Here are the first three chapters in a story I had begun last fall but never finished. Let us give thanks that many things (and people) leave us, but our stories never do. More chapters soon to come!

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It’s just a story…but then so are we.

“This is it! This is really it. And it’s all here; all of it!” I turned the creamy white outer jacket over and over in my hands as if to prove to myself I was really holding it. It had been over twenty years since I’d last held a copy, but doing so now took me even further back. 1974. Upstairs in my bedroom clawing at the plastic wrapping, my brother Lonnie sitting at the other end of the bed, looking longingly from under the mop of hair always in his eyes. He knew he shouldn’t even dare to ask to touch it. Chicago at Carnegie Hall. Just the title still makes me a little dizzy in the head.

A few weeks ago I was over at my friend Mike’s house. After dinner his wife took the kids upstairs to get ready for bed and Mike and I got down to talking about mutual interests, including music. Mike is an Old Testament scholar and a jazz drummer, and somehow—don’t ask me how, but it’s true—the two go together. It didn’t surprise me at all to find out that, like me, he had been a high school band geek. More than that, the two of us were and remain unrepentant high school band geeks. We have high school band geek souls. It’s our tribe, our denomination, our patria. We forever walk through life at eight-to-the-five.

From the comfortable confines of Mike’s living room—and even more comforting distance of many years—we were able to look back with the fuzzy drunkenness of nostalgia on those bygone days. Though they were days of slogging our heavy instruments across the frozen tundras of our respective football fields, we didn’t speak of the suffering that went along with our art. We didn’t need to; we both knew. My friend’s hand instinctively went to that permanent indentation in his right shoulder from the snare drum strap. I unconsciously flicked my tongue across the flap of dead skin on my upper lip from that time the mouthpiece of my baritone horn froze to my embrochure two minutes into the big Thanksgiving Day halftime show. We had known what it was to be in the ranks of Michaelangelo painting on his back or Van Gogh putting the knife to his ear. It has been said that all great art comes from suffering. No one could ever dissuade either of us therefore from our belief that some of the greatest art America will ever know has been produced somewhere near the fifty yard line of a windswept gridiron.

But the suffering of a band geek is not only in the torment of his flesh and blood. There is also the psychic toll of being the outsider, forever gazing through iron bars at the coveted land of “coolness.” In the ’70s there were jocks and freaks and socials and druggies, each with their own piece of real estate in the kingdom of cool. But not so the band geeks. No one ever mistook us for citizens of that fair land. We didn’t even have visas for short term visits.

Remembering all that brought Mike and I to a moment of silence. We both stared at the floor, each lost in his own private recurring nightmare of rejection and misunderstanding. Just when I was about to propose that we change the subject, a different sort of memory came out of nowhere. At first, barely formed, it wasn’t even a vision of a time or place or event. Instead, it was a snatch of music. A blare of syncopated horn chords. A ripping trombone solo. And then the out-of-its collective skull roaring of a crowd. Slowly a smile came to my face. A long-repressed ache from my left thumb where it used to support the weight of a Conn 8H trombone brought the memory back in full. “Mike, my friend,” I said, “there was actually a moment, just a moment now, of coolness in my own band career.” Mike looked up with surprise and not a small amount of doubt. “The name At Carnegie Hall mean anything to you?” I inquired.

Mike’s head jerked up like I had just mentioned some secret sin he thought no one knew about. He tried to respond, but words wouldn’t come. Instead he held up one finger signaling “wait a moment” and dashed down the stairs to his basement. A minute later he walked into the living room with a thin white box held out on his upturned palms as if it held the crown jewels of Britain. Without a word he laid the box in my hands. I turned it over…and there it was. For the first time in over twenty years I held it in my hands. That familiar calligraphic script outlined in muted gray said the one magic word: Chicago. Not quite believing that I was actually beholding this artifact from the primordial goo of my adolescence, I turned it on its side and carefully slid out its contents. It was all there, complete. The four vinyl discs, each in its own slipcover, track listings hand-lettered on the outside. The big kaleidoscopic wall poster of the band on stage. The multi-page lyric book with the schematic of Carnegie Hall on the front and the listing of every concert the band had ever played to-date on the back. It even still had the chart of voter registration rules for all fifty states! I looked up at Mike, truly speechless. It was that moment up in my room with my kid brother twenty-four years ago all over again. The record album that more than any other could be said to have been the soundtrack of my most formative years was back in my hands.

At Carnegie Hall was recorded at the very peak of Chicago’s revolutionary early career. This was not the syrupy, pop ballad hit producer of the 1980s, a band merely serving as window dressing for Peter Cetera’s crooning. This was the Chicago that validated my existence. This was the Chicago that made it cool to be a horn player, that made wind instruments, for a few brief years, into devil-spawned tools of rock ‘n’ roll. Though breaking into the coveted top 40 of hit singles very seldom, Chicago fit hand-in-glove with the emerging FM “album oriented rock” stations. Along with Blood, Sweat, & Tears, Tower of Power, and Sly & the Family Stone, they brought a horn-fired jazz-blues-rock fusion that became the needed antidote to tired psychedelia and “hard rock.” And more importantly to those of us faithfully trudging along in the back rows of our respective marching bands…we were suddenly Rock and Roll!

Well, almost.

Our rock starredness was still only by extension, by association. The jocks and freaks forever barring us from that first exclusive country club of life, the high school boys’ restroom, were not fooled for a moment. To them, we were still the same pimply-faced, knock-kneed, Coke-bottle-bespectacled dweebs they had been tormenting since Cain gave Abel the first wedgie back at Eden High. But that changed on one fateful day, even if it only changed for that one day. Sometimes one day is all you need for a lifetime.

Chapter Two

It was the late summer of my kidhood, sophomore year of high school to be exact. Freshman year had been little more than Eighth Grade: The Sequel. No, more like Eighth Grade vs. Godzilla, with Godzilla being the monstrous complexities of the high school social web. Most of us freshmen just tried to keep our heads down below the edges of our foxholes, vainly hoping against hope that if we couldn’t be seen, the artillery shells of the upperclassmen’s disdain for us couldn’t hit us.

It wasn’t until sophomore year that my friends and I really began to believe that we had actually been allowed into this private club called High School. We began to delude ourselves that we belonged, that this was our home. A home where you were afraid to go into your own bathroom, but home nonetheless. But even though we were beginning to feel at home, we were still looking for an invitation, a sign from on high, the divine light of acceptance to shine upon us. For some it would never come. These hapless slobs would be forever freshmen, forever dodging their way from one foxhole to the next, only to be told they belonged–maybe–in the next foxhole. For a few of us though the promise of that golden light, or at least a sliver of it, came with our acceptance into marching band, our enlistment to begin the week before the opening of sophomore year with Band Camp.

Now contrary to what might seem obvious, there are substrata within the coolness geology of any high school campus. Yes, there are those at the summit, visible to the whole world, the sun gleaming off the snowcapped brilliance of their permanent coolness. These are the usual suspects, the cheerleader and quarterback types. The vast unwashed majority of us knew we would never sit in their lofty heights; we were excluded by birth. But even the peasants in the mudfields, Monty Python aside, do not spend their days endlessly discussing the royals. They find their own way to be cool down in the mud. They hold their own mud festivals and mudpie contests, and build something they call a life, the royals be damned. The mudfield that had fallen to me at that stage of my existence was the A-Wing of Memorial High.

A-Wing was the performing arts ghetto of Memorial. Clustered around the auditorium, as if it were our temple, were the band and orchestra rooms with their attendant practice cells. To reinforce the ghetto imagery, the school assigned anyone signed up for marching band to a locker in A-Wing, thus herding all the band geeks together, safely isolated from the general population. The practical reason behind this was that the marching band practiced every morning for an hour before school actually began, and continued to practice right into first period. So band was your homeroom as well. No, it was not just your homeroom, it was your home. It was mother, father, sister and brother. Your bandmates were your comrades-at-arms. You would fight together and, if necessary, die together between the 20 yard lines every Saturday afternoon. Too often it was Gallipoli all over again: you gave your blood while the world went off to get a hot dog. But it didn’t matter. When you locked eyes with your buddy Hougher as you passed him in a triple-time maneuver, his jaw set as he fought his sousaphone through a vicious cross wind, you and he both knew the glory of battle.

So it was that we found our own little corner of self-created cool. The Jews in the Warsaw ghettos of the ’40s organized orchestras and plays and debating societies. Though the world despised them, they found their own life. And so it was with us in A-Wing. There was only one problem with our little Disneyland of the marching band: when the football season ended, our Fantasyland would close its gates. We all knew that was coming, but no one ever talked about it. It was just too horrible to contemplate.

Then one day at lunch late in November, Doomsday looming ever nearer, my friend Whistman mumbled something through his ketchup and Cheesewhiz sandwich that would change the course of my life: “You going out for stage band?”

“Stage band?” I inquired, “What’s that? You mean concert band? Concert band sits on the stage for the Spring Concert. I’m already in it.”

“No, not concert band…stage band,” Whistman shot back with the sneer of one who is in-the-know. “It’s kinda like a jazz band. Not everybody’s in it, just the best players.” He paused dramatically, eying me over the top slice of Wonder Bread, checking to see if he had his hook set in my mouth yet. Seeing that I was toying with the worm but not quite on, he pulled out his prized lure. “Al’s leading it.”

“Al?? Al Helm? Alan Helm?”

Whistman gave a smile of triumph. He had me in the boat.

Alan Helm was the undisputed definer of all that was cool in the bandroom ghetto. He was the Walt Disney of our Disneyland. He had been appointed drum major his junior year, unprecedented at Memorial where that honor had always been reserved for a senior. And now apparently he had won what amounted to the Grand Slam of band geekdom: in the same year he was drum major he had been given the reigns of the stage band. If being drum major your junior year was remarkable, getting headship of the stage band the same year was unbelievable. It was the pinnacle of success in our little world. And if could happen for anyone, it would happen for Al. Helm was a prodigy of near-Motzartian proportions. Born to parents who were both professional musicians, he could play four different instruments by the time he was eight with enough proficiency to be asked to play in a local college orchestra. By the time he was ten he was charting arrangements for his father’s jazz band. We had been hearing about him since the day we first brought in our instrument rental forms back in sixth grade. He was a legend, a myth, a god to us before we left junior high. To make marching band by sophomore year had been a worthy goal in itself for me, but knowing that it would mean serving under Al made it an obsession. And now the chance to continue to bask in the glow via stage band…

My dear buddy Whistman had his fish in the boat, but now it was time to gut the poor creature. “Alan’s looking for one more member in the horn section.” He couldn’t miss that he had the attention of every cell in my body. I was a horn player! “Too bad you don’t play trombone. That’s what he needs.”

My Ho-Ho dropped unnoticed from my fingers into my open milk carton. What was I thinking! How could I have even dreamed for a moment that I could ever be in the stage band. Yes, I was a horn player, but of the wrong horn…a baritone horn. Bb euphonium to be exact. The euphonium was the Ed McMahon of the band world—always the sidekick, never the star. There are no euphonium player Halls of Fame. You will never be asked the name of the greatest euphonium player of all time in Bar Trivia. There are no Facebook groups named “Hooray for Euphoniums!” Nobody in history ever set out to be a euphonium player. God knows I didn’t. No, I was an unwitting victim of that insidiously corrupt machine that is the high school band farm team system.

Chapter 3

Everybody knows how the sports farm machine works. Very few people, outside of tear-jerker movies, ever just show up for tryouts and make the team. The stars, at least, the big time players, are cultivated from an early age. Most likely they are given footballs in their hospital incubators instead of a warm blanket. Elementary school phys ed teachers exist for one purpose: to spot these Converse-shod Mozarts and cultivate them for their predestined futures on the high school team.

What is not so well known is that school music programs operate under the exact same paradigm. They know that just as there are kids out there born to hurl pieces of leather around a field, so there are those of us who come into this life itching to produce melody. For us foreordained band geeks music never could be just something that comes out of the radio in the old man’s Chrysler. Music was something we needed to do, not just listen to. The school music machine knew this and exploited it to the max. Their first diabolical ploy was to make us wait, to tell us that we were not yet “ready” to do that which we in our mewling, puking little skulls knew was the only thing we wanted to do with our lives. They well knew that the best way to change an interest of a human being from a casual preoccupation to a raving monkey on his back is to simply tell him that he can’t have it.

In the education mills of Pine Grove, New Jersey, this particular form of torture was focused upon the boys who wanted to play brass instruments. The rule was that you could start a string instrument in fourth grade but not take up a band instrument until fifth. In our later mythology we convinced ourselves that this was a secret plot to sift out the True Believers from the Great Unwashed Masses. Guys whose very names foreshadowed their lot in life—Melvin, Chauncey, Francis—succumbed too easily and allowed a violin bow to be placed in their delicate little mits in that fateful fourth year. While the rest of us were sorely tempted, something in us made us hold out for the promised land. And when those gorgeous, gleaming, gilded trumpets and cornets arrived from Manny’s Music Emporium in September of our fifth year, we knew that the suffering, the perseverance, had all been worth it.

Yes, I said trumpets. Every fifth grade boy in the music crowd who makes it through the forty-days-wilderness of the fourth year orchestra temptation does so because he has his eye on the true sex symbol of the American concert band, the trumpet. The trumpet was the quarterback, the starting pitcher, the point guard of our world. I said it before and I’ll say it again: no one ever set out to be a euphonium player.

Yet not everyone with the talent to be a football player gets to quarterback, and so it goes in the band world. Though we could never prove it, we later knew it must be true—some time around August each year, all the elementary school music teachers in the town are summoned to a clandestine meeting in a smoke-filled room behind the pool tables at the local jazz joint. Their mob captain, the high school band director, gives them their assignments. “Migliori, yoor over dare at dat South End School, right? Yeah, right. We don need no more of dese trumpet players you been sendin’ us, capiche? So find us sumpin’ else, or yool be playin’ Sousa marches outa parts a yoor anadomy dey ain’t meant to be played from, capiche?”

So as we filed in for those first few weeks of trumpet lessons, each of us holding our long, slim mass of golden tubing like it was the Holy Grail, we had no way of knowing that some of us were being singled out, like lambs for the slaughter. Vainly we all thought we were going to be quarterbacks. But the team needed some defensive linemen as well; and the slow, the lame, the halt would just have to be sacrificed for the Gipper. Sitting in my squeaky metal chair in the practice room, Hougher to my right and Whistman to my left, I did not know that Mr. Migliori had already decided my fate. Actually, as things would turn out, both Hougher and Whistman had also already been checked off a list of non-quarterback-types. The former, his already large frame setting his doom, would go on to spend his Memorial High years lofting the brontosaurus pair of the music world, the sousaphone and tuba. The latter was granted a less ignominious fate, being handed the supporting actress sex symbol of the band, the trombone.

For me, however, it was to be a journey into truly uncharted waters, an instrument none of us had ever dreamed could exist, never mind had we ever even heard of it. The fateful turn came near the end of the third week of trumpet lessons, when Migliori suddenly called on me to play the full octave of the basic C scale.
To be continued….

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