Thirty years ago I lived in Santa Cruz with some very special people, mostly musicians. Some of them are still important players in my life. One of the most interesting of these people was Cornelius Bumpus. Aside from having one of the most euphonious names, ever, Corney had the driest sense of humor on the planet, and he could play his ass off on tenor saxophone. Latecomers to this blog and its players may have heard Cornelius with the Doobie Brothers, with whom he played for two decades, or more recently with Steely Dan.
Corney was so devoted to music that when he made no money, it was no problem. He lived in his blue 1965 Volkswagen bug, not because he liked to, but because, on a musician’s wages, it was his only option. He’d play in the afternoons at Cooper House, the old county courthouse which had been converted into a place for the idle classes to fritter away their daylight hours over a walnut salad and Anchor Steam Beer. On the outdoor patio, de facto jazz groups played under a mural of jazz musicians playing at Cooper House. All of them including Corney were immortalized in that mural, which fell down and went to the sanitary landfill when the Loma Prieta earthquake changed Santa Cruz forever.
Cornelius Bumpus, who was one of the few Santa Cruz natives I knew, refused to sleep in Santa Cruz, even in his Volkswagen.
The hat having been passed at Cooper House, the tips having been divided and distributed, Corney would rev up his bug and head out of town on Highway 17, headed for parts unknown, where he made camp and curled up to sleep.
One spring in the late seventies, baseball fever gripped the musicians of Santa Cruz. It might have been David O’Connor’s admonition that the Oakland A’s--who were between owners and saw their attendance slide from pathetic to insignificant--“needed our support.”
David, a bubbly Irish wit who had toured with Buffy St. Marie, Leonard Cohen and the Lettermen, organized (insofar as we could be organized) outings to day games at the Oakland ballyard, a vast expanse of poured concrete and genuine grass where we made up most of the crowd in the left field bleachers. We drank way too much beer those afternoons, due in large part to the fact that we had our own, personal beer vendors. O’Conner drove most of the time in the gigantic car that Steve Bennet owned. If memory serves, David was the one of us who was sober enough to handle Highway 17 and its blind curves. We drove to one day game in Jaws, also from the Bennet stable. Jaws was a Chevy crew van, retired from the Forest Service. I think Zack Arbios, who was not a musician, sold Jaws to Steve, who sold it eventually to drummer Peter Burchard.
I have in my mind a picture frozen in amber of O’Conner behind the wheel of Bennet’s massive Chrysler, four of us in the back seat giggling like fools as he showed us how a Highway Patrolman would take a curve coming on to 17 in San Jose. He kicked the transmission down and punched it, locked his arms at 10 and 2 on the wheel and grinned like a character out of a Hunter Thompson book as we climbed through the iceplant and pointed Bennet’s boat toward Santa Cruz.
It became obvious that going to an occasional day game in Oakland wouldn’t be enough. The A’s were on the road half the season and could move to another city the moment Charlie Finley sold them. It was decided that our afternoons, after Cooper House ended lunch service and before happy hour was upon us, we would spend a few hours in Branciforte Park, playing softball.
It was never an organized game, but these afternoons lasted through the languid summer until the rains came and washed the infield away. Almost every musician made at least an appearance, some lasted the whole summer. Some tried, without result, to get the game operating on a more serious level, or even to convert it to fast pitch. Whenever the bartenders at the Crow’s Nest or the Catalyst showed up there was some effort to take the game to another level, either by making the pitches whiz by or using one of the massive 12-inch spongy softballs favored by Polish teams in Chicago.
I am happy to report that all efforts to organize and change the basic reason we were playing failed, because we were, well, musicians from an essentially anarchist community with a socialist majority on the city council, enjoying the afternoon. We started a pickup game that stayed a pickup game, wedged into our schedules between afternoon gigs and evening gigs, once a week.
The only significant deviation we had from the rules of the game involved Cornelius Bumpus. Corney possessed massive upper-body strength. When he swung at a ball he moved nothing from his hips down, relying instead on his arms and trunk to launch the ball when he connected. He hardly ever whiffed. Striking out was not his problem. He could easily slice five or six foul balls down the left field line. And that was a problem.
Branciforte Creek formed the limit of left field, running through the park. Only Corney could hit the ball into that creek. There were a couple guys who had volunteered to bring softballs to the park, and their balls were frequently fouled off into the creek and were coming back soggy. These guys, it must be said, were not musicians, but friends of musicians and bartenders. Unfortunately, we made so little playing music that we didn’t have it in our budgets to buy new softballs.
After a couple weeks of walking away with soggy balls, the bartenders and friends of musicians decided to impose a new rule that would penalize Corney. Henceforth, a “Creek Ball” would be called if a ball was sliced foul into Branciforte Creek, and the batter would be out.
I remember watching the Bumpus swing. Corney swung like a gate, all muscle in the top end with hardly any leg movement at all. I also noted that Corney was pointing his toes into foul territory, guaranteeing a long series of foul balls. Once the new rule was in place, I took Corney aside and suggested he might point his toe around into the field of play. He tried it and, with no modification to his swing, just moving his gate more toward fair territory, Corney was able to change his long loud foul balls into long loud home runs. But the non-musicians were still getting soggy balls, as the creek also ran defined the home run line as well as the foul line. And so the Bumpus rule was extended to fair balls as well as foul.
Corney took it all in stride, and in time started peppering line drives into every field by shortening his stroke and pointing his toe just before swinging the gate, much like Saduharu Oh. He became the nemesis of every outfielder on the opposing side. When we started playing--when we made that transition between the bleachers in Oakland and the hallowed fields of Branciforte--Corney was playing music primarily with Jerry Miller in his resurgent Moby Grape at night, and daylight hours in the odd jazz gig at Cooper House or one of the various venues around town.
We were all a little stunned when Corney brought a couple of the Doobie Brothers to Branciforte to play one afternoon. The Doobies were from the other side of Highway 17, the area that was to have become Silicon Valley in a few years. They seemed to play pretty well, and I think we treated them like regular musicians.
And so it came to pass that Cornelius Bumpus was recruited by the Doobie Brothers, not for his mighty swing to the outfield that resulted in the institution of the Bumpus Rule, but because of his soulful tenor playing, his doubling on Hammond B-3, and his vocal skills. Michael McDonald had recently joined the band for touring, and it was a good time to make a move. The Doobies had a hit record out called “What a Fool Believes” and were packing them in at stadiums and larger venues worldwide. Word was on the ballfield that Corney was pulling down $1200 a week retainer when the Doobies were NOT touring. For a bunch of guys who, like me, had cheerfully gone out on the road for $225 a week, it seemed like Corney had made it, big time.
Nonetheless, Corney still wore plaid long-sleeved shirts and Levis 501 jeans on stage and off. I saw him about 6 months later, when I had moved to southern California so I could gain visibility as a road musician looking for work. We met up by the Universal Sheraton hotel at the top of Cahuenga Pass. Larry Scala and I were living a couple miles apart in West LA, and, as part of the Branciforte mob, we decided to drive up to the hotel and take our chances on finding Bumpus before the band headed off to the gig. We were successful, although we felt like stalkers. We caught him between limos, heading off for a sound check. Larry and I congratulated him and wished him well, and he was off.
A few months later I got a card from him saying he had made a record and would be driving down to play at the Baked Potato in Los Angeles, and suggesting that I might want to hear the band, which was made up of him, a Santa Cruz piano player who had played a few games at Branciforte, and “a couple brothers from Harlem.”
When I got to the venue, it turned out the drummer and bass player were indeed brothers, but not from Harlem, but Haarlem, in the Netherlands, two gangly white guys.
Corney got married, built a house in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and started a family. He became a part of the community when he was off the road. Longer than a decade later, the Doobies imploded, but Corney was ready with Plan B, and moved with his family from Murphys, California to New York City, where in time he joined Steely Dan.
He always maintained ties with the Sierra foothills. One day he got on a plane to perform at a jazz festival there. He died on that plane, of a heart attack, over Montana, nearly thirty years after the Bumpus Rule went into effect at Branciforte Park.
I still congratulate him on a life well led and wish him well. Keep swinging, brother.
