From Green Checks to Direct Deposit in 40 Short Years

It’s March 27, 2013, and moments ago I noticed on my iPad that my credit union had posted a deposit for my first Social Security check since 1973, when I got my last green check from survivor benefits from my father’s account.

I went through college on those green checks, just up the hill from where I live now. I had entered UCSC as an emancipated minor, self supporting though, courtesy of a California State Scholarship, one who didn’t have to worry about fees, which were just $229.50 a quarter at the time. All I had to worry about was care and feeding—renting a room and buying groceries—and that’s where the green checks came in.

It's been a long and eventful 40 years between Social Security payments, during which I paid into the system, more so than most of the musicians I know. I had nonmusical careers that operated strictly within the system, and I looked at the small deductions as just a part of the game. Some of the lines of work were . . .

Waiter in an Ice Cream Parlor

Sonny was connected, or so I thought. He owned an ice cream parlor called The Ice Cream Parlor in the town back east where I worked when I was sixteen. Noreen, my sister, worked there when she was fifteen, also waiting tables. I’ll not mention the town for fear of retribution. That’s the kind of guy Sonny was, and perhaps is still.

Unloader/Loader of Trucks

I went down to Santa Ana the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at UCSC, My best buddy from high school had dropped out of UC Berkeley and his parents left him the house for the summer, so I moved in with him and a couple blokes and started working right away at the trucking company where he was working. Every night we unloaded freight from trucks, sorted the freight in a warehouse, and loaded the sorted freight into empty trailers. We also tested the patience of the Costa Mesa Police Department by looking suspicious at 4 am while their new helicopter was flying.

Baritone Saxophonist for Stan Kenton

“And then the phone rang.” I’d always herd that was how it would be, and that was how it was. The guy at the other end of the line was Dick Shearer, Stan’s crew chief, offering me a job.

Cab Driver in New York City

Nobody moves to New York to drive a cab, not even someone from Pakistan (who in all likelihood has advanced degrees in physics). But there you are, in New York, trying to find your way. You have no clue about the city’s layout, but you have a map, and you’ve just shelled out 40 of your last dollars to the Taxi and Limousine Commission for a license. You pick out a garage, and you’re in business. The first night on the job, a man and woman got into my cab, midtown. A car emerged from a Hertz garage and the guy told me, “Follow that car.” Guys drive cabs for a lifetime without hearing that one.

Baritone Saxophonist for Glenn Miller Orchestra

I was just getting myself into a comfortable pattern of driving the graveyard shift when it was disrupted by a couple of guys from the Glenn Miller band, who, on a rare night off, were listening to a band at a club called Stryker’s uptown. We chatted on the way to Times Square about life on the road, and when they were leaving the cab at their hotel I told them, “If you ever need a bari player, give me a call.” The Texan of the two, Laigh Langley, laughed and said, “Our bari player is on the third week of his two week notice.”

So off I went.

Temp Tech Employee in Orange County

I didn’t want to do this, but in the boomtown atmosphere that was Orange County in the seventies, you could walk into a temp agency and walk out with a job, sometimes a job that paid more than ten dollars an hour. I operated a machine that connected wires to pins of circuit boards—my first exposure to computers. I worked in the print shop at Cannon Electronics in Santa Ana (I used to deliver the afternoon paper to their guard shack when I was a kid), and they offered me a permanent job. I turned them down and moved to Venice to pursue musical opportunities which I mistakenly thought existed.

CETA Employee of Purr-Fect Printers

I had moved from Santa Cruz to southern California with the intention of getting work as a musician, but it always seemed like whenever I moved, things were great a couple months or a year ago, and it’s dry now. So with that in mind I applied for retraining through CETA, a scheme of the Ford administration to retrain chronically unemployed people with job skills that were in demand. I worked for Chuck Amadon, doing paste-up, ordering type, working the counter, and, eventually running a press. CETA kicked Chuck back several dollars of my hourly wage.

Printers Devil

Patrick Reagh was a piano player with whom I did a few salsa gigs, but he was also one of the best letterpress printers in the country, or he was getting there anyway. It was a long ride up the Olympic bus to his shop, but one look around the shop and I knew it was time to leave offset. I set type by hand, ran presses and casters and generally made myself useful.

Road Musician with the Modernaires and Helen Forrest

By this time I’d married, become a father, and moved to the Palms district of west Los Angeles. When an opportunity came up to go on the road with a very swinging band in the very non-winging month of January (back in mid-March) I jumped at the chance. But I missed my son’s first steps. So I hung up my spurs for a couple years.

Typesetter

Learning computer typesetting after working with metal type was a cinch, although there were employers in my intermediate years who didn’t think I was quite so adept. My first employer was Newport Stationers. We’d moved to Irvine by then, and I rode my bike to work most days on a great and underused bicycle path, a straight shot to the neighborhood of the Orange County (SNA) Airport. When I’d worked a year I thought I could make more money than they were willing to pay me, so I went with the Firm of Christopher Wren. (What kind of a name was THAT?) Gradually, I made a plan to go out on my own.

Owner of Typographic Business

I opened Ampersand & Company (makes more sense than calling your typesetting business the Firm of Christopher Wren) just as my daughter was being born. The business thrived with the change to PostScript. Desktop Publishing had zero effect on me, unlike my competition. After 4 years, family relations strained, and I was left with little alternative than to close and take the proverbial bath.

Graphics Manager for GES Exposition Services

After working for myself for five years I had no trouble at all setting up a print shop for Expo-Tech, the company where my sister worked. Moving the printing of forms in house saved them a ton of money, and the trade-off for me was I had a steady, reliable paycheck again. When Expo-Tech merged with GES I moved over to their office in Cerritos with Noreen. The thing I remember being most challenging about the job was napping after a night of gigging, my hand on the mouse and my back turned to the door in case anybody walked in.

Print Shop Manager

I managed a print shop in Austin, although the owner—who moved cocaine through the shop and was in a lot of legal trouble for mail fraud—had a tendency to override my decisions. It didn’t last long, and the business folded under the weight of the straw man the owner had selected to receive his assets. It got ugly, but by then I was long gone.

Author of several Macworld reviews and one Peachpit book

I copied a lot of music over the years, and when I ran into Marjorie Baer at a UCSC alumni function she asked me if I’d like to write some bylined reviews for Macworld magazine. When Marjie moved over to Peachpit Press, she asked me to write a book about Claris Home Page. The week the book was published, Steve Jobs was back to Apple. He pulled the plug on the product. Today you can buy a copy (all 5,000 printed were sold) for 1 cent on Amazon, but I got some pretty good reviews you can read on the Amazon listing.

Database Manager for South by Southwest

What can I say? I was the only practicing musician on the staff. I moved the staff. kicking and screaming, into relational databases. Far and away my favorite part of the job was when I was Doctor Demento’s handler at one of the festivals. With the crash in air traffic after 9/11, I was laid off.

Ship’s Musician for Princess Cruises When I called Brian, the guy who hired the musicians for Princess, on his private line, and asked if there might be work for me, he hired me straight away. I worked in Alaska, the Caribbean, and the Baltic.

Ship’s Musician on QE2

Back to today. I spent most of the day watching YouTube videos of the QE2. Of all my jobs (and, admittedly, this is in hindsight, with her venerable hull in my rear view mirror) this one left the most deep impression on me. I knew going in that she had been sold to Dubai, and that she’d likely be suffering from her advanced age. The food was lousy, the English passengers of a certain age were bitter at her sale for “mere money,” my cabin was an odd L-shaped affair that did in fact have a porthole, and did I mention the food?

I may not be at the end of my working days. Big bands could in some odd way come back, which would suit me just fine. I’ll still be writing the charts for this band, and I’d drive the bus too, as Laigh Langley used to say.

But whatever happens in the future, I owe my employers a note of thanks for making all those payments on my behalf over the years. Now that I have reached sixty-two years with certain challenges to my health I am grateful that I can go to the Social Security website, apply for early retirement benefits, have one brief conversation with an officious Social Security employee, and, six weeks later, receive my first payment, a direct deposit to my credit union.

There’s still a liquor store in Santa Cruz called Bonesio’s. I used to buy booze there for various dorm and private functions from the time I arrived here in 1969. On my 21st birthday, I went to Bonesio’s and, selecting a gallon of Cribari and a six pack of Mickey's Big Mouth, went up to the counter with my purchases.

“You have to ask to see my ID,” I told my usual clerk. He did, and I showed him.

“Well, you could have fooled me,” he said as he rang me up.

“I have been,” I replied. "For the last three years."

Maybe tonight I’ll go down to Bonesio’s and tell the clerk he needs to ask for my ID. Again.

I Remember Basie: an Appreciation

From Pollyanna jpegs

The other day I was thinking about Count Basie. Nothing unusual there. When other people whistle tunes–real tunes that can be identified–I’ll bet not many of them can do entire arrangements by the Count Basie Orchestra. But here in my head, Basie plays non-stop.

Maybe some explaining is in order. A few intrepid souls who are not members of my family may have seen pictures of my father and mother getting married. My favorite shot is the one where my dad is happily holding a crystal serving plate of donuts, looking pleased beyond belief in his rented white dinner jacket. The picture–my mother is in the frame too–was taken on April 29, 1950, at my mother’s parents’ house in the center of Fitchburg, Mass., before my grandfather bought an old farmhouse on the outskirts of town. My maternal grandmother, who supplied the donuts and was a bit of a wag, observed when I was born on January 29, 1951, that my gestational period was “nine months and twenty minutes.”

But, getting back to Basie, when the last donut was eaten my mother and father somehow were conveyed (my mother didn’t drive until 1960 and my father stopped driving when he had a rear-ender in 1948) to a Boston hotel, where, if one would infer and amplify on my grandmother’s sideways look of the world, my gestational clock started ticking. That night–for the wedding had taken place in the afternoon–my parents rose from their hotel room, impossibly young at 23 and 19, and took a cab to a night club (look it up in Wikipedia if you are unfamiliar with the term) called Storyville, and heard Count Basie’s band featuring Joe Williams.

My mother told me a lot of embarrassing stories about me and my sister, who was born as soon after me as she could be in the rich Irish Catholic tradition into which she–my mother–married, and one of the thing she tossed out once was that most of my feeding took place while she–my mother–was listening to Joe Williams and Count Basie.

It’s 1961. My dad is an arranger, a part time fill-in drummer at Disneyland, a repeated bandleader trying every desperate measure at his disposal to make the big bands come back. We live in Santa Ana, where thousands of acres of orange groves are being uprooted and replaced with tract housing. My dad converts the garage of our new tract home in the south side of Santa Ana into a teaching and writing studio. He borrows money from a family friend and sets up Dick Fenno Publications to tap into the uncertain waters of the stage band movement which is popping up in odd places like Texas and Lexington, Kentucky. Armed with little more than 4 charts he wrote when he was the arranging instructor at the doomed Westlake School of Modern American Music, a book with all the secondary schools in America and a two-sided flyer with the name BAND DIRECTOR printed as the addressee, my dad had the nerve to take the plunge with 5 kids aged between 10 and 2. One of the charts written at Westlake was called “I Remember Basie.” Above his desk at the garage studio and the incredible second story office which he rented when the charts started coming in from the printer were eight-by-ten glossies of Stan Kenton, Glenn Miller, and Count Basie. The orders come in for Dick Fenno Publications.

My dad plops me down in front of the Basie band at Disneyland (the original, in Anaheim) without comment on my birthday. Basie’s band is playing in Tommorowland, across from the GE house of the future or whatever the place was called. The band members are neatly dressed and wander around talking and smoking while Basie ascends to the piano with Sonny Paine, the drummer. Basie plays a gospel-based tremolo, then another, then 2 bars of eight note triplets. Somehow the band has miraculously gotten themselves onstage and picked up their horns, all within the span of this 10-second introduction–no longer than that. That’s when the band came in, Sonny Paine kicking them. Maybe you know the tune. Imagine the notes, based on the words of the song.

<I> <Can’t> <STOP> BREATHE <LOVING> <You>.

At the end of the third note of letter A, where the pause takes place between the words STOP and LOVING was the most exquisite space. I can still feel it, and when I play the chart now in my band it’s no less a thrill. Back then, when I’d been playing saxophone for six months, most of my practicing taking place in the family sedan, it was a revelation to understand that these guys were showing me that space is just as important as notes. The band was an extension of Basie, and the concept of space was central to his pianistic style. A strand of musical DNA got into my ear that night at Disneyland, sitting in front of the toughest lead alto player in the business, Marshal Royal, who put a hurtin’ on me. I remember the ride home, late at night for me, but feeling emotionally wrung out in a really positive way. Can you imagine a twelve-year-old seeing the Los Angeles Dodgers for the first time, with Koufax, Drysdale, Gilliam, Roseboro, Wills? Well, that happened too, but it just didn’t throw the switch like the Basie band did for me.

I went to college a couple years after my dad died, I stuck around after I graduated from a very stuffy university music department, because the local junior college band needed a baritone player. My boyhood buddy Art Baron was actually playing trombone on Duke Ellington’s band, and so I knew that anything could happen. The Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble became notorious for going to jazz pow-wows and, rather than playing the ballistics most bands were playing at the time, digging into “Who’s Sorry Now?” at breakneck speed while exaggerating the dynamics. We left judge’s panels flat-footed and gasping. Thanks Leader Lile Crews, 1st Trumpet Billy Theurer, Bassist Steve Bennett, and most of all Altoist/Flutist Paul Contos . . .

One fateful night the Cabrillo band was to have opened the show at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium for the Stan Kenton band, which was on its usual endless string of one-nighters. When we got to the hall, we found the doors padlocked. A half hour before the show Stan pulled up on his bus and found our band and maybe 50 people who were milling about, wondering what would happen. (Remember now, any recovery of a contract requires the musicians show up at the gig, on time and ready to play.) Stan–in his big booming voice–asked how many people had paid to see the show. As I remember the scene, most of the milling crowd had. “Well, there’s just one thing we can do then. Let’s find out who has the key and open this place up.” Off he went with Jack, the road manager, to find a personage who had the authority and the key.

We opened for Stan Kenton that night. You don’t want to get in a hammer-clobbering contest with Stan’s band. Between the ten brass players and the 28-inch ride cymbal that Peter Erskine was playing, that strategy, especially in the boomy old Santa Cruz Civic, would have been pointless. So Lile took the opposite approach. We did a 40 minute set of straight ahead stuff, liberally leavened with Basie charts, including “Who’s Sorry Now?“. And we knocked the small but eager crowd and the Kenton band on their ears.

I could go on and on about Basie, about trips down to Disneyland from Santa Cruz because on summer nights you could hear 4 sets of the band for $12.50, about seeing Basie the night that Duke Ellington died, at the Paramount in Oakland, about the speculation when Marshal was relieved of his position in the center of the saxophone section, about how Basie returned to the piano chair in a motorized wheelchair, or how sometimes my dad’s classmate at Schillinger House, Nat Pierce, would fill in for him on piano. I’ve seen the band hundreds of times, and it never ceased to gas me!

Now that I’m trying to get this band reanimated, I’m happy to report that we’ll be recording new demo tunes at Promiseland Church on August 21, 2009. Playing first tenor saxophone will be Tony Campise, who played alto with Stan’s band that fateful night in Santa Cruz. The other saxes are me on alto, Tony Bray on the other tenor, and Paul Baker on baritone. Trumpets look like they’ll be Kevin Flatt and Pete Claggett. Ulrican Williams will be on trombone. Piano is a little up in the air, Ulrich Ellison on guitar, Kris Afflerbach on bass, my brother Jimmy on drums of course. Jimmy will supply male vocals and Marilyn will do the part of the canary, with Jennifer Zaveleta.

Especially for this event, Butch Miles will sit in on a takedown I cooked up on a Joe Williams/Count Basie collaboration called “All Right, OK, You Win.” Here’s a very young Butch Miles with the Basie band and Joe Williams doing the chart I took down, one of the recordings we’ll do in the 21st.


Yeah, I remember Basie. As luck would have it, I played with Kenton, the Glenn Miller band and the Modernaires on various bus rides across this and other continents. When I married my ex-wife, her father set the entertainment budget at whatever it takes, so we hired the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut, a Los Angeles-based big band that plays from the Basie book.

I feel lucky that I played with two of the three photos in my dad’s studio.

But no band’s sound floats my boat, or has influenced me more than Basie. That DNA that got into my system all these years ago keeps spinning.

Facebook Strikes Again!

Just when you think that the past is safe, buried and long gone, there comes an old associate from the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had pictures of the "good old days." So far one of the pictures is of me in my short tenure with the band. The guy you see above is me in 1977, aged 26. I was four years out of UCSC, I had done a couple years of remedial work in the Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble and I'd been scooped up by the Stan Kenton Orchestra. I'd left that band under a cloud, moved to Boston and played with what MUST have been the first Tower of Power tribute band (1975--Herb Lee's Player's Club, and yes, it meant that) and returned to Santa Cruz. Bored and without prospects, I decided to throw it all to the winds and flew with Peter Burchard on the red-eye to New York City to make it big. No vacancies were available in the saxophone player category, so off I went to get my very own hack license and become an official New York City cab driver, in the middle of the winter, with no knowledge of the territory whatsoever.

Sharon Wong (who was my spouse's roommate briefly before Jan left for Colorado) saved me by letting me move into the third floor of her house in Englewood, NJ. I was leading a perfectly brutal life as a hack, crossing the bridge and having various adventures including my first night on the job, when I picked up a man-woman team of private detectives who told me to "follow that car."

Then Laigh Langley and Jack Mootz flagged me down at Stryker's on 86th St, going downtown to a hotel off Times Square (not the Edison, just around the corner).

Laigh and Jack were on the road with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, on a night off, and had gone to Stryker's to hear some music. I was going to Stryker's to hear a band myself, and to hang with the cats in the band and run them downtown after closing. When Laigh flagged me I figured I'd take a quick fare downtown and deadhead it back to 86th.

On the way down to Times Square, we got to talking about this and that on the road: busses mostly. As they left the cab--and I can remember this with clarity that only a few events in my life have--I blurted out, "If you ever need a bari player, give me a call."

Laigh started laughing and said, "Our bari player is on the third week of his two-week notice."

So I ended up doing an audition, the other guy got sent home and, a couple days after I picked Laigh and Jack up, I was back on the road. The band was pretty good. Jay Cummings was the drummer (those are his drums over my right shoulder), Gary Tole led the bone section, and the leader, Jimmy Henderson, had the habit of introducing the two singers at the end of the night by saying, as he pointed at stage right and stage left, "Anita! Laigh! Everybody!"

In this picture we are I think playing a gig, one of several, with singer Frankie Laine, up in Canada.

Laigh and I work together, and he was kind enough to fly out to attend my son's wedding at the end of September. Jay (Laigh's roommate at the time) works for NCL, and I have a picture of him meeting some of us QE2 guys in the Canary Islands. Gary is on Facebook and so is Anita.

And leave it to Dan Riley to publish these photos on Facebook. Who knew that these still existed away from the Smithsonian?