I sought cruise ship work because there were fewer gigs going on, because my day gig had fallen apart, and because, not being a fool, I like the idea of knowing where my next meal was coming from, and the one after that. The kids had moved out of our house--two of them for Jan and two for me. I don't drive cars when I'm on ships. I don't see my wife usually, or our dogs either.
Anyway, I started to get itchy for living in a closet-sized room, connected with the music office at Princess Cruises, and off I went to the Caribbean (briefly), through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific Coast to Alaska, where I spent the summer of 2005, one of the hottest on record in the town I live in, Austin, Texas.
I worked 4 months on the Dawn Princess, treading the waters between Vancouver, a wonderful city with more to do than I had imagined, and Whittier, Alaska, a town with two bars and that's it. In between we called at Ketchican, Juneau, and Skagway, and then into the frigid waters of Glacier National Park and College Fjord. The gig was mostly easy. We backed the acts. Four horns, three rhythm. The quality of the acts and of their charts was enormously variable, but we were getting good money to play music in one of the more beautiful settings on the planet. If I complained, I don't remember it.
Well, there were little inconveniences, like the guards who frisked us in Whittier, like we were going to blow the ship up or something. But that was minor, the usual Security post -9/11 theatre crapola.
I did my four months, came back and decided to do some more as soon as I could. So they sent me off to the Caribbean and the Baltic and the Caribbean again. I loved the Baltic, tolerated the merely tolerated the Caribbean. The bands were, well, interesting. There was usually a young tenor player who thought that life began with John Coltrane, not always though. Attitude means everything, just like it did when I was on the road with bands, living on buses. The pressure cooker nature of the gig, and having to face the same personalities and faces every day, just make it impossible for someone with a less than positive way of viewing the surroundings was just asking for it, and the cohesion of the band suffered in the process.
The hardest part of leaving home is leaving home, of course. My kids were out on their own and doing pretty well. That left my spouse and the dogs to fend for themselves. Jan and the dogs gave me special permission to see what it was like out there.
I had worked on cruise ships twenty years before, when I lived in Los Angeles. Cruise ships were relatively new then, and the cruise line I worked on was a real corker. The Azure Seas was the ship, and she went from LA Harbor all the way to Ensenada, twice a week. If it sounds like a grind, it was. Back then, in the early eighties, the only way that middle-class folks could gamble was to drive to Las Vegas, or to book a 3-day or 4-day cruise on the Azure Seas. We'd clear the Vincent Thomas Bridge and, after about an hour and a half, the casino would open.
I liked the gig, and I found enough to do on the ship to keep away from the usual temptations musicians fall prey to. (Unfortunately, my cabinmate was not so lucky. After I had left, he fell hard for one of the dancers, who didn't reciprocate, and in one final effort to change her mind, immolated himself on her suburban front lawn.)
That's why, after a I'd taken 9 months off (there's something you can't do in most jobs) I emailed the guy who booked me at Princess Cruises. He emailed me back several options on Princess' ships, but the thing that caught my eye was the historic last cruises of the venerable Queen Elizabeth 2. It was an unusual offer in several ways. On Princess, all my work was done as a showband musician, an all-purpose category that involves backing the acts, playing dance sets, and occasional forays into the Atrium, the territory of the solo pianists and guitarists. The work involves flyshit reading, a lot of doubling and a knowledge of musical styles that date back some years. On QE2, I would be the only saxophone player in a dance orchestra in the Queens Room (no hyphens please), whose bandstand served the largest dance floor at sea.
Even though they needed the spot filled in 2 short weeks, I went for it, and for the first time agreed to a contract of longer than 4 months. I'd be on QE2 for 6 months so I could do the last World Cruise. But I had a major hurdle to get across. I had to obtain a Norwegian Seamans Medical Certificate. The Cunard folks in England gave me no option but to go through a doctor in Houston, a hundred fifty miles from my house. The physical exam was extensive, and included a clean EKG. I was already taking beta blockers for marginally high blood pressure, which popped up when I was performing miracles for my last employer.
I have another blog, written while I was on QE2, that chronicles in reverse order most of that voyage. It's at this link that the narrative starts:
By the narrowest of margins I got all my documentation together, tidied up my gig situation and kissed my wife goodbye at the Austin airport for a thrilling hop to Chicago Midway, followed by an even more thrilling ride to Heathrow, perhaps the two most insane airports on the face of the earth. In the process, I managed to lose my medical certificate and my joining papers. But I got my ass there.
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