Category — Miscellaneous

Instrument cases, they’re like coffins. Red velvet.  Often musty.  Occasionally mildewy.

A clarinet is a chopped-up piece of African granadilla wood, stained black.  It’s just a big wooden flute with a lot of hardware.  It takes a minimum of seven years’ practice to sound decent.  Kids sound horrible on clarinets.

When some schmuck calls and yells at me about no heat, I just fire up my clarinet.

You need gigs, or you’ll quit practicing.  Playing for oneself, that lasts only about six months. I hung with a community band once; the conductor ranted at us like we weren’t good enough to park cars at Severance Hall [home of the Cleveland Orchestra].  I dropped out.

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Tomorrow:
TWO GUYS JAMMIN’. . . Fritz Kreisler and Fritz the Cat.

One day you’re a real estate slumlord, and the next you’re signing autographs at a concert.  The first time I signed an autograph, I couldn’t fathom it.  I am not Bob Feller.

About 10 percent of CD-buyers want your autograph.

They are the well-wishers after the gig.  “Great concert” is the standard greeting.  Some of these people try to hog the musicians’ time with stories about their grandkids’ clarinet playing, or their memories of Mickey Katz – which is actually interesting.

Sometimes I’m the autograph hound. I was talking to Josh Dolgin (Socalled) of Klezmer Madness after a concert — and I know the guy, I mean he has stayed at my house — when a concertgoer cut in front of me and started flashing his business card, and I backed off.  I was looking forward to going out for a drink with Dolgin maybe.  Who knows.  Maybe David Krakauer, the star of the show, would have come along.

Instead I went to a coffeehouse with Irwin Weinberger, Yiddishe Cup’s guitar player,  and we rehashed the Klezmer Madness show.  We decided Krakauer was a clarinet player beyond belief, but 90 minutes of non-stop clarinet — no matter how good — was too long.

Keep it 30 minutes or under.  We’re in a hurry.  We grew up on Sesame Street.  (Howdy Doody in my case.)

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Tomorrow:
PO-PO AS RENTER . . . The police pay on time.

I had my clarinet’s tone holes undercut, which means the clarinet repairman shaved some wood out of the clarinet’s bore.  Repairman . . . technician . . . the guy was my neighbor.  He spends his workday looking down clarinets and saxophones.  Like a coal miner.  He has a little light he drops down the clarinet shaft, looking for leaks.

So my axe has a very wide-open sound.  You can put a lot of air through it.  That’s the trick — to put as much air through as possible.  (The champ of  “big air” is Gary Gould from Los Angeles.   He’s plays a Claude Lakey 4* jazz clarinet mouthpiece — a loud and uncontrollable thing, like a two year old in a restaurant.)

But it’s not all about the bike, or horn.  The player needs to maintain a thin stream of air, like blowing a Superball across a table.  Not a golf ball or ping pong ball.   It has to be a Superball.  (Ilene Stahl used the Superball analogy at KlezKamp two decades ago.)

On a sax, you can put tons of air through because the physics of the sax are different than the clarinet.  All the sound of a sax comes out the bell; on a clarinet, only a bit of the sound comes out the bell, and the rest pops out the fingering holes.  There is a reverse air pressure on the clarinet.  Air coming back at you.

In the real estate biz the “back pressure” is water leaks.  Property management is all about water problems — roof  leaks, pipes bursting, or some guy flushing potatoes down his toilet.

I have a trio of plumbers: Ron, who goes in with a pneumatic pump.  If that doesn’t unclog the drain, we go to Bob, who has an electric snake.  He’s picky, though;  for example, he’ll say, “I’m not going in there.  There’s a ton of feces and the guy is a fat slob.”  If  Bob can’t — or won’t — fix the mess, we go with Bill, who charges 50 percent more than Bob and has a howitzer in his truck.

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Tomorow:
NEXT STOP PINSK . . . How to run your band like a train.

For our D.C. gig, the hotel wanted to see our band’s liability insurance policy.  We didn’t have one.  Same request came from a temple in Boca Raton, Fla.  Must be an East Coast thing — the band must have an insurance policy.  In the Midwest nobody sues anybody else.  We’ve had a couple broken ankles over the years — people falling in “Hava Nagila”s, or getting spiked by another dancer’s high heel.  Stuff happens.  But nobody sues.

Contracts are almost meaningless.  If there’s no trust, you’re wasting your time.  Who you going to take to small claims?  I’ve done a couple rounds.  Maybe one a decade.  Not for the band, the real estate.  Only do small claims when you know the person is collectible.  Like when they work for the Cleveland Clinic.  Even then, the person might quit his job when he gets the garnishment letter from you.

Best to check out the person on the way in — not the way out.  Call the previous landlord if you have to.  Run a credit check.  If the previous landlord says the guy is a psycho, believe him.  And refuse to comment when the prospective tenant asks, “What did my landlord say to kill the deal?”  Be glad the landlord leveled with you.  Often the previous landlord will mislead you just to get the psycho out of his building.

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Shabbat shalom
Tomorrow:
THE CLARINET SHAFT . . . How to make a clarinet sound decent.

Never take less than the equivalent of two months’ rent on move in. If a person can’t pay that, you’ll be chasing that person from the get-go.

I once had a custodian who took a ring instead of a security deposit. The renter was an elderly retired nurse from Houston. Also, a felon. But we didn’t know that. She conned her way into the apartment with a dime store ring.

I did a little “self-help” — legal-talk for evicting her without the court’s permission. I got a couple guys, and we moved her stuff into the basement. Her lawyer took several thousand from me. That was my last self-help.

I’m not “mom and pop” — I have a layer between me and the tenants: my on-site building managers/custodians.

How did I get to be bigger than “mom and pop.” First off, it helped my father was Toby Stratton. He bought a six-store, 21-suiter in 1965. He put down 8 percent and got two second mortgages. That’s heavy leverage. Gambling.

The band biz — we’re not “mom and pop” either. “Mom and pop” in the music biz would be a bar band — $100 per night per guy. Yiddishe Cup is above that. We’ve played the soft-seat auditoriums. That’s what the music biz calls the college auditoriums with cushy chairs.

For example, we played Loras College in Iowa and ate at the Ground Round afterward — the only place in Dubuque that was open after 10 p.m.

We’ve played Mt. Union College, Beloit College, Michigan State, UNC-Greensboro, Chautauqua Institution, City of El Paso (Tex.), Kenyon, Wabash, Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. That’s the gateway to the Ozarks. A lot of places.