A SWING AND A MISS

 
Last month I ran into a tenant, carrying an electric bass in a case. Or so I thought. Turns out he had a Stratocaster guitar. “I’m storing it for a guy,” he said.

“What do you play?” I said.

“I’m the vocalist.”

“What’s the band?”

“Home and Garden.”

[Later googled: Home and Garden is an avant-garde, post-punk band featuring some former Pere Ubu players. And by the way, the singer pays his rent on time.]

“My son is in a well-known band — Vulfpeck,” I said.

“What?”

Vulf . . . Peck.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, I guess they’re not that well-known.”

—

I had been trick-or-treating with my grandkids in Chicago several days prior. I played clarinet while making the candy rounds. Two young dads requested a jazz tune, so I played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I can get away with Dixieland because I’m old. The  dads seemed OK with it. I asked if they played music. Yes, drums and bass. I didn’t ask them if they had heard of Vulfpeck. The trick-or-treating and my grandkids — the main attraction — threw me off my kvell game.

I bet they knew Vulfpeck.

The Strattons in Ann Arbor, 2010. Random old photo.

—

The above reminds me of a Cleveland Jewish News article (3/31/2000) about the father of Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen:

“Would you, by chance, be a Steely Dan fan?” Beachwood resident Joseph ‘Jerry’ Fagen inquires wryly. It’s an unlikely question coming from an 80-year-old, but Fagen’s favorite conversation starter affords the opening he needs to do what any parent would do in his shoes: kvell a little.

“Reaching for his wallet, the spry sneaker-clad Fagen produces a computerized list in tiny type of the 13 albums released by his son, Donald Fagen, co-founder of the jazz-rock-pop recording group Steely Dan. His latest entry? Two Against Nature, the group’s newest release, which debuted last month at #6 on the Billboard charts.”

Full CJN article by Susan Rzepka here.