tongue.  “Mama Lotion. You can buy it at CVS.”

You have to be there.

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2 of 2 posts for 7/21/10

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Sun. (July 25):  Yiddishe Cup is at the Lake County Heritage Festival, formerly the Little Mountain Folk Festival.  Painesville, Ohio. $. www.lakehistory.org.  Final revised schedule: Yiddishe Cup is on at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

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Thurs., July 29:  ”Driving Mr. Klezmer” duo show at Cain Park, Cleveland Hts., 7 p.m.   $20 in advance, $23 at the door. $2 off for 60+ and students.  216-371-3000 or www.cainpark.com.  If you miss this show, your last words might be “I really screwed up.”

My cousin Bill is a big fan of Yiddishe Cup.  I’m five years older than him, so whatever I say goes, and I say, “Like my band.”

Bill flew Yiddishe Cup to Atlanta for his son’s bar mitzvah party.  (Note: my cousin Margie brought Yiddishe Cup to Kansas City for her four kids’ simchas.  Margie is also younger than me.)

We cousins usually meet up at simchas and funerals. One time, though, Bill came up to Cleveland on biz, and we weren’t at a simcha or funeral.  What to do?  Where was the smoked fish?

We went out to a Korean restaurant and a cemetery on the West Side.  The restaurant was across the street from where our grandparents were buried.

The cemetery was closed, so we crawled underneath the iron grating and looked around in the near twilight for our grandparents’ graves.

A security guard with a German shepherd approached.

I said to the man, “I know you’re closed, but my cousin came all the way from Georgia.”

The guard asked, “Are you Polish?”

“No, Jewish,” I said.

“That’s the right answer,” he said.  It was like a World War II checkpoint scene.  He let us stay.  (There had been vandalism at various West Side Jewish cemeteries.)

***

A friend, living in Israel, came home to Cleveland to bury his mother.  He had nowhere convenient to sit shiva, so he rented a room at an I-271 hotel.

He hung around that room for a couple days.  Visitors knocked on the door, which was kept ajar, to announce themselves.  Ten Jews in a suite, chanting Hebrew prayers was mystical and somewhat subversive.

My friend left after three days.  It was no picnic, that hotel, except for the picnic I brought in: $204  of kosher chicken Marsala and sides, from Norman the caterer.  (Norman is not his real name).

Norman, years ago at a gig, had thrown dirty plates all over the kitchen floor at the auto museum.  So many plates, we couldn’t roll our carts over the jumble.  It was like a Greek party center at 4 a.m.

When a wedding client called and asked about Norman, I said, “I wouldn’t use him.” Then she promptly told Norman.

It was just business, Norman! It wasn’t loshn hora (evil gossip).

Norman said the messy gig had been his first off-premises catering job. I hadn’t known that.  I told him I wouldn’t bad-rap him again.

So I dropped $204 on Norman for hot food.  Everything is kosher now between us.  He is a good experienced caterer.

My cousin Margie is coming to Cleveland next week to visit.  Where’s the food?  What to do?  Crawl under a cemetery fence in Parma?
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1 of 2 posts for 7/14/10.  Please see the post below too.

Harvey Pekar wasn’t that funny in real life.  He was a campeón del mundo bitch-moaner.  He would drey you with pedantic lectures on, say, an avant-garde jazz musician or a neglected writer such as George Gissing.  Harvey threw in gobs of “you know’s,” connectors that allowed him to talk for a half-hour nonstop and still retain membership in the Youse Guys Club.  The lectures were always about Harvey, with the occasional aside about the neglected artist, who was also really Harvey.

When Harvey edited his work for his comic books, he distilled a year’s worth of  harangues and keen journalistic observation into a few thousand words.  The comic book — the insights, the dead-on dialogue and the self-deprecating humor — was the opposite of his rambles.

Ray Dobbins (a.k.a. Jim Flannigan), the author of Don the Burp and Other Stories, was an ex-Clevelander in New York who lived in the East Village near a Village Voice critic.  Dobbins showed Harvey’s early comic books to critic Robert Christgau and his wife, Carola Dibbell, who wrote up Harvey for the Voice, Dec. 31, 1979.

Onward.

Through the ensuing acclaim and fame, Harvey was, still, the Kinsman Road boy who unfortunately attended Shaker Heights High.  That move — from proste Kinsman to fancy-schmancy Shaker of the 1950s –  contributed mightily to Harvey’s me-against-the-world attitude.  Read about it.  It’s in his comic books.

At my first son’s bris in 1981,  Harvey gravitated toward the mohel, an Orthodox rabbi.

Harvey told me he was going to write about the bris.  Something about the mohel raising his arms and saying, “Golden hands!”

Pekar saw things others missed.  And he got it down on paper.

—-
["Drey" is  turn/pester.  "Proste" is common/boorish.]

[More on Harvey at "Where is My Harvey Pekar Bobblehead?", a Klezmer Guy post from 2/3/10.]

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2 of 2 posts for 7/14/10
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See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” 7 p.m. Thurs., July 29, at Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights.  $20 in advance. $23 at the door.  Call 216-371-3000 or visit www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is a clutch-popping trip through the states of klezmer, pop, Tin Pan Alley and spoken word.  The ride: a Ford Tsuris.

The show is a nudnik/beatnik mash-up of music and comedy.  Bert Stratton is on clarinet and spoken word (i.e., this blog). Alan Douglass, the chauffeur, is on vocals and keyboards.

–

Subs are often the best musicians.  They’re great ear players.

I’ve subbed a few times.  One time I wore a suit instead of a tux and got The Ray (the stare) from the bandleader.  Another time I iced my tendinitis during a break and almost missed the downbeat (the start of the next set).

I don’t do much subbing.  I’m not the greatest ear player and my sight-reading skills are only so-so.

The worst player in the band should be the leader, who then hires people better than himself.

[Subliminal message  for non-readers: Jump to the video at the end of this post.]

Playing by ear . . . that’s the big mysterious matzo ball of music.  Fact: You can get better at playing by ear. A little better.  First, close your eyes for a minute before practicing.  Listen to the clock and your neighbor’s barking dog.  Then play a couple notes, eyes closed, like C, D, and E, and imagine why they’re different.  What is the distance between the notes?

You have no idea.

Follow up with a chromatic scale, C-C#-D-D#-E, and you’ll have an idea.  The chromatic run sounds like swarming bees, à la “Flight of the Bumblebee.”  This chromatic run “looks” zig-zaggy, as if you’re walking up the fire-exit steps at a downtown hotel.  C is the first floor, C# is the landing, and D is the second floor. You begin to feel the intervals (the leaps).

Don’t underestimate the eyes-closed part.  Pretend you have eye strain and need to rest your eyes.

If you’re a professional musician, try playing with your eyes closed on stage occasionally.  It’ll clear the visual clutter.  I spent 30 minutes at a concert trying to remember my kids’ preschool teacher’s name.  She was in the audience.  My kids are in their twenties.  I should have had my eyes closed.

***

I encouraged a gentile Yiddishe Cup musician to attend KlezKamp, the klezmer convention, to learn klezmer conventions.  When the KlezKamp registrar asked his Yiddish name, I interrupted, “Farbisener.” (Bitter One.)

My musician wore his Farbisener ID badge for five days.  He could take a joke — barely.

I’ve had goys in Yiddishe Cup since the beginning.  That’s no surprise.  Have you been to an Orthodox Jewish wedding in the Midwest?  The sole Jewish musician is often the singer, because he has to know Hebrew.  The rest of the band might be jazzers, many of whom are cool dudes with cigs, fraying tuxes, and war stories about backing up Jerry Lewis and Tom Jones.  Divide everything they say in half.   But they can play — anything from Charlie Parker to Madonna.

Some subs, on the other hand, are not old jazzers; they are young music school grads who don’t smoke, don’t dress like shlubs, and know all the tunes — and are also full of BS.  If a young sub says he just made $500, that means he drove to New York, slept on a couch, and didn’t calculate his travel expenses.  He has never heard of depreciation.

I hired a sub from a small town near Canton, Ohio.  (Yes, Canton is small, but this guy’s ville was very small.)  He played terrific guitar and sang in Italian, Spanish and English. He had grown up in three countries.  He claimed he did 260 gigs a year — a lot.  Most were quality gigs, he said, although some were “wallpaper” (background music), and some outright sucked: “I had a gig playing dinner parties for the Hoover vacuum family.”

Subs need quips to regale the band at breaks.  The regulars demand it; they are sick of each other’s jokes and stories.

The toughest job in music — subbing.

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This vid clip is from the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” show.  Includes klezmer and Mickey Katz’s “16 Tons,” followed by Alan Douglass, on keyboards, reciting the first verse of Genesis in Hebrew.  Not bad for a gentile.

See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” 7 p.m. Thurs., July 29, at Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights.  $20 in advance. $23 at the door.  Call 216-371-3000 or visit www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is a clutch-popping trip through the states of klezmer, pop, Tin Pan Alley and spoken word.  The ride: a Ford Tsuris.

The show is a nudnik/beatnik mash-up of music and comedy.  Bert Stratton is on clarinet and spoken word (i.e., this blog). Alan Douglass, the chauffeur, is on vocals and keyboards.

Congregation Beth Am’s social hall smelled.  The stained drop-ceiling tiles were caked with decades of latke grease.  And where did Beth Am get that gefilte fish air freshener it used in the back entrance?  My bubbe’s place on Kinsman, 1960, smelled crisper.

Yiddishe Cup played the last wedding at Beth Am in 1999.  The Cleveland Heights building is now the New Community Bible Fellowship, with crowds like for Yom Kipper every Sunday morning.

Beth Am had approximately 400 adult members on closing day. The shul debated downsizing, closing, or merging with a bigger temple.  Syn biz: shul income comes from dues, social hall rentals and contributions.  That’s it.

I voted not to merge with the bigger, newer shul out east.  “If I forget thee, O Heights . . .”

One-fifth of the congregation voted to stay.  Four-fifths said, “Let’s get out of here!”

The rabbi, Michael Hecht, said “Let’s go, people.”  His opinion counted.  Like most congregants, I respected Rabbi Hecht.  He liked opera, classical music and musicians in general.  He put musicians in the same category as physicians.  That alone was worth paying full dues.  Rabbi Hecht, who knew some Greek, said “musician” meant “healer by Muse,” and “physician” meant “healer by physics /nature.”

He also said a congregant, no matter how poor, can give tzedakkah (charity).  If you’re broke, give blood, he said.  That stuck with me.

Rabbi Hecht was not warm and fuzzy. He was not Mr. Jingeling.  He wouldn’t go full-costume on Purim.  Maybe a crazy hat.  That was it. He was a Yekkie (German Jew) who sermonized on how life is not fair.  He said we should try to incrementally improve the planet.  He called that distributing “artificial justice.”

***

Richard Shatten, a Beth Am congregant, indirectly gave me the nickname Klezmer Guy.  He didn’t realize it.

Richard died of a brain tumor at 47.  When I went to his shiva, Richard’s wife said, “Here’s the klezmer guy.”  She blanked on my name.  Richard had known a lot of people, the room was crowded, and I didn’t blame his wife for not knowing my name.  Richard had been an urban-planning strategist, who via non-profit and academic jobs tried to halt the town’s economic decline.  He also played clarinet.

Richard took a solo at his oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah party.  Gutsy, because he hadn’t played much since high school.

Richard liked to schmooze with me at shul, because for one reason I had “primary source data,” as he called it; I knew tenants’ credit histories, their education levels, where the tenants were moving from, and where tenants’ parents lived.  Richard couldn’t get enough of that.  He wanted to attract young people back to Cleveland.  He himself had gone to Harvard and come back.

He hosted his kid’s bat mitzvah party at a formerly anti-Semitic country club near Shaker Square, just to do something totally urban.  No way was he going to the generic party center out by I-271.

When Richard died, his funeral was out by I-271.  Couldn’t be helped.  The newer shul out there – the one Beth Am merged with, and Richard had voted against — was the only place big enough to hold all Richard’s friends and family.

I am the Sol Hiccup — maybe — of klezmer shows in Cleveland.  I am a volunteer on a Workmen’s Circle committee that has brought in Kapelye, Pharaoh’s Daughter, Theodore Bikel, Chava Alberstein, the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Shtreiml, Beyond the Pale, Susan Hoffman Watts and many more.

It’s not my money; it’s the Workmen’s Circle’s concert endowment earnings.

Many committee members don’t know much about Jewish music, so my opinion carries weight. Sometimes my picks work, sometimes, not.

Anything experimental, feh.  Too much kvitching (squeaking) on the clarinet, feh.  Hebrew songs — no thanks, it’s a Yiddish concert. Obscure Yiddish songs — no thanks.

Last year the committee brought in Yiddishe Cup (from a distance of  7,920 feet).  The band played mainstream klezmer and did Mickey Katz–style Yinglish comedy.

A committee member said the band didn’t play enough klezmer instrumentals.  He said, “That’s what the Russians wanted to hear. They came to hear klezmer music, not  . . .” He paused.  “Ech, you were OK.”  Not a bad review, considering this critic  — a 94-year-old Yiddishist — often favored “horrible,” “not Jewish enough,” and “jazz - why jazz?”

Giora Feidman, the renowned Israeli clarinetist, played all instrumentals one year.  That was nisht gut (no good).  No vocals.

Where was the road to a good program? “Call Zalmen in New York,” according to one veteran committee member.  Call Zalmen Mlotek.

Zalman is not 94 years old, even though his name is.  Zalman is a baby-boomer pianist, theater director, and macher in the klezmer world.  He knows just about every quality Yiddish performer.

Zalman’s job, from the concert committee’s standpoint, was to forestall repertoire malfunctions.  The committee, which included several lawyers, stipulated performers should deliver “at least 70 percent Yiddish content.”  No more all-instrumental shows or predominately Hebrew and English song fests.

For instance, the headliner in 2007 had counted “Di Grine Kusine” (The Greenhorn Cousin) 100 percent Yiddish content, even though his group’s version was mostly instrumental jazz solos. When I told him he hadn’t fulfilled his Yiddish quota, he said, “Why are you telling me this the minute I walk off stage!”

He had a point. I should have waited.  But his pianist had taken more solos, on the clock, than his Yiddish vocalist.

I was only doing my job.  And I was in trouble. I was coming off a bad year; I had recommended an “experimental” act the year before.  I was losing my Sol Hiccup credibility.

We brought in a Canadian band, Beyond the Pale.  They covered the bases, mixing klezmer instrumentals and Yiddish songs. I was redeemed for a while.

Then a long-time committee member quit.  She said there wasn’t enough Yiddish, and hadn’t been enough mama-loshn (Yiddish/mother tongue) for more than a decade.

Azoy geyt es. (So it goes.)

A majority of the Yiddish-speaking audience was in the cemetery along with the committee’s top pick, Bruce Alder, a terrific Yiddish song-and-dance man who had died in 2008.  Our concert ushers — World War II Jewish War Vets — were also with Bruce.

I played a party for Jewish war vets. They were Vietnam guys, looking just like World War II vets, except breathing. The vets liked “Old Time Rock and Roll.”  I couldn’t see them ushering a klezmer concert.

This summer’s Yiddish concert is Sunday, featuring “New Voices of the Yiddish Stage,” an ad hoc musical variety show from Folksbiene — Zalmen Mlotek’s theater in New York.  The musicians are in their twenties and thirties.  Clarinetist Michael Winograd alone is worth the price of admission. 

Aside to the  “New Voices”  performers: Jazz is a four-letter word west of the Hudson.

—

The 32nd annual Yiddish Concert in the Park is 3 p.m. Sun. (June 27) at Cain Park, Evans Amphitheater, Cleveland Heights.  Free admission.  The concert is a co-production of the Workmen’s Circle and the City of  Cleveland Heights.

My father, Toby, ate his last meal out at Wendy’s on his way to Columbus, Ohio, for experimental leukemia treatments.

He checked in to the hospital, then checked out, so to speak.

My father liked Wendy’s (headquartered in Columbus) because he had a quasi-business relationship with the company.  Toby had almost invested in Wendy’s before it went national.  Almost. Toby’s near-miss with Wendy’s stock topped any of my uncles’ near-miss sagas at Seder.

Toby liked fast food. He and I often ate at McDonald’s on the West Side.  I got the Filet-O-Fish.  I thought it was good for me.

Toby explained franchising: the franchisor took a percentage of the action for eternity. Toby had been a franchisee/sucker with a cosmetics company - and he knew something about the food business too.  He especially knew about chazerai (junk).  Toby had worked in his mother’s candy store, dipping ice cream bars into vats of chocolate, and writing “free” on a few wooden ice cream sticks.  Very few.

When I visited my father’s grave the first couple times, I brought along Mr. Goodbars.  Once, a Planters Peanut.  (The bars were for me, by the way.)

***

I raised the rent on the flower-shop guy a mere $10 per month. Toby smiled and said, “You’re a nice guy.”  I think Toby’s smile — a rarity — meant he was glad I wasn’t a total hardass like him.  We had arrived.

Decades later, I sat at the West Side McDonald’s with my oldest son, Ted, 28.  I now knew the Filet-O-Fish was a calorie bomb, so I ordered the chicken Caesar salad.  Ted, like his late grandfather Toby, ordered a huge burger.

I was instructing my son on the watchword of our people: Don’t be a sucker.

Lesson one: The first generation (Grandpa) scrapes, the second (Dad) tries to keep things on keel, and the third (Ted) needs tutorials in toughness because he doesn’t remember his grandfather.

During Toby’s final days, the Cleveland Clinic nurses called him “chief” because he was so bossy.  A doc said, “You’re a hard one.”  Toby answered, “That’s right.  It’s my life.”  A nurse wondered if Toby was in the medical field because he had a stack of homemade medical folders.

Toby was flattered. The closest Toby had come to the medical field was a dental school acceptance in the 1950s, but he couldn’t afford to go because he had kids.

I told my son not to forget the little things: pens, checks, camera, Post-It notes.  Lesson one: “Write everything down.  You don’t want to think about ‘cold water leak, Webb #24 bathroom sink,’” I said.

Lesson two: Be wary of restaurant workers, particularly chefs and servers.  They come home late, party hard, and wake up the solid-citizen tenants in the building.

Lesson three: Always Be Closing.  ABC.   That was from a David Mamet play/movie, and was a joke between my son and me.  My son, like every other young person, enjoyed quoting movies verbatim.

I thought of a non-movie line for Ted.  I said, “If the tenant hasn’t mailed his rent, say, ‘Do not mail in your late rent.  Hand it to the custodian.  Hand it.’ We don’t want to wonder if the post office has lost the check.”

Ted seemed more interested in his burger.  I wasn’t up to Mamet’s standards.

“The job sucks on some level!” I said.  That got the boy’s attention.  “You make it interesting.  It took me a while.”

***

My father dragged me to a lightning-round tutorial with Cousin Gershy.  (Gershy is short for Gershon.)  Gershy looked horrible — three strokes and two heart attacks.  My dad didn’t look much better.

Gershy had shotguns over the mantle, plus a longhorn steer horn and shalom plaques.  ”You wouldn’t believe it, but I used to be a shtartker,” Gershy said.   (Strong guy/bully.)

I believed it.

Gershy said, “You’ve got that little curl in the tail — that little something different — that something the new treatment doesn’t cure.   You’re in trouble.  They say, ‘We can’t straighten out your tail. You’re dead.’  That’s what the doctors tell me.”

Gershy’s steer horn cost $50.  A gun dealer, who had sold the horn to Gershy, wanted it back.  “Gun dealers is a funny ballpark,” Gershy said.  “He could shoot me, but a deal is a deal.  That’s the way it is.”

Gershy owned a shopping strip center on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights.

His price was too high, Toby said.

“If the kid is interested,” Gershy said, looking at me. “I’d come down.”

“It’s up to the kid,” Toby said.

“I’ll work with him,” Gershy said.

***

Driving home, Toby said, “Gershy has mellowed.”

Mellowed? Gershy would not pass for mellow in my Donovan world.

“And he’s a gonif,” Toby said.  “Don’t buy anything from him.”

I didn’t.

At McDonald’s, I told my son, “If a real estate broker claims operating expenses are forty-five percent, he’s delusional.  Building operating ratios are higher than that.”  I slid a Wall Street Journal across the table.  “Take it.  Take the paper.”  The Journal was the best I could offer.  I didn’t see any Gershys or Tobys around.  Unless you count me.

I played a crummy clarinet, blasting against the side of a barn door on a bike trip in rural Ohio.  I nearly destroyed my lip.

Last summer my friend Mark Schilling from Japan said he wanted to ride the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA), so I couldn’t very well say: “Mark, I’m passing on GOBA.  I have a big gig coming up and need to practice.”

I had to practice for Yiddishe Cup’s twentieth anniversary concert, which was the day after the bike tour.

Some musicians don’t need to practice; they practiced in music school and can wing it as adults.  I wasn’t a music major.  I have to feel the notes in my fingers and brain almost daily before a big show.

My borrowed, cheap clarinet had decayed pads, squeaky keys and cracked dirty reeds.  The mouthpiece had layers of caked lip gunk. The axe was plastic and generic.  No name.  I got it from a friend.  Ray-somebody in Sioux City, Iowa, had once repaired it; his card was in the case.

Why didn’t I have a back-up axe of my own? Was this an example of rigid thinking on my part?  I had put my professional clarinet through so much — parades and other outdoor indignities — and didn’t own a back-up.  For example, I should have had a plastic horn for the 2004 Israel Independence Day parade when we marched outside in 40 degrees. (One Yiddishe Cup musician went AWOL on that parade because he didn’t play under 50.)

On the GOBA trip, I played next to the Wood County Fairgrounds sheep barn.  If I had stood in the middle of the horse-showing ring and played — without the barn wall to bounce sound off — I would have blown my lip out even more.

I had to practice high notes, which cheap clarinets don’t do well.  You need a decent mouthpiece and a quality reed.  I bit down hard and tore my lower, inside cheek.

Nobody on the bike tour – about 2,500 riders — complained about my playing.  Midwesterners, particularly bicyclists, are very tolerant and polite.

I also practiced at a high school football field. That town, Elmore, had a bass drone coming from the Ohio Turnpike a block away.

I used cortisone cream on my cheek.

The final day of the ride, my friend and I performed at the bike rally’s talent show.  Mark and I had written a song about aching backs, bad food and smelly port-a-potties.  So had all the other contestants.  The difference: our tune had a klezmer clarinet.

We riffed on the melody “Nayer Sher,” a.k.a. the “Wedding Samba,” popularized by Xavier Cugat.  I had heard that 1950s tune on Muzak in a Cleveland grocery store.  The song had crossover appeal.

But we didn’t win.

A barbershop trio did.  They sang about tandem bike riders smelling each other’s gas.  We hadn’t thought of that.

Irwin Weinberger, a veteran GOBA cyclist and Yiddishe Cup’s singer, came in second.  Irwin inserted port-a-potty lyrics into the Kinks’ “Lola.”

Irwin hadn’t practiced all week.  Irwin is a natural.  And he’s a gas.

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GOBA begins June 20 in Logan, Ohio. The GOBA encampment is half Pilot Gas rest stop, half Cabela’s.  There are six semi-haulers and many tents.  The semis carry the cyclists’ baggage.  Two of the semis are actually mobile shower trucks (which are sometimes used for natural disasters). There is close-quarters snoring on the football field, with hundreds of tents pitched within several feet of each other.  Rated: Difficult.
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Yiddishe Cup plays the post-parade concert at Parade The Circle 1 p.m. this Sat. (June 12).  Wade Oval, Cleveland. Traffic tip: Ride your bike to the parade and park in the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op lot.

Everybody in world music wants to be the next crossover act.

Eddie Blazonczyk, the Chicago Polish polka musician, tried.  And then there was Ruben Blades, the Panamanian salsa guy.

In klezmer, nobody has done it lately.

Lately is the key word.  [Continue by clicking on video]

CLOSED CAPTION.  6/4/10.  The paragraphs below are what the man in the video is saying, more or less, prior to playing “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” . . .

In 1938 the Andrews Sisters made “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” (By Me You Look Grand) the number one song on the American pop charts.

“Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” is the tune in the klezmer concert repertoire.

Yiddishe Cup was playing a concert in Detroit — just barreling through a medley of esoteric klezmer fusion — when I called an audible (changed the set list) to play “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.”  Bingo, the mostly elderly crowd was right back with us.

My daughter, when she was little, called the song “My Bear, Mr. Shane.”  My youngest son performed it at 3 ½. [Check out the boy’s video.]  Jazz musicians call the tune “My Beer is Duquesne.”

Only Jews think “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” is Jewish.  Everybody else thinks it’s German or plain nothing.  (The spelling on the original record label was “Bei Mir Bist du Schön.”)  I lectured a group of gentile senior citizens in Westlake, Ohio.  I asked if they knew “Bay Mir” was Jewish.  None did.

Sholom Secunda wrote the melody to “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” for a Yiddish play in 1932.  Then he sold the rights to a music publishing house, the Kammen Brothers, for $30.

Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin put English words to the Yiddish version.  The tune became a huge hit for the Andrew Sisters.

Secunda supposedly had a conversation with a shoeshiner, who was whistling “Bay Mir” in 1938:

Secunda: “That song is making quite a hit now, isn’t it?”
Shoeshiner: “Hit ain’t the word.  It’s a riot.”
Secunda: “I guess the guy who wrote that must be making plenty of dough.”
Shoeshiner: “Not him.  That dope sold his song for thirty bucks.”
Secunda:  “And that isn’t the half of it . . .” **

**From the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, Jan. 26, 1938.

Secunda had to split the $30 fee with the original Yiddish lyricist, Jacob Jacobs.

A Jewish tune crosses over to the big-time about once a century.  That’s my guess.  I’m thinking the next hit will be the Hip Hop Hoodios’ “My Nose is Large and You Know I’m in Charge.”
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On Sat. June 12, Yiddishe Cup plays the best event in Cleveland, Parade the Circle. We’re not marching in the parade; we’re playing a post-parade concert at 1 p.m. on Wade Oval. Gonna be a massive bar mitzvah party.

If you’re on the Cleveland Workmen’s Circle concert committee, there’s a 25 percent chance you’ll be dead in 10 years. (I counted the dead from a 10-year-old committee roster.)

An elderly woman suggested we include a tribute to a recently deceased committee member in our concert brochure. But the brochure’s cover already read “in memory of Eugenia and Henry Green,” the concert’s principal funders.

I said, “People are dying on this committee every other year. We can’t be putting in written testimonials.”

“Like who?  Who’s dying?” the woman asked.

I didn’t name names.  Why sidetrack the meeting?

The committee met in a room under a portrait of Eugene V. Debs.  A photo of Norman Thomas was in the hallway.

This committee in its prime — about 20 years ago — was like hanging around the cafeteria at CCNY or Western Reserve University in the day.  There had been Max Wohl, Socialist (capital S) and major ACLU donor; David Guralnik, editor of the New World Dictionary; Herman Hellerstein, the cardiologist who first recommended, in the 1960s, exercise after heart attacks; and Harold Ticktin, Mississippi civil rights lawyer (summer 1965), authority on the Jewish Bund, and former “Kinsman cowboy” (Kinsman Road loiterer).  Ticktin said the Jewish Kinsman cowboys in the 1930s called the Italian Kinsman cowboys “noodles” and shkutzim (gentile boys).

Committee members occasionally called each other “friend,” a quasi-socialist salutation.

Several “friends” decided to honor Yiddishe Cup with a Workmen’s Circle dinner.  What Yiddishe Cup didn’t know: the honoree paid to be honored.

Ben Shouse, friend in charge of fundraising, had a booming voice and a shock of gray hair like H.L. Mencken.  And he wore suits like Mencken, and he smoked a cigar like Mencken.  Politically, Shouse was un-Menckenable.   Shouse was a retired labor union boss, autodidact (he liked inculcate), and an advocate for the arts, especially “Shakespeare for the workers”-type events.

Shouse phoned me, suggesting Yiddishe Cup musicians pony up for the banquet.  He said, “Stratton, you know how these things work. Cooperate!”

I didn’t know how these things worked.  Not in 1994, I didn’t.  I thought Yiddishe Cup was being honored because we were good — some sort of arts prize.  I had played tribute dinners before, but had never understood the dynamics.  Shouse said he had raised thousands at a previous dinner in honor of his elderly girlfriend.

Two Yiddishe Cup musicians told me they couldn’t afford the price of the dinner, let alone bring friends, or crazier yet, “buy a table.”

I corralled three people, including my wife, to attend.  I hesitated to hock friends, particularly for a chicken dinner at a windowless Alpha Drive party center.  And my friends would have to listen to speeches about a fraternal organization, Workmen’s Circle, most had never heard of.

Shouse phoned Yiddishe Cup’s singer and said to him: “Stratton gave fifty-five dollars.  Greenman gave twenty-five dollars.  How about you?  And who are you bringing?”

Shouse nearly traumatized my singer, a sensitive artist.

One Yiddishe Cup musician didn’t bother to show up for the tribute.   Another musician rewound his Shouse phone message for me: “This dinner is in your fucking honor!  You’re sophisticated. You know the rules.  Do your part!”

Shouse died in 2003. He raised a lot of money for the arts in Cleveland.

—

Coda:
This year the concert committee added several younger members. Odds are now probably less than 25 percent of a random committee member dying in the next 10 years.  Also, the  Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas pictures are down. Rebbe Menachem Schneerson is up.  A Chabad-affiliate organization bought the Workmen’s Circle building and shares it with the Workmen’s Circle. Now playing in Cleveland: Enemies: A Love Story.

1. GOT A CARD?  NO!

I was a guest at a wedding where the band’s sign was bigger than LeBron James. The banner was eight-foot, like something you might see on a telephone pole announcing “125 years of excellence in education.”

The wedding reception was elegant, but the band’s sign was totally Bedford Auto Mile.  The sign read “More Acts, Better Music, Higher Standards.”

Higher Standards?  The bandleader was Italian.  I knew him.  Roman standard bearers?  The bandleader said to me, “It’s better to be a guest than to work, huh?”

What?  I always prefer playing over schmoozing.

When Yiddishe Cup does weddings, I hand out business cards.  Nothing gaudy.  And I don’t shovel them out.   These cards are almost collectors’ items.  I’m not going to pass them out willy-nilly.

Everybody already knows Yiddishe Cup.  If you say “klezmer band” in Ohio, it’s us.  Now, if we’re in Buffalo, N.Y., for example, I might go heavier on cards.  But I don’t put out a tray.  That’s too dental office.

Granted, we feature Yiddishe Cup’s logo on our bass drum.  Our logo is cool, whimsical and tasteful, and it gets us some gigs.  (Ralph Solonitz designed the logo.)

At the “Higher Standards” wedding, I met a businessman who did music production as a sideline.  I asked for his card.  He didn’t have one.  And he had 100 employees, he said.

He had achieved placid-plus status: no card.

My goal is to be him.

***

2. BALLISTIC / LOADING / CAVS

A Yiddishe Cup musician went ballistic when he saw a college football game, or so he thought, off in the distance.  He said, “I’m so through with this country’s obsessions with sports!”

Yiddishe Cup was loading-in at a student union by a college stadium.

The Yiddishe Cup musician had fouled.  Here’s why: (1.) The college kids were playing lacrosse, not football.  (2.) It was a Division III game.  The stadium was small, with no crowd to speak of.  (3.) The kids were getting some exercise; this was not a big money, faux-pro game.

Yiddishe Cup musicians, for the most part, are not up on today’s sports scene.  For instance, I just learned a basketball shot “from downtown” means a three-pointer.  And I’m wondering what “the post” is.  I watched several basketball games lately.

I have an agreement with my cousin George, a serious sports fan, to go to the Cavs victory parade. I want to be there.  Depends on my Depends though, because I’ll be very old.  Also, depends if it’s raining.  I’m fair weather.

Last Sunday Yiddishe Cup had a gig, a pre-Shavuot Torah dedication/celebration, which was almost postponed to accommodate LeBron James’ reading of the Book of Kells.  The Cavs were scheduled to play the Celtics then.  (Cleveland lost prior, on Thursday, so the playoff series ended, and everything worked out fine for the Torah dedication.)

About championships . . . My father, Toby, promised to take me to the World Series, but the Tribe never made it when I was growing up.  My dad, instead, took me to Ohio State homecoming games.

I took my kids to the 1992 OSU homecoming game.  The Ohio Stadium scoreboard lit up: This Sat. at the Wexner Center, Don Byron Salutes Mickey Katz.

What next, Bucks?  “Fight the Team Across the Field” in Yiddish?

Don Byron played OSU, I think, because Columbus resident Les Wexner, the billionaire owner of The Limited, paid Byron’s band to entertain Wexner’s elderly mother, who probably requested the Mickey Katz show because she didn’t want to fly to New York.  That’s the only logical explanation.  Don Byron never played any other Mickey Katz–tribute shows in Ohio.

Go Mickey.

Go Katz.

Go ‘Cats.

Go Cavs.

If you’re a Cubs fan, or whatever, be quiet about your sports-induced suffering.  You don’t know anything.

My clarinet teacher, Harry Golub, was nicknamed the Bald Eagle.

Harry was hairless.

A student, Zuckerman, gave Mr. Golub that nickname.

Zuckerman, like many junior high clarinetists, dropped out of private lessons around bar mitzvah time.  I hung in through eleventh grade.  During my high school years, Mr. Golub asked me how the clarinet dropouts were doing.

Mr. Golub was often cranky because, for one thing, he didn’t get along well with the music department at the high school.  They wouldn’t buy instruments and sheet music from him.  The high school was in cahoots with another music store, the one out in goy land, Lyndhurst, Mr. Golub said.

Mr. Golub’s store was in Little Israel, the Jewish quadrant of South Euclid. (Little Israel was across the park from the Italian neighborhood,  where I lived.   At least we had finished second floors. The bungalows in Little Israel were custom-built for Jews; nobody over 5-9 could stand up in the dormers.)

I ran into Mr. Golub frequently years later at Yiddishe Cup gigs.  He still railed against the school system . . . “those mumzers [bastards], those anti-semits.”

I don’t know . . . I don’t know if the school was truly anti-Semitic.  Exhibit A: Steve, a loudmouthed Jewish kid, a NYC-style sasser, and one of the smartest guys in my grade.  [Steve isn't his real name.]   Steve and his father, from the East, read the Sunday New York Times. Steve knew about Dylan way before the rest of us.

The high school administration — mostly non-Jewish grads of small Ohio teachers colleges, it seemed — didn’t believe in adjusting to different “learning styles” back then.  Steve’s style was to question all authority and study like mad.  Also, he wore jeans and got sent home.  He talked back to teachers.  He got straight A’s.

Steve was turned down by every college he applied to.  Our guidance counselor wrote something like “rabble rouser” on Steve’s college applications.  (Steve learned this when a classmate, working part-time in the Wesleyan University admissions office, snooped around a couple years later.)

I don’t think the high school administration was purposefully anti-Semitic.  They just had no idea what to make of the insanely competitive, antic Semites — children of pawn shop owners, umbrella salesmen and Holocaust survivors.  These students would ask: “Will this be on the next test?” “Are we responsible for all of section A?  “Can I skip marching band because I have SATs tomorrow?”

You can skip marching band and you’ll be out of the band.

Great!

—-
[Credit to writer Josh Kun for antic Semites.]
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1 of 2 posts for 5/12/10.  Please see the next post too.

We interrupt this blog to tell you this blog is a year old.

Special thanks to our major donors (commenters).  We could have done it without you, but it wouldn’t have been as interesting.

In no particular order, thanks to Marc, Jessica Schreiber, Gerald Ross, Robert K S, Shawn Fink, Teddy, Adrianne Greenbaum, Bill Jones, Mark Schilling, Harvey Kugelman, Wolf Krawkowski, Terri Zupancic, Ellen . . .

David, Irwin Weinberger, John M. Urbancich, Jane Lassar, Zach, Gary Gould, Robin, Ben Cohen, David Budin, Alice, Alan Douglass, Diddle, Don Friedman, Kenny G, Richard Grayson and Steven Greenman.

Get your name on this list next year by contributing at least $2,500, or writing in a lot.

Google Analytics — a spy op — has uncovered Klezmer Guy readers in every state except the axis of evil: South Dakota, Nebraska and Arkansas.  Google also hears Klezmer Guy “chatter” from many foreign countries.  The most active Klezmer Guy cells are in Canada, Israel, England, France and Germany.  And there is a lone-wolf reader in Libya. ( Salaam, bro, don’t shoot.)

Google doesn’t divulge readers’ names, by the way,  just cities and countries.

Expect some Klezmer Guy video this coming year.  These video clips should appeal to a broader readership: non-readers.  Some nudity in the clips. (Facial and hand.)

***

Quiz-time

Several Klezmer Guy readers  report: “I’ve read every word of your blog!”   Kathy, one of these extreme readers, has asked for a quiz.  She thinks she will win.

[The quiz is now in the "comments" section of this post. 5/21/10]

See you at the next Yiddishe Cup concert or “Driving Mr. Klezmer” duo gig.  Or if not there, here.

The bell rings.  Round two.

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2 of 2 posts for 5/12/10

A banda clarinetist in Sinaloa, Mexico, lent me his axe. I played horribly because of that clarinet’s craggy reed; I’ve seen better reeds in a fourth grader’s case. I played a Meron/Israeli nign (wordless melody). The Mexican listeners clapped. They could have whistled.

That was my sole south-of-the-border performance. (My family was on a hiking trip in northern Mexico, where we stumbled upon a horse auction with oompah banda.)

A Cleveland woman announced her Central American wedding — a Jewish ceremony in San Salvador.  I told the bride’s mother to hire Yiddishe Cup.  “I’m sure the groom’s family can afford it,” I said, “or they wouldn’t still be down there.”  The mom agreed to the “afford it” part, but not the band.  The mom burned a CD of horas from my wife’s collection and took that.

Yiddishe Cup plays Latin music fairly well. We have cornered the Latin Jewish doctor market in Cleveland — a market that fits comfortably into the backseat of a Camry.  We did a gig for a Mexican Jewish doctor who headed the Cleveland Clinic evil eye center (Cole Eye Institute).  That was one salsa-dik party.  Latin Jews party second only to Russian Jews.

We played a Cleveland Ecuadorian wedding where I explained the chair-lifting tradition to the groom’s gentile parents.  I said in Spanish: “You will see people seated in chairs in the wind.”

***

In Dallas, when Yiddishe Cup musicians visited the grassy knoll,  I stopped at the neighborhood taco shop to update myself on Mexican drinks.

The taco shop had orange, carrot, horchata, mango, guava and Sidral apple drinks.  They also had bottled Mexican Coke. The clerk explained Mexican Coke is sweeter than American Coca-Cola.

Yiddishe Cup’s ultimate hip-spanic thrill was an outdoor concert in El Paso, Texas, where we played “La Bamba” for 2,500 predominately Mexican-American listeners.  For Jewish flavor we added Hebrew lyrics from Psalm 133 (”Hine Ma Tov” / Behold how good ).  We borrowed that idea from a Kansas City band, Guns ‘n’ Charoses.

From the bandstand, we could see the Rio Grande.   We played “Meshugeneh Mambo.”  We said gracias a lot.

So close to Latin America.

Cinco de Mayo.  Hoy. (Pronounced “oy.”)
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1 of 2 posts for 5/5/10. See the next post too, please.

Busking is a British term.  In the Midwest we say “playing on the street.”  Kind of awkward, but we don’t want to sound British.

In the 1990s, several Yiddishe Cup musicians played on the streets in downtown Cleveland and made nothing. Security guards shooed us away from Higbee’s and the Arcade entrance.

Our parking expenses were more than what we made.  Then we ate out and lost even more money.

We were certainly contributing.  We were putting the viva back in city.

The bus exhaust stunk.  The passersby ignored us — except for the bums,  who ogled our money pot.  Our gelt was immense.

***

I have “busked”; I played on the streets abroad. (Northern Mexico, 2008, doesn’t count; that was a freebie.)  In 2006 I made 16 shekels ($4) on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem.  I had my axe with me in Israel, so why not play for my people?

My people wanted Dixieland.  “The Saints Go Marching In” was killer.  A charedi (ultra-Orthodox) boy kept asking for it.  I tried klezmer but that didn’t sell, except for “Anim Zemiros.” (Song of Glory)

The tzedakah (charity) collectors eyed my coins.  Again, awkward. Give it up for the charedim.

There is a new video clip of Pete Rushefsky, the renowned klezmer musician, playing on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.  Pete is wearing a glove, the wind is blowing, and there is a sole listener, who says to Pete: “My grandfather used to play this stuff.”   Great stuff — the video.  Turns out the grandpa was Louis Armstrong.

Not exactly.   Grandpa was  Jack Boogich of the historic Romanian klezmer family. For hardcore klez fans only, check out this link. Scroll to the bottom of the text for the Brighton Beach video.
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2 of 2 posts for 5/5/10

I know a Cleveland guitarist who jammed with Hendrix about 40 years ago.

I played with Brubeck.  Chris Brubeck — Dave’s son.   Chris played in the Michigan jazz band, which I was in briefly. I don’t think Chris would remember me.

I was a jazzer.

Most everybody was  into Steppenwolf.  My freshman roommate liked the MC5 too.  I convinced him to move out.  I got a roommate who was into Jefferson Airplane.  That was better, but not much.

Pure jazz — that was my thing.  The blues, too, was kosher.

My final roommate, Dave (not his real name), was an inner-city Chicago kid into nothing.  Dave didn’t know a clarinet from an oboe. We got along great.

I visited Dave at his Chicago house decades later; he still lived in his old neighborhood in a triple in Wrigleyville.  His teenage kid was jamming on tenor sax to jazz play-along records.  Dave was a brakeman on the railroad.  He had entered Michigan as a pre-med, like everybody else, and had come out a brakeman.  Luckily, he had made it through at all; during sophomore year he had chalked “Take Drugs” on the sidewalk at the co-op house, or “Only Fools Stay in School.”

Dave, rolling a cigarette on his Chicago front stoop,  said, “I would like to raise more Cain, but I don’t know if the Revolution is going to come around again.”  He was sweating his monthly urine test.

His house, which he had bought in 1975 for $30,000, was worth about 15 times that now. “I’m a capitalist,” he said. “I have two renters.” And he subscribed to the Socialist Workers Party newspaper.

His kid played “Watermelon Man.”  Every high schooler started on that, thanks to Jamey Aebersold’s jazz play-along series.

This scene was familiar, except for The Militant newspapers. My family had been Newsweek subscribers.

***

At Bill DeArango’s music store in Cleveland, I played through tunes from the book New Sounds in Modern Music, edited by Bugs Bower, 1949.  The book’s blurb read: “The new era has now fully blossomed . . . [This is the] progressive approach to modernism at its very peak.”

Long live John Birks Gillespie!

DeArango, the store owner, had recorded and played guitar with Dizzy on 52nd Street.  DeArango was the man in jazz in Cleveland.  And he couldn’t believe how good I was.  DeArango had randomly picked the New Sounds charts from his store’s sheet-music rack, and I had played cleanly.  Also, DeArango was probably thrilled to see a kid with a horn in 1970; the store was crammed with electric guitars and rock drum kits.  I didn’t tell DeArango I knew the New Sounds tunes because I already owned the book.

I went up to Berklee in Boston.  There was no campus, just one building.  The school’s founder, Lawrence Berk, had named the school for his son, Lee.  Berklee seemed too similar to my dad’s failed drug company, Lesbert Drug Co., named for my sister, Leslie, and me.  Not my bag — family businesses.  I returned to Cleveland, then on to Ann Arbor, my real college.

I was mediocre, at best, at jazz.  I could not mimic sounds quickly.  I bought play-along records.  (Few students in 1970 knew what jazz was. That was to my advantage.)  I went to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, and I bought jazz instructional books.  These books contained hoards of chord patterns and scales, on par in incomprehensibility with Organic Chemistry.

I packed up my alto sax for about two decades.

My father, Toby, owned a modern “apartment community.” The complex was “garden-style,” meaning three-story buildings grouped around a parking lot and pool.  The buildings had mansard roofs and looked like McDonald’s.  The place had an Anglo name.  Jamestown.  Should have been Jonestown.

The development looked genteel but wasn’t.  One guy peed in the heating ducts and poured aquarium gravel in the toilet on his way out.  Some tenants used the hollow-core doors for karate practice.

A high school wrestling coach, who was also a multi-millionaire, bought the complex and turned it into condos in 1977.  Worked out for everybody.  As the banker said to Toby, “You made your money, and he made his. Be happy.”

I used to repair the complex’s roofs, mostly replacing lids on vents.  The lids were called Jap caps because of their coolie-hat shape.

There is no more peaceful place than a roof top — at least a flat roof.  You can see everybody, and nobody can see you.  That’s why cops in The Wire go on roofs so often.

***

“I’m in real estate.”

I say that whenever I don’t feel like saying “I’m a landlord.”  If I say “I’m a landlord,” people often hear “I’m a slumlord.”

I don’t sell houses or flip properties.  I collect rent, evict people, charge late fees, and look for cats in apartment windows so I can charge pet fees. Does that sound like a slumlord?

When I vacationed at the Michigan alumni family camp, I introduced myself at the meet-and-greet as a landlord and klezmer musician.  People laughed at the “landlord” part, particularly the campers with advanced degrees.  “Landlord” was so bad it was good. “Klezmer” was cool — the arts.

I came across a Yiddish anti-landlord song in the klezmer business. “Dire Gelt” (Rent).  The lyrics, in brief, are: “Why should we pay rent when the stove is broken?”

I’ve heard that line before about the broken stove.  Not often.  It’s usually “My bathroom ceiling is falling in.”  It’s all about water damage in the landlord biz.

And it’s occasionally about animals.

What bugs me: tenants who ask for a hotel room because they saw a mouse.

Mice are good people. I’ve had mice in my house. I don’t run to a hotel every time I see a mouse, and my bank doesn’t give me a reduction on my mortgage payment.
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1 of 2 posts for 4/21/10.  Please see the next post too.

While waiting in line at Taco Bell, I tried to unlock the mystery of the restaurant’s warning: “Time Delay/Time-Lock” safe can not be opened for 10 minutes and up to 18 hours.

I couldn’t unlock it.

The other drawback — and a big one — to my West Side T-Bell hangout was the manager locked the restrooms because of vandalism.  I had to ask for a key. The manager lost some of my business because of that.  Please, can I go?  I didn’t like repeating first grade.

I was at Taco Bell when the founder, Glen Bell Jr., died.  I hadn’t known a Mr. Bell existed until I read his obit.  A customer broke the news to me — not about Bell’s death — but about the manager not locking the restroom door anymore.  In memory of Glen Bell Jr.?   In the obit, Bell said customer service was paramount.

Hallelujah for the new open door policy, Brother Bell.

The customer in front of me said, “They finally got smart here.  People come in here after hours on the road, and they have to go!”

I frequented  T-Bell more often because of the new restroom policy.  And I developed a new T-Bell hang-up — a musical one.  I asked the young cashier to name the horrible song playing.  She couldn’t.  Name the artist?  “It’s satellite,” she said.

Put cilantro on that satellite radio station, hon.  Quash the piped-in Lady Gaga music.  The customer comes first.
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2 of 2 posts for 4/21/10