In the Beginning Part Two
The next thing I knew, I was scheduled to audition for Glenn Stead. At that time, he was teaching at the Music Center in Long Beach. I still remember that Saturday morning. The Long Beach Music Center was very different than Bettie Thomas Studios. Whereas Bettie was a relaxed, ma and pa-type family operation, Long Beach Music Center was all business. The sheet music was neatly organized in racks and accordions were in display cases. It was music, but it was also pure business.
From day one, Mr. Stead was always the consummate gentleman. At the time, the Music Center operation was being split into individual schools, and Mr. Stead was going to lead the Compton store. That is where I started lessons.
There was a shift in the musical emphasis. I started working on technical exercises, scales, theory, and a carefully selected repertoire. The teaching atmosphere was much more formal. Students call teachers Mr., Mrs., or Miss. Mr. Stead was much more pedantic about fingering, playing the right notes, phrasing, and developing an ‘even’ technique. The metronome became a critical practice tool. Every detail of the printed page became important. There was a small plaque on his desk with an inscription that I never understood. It went something like ‘when in this room, speak in low smooth tones, …or else I will become irritated.” I never had the nerve to ask what it meant.
I also played in the bands. In addition to playing some of the regular accordion band schlock, we also did some traditional jazz band arrangements. We played these from the original parts – trumpet, trombone, sax, or clarinet, requiring us to transpose the part so it would sound in the appropriate key when played on the accordion. Mr. Stead thought the capability to transpose was an important skill for any musician. Despite his enthusiasm for the jazz charts, the results of this endeavor must have been disappointing for him. I remember working on an arrangement of ‘Take the A Train’ for quite an extended period of time. It kept getting painfully worse with each passing week. Somehow students have a way of figuring such things out.
There were also report cards that evaluated the progress in both private lessons and in the band. ‘I’ stood for improvement, ‘S’ for satisfactory, and ‘O’ for outstanding. Whereas Bettie played all the patriotic military service songs on the float, Music Center was sometimes more like attending military music school.
Mr. Stead smoked his pipe during the lessons, filling the room with a pleasant aroma.
A highlight of the early Stead years was an audition and subsequent performance for Ted Mack on his Original Amateur Hour. Ted Mack brought his weekly talent show to the Moulin Rouge in Los Angeles for two or three weeks. We prepared Dance of the Buffoons. Unlike the bands at Bettie Thomas where everyone played in unison (which was good because you could use band repertoire for solos), the Music Center Hit Paraders played band arrangements written in parts. We rehearsed and rehearsed and finally the audition day came.
The audition took place somewhere in Los Angeles. There was every imaginable act. For some reason, Glen Stead always insisted on amplifying the Hit Paraders so there was this ritual of plugging all the band members into a single amplifier. Glen had a mixer that sat on top of the amplifier and there was a mass of wires running from each of the accordions to the mixer; a totally bizarre practice that certainly didn’t contribute to the overall effect of the band. Glen would have each student play a few notes and adjust the level for that accordion. For me, he would always make sure that I hadn’t turned the accordion’s volume control down, only later to crank it up. He would instruct me to play at a natural volume as he suspected that I would play quietly during the electronic tune-up only to play with considerably more gusto once we actually started playing. A panel of screeners listened to the acts to determine who would perform on the show. It was a 1950’s version of American Idol, but without the cameras and comments.
After sitting around most of the day waiting for a call back and additional screening, we were told we would play and Glen Stead went to work with the producers on the content and length of our performance. Dance of the Buffoons was reduced to a shortened version of the introductory theme followed by an immediate segue into the second half of the trio of the ‘Music Center March’, concluding with an 8-bar ensemble bellows shake. The entire bit was well under two minutes.
Over the next several weeks we did a lot of rehearsal which culminated at the Moulin Rouge for the live television appearance. We had some very though competition. The returning winner, well on his way to being one of the year’s finalists, did a whistling gimmick with his stomach painted like a face, using his naval as his mouth.
We spent a very long day at the Moulin Rouge rehearsing for the ‘live’ show. Ted Mack finally arrived right before the actual broadcast and read the introductions from cue cards. Getting the band on stage and getting all the accordions plugged in during the length of a commercial was a challenge. The performance went moderately well up to the bellows shake where it became somewhat of a race, but we ended together. At the end, Ted Mack enthusiastically commented, “Well, well, well… from Compton California! The Hit Paraders!” In retrospect, it was the ultimate high camp, mainly because we were trying to be so serious. But the singing navel continued his winning streak.
Larry was at home with one of his early girl friends in charge of taping the show on our Pentron tape recorder. I don’t know if the show or the conversation with the girl friend was more entertaining.
I did another live television show, this time for one of the local stations. It was a feature show, and this time I played Art Van Dame’s Meadowlands as a solo. The jazz arrangement was prepared with the same rigid attention to detail that would have been applied to a Mozart sonata, which in retrospect I find totally somewhat amusing!
A milestone in my early accordion years was a guest artist appearance by Johnny LaPadula, who had just won the Coupe Mondiale. I had never heard anything like it. The largest hall at the Municipal Auditorium was filled nearly to capacity. They announced his name and this insanely fast bellows shake in a sequence of chromatic chords started behind the closed curtains. There was a Magnatone Amplifier with two external speakers placed on each side of the stage.
The curtains opened as the bellows shake segued into Dizzy Fingers played flawlessly with impeccable clarity at a blindingly fast pace. I had never seen anything like this. This was followed by transcriptions of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and von Weber’s Konzertstuck, the piece he had played to win the Coupe Mondiale. I remember Johnny announcing that, “he would stand on the easy ones and sit on the hard ones.” If there was ever a single event that convinced me I really wanted to play accordion, this was it. Nothing had ever had this effect.
My parents had taking me to numerous concerts and workshops by accordion’s greats, John Molinari, Anthony Galla Rini, Charles Magnante, and Tito. I had been influenced and impressed, but none of those cause the gut-level reaction of Johnny’s performance.
Many years later, the things that came closest to hitting me that hard in terms of pure technical displays were a performance of the Barber Concerto with John Browning, the Brahms’s Bb with Sviatoslov Richter, and an encore performance of Chopin’s Grand Polonaise by Arthur Rubinstein after a Los Angeles Philharmonic performance that had the Beethoven Emperor before intermission and the Tchaikovsky 1st after. I still place Johnny’s technical impact on me at a pretty high level!
The Music Center Student Recitals were much more structured than Bettie Thomas. I have recordings of playing Finlandia and Magnante’s arrangement of Concertstuck. Glen Stead had a lot of students and many different groups. The concerts were marathon affairs.
In the 8th grade, I had a major tragedy. It was a Saturday night and I was having a hard time deciding if I wanted to practice some more or go roller skating. I had skated with strap-on street skates for years, but the attraction of the Torrance Roller Rink was something entirely new. I finally decided I would go skating. My folks dropped me off and I joined some of my friends. An hour or so later, I caught a skate on someone else’s skate and fell. Looking down I realized my right wrist was offset by almost an inch and a half. I was taken into the office and the management called my parents.
Dr. Stetson, or family doctor, said, “Isn’t this the accordionist?” and called an orthopedic surgeon. I had surgery that night to set the wrist. I was put in a traction cast and came out of the anesthesia in a lot of pain. I think my parents liked to tell the story of the choice between skating and practicing – and the result. And in true trooper fashion, I would spend the next 8 weeks concentrating on improving my left-hand technique.
I was already on my way to being pretty neurotic about the entire music thing realizing years later that it wasn’t until I went into the Army that I had never built the strength back up in the wrist. But this didn’t effect my playing, and at the time that was all that was important.
When everything was said and done, Mr. Stead helped build a solid musical foundation; introduced me to a more disciplined concept of technique, and ultimately sold me a Dallape Super Maestro. It was the accordion brand de’ jour and I had finally graduated to a full-size instrument.
Ted Mack and the Original Amatuer Hour
Art Van Damme, Meadowlands - Local TV Show
I brought my accordion to the party, but no one asked me to play
