Let’s Start a Band!
Dreams of stardom
by Stuart Smith
Since at least the “Jazz Age” in the 1920’s teenagers have spontaneously formed bands to play the popular music of the day. I’d guess maybe 2 or 3 percent of the kids in this age group form bands. Most of these last only a few years. My band was no exception.
The beginning
My neighborhood friend Billy and I were just hanging out one day when somehow the idea of starting a band came up. He played trumpet, I played drums, and Billy’s older sister, Ginger, played piano. We agreed that we’d need a reed instrument (sax or clarinet), a girl singer, and a bass player. We knew Bill, a tenor sax player, from the elementary school band we were in. We asked him to join the group and he did. Some friend of Billy’s recommended a girl singer, who then joined us. We didn’t find a bass player until a while later. I had just switched from playing trumpet and didn’t yet have a proper drum kit. Instead I played on a sad collection of relics that looked like the ones I’d seen in pictures of bands in the 1920’s. But no matter, now I was in a band!
Getting started
We got off to a somewhat rocky start. We had just acquired the ubiquitous — but illegal — “fake books,” which contained the pop standard tunes we assumed we’d be playing: the music of our parents’ generation, such as Glenn Miller, Harry James, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, etc. None of us knew more than a few of those tunes. Not surprisingly our first, slapped-together “arrangements” were amateurish.
We practiced in Billy’s basement, which had been flooded more than once. The piano which Ginger used to bang out chords for us hadn’t escaped damage. It was playable, but it sounded roughly a whole step lower than the written music. This was actually convenient because Billy, Bill, and Ginger could all read from the same sheet music (readers who are musicians must immediately be wondering: OK, but what did you do when you played a job someplace that didn’t have a “B-flat” piano?)
Our practice sessions were usually in the evening from 7 to 9 PM. The police were called on us several times because of complaints from a commercial airline pilot who lived across the street. He said that for the safety of his passengers his sleep could not be disturbed.
Who is the leader?
As a naïve pre-teen (I was 12 at the outset) I hadn’t yet experienced the group dynamics of a band. I didn’t know I was about to take a crash course about roles, norms, intermember relations, values, communication patterns, and status differentials. My first inkling of what was to come came when we had to choose our band leader.
For some reason I thought it would be me, but to my surprise the group selected Billy. I was disappointed and hurt. But I wanted to play with the band, so I just sucked it up. But it was beginning to dawn on me that being in a group formed by kids was very different from being in an adult-supervised group like a school, camp, or the scouts.
Early gigs
To get ourselves known we played our first few gigs for free. Among others, I remember a party at the local community center, the final meeting of a social dancing class in the gym of my elementary school, and a PTA-sponsored talent show. Once we established ourselves we began to get paying gigs for school dances, parties, and an occasional adult function. The adult functions almost always took place in rooms choked with cigarette smoke and half-drunk adults, an eye-opening experience for kids our age.
The money we made was small, especially since it had to be divided five ways. By this time we had found Lynn, our bass player, who introduced us to a whole cadre of good musicians from his town, several of whom I played with in later years.
Gradual decline
After about two years of more or less stable operation, a slow process of disintegration set in. Ginger, who was several years older than the rest of us, had already moved away to college. I’d picked up the pianist role. We found a drummer, yet another “Bill,” who was a friend of Lynn’s. He took drums over from me. Bill the sax player had been losing interest all along and had been replaced by Bernie, an extremely intelligent guy and excellent alto sax player.
One painful moment was “firing” our singer. Miles Davis and John Coltrane were major jazz figures at the time, and we wanted to play music like theirs. For that we didn’t want or need a singer. The firing was especially difficult because Billy had been dating the girl and, even worse, the parents of the original band members had formed a friendly social group that had been meeting on their own apart from any band activity.
Parting of the ways
Our leader, Billy, was a continuing problem. During a job he would argue with other band members about what tune to play next, which was often one that featured him. He insisted on doing an impression of Elvis Presley, and he would always want to play Perez Prado’s trumpet showcase piece “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” which was number 1 on the Hit Parade in 1955.
Billy was clearly aiming at a glamorous performing career. He signed us up for an audition for the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. The rest of us knew we didn’t stand much of chance of being chosen, which undoubtedly came through in the lackluster performance we put on. Billy also had us drive into NYC to cut a demo record that we would distribute to people who might hire us. This was an interesting and useful learning experience but it produced nothing in terms of gigs.
After another year or so, most of the group aged out. Four of us were off to college. Billy, who was a year younger than the rest of us was left behind. Over college vacations we would still get together for occasional gigs, but basically the band had come to its end.
Growing away from your audience
I taught music at the college level for many years and got to know young people who formed all kinds of bands. Despite the great variety of styles and genres of music they played, one thing was common to almost all of them: the longer a group stayed together, the wider the gap in musical tastes between the group and their audience. One of my students, for example, played in a group that specialized in Irish music. He once complained to me that his group knew lots of good Irish tunes, but his audience always wanted to hear just the old chestnuts, like Danny Boy, When Irish Eyes are Smiling, and My Wild Irish Rose.
I did have one student who was determined to always have an audience, no matter what. He would roll up to the location of a gig with his car pulling a trailer. The trailer didn’t contain any musical instruments: it was a mobile library of sheet music of every conceivable kind of music the group might be asked to play. In addition to all the “standards”, he had sheet music for country and western tunes; Italian, Irish, and Polish music; polkas and German beer-drinking songs; Jewish “klezmer” music, as well as music for every national and religious holiday.
Culture change
My band faced a huge challenge that bands before us and after us didn’t have to face: the seismic cultural shift between the 1950’s and the 1960’s. We had formed our band in the mid-1950’s, at the moment when era of big bands and “Hit Parade” pop music was coming to an end, and the era of rock’n’roll and a separate “youth culture” was appearing. Adults and young people no longer shared the same popular music. We had chosen to continue the adult music.
Elvis Presley and Little Richard were among the new superstars that all kids followed. This was a transition that our band did not — and could not — navigate successfully. Apart from not being fans of rock’n’roll, we had the wrong combination of instruments: three electric guitars and drums was the new standard. We got fewer and fewer jobs, and our attempts to play the current rock’n’roll tunes were pathetic.
Finale
My story doesn’t have a sad ending. Later in life I was able to play again with some of the musicians I had performed with as a teenager, and I played as well with some fine musicians I had met over the years. As adults we had a definite idea of what we wanted to play — jazz — and we had the knowledge and experience to play at a very high level. Playing with these older guys was the most gratifying experience in all my years of performing.
