Category — Miscellaneous

My real estate job is pretty easy physically. I just boss custodians and repairmen around  and do paperwork: pay taxes, pay cockroach killers, and argue about security deposit refunds.  The only physical part is climbing the stairs and going on roofs.  None of my buildings has elevators.

Playing the clarinet . . . that can injure you.  You know where?  The right thumb.  The right thumb holds a disproportionate weight when you’re standing.

I had a pain in my right thumb that lasted 18 months.  The pain took a long leisurely trip through my body. Went from my thumb to my shoulders to my neck.

Physical therapists love musicians, particularly violinists, flutists, pianists and clarinetists.

I drove to Cincinnati to see a specialist for clarinet pain.  Then I did Alexander Technique, and every other technique short of amputation.

Some clarinet players use a neck strap. I do.  At KlezKamp, the music conference, I met a clarinetist who wore a neck strap.  He said, “The pain eventually goes away.”  That was my mantra for more than a year.

The clarinet is the agony stick.  Musicians call it that.  Not simply because the clarinet can be painful to play, but because it’s difficult.  The fingerings are harder than the sax, and a clarinet has the “break,” the awkward leap from A to B in the middle register.  The clarinet squeaks.  And the clarinet’s register key raises the note a twelfth, not an octave.  This is extremely odd physics.  The clarinet’s sound doesn’t typically come out the bell, like on a sax.

You mic a sax by clipping a mic on the bell, but on a clarinet you surround the clarinet with mics like on Wagon Train.  I had a mic rig for my clarinet that was so complex and heavy — and cost more than my axe — I  gave up on it.  Plus, it was hurting my thumb.

I asked a sax player in a big band if he played clarinet.  He said, “I have a clarinet.”
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1 of 2 posts for 9/30/09.  Please see the post below too.
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A version of this post will appear in the upcoming (Dec. 2009) issue of The Clarinet, the magazine of the International Clarinet Association, www.clarinet.org.
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Apparently some people don’t know there is a comments section to this blog.  Click on the “comments” link  below the “Tell A Friend” link. If there are few, or no, comments, go to the end of the “Sanctuary” post — two down from here. There are a lot of comments there.

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Wedding clients never forget you. You’re in their video.

When I run into an old wedding client, he says, “Abigail and Isaac, this is Mr. Stratton.  He played Mommy and Daddy’s wedding.”

I say to the kids, “You weren’t there.”   (I’m not good with kid chat.)

Some of these weddings were 15-20 years ago.

In real estate, that kind of long-term psychic pay-off  is minimal.  Last decade I got a letter from a recovering alcoholic who said I saved her life when I kicked her out of her apartment for being drunk and not paying her rent.

I’ve rented to a lot of drunks.  The “not paying her rent” part had been the problem.

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I’m an official “old guy” now. An arts agency made a documentary about roots music in Ohio, and a bunch of  baby-boomers, including me, was the subject.  We were the old fogies on the porch picking away at authentic instruments.  Meanwhile, my “old guys” — Muddy Waters, Dave Tarras, Mickey Katz — are dead.

I saw a 92-year-old piano player recently.  He wasn’t dead.

I still get nervous when I play.  Good, I’m not dead.

I played at Nighttown, a local club, for the “old guy” DVD-release party.  Something like my 1,028th Yiddishe Cup gig.  I played “Nelika” in 7/16 and stopped halfway through it.  I didn’t take the repeat.  Man, I was playing it in 9/16 or 10/16.  I was so ahead of the game.  I was freaked out by my fellow musicians in the room.

Always good to be nervous. Me and nervous go way back.  My first couple recitals at Victory Park elementary school were debacles.  I had memorized the tunes and then forgot where I was.  Let’s take it from the top again, shall we? Those grade-school gigs are hot-stamped on my brain.  Worse, a violinist prodigy always followed me.  Philip Setzer.  He wound up in the Emerson String Quartet.

[For goys only: “A.K.” in this post’s title stands for alter kocker (old cocker).  An A.K. is anybody 10 years older than you.]
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Tomorrow:
No more of  these “tomorrow” teasers.

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Not too many sidemen care about the contract.  They just want to know their cut.  And that’s the way it should be.  The sidemen aren’t dealing with the kvetching bar mitzvah moms and uptight brides.  And they aren’t having meetings at their houses discussing whether the bride is going to circle the groom or not.  (The bride often circles the groom seven times at a Jewish wedding.)  Or is the dad going to do the welcome toast before or after the challah blessing?

I always try to get paid at the gig — take the client over to a corner table and have him sign the check. I get at least a double portion for being the bandleader. Why?  Because Yiddishe Cup is not just a club-date band. (Club date means private party band.)   Yiddishe Cup is a concert-playing band that rehearses and has ongoing expenses — like advertising and travel expenses.  And I want to recoup that.

In Cleveland if a top-flight musician gets $200 per night, he’s happy.  That’s $50 an hour.  I pay my guys more.
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Tomorrow:
AT THE A.K. LODGE . . . Where the old guys hang out.

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The band biz is a fraction of the real estate money, but the time commitment is about the same.  And as for the psychic payoff, the band is several times higher than the real estate biz.  Nobody is going to give you credit — at least long-lasting credit — for fixing a toilet.  Nobody is going to write on your tombstone: “This guy provided heat for many apts.”

The real estate biz — that is humble stuff.  The arts — one big ego trip.  My dad said that.  He was probably right.  Where did he come up with the word ego?   That wasn’t his style.

Right after I started Yiddishe Cup, in 1988, I told the Cleveland Jewish News, “We’re not in it for fame and fortune.”

That lasted about six months.  After our first concert, we began dining regularly at The Big Ego, which is next to The Big Egg, W. 51^st Street and Detroit Avenue.  Figuratively speaking.
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Tomorrow:
The Yiddishe Cup Fight Song . . . Go Cup Go

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When you’ve done more than a thousand gigs, you can safely tell the brides’ moms what’s what.  Only once in a while will you run into a “play this, play that” mom.   Or  “My sister wants to sing.  Don’t let her!  And why are you taking a break right now?”  Micro-managers.  Don’t they have anything better to do on the big day?

All in all, simcha (weddings and bar mitzvahs) work is pure pleasure. Most everybody is there to have a good time, and you can sound awful and nobody will notice.  You can even rehearse new tunes on the bandstand.  As long as you play “Sunrise Sunset” — or don’t play it, as the case may be — everybody is happy.
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Tomorrow:
PULL THE TRIGGER . . . Make the Deal.  Do it.

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Instrument cases, they’re like coffins. Red velvet.  Often musty.  Occasionally mildewy.

A clarinet is a chopped-up piece of African granadilla wood, stained black.  It’s just a big wooden flute with a lot of hardware.  It takes a minimum of seven years’ practice to sound decent.  Kids sound horrible on clarinets.

When some schmuck calls and yells at me about no heat, I just fire up my clarinet.

You need gigs, or you’ll quit practicing.  Playing for oneself, that lasts only about six months. I hung with a community band once; the conductor ranted at us like we weren’t good enough to park cars at Severance Hall [home of the Cleveland Orchestra].  I dropped out.

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Tomorrow:
TWO GUYS JAMMIN’. . . Fritz Kreisler and Fritz the Cat.

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One day you’re a real estate slumlord, and the next you’re signing autographs at a concert.  The first time I signed an autograph, I couldn’t fathom it.  I am not Bob Feller.

About 10 percent of CD-buyers want your autograph.

They are the well-wishers after the gig.  “Great concert” is the standard greeting.  Some of these people try to hog the musicians’ time with stories about their grandkids’ clarinet playing, or their memories of Mickey Katz – which is actually interesting.

Sometimes I’m the autograph hound. I was talking to Josh Dolgin (Socalled) of Klezmer Madness after a concert — and I know the guy, I mean he has stayed at my house — when a concertgoer cut in front of me and started flashing his business card, and I backed off.  I was looking forward to going out for a drink with Dolgin maybe.  Who knows.  Maybe David Krakauer, the star of the show, would have come along.

Instead I went to a coffeehouse with Irwin Weinberger, Yiddishe Cup’s guitar player,  and we rehashed the Klezmer Madness show.  We decided Krakauer was a clarinet player beyond belief, but 90 minutes of non-stop clarinet — no matter how good — was too long.

Keep it 30 minutes or under.  We’re in a hurry.  We grew up on Sesame Street.  (Howdy Doody in my case.)

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Tomorrow:
PO-PO AS RENTER . . . The police pay on time.

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I had my clarinet’s tone holes undercut, which means the clarinet repairman shaved some wood out of the clarinet’s bore.  Repairman . . . technician . . . the guy was my neighbor.  He spends his workday looking down clarinets and saxophones.  Like a coal miner.  He has a little light he drops down the clarinet shaft, looking for leaks.

So my axe has a very wide-open sound.  You can put a lot of air through it.  That’s the trick — to put as much air through as possible.  (The champ of  “big air” is Gary Gould from Los Angeles.   He’s plays a Claude Lakey 4* jazz clarinet mouthpiece — a loud and uncontrollable thing, like a two year old in a restaurant.)

But it’s not all about the bike, or horn.  The player needs to maintain a thin stream of air, like blowing a Superball across a table.  Not a golf ball or ping pong ball.   It has to be a Superball.  (Ilene Stahl used the Superball analogy at KlezKamp two decades ago.)

On a sax, you can put tons of air through because the physics of the sax are different than the clarinet.  All the sound of a sax comes out the bell; on a clarinet, only a bit of the sound comes out the bell, and the rest pops out the fingering holes.  There is a reverse air pressure on the clarinet.  Air coming back at you.

In the real estate biz the “back pressure” is water leaks.  Property management is all about water problems — roof  leaks, pipes bursting, or some guy flushing potatoes down his toilet.

I have a trio of plumbers: Ron, who goes in with a pneumatic pump.  If that doesn’t unclog the drain, we go to Bob, who has an electric snake.  He’s picky, though;  for example, he’ll say, “I’m not going in there.  There’s a ton of feces and the guy is a fat slob.”  If  Bob can’t — or won’t — fix the mess, we go with Bill, who charges 50 percent more than Bob and has a howitzer in his truck.

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Tomorow:
NEXT STOP PINSK . . . How to run your band like a train.

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For our D.C. gig, the hotel wanted to see our band’s liability insurance policy.  We didn’t have one.  Same request came from a temple in Boca Raton, Fla.  Must be an East Coast thing — the band must have an insurance policy.  In the Midwest nobody sues anybody else.  We’ve had a couple broken ankles over the years — people falling in “Hava Nagila”s, or getting spiked by another dancer’s high heel.  Stuff happens.  But nobody sues.

Contracts are almost meaningless.  If there’s no trust, you’re wasting your time.  Who you going to take to small claims?  I’ve done a couple rounds.  Maybe one a decade.  Not for the band, the real estate.  Only do small claims when you know the person is collectible.  Like when they work for the Cleveland Clinic.  Even then, the person might quit his job when he gets the garnishment letter from you.

Best to check out the person on the way in — not the way out.  Call the previous landlord if you have to.  Run a credit check.  If the previous landlord says the guy is a psycho, believe him.  And refuse to comment when the prospective tenant asks, “What did my landlord say to kill the deal?”  Be glad the landlord leveled with you.  Often the previous landlord will mislead you just to get the psycho out of his building.

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Shabbat shalom
Tomorrow:
THE CLARINET SHAFT . . . How to make a clarinet sound decent.

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Never take less than the equivalent of two months’ rent on move in. If a person can’t pay that, you’ll be chasing that person from the get-go.

I once had a custodian who took a ring instead of a security deposit. The renter was an elderly retired nurse from Houston. Also, a felon. But we didn’t know that. She conned her way into the apartment with a dime store ring.

I did a little “self-help” — legal-talk for evicting her without the court’s permission. I got a couple guys, and we moved her stuff into the basement. Her lawyer took several thousand from me. That was my last self-help.

I’m not “mom and pop” — I have a layer between me and the tenants: my on-site building managers/custodians.

How did I get to be bigger than “mom and pop.” First off, it helped my father was Toby Stratton. He bought a six-store, 21-suiter in 1965. He put down 8 percent and got two second mortgages. That’s heavy leverage. Gambling.

The band biz — we’re not “mom and pop” either. “Mom and pop” in the music biz would be a bar band — $100 per night per guy. Yiddishe Cup is above that. We’ve played the soft-seat auditoriums. That’s what the music biz calls the college auditoriums with cushy chairs.

For example, we played Loras College in Iowa and ate at the Ground Round afterward — the only place in Dubuque that was open after 10 p.m.

We’ve played Mt. Union College, Beloit College, Michigan State, UNC-Greensboro, Chautauqua Institution, City of El Paso (Tex.), Kenyon, Wabash, Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. That’s the gateway to the Ozarks. A lot of places.

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