Real Music & Real Estate . . .

1. PITTSBURGH

Pittsburgh is where terrific walk-on musicians play with Yiddishe Cup.  We had a Duquesne University guitar teacher, Kenny Karsh, sit in at wedding.  How many jazz musicians know “Yossel, Yossel” and “Chusen Kale Mazel Tov”?  He did.

At another Pittsburgh gig, the bride’s uncle sang.  He requested the key of Ab.  Nobody but a pro asks for Ab.  He sang “Unchained Melody,” a slow song, even though the bride had emailed “NO SLOW SONGS.”  But what could she do, the singer was her uncle.  He was a hit.  (Brides don’t know what they want.)  He was in a Chicago society band.

Pittsburgh’s JCC has an outdoor clock with Hebrew letters on it.  Pittsburghers rebuilt their JCC in Squirrel Hill, where it had previously been.  In Cleveland, no Jewish institution would rebuild in the same place.  Twenty-five years and out.  That’s the rule in Cleveland.  Move it.

Pittsburgh JCC

When the Cleveland Heights JCC moved to Beachwood in 1985, my dad, Toby, bought a plaque for the new cloakroom. The plaque, which was no bigger than a business envelope, cost several thousand dollars.

Nobody noticed the plaque.

Several years later, the Beachwood JCC expanded, and Toby’s cloakroom was in the heart of the action, right next to the new auditorium.

My dad could always pick property.

Except in New Mexico.  That was out of Toby’s wheelhouse.  Toby foundered whenever he left Ohio. He bought a piece of land near Albuquerque that went nowhere.

Lot for sale. Rio Rancho, New Mexico

He also did a deal on a shopping strip center in Sunrise, Fla., and lost money because he wouldn’t — or didn’t know how to — play ball with the crooked city administrators.

A relative, Lefty, sold my father the New Mexico land in 1965.  Lefty was a Jew with a tattoo.  Lefty lost a lot of money for a lot of people.

Toby didn’t hold the deal against Lefty.  The land is still there. It’s not going anywhere.

I saw Lefty at gigs over the years.  He didn’t go by Lefty any more.  He got into basement waterproofing business and made a lot of money.

Forget the Land of Enchantment . . .

Pittsburgh.   Pittsburgh is Yiddishe Cup’s San Francisco — hilly, terrific neighborhoods, great museums and a lot of culture.  “I Left My Heart in Pittsburgh.”  Write it.

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2. BOLLYWOOD

Something important happens at weddings, unlike at bar mitzvah parties, where you’re just attending a family reunion. Pass the family reunion T-shirts.

The ultimate low-stress gig: a 50th wedding anniversary party.  Play whatever you want. Everybody is glad to be there, period.

For weddings, the bandleader sometimes gets mounds of emails and communiqués beforehand.  The bride doesn’t want the band to play anything slow, nothing from Broadway, and she wants to hear her Bollywood MP3s at break.  Also, don’t announce the newlyweds’ names, but if you must, say “Jen and Zach.”

“I’m NOT taking his last name!!” the bride emails.

Not every bride is hands-on, though.  Some say, “We know Yiddishe Cup has done this many, many times.  You know what works.  We trust you.”  These are the best brides.

Here’s what works: skipping the Bollywood music, strolling table-to-table, varying the musical styles and inviting guests to sit in with the band.  Toasts work too — in chunks.  No more than three toasts in a row.

And having the wedding in Pittsburgh.  Preferably at the downtown Westin.  The staff there feeds Yiddishe Cup before the guests.  Maybe because we’re important out-of-town musicians.
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Yiddishe Cup plays 7 p.m. Wed., Sept 29,  Fairmount Temple, and  7:15 p.m. Thurs, Sept. 30, Park Synagogue, for Simchat Torah.  Cleveland.

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I sometimes celebrate the High Holidays a week or two before the real ones. I have the shul almost to myself.  The upside: no annoying people.

However, this plan defeats one of the purposes of the High Holidays– hanging out with large numbers of Yidn. My rabbi says if you attend the real High Holidays– and shul in general– you’ll feel less lonely.

I sometimes get agitated on Rosh Hashanah morning because there is so much commotion and noise in the shul.  Then the rabbi sermonizes about loneliness and community, saying, “Hell is other people according to Sartre, but what’s the alternative– sitting at home in your underwear watching reruns?”  Point taken.

In the sanctuary, I see a doc who gave me a colonoscopy.  I see, several rows over, a PhD scientist who is so anti-religious his seat needs an ejection button; his wife forced him to come.  The guy next to me, a real estate broker, says, “How’s occupancies?”

“Commercial, bad.  Residential, OK,” I say.  I don’t mind some biz talk on yuntif. No big deal.

I see a weight-loss doc in the loges (the elevated seating around the perimeter of the sanctuary). Her picture is occasionally in the Cleveland Plain Dealer next to the word “obesity.”   She’s in excellent shape.

A Jew visiting from New York gives me greetings from a New Rochelle cousin.  Nice.

A couple people say hi to me because of the band.  I don’t know their names.

After services, a worshipper asks if I remember him. Yes, I know him.   A few years ago Yiddishe Cup played his son’s bar mitzvah.  He is happy I remember him.

“You have to come over for shabbes,” he says.  “And you won’t have to bring your clarinet.”

Sweet.

Happy New Year.
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1 of 2 posts for 9/8/10.  Please see the post below too.

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Two-thirds of the art in my house is by Irwin Weinberger, Yiddishe Cup’s singer.  Irwin is also a painter and middle-school art teacher.

He did a portrait of my kids 19 years ago.  I thought the kids — those pipsqueaks — were cute.  But their pipsqueak phase dragged on for years; I would stare at that painting and say, “Grow up already!”  Schlepping kids crosstown to gymnastics meets was not fun.  Schlepping the youngest child to an 8 a.m. hockey game in Parma Heights was not fun.  Sitting through my daughter’s swim meets was not entirely pleasant.  (The diving part was pleasant, but the swimming races — which she had nothing to do with — weren’t fun.)

As it turned out, the whole thing — childrearing — lasted about two weeks.

Yiddishe Cup has been in existence 21 years, and that, too, has felt like two weeks. One day — back in 1989 — we were playing a Cleveland Heights street fair, and the next day– 21 years later– we were playing a Cleveland Heights street fair.*  What’s with that?

We — the Yiddishe Cup musicians — enjoy the short drive to work.  We are in our own backyard, kind of  like the working musicians in Las Vegas or Branson, Mo.  The downside to playing Cleveland a lot is everybody has heard us a million times.

Make it new.  Or go nuts.

The newest Yiddishe Cup recruit, our drummer, has been with us 12 years.  We have new music, but not new guys.

I rarely put the musicians’ names front and center.  It’s all about Team Yiddishe Cup.  What if a Yiddishe Cup “star” leaves? That would mess up the band’s publicity.

The band’s PR photos are like my family portrait.  Same guys, basically.  Why change the photos?  We look the same as we did in the 1990s.  I think so.  It’s the same guys.

Yiddishe Cup, 1998. An outtake. The arrow in Irwin's head messed up this shot. (Photo by Charles J. Mintz)

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* Footnote: Yiddishe Cup did not play a Cleveland Heights street fair in 2010. However, the band did play Parade the Circle in University Circle — close to, but not in, Cleveland Heights. And last year the band played for the outdoor movie/concert night at Coventry (Cleveland Heights).

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2 of 2 posts for 9/8/10.

L’shana tovah. (Happy New Year.)

Yiddishe Cup is at Fairmount Temple  Wed. Sept 29 and Park Synagogue Thurs. Sept. 30 for Simchat Torah.  Cleveland.

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When the Kleveland Klezmorim disbanded in 1990, bandleader Greg Selker said, “I’ll miss the bliss but not the arguing with bookers and musicians.”

He became an executive headhunter.

“I’ll Miss the Bliss.” Somebody should write that tune.

My musical bliss happens most often when I hear a new instrument with Yiddishe Cup — like when Steve Ostrow first played trombone with us; or Walt Mahovlich added accordion; or Gerald Ross, Hawaiian guitar; or Shawn Fink sang “Joe and Paul.”

Or when I had Donato’s pizza with pineapple.

Selker didn’t like arguing with band mates.  Who does? Luckily I haven’t had that many arguments.  The worst was when a musician told me to get lost, or words to that effect, when I wanted him to commit to additional Yiddishe Cup rehearsals.

Professional musicians — guys who do only music — get very annoyed if they perceive the bandleader is trying to own them.  (“Own” is a sideman’s word.  Bandleaders say “hire.”)

Career musicians demand their independence and right to follow the dollar.  The bandleader can only request first call, which means the sideman has to check with the bandleader before taking a gig with band number two.  That sometimes gets tricky.  For instance, when Yiddishe Cup’s first call is a nursing home and the sideman’s second call is the Ancona (Italy) Jewish festival.

Selker quit too early.  He could have played Ancona and other exotic festivals; the Kleveland Klezmorim were one of the first klez revival, klez-fusion bands.  Selker slept at Frank London’s New York apartment, which in klezmer terms is equal to the Lincoln bedroom.  (London is a founder of the Klezmatics.)

Kleveland Klezmorim, 1985

Another guest at London’s apartment was Yiddishe Cup’s keyboardist, Alan Douglass, an original member of the Kleveland Klezmorim.  Alan slept at London’s when the Kleveland Klezmorim played Carnegie Hall . . . Carnegie Hall Cinema.  The Kleveland Klezmorim accompanied silent Laurel and Hardy shorts in New York in 1985.

(A former Yiddishe Cup drummer played the Hollywood Bowl . . . parking lot.  Yiddishe Cup played Severance Hall
. . . lobby.)

I took private lessons from Selker in 1987, which was a hassle because Selker was so footloose back then: It’s spring, Bert.  I need to reschedule. I’m going for a walk in the Metroparks. I had arranged for babysitting for my kids. (Selker eventually had three boys and settled down big-time.)

Greg “I’ll Miss the Bliss” Selker . . .

At Yiddishe Cup concerts our first several years, I often thanked Selker from the bandstand.  He told me to give it up. It was hard.  No Selker, no Yiddishe Cup.

***

Alan Douglass sent me an email a year ago containing “cool ancient [klezmer] history,” as he called it.

Alan said the Kleveland Klezmorim drove all night from Cleveland to New York for the Carnegie Hall gig, winding up in a filthy New Jersey hotel. “Beer bottles on the window sills inside the room,” Alan said.

The band reconnoitered the next day on the steps of the Museum of Modern Art.  “We played on the sidewalk,” Alan said. “Greg got a comeuppance from a local marimbist playing down the street.  She was a Philharmonic percussionist and a monster — barely five feet.”

The band played three shows on Saturday and four on Sunday at the Carnegie Hall Cinema.  “I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired,” Alan said.  “We drove back home on Monday. I made $50.”
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Yiddishe Cup is in Motown this Sat. night, Sept. 4.  Temple Israel, W. Bloomfield, Mich.  8:30 p.m.  Free.

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Ted Budzowski was my dad’s favorite building manager.  Maybe because they were both Teds.

My dad was “Ted” at work and “Toby” at home.  Ted Budzowski was “Ski” at his day job (crane operator at Republic Steel) and “Ted” around the building.

Ted Budzowski could have treated me like a silver-spoon son of a boss, but instead he invited me down to the mill on family day.  I didn’t make it to the mill for some reason.  Everything was air-conditioned at the mill now, Ted said, including his crane cab.

I eventually caught a tour of the mill with the Society for Industrial Archeology.  The slabs of molten steel coming from the furnace looked like creamsicles.  Big red melting blocks.

My dad and Ted talked in a clipped cadence, like telegrams.  Ted would say, “The kid [tenant] is hanging on by the grace of God.”  That meant pay up.

“That tenant is a troublemaker,” my dad answered.

“The kid better not raise a rumpus.”

“He’s thinks he’s cute.” Toby said.

“Yeah, tell it to the judge,” Ted said.

“Give him an eviction notice.”

Ted had two Stratoloungers in his living room, an Okinawan mongoose-and- cobra souvenir, and a tree-stump occasional table, which his son had made. The son lost $8,000 on tree stump tables, which never caught on big in Cleveland.  The good news was the son also was a retired career solider.

Ted Budzowski, 1978, age 63

Toby and Ted were about the same age.   Toby was from Kinsman Road, and Ted had grown up in Youngstown, Ohio, near Cowshit Hill (a real place).  Ted’s kids had made it out, just like Toby’s.   Ted’s second son worked for the phone company.

When Ted retired to Texas to live near his military son, I hired Buck, a hard case who had grown up in a Tennessee orphanage.  Buck didn’t like certain people, particularly sons of bosses.  Buck thought many routine tasks — cleaning up after tradesmen, watering outdoor plants — were not part of the job.

Buck frequently got “porky” with me.  (That was West Side talk for “argumentative.”)  Ted, on the other hand, had always been helpful.  Ted would tell me when my tire pressure was low.  He could sense low tire pressure.  He thought about tire pressure.  

For his last 15 years, Ted’s HQ was probably his Stratolounger in San Antonio.  He didn’t check back with me, except for an annual holiday card.

Meanwhile, Buck was raising prices unilaterally on odd jobs.  He never asked what I thought the job was worth. Who was bossing whom?

I had a hard time bossing around people older than myself.

That changed. I got older.
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1 of 2 posts for 8/25/10.  Please see the post below too.

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Bert Stratton is a pianist and singer on the Caribbean Princess cruise ship.

A man phoned and said, “Bert, this is Joe.  I’m upstairs.”

I was in the basement.  Joe was upstairs.  Creepy.

Joe was upstairs at the other Bert Stratton’s house.

A friend of mine saw Bert perform.  Bert knew me — knew of me — he told my friend.

I know Bert, sort of.  The imposter always tops me on Google.

I wouldn’t mind playing a cruise ship like Bert Stratton.  I know a retired rabbi — Bernard Ducoff, the father of Yiddishe Cup’s dance leader Daniel Ducoff — who does cruise ship gigs.  He’s the boat rabbi for a week or so.  Yiddishe Cup could do a Caribbean klezmer cruise.  There already is a Caribbean cantors cruise on Kosherica lines.  (Not fiction.)

I could not see doing a klezmer bus tour.  No thanks to blowing clarinet on a moving vehicle.  Bad for the teeth.  I was asked to play on Lolly the Trolley and said no.

I could play klezmer on an elevator.  I did.  Yiddishe Cup played elevator music at the opening of Stone Garden Center for Adult Living.  We have played at Stone Garden many times since, but not in the elevator.  We call our Stone Garden gigs “playing the Garden,” as in Madison Square Garden.

Has Bert Stratton ever played the Garden?
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2 of 2 posts for 8/25/10

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1. A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA MAYBE FALL

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player doesn’t like to play in direct sunlight.  He wants our contract to say “We will not play in direct sunlight.”

I ignore him.  At summer concerts, I try to set up outside.  This has cost the band one loudspeaker, damaged by heavy rain.

Yiddishe Cup has played on the Wiley Middle School lawn, University Heights, Ohio, for 16 years and has moved inside the school three times.  (Thus, there is a 19 percent chance we’ll get rained out in Cleveland on an August night.)

At private parties, clients sometimes rent backyard tents just so they can have something extra thing to worry about — whether the tent will blow down or not.  Some Jews will pay extra for another worry.

Yiddishe Cup played a tent in Dayton, Ohio, where it rained so hard, busboys poked holes in the canopy to collect rain into garbage cans.  I thought the band might get electrocuted, the floor was so damp.

At a Shaker Heights tent, the air was so hot and humid, my clarinet slid apart at the cork joints.  Biloxi, Miss., had nothing on Shaker that night.

Yiddishe Cup played poolside in a Shaker backyard.  We were like Catskill mambo kings.  At the Akron (Ohio) JCC, we also played poolside, and the kids tried to splash us with belly slams and cannonballs.  That was Family Fun Day, a.k.a. Let’s Destroy Professional Musical Instruments Day.

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player doesn’t like it when I vacillate between indoors and outdoors.  Mr. Keyboard Player, who are you going to trust, AccuWeather or your leader?

I avoid indoors if possible.  Granted, outdoor sound is mediocre, but the breeze is good and the kids get to run on the grass, and summer is so brief.

Last summer at University Heights, we moved the band’s equipment indoors at the last minute.  The storm knocked down a chain-link fence and several trees.  That was one of my better calls.

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Here’s a video clip from last year’s concert.  (The stage patter at the end of the song, at 1:58 min., is amusing.)

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2. ELI, ELI

Eli “Paperboy” Reed played at University Heights with Yiddishe Cup the night the power went out throughout Ohio, then Michigan, Ontario, and the entire Northeast.  Maybe Eli caused the Northeast Blackout of August 2003.  Eli, not FirstEnergy.  We continued the concert with a battery-powered amp.

Eli “Paperboy” Reed doesn’t need, or probably want, a middle-aged klezmer guy saying nice things about his new album, Come and Get It. (Klezmer Old Dude = Kiss of Death.)  I’ll keep it low-key. Ta-da . . .

Eli “Paperboy” Reed sings and writes original, yet classic-sounding, R&B/soul.  No, “Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed” is not a pseudonym for my son the drummer.  My son-the-drummer’s pseudonym is DJ Paradiddle.

Reed, 26, is big in Europe.  Like on The Ed Sullivan Show (the modern-day Brit equivalent) and the cover of Rolling Stone (the Brit equivalent).  Look for Come and Get It on Capitol Records and for Eli everywhere.  He was on NPR “Weekend Edition” [hear] several days ago.   He’ll probably be on late-night American TV soon.

I know a couple klezmer guys who are big, too, who played with Yiddishe Cup.  Years ago the bass player for the Klezmatics did a gig with us in Toledo.

Ipso facto, there is no such thing as “big” in klezmer.

Eli Reed doesn’t play klezmer, though.  When he performed with Yiddishe Cup, he did soul/R&B.

Reed and his band, the True Loves, have a gutsy Stax-like sound, which provides the core support to Reed’s emotive lyrics, which are rabbit punches to the solar plexus of young love.  Example: “You went from name calling to calling my name. You went from school-yard teasing to all night pleasing.”  That is clear-cut sawing in the coming-of-age forest.

Eli — they love him in España and France.  I hope Eli “Paperboy” Reed becomes huge in America, and says in passing, “Yiddishe Cup is all right,” and Yiddishe Cup gets more gigs.

When you buy Eli “Paperboy” Reed’s Come and Get It, tell them — Reed, Capitol, iTunes, et al. — Yiddishe Cup sent you.

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1 of 2 posts for 8/18/10.  Please see the post below too.

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See Yiddishe Cup 7 p.m. tomorrow (Thurs. Aug. 19) at Wiley Middle School, 2155 Miramar Blvd., University Hts., Ohio.  Free.  Indoors if raining.

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Magic Markers must say “Sharpie Retractable Fine Point.”  The “Retractable” means there is no cap — nothing to unscrew and then laboriously screw onto the other end of the pen.

I ordered 24 red Sharpie retractables online because I couldn’t find a lone red Sharpie at Staples or Office Max.  Those places think you’re representing the entire Cuyahoga County juvenile court system when you walk in.

Pay close attention to the words “fine point” on the retractable Sharpie.  The “ultra fine point” model is nothing more than a pen.

I bought 7 pounds of 7-inch “Big Red” rubber bands from Netherland Rubber in Cincinnati.  The company wouldn’t sell less than 7 pounds.  That supply — my 7 pounds/1,260 rubber bands — lasted eight years.  If you purchase similar big rubber bands at Discount Drug Mart or Staples, you’ll pay $2 for 12 rubber bands — 17 cents per rubber band.  Mine, in bulk, were 3 cents.  The rubber bands are good for organizing manila-folder tax return files.  They’re also useful for organizing clothes in a duffel or backpack.

Pentel RSVP pens . . . You need a balanced pen like that. Use the RSVP fine point for detail work like bookkeeping, and the medium point for regular tasks.  The medium point moves quicker across the page than the fine point. Use Gel pens for the dramatic, inky, John Hancock-style, five-year lease signing.

For Post-its, pay extra and go Super Sticky.  Make sure you don’t accidentally buy the accordion-style, pop-up Post-its. That is a death sentence.

I wrote to a real estate newsletter: “The Post-it has simplified my life more than my computer!”  This was pre-Internet.  Now I’d take my computer over Post-its to a desert island.

Get a couple clip-on pens. Don’t buy them. Find somebody from the Cleveland Clinic to give you a couple. You need a clip-on pen (no cap) for quick accessibility. Sometimes a bandleader has to quickly write the name of a tune on an index card.  Nobody can hear anything on stage.

My father used 8-column green accounting pads for record keeping.  I still occasionally refer to his records, particularly the marginalia, like “Light the incinerator from the top floor down, so the refuse burns down.”

Incinerators were banned more than 40 years ago.

“In September have boilers bled and check safety valves.”

Check.

For checks, try J&R Computer Supply in Mankato, Minnesota . . .
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2 of 2 posts for 8/18/10

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The last Midwest klezmer conference was in Chicago in 1998.  The Challah Fame in Cleveland wants to restart the Midwest klez conference. Not in Chicago, thank you.  And not in some bubble-tea town like Madison, Wisc., either.

KlezKleveland.  Check it out.  This year.  Or maybe in 2018.  (To be announced.)

KlezKleveland will be like KlezKamp and KlezKanada, but with more letters and more heymish — with a Midwestern “hi!” attitude.

Where: my house.

Accommodations: tent camping on my neighbor’s front lawn.  Or you can camp inside his house.  There’s no plumbing; his copper pipes are gone.  Nobody lives there.

There will be shower trucks and port-a-potties in the driveway.  Don Johns — only the best.

Kosher food available. (Queen Alice’s falafel truck.)

Gentiles welcome, of course.

Do I need to play an instrument to attend?

No, we’ll supply drumpets (combination trumpet and drums) made from leftover McDonald’s packaging.  Drumpets, by the way, were invented by Dr. Craig Woodson, a former Yiddishe Cup drummer.

Do I need to know Yiddish?

No, but be familiar with at least five Yiddish words besides bagel, schmuck, meshuge, chutzpah and putz.

Faculty?

Yes.  Eco-friendly Midwestern teachers like Steven Greenman, violin; Adrianne Greenbaum (originally from Akron, Ohio), flute; and Yosef Greenberger, a Cleveland keyboardist.

“Klezmer Guy,” the KlezKleveland director, will lecture on klezmer biz — for instance, how to deal with bar mitzvah moms.  He will participate in a mock-u-drama with a real mom, Alice Stratton . . .

Alice:  I’m worried about my son’s bar mitzvah party.  His friends, will they like klezmer?

Klezmer Guy:  Of course they’ll like it.  Kids love klezmer! They’re sick of rap.

There will be daily aerobics and spinning sessions on the deck next door with music by KnishKnash, a NYC klez-fusion band and eatery.  Free kikhl (cookies) and wine coolers for all.

In the evening, teens perform an experimental Yiddish-inflected drama about scrap and Midwest Jews, adapted from Leonard Tennenbaum’s memoir Junk Is Not a Four-Letter Word. The teens wear turtlenecks, Speedo trunks and Groucho glasses.

Students in the fencing class wear uniforms reminiscent of prewar German Jewish sports clubs.  The outfits are black Yiddishe Cup T-shirts, provided.  Bring your own trousers.  White, please.  Not cream-colored.  White, meine Herren!

KlezKleveland fencing instructors Daniel Ducoff (L.) and Alan Douglass.

Yosef Greenberger, Cleveland’s Ortho one-man-band keyboard wizard, will demonstrate proprietary synth settings that emit odors, such as latke smells for Chanukah songs and cinnamon for Christmas carols. (Gotta eat.)

Local experts will lecture on “co-territorial” music.  Polka DJ Tony Petkovsek speaks on “Johnny Pecon and Molly Picon: Mishpocha?”  [Family.]

Cleveland accordionist Walt Mahovlich leads the hands-on Gypsy music workshop: “Doin’ the Continental.”

Yiddishe Cup plays during lunch breaks.  Attendees leave knowing at least one Mickey Katz tune, “16 Tons.”  (“You load 16 tons of hard salami, rolled beef, corned beef, and hot pastrami . . .”)

KlezKleveland ends with a fireworks display over Shaker Lakes.  Look for Chagall-like goats and Hasidic violinists in the sky.

And look for the KlezKleveland flyer in your mailbox.  Please look regularly for the next eight years.

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1 of 2 posts for 8/11/10.  Please see the post below too.
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KlezKanada — a good time — is Aug. 16-22 in Lantier, Quebec, near Montreal.  www.klezkanada.org
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Thurs. Aug 19, Yiddishe Cup plays on the lawn at Wiley Middle School, University Hts., Ohio.  The concert is  free. Not only that, you get a free Klondike ice cream bar from the city just for showing up.  You’re ahead, even if you don’t like klezmer.   7 p.m.  Indoors if raining.

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At the Harvey Pekar (urn) Benefit, a hipster with shoulder-length dreadlocks said, “I wrote a book about my sex life.  Three-hundred forty pages.”

I asked, “You going to do another one?”

“No, I don’t think people are that interested.”

The Pekar benefit had characters, especially hippie dinosaur characters, myself included.  (Another species of dinosaurs — old ethnics — gathered three blocks down at the Slovenian Workmen’s Home to hear Bobby Kravos’ polka band.)  The Pekar benefit was at the Beachland Ballroom, formerly the Croatian Liberty Home, Collinwood.

Ex-Cleveland Heights Mayor Alan “Popo” Rapoport, age 61 — and 23 years out of politics — was back on the scene.  He danced a hora to Yiddishe Cup.  He was running for the new county council seat.

After the benefit, my wife, Alice, and I ate with Popo at a nearby cafe.  He said he was in Collinwood, in part, to put up campaign yard signs at street intersections.  He did the sign installations around midnight so he wouldn’t get a ticket for littering.

I asked Popo what he had been up to for the past two decades.

“Real estate law and probate,” he said. “Sometimes called graves and ground.”

Alice said, “You should write a blog, ‘Graves and Ground.'”

Popo said the Harvey Pekar toxicology report could take six weeks or so to come back from the coroner’s office.

At the Beachland Ballroom bar earlier, Harvey’s wife, Joyce Brabner, had told me, “Harvey had worse [prostate] cancer than I let on.”

When I offered Joyce my condolences, she said, “Some people get that confused and say ‘congratulations.'”

“That too,” I said.

I wanted to ask: “How can you suddenly croak of cancer in your sleep?”   (Harvey had died quickly at home in his bedroom.)  Instead I said, “Is there some Latin word for how he died?”

Joyce said no. Then she left the bar area. She knew many people in the Beachland, including a free-lance photographer on assignment from the New York Times.

The New York Times had run an article “The Upbeat Final Days and Busy Future of Harvey Pekar” several weeks  earlier.  In the piece, a Cleveland illustrator had said Harvey was chipper the day before he died.   Joyce wanted her side of the story out.  Harvey, upbeat?  Not likely.

Would The Times actually run three stories on Pekar?  (1.) Half-page obit.  Done.  (2.) Chipper Harvey story. Done.  And now Joyce’s take?  Joyce was the PR wizard.  Could happen.

The angle: How could Pekar not have enough money to bury himself?  The cheapest guy who ever lived!  He lectured for decent fees; had a piece — albeit small — of a Hollywood movie; and collected Social Security and government pensions.

Joyce said the gobierno had cut off Harvey’s checks, pending determination of the cause of death.  Harvey died at 70 and left no will.

Seventy is the new 60 for dying. Seventy is a raw deal.  You’re supposed to reach 80 now, al minimo.  My dad died at 69 in 1986; very few people back then considered that unusual.

Eighty-plus or bust.  Alfred Lerner, the former billionaire chairman of MBNA and owner of the Cleveland Browns, died at 68 of brain cancer a few years ago.  That was news on two fronts:  (1.) The man died so young.  (2.) The man’s mega-money couldn’t get him another decade.

The Beachland Ballroom owner talked about erecting a statue of Harvey at Lake View Cemetery.

Joyce said, “This town can’t raise enough money for a statue of Superman, let alone one for Harvey.”

Paging Harvey Pekar.  Your burial urn tsuris cries out for a new episode of American Splendor.

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Footnotes:

1. There was talk of putting up a Superman statue in Glenville, the Cleveland neighborhood where two high school boys created Superman in the 1930s.

2. The sentence “Your burial urn tsuris cries out for a new
episode . . .” is stolen, in large part, from writer/critic Mark Schilling.
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2 of 2 posts for 8/11/10

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Maggies were linoleum salesmen/hustlers in Cleveland.

Harvey Pekar wrote a comic strip about them several decades ago.  I didn’t hear the word maggies again until last week, when my cousin Danny Seiger, 78, expounded at shabbes dinner on the maggies of Kinsman Road.  At first I had no idea what Danny was talking about. Neither did my wife.  She said, “Magistrates?”  And I said, “Magi?”  (I hadn’t remembered the Pekar comic strip.)

“Magi!” Danny laughed.  “Magi?  That would be Yoshke’s boys!” [Jesus’ boys.]

“The maggies carried thick samples of linoleum that looked like Venetian marble,” Danny said. “They sold nine-by-twelve sheets for fifteen dollars.  Nobody had fifteen dollars back then, so the maggies took five bucks on installment, and came back with a roll of tissue-paper.  They could carry it upstairs real easy.  It weighed three pounds.  The maggies laid the tissue-paper linoleum on your kitchen floor, collected the five bucks, and never came back.”

Danny grew up in his parents’ deli, Seiger’s Restaurant on Kinsman Road, and knew something about conmen, kibitzers, bookies, contractors and maggies.  It was like an Eskimo knowing about snow.   [Kibitzers are meddlesome observers.]

The maggies sold more than linoleum, Danny said.  They sold ties at barbershops, socks at saloons.  Each maggie had a territory and a product line. “One maggie stood by the streetcar stop and ran up to women with nice lemons,” Danny said. “The maggie held up a few lemons and said, ‘Two for a nickel, three for a dime.’ The woman gave him the dime and hopped on the streetcar.”

***

Relevant: Yiddishe Cup plays the Harvey Pekar (urn) Benefit this Saturday night at the Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland. If enough funds are raised, Harvey’s urn goes next to Eliot Ness’ grave at Lake View Cemetery.

I Googled “Maggies” after my cousin Danny left. Maggies, an Irish music group, popped up.  Then I tried “Maggies + Pekar.” I was thinking about Pekar because of the Beachland gig, and something about “Maggies + Pekar” jogged my memory . . .

Michigan State University Libraries,
Comic Art Collection.
“The Maggies: Oral History”/story by Harvey Pekar;
art by R. Crumb. 2 p. in American Splendor, no. 7 (1982).

I phoned Danny Seiger and read the Pekar story to him. I wanted to know if Turk’s deli — where the maggies hung out in Harvey’s comic — was the same place as Seiger’s deli.  Danny said, “Turk’s was at One-hundred Seventeenth. We were at One-hundred Eighteenth.”

I said, “There were two delis right next to each other?  How many delis were there in Cleveland?”

“There were seven on Kinsman, and twenty-eight in Cleveland in the 1930s,” Danny said.

“What about Zulu Goldberg and his brothers — the guys in the comic who sold linoleum in bulk to the maggies?” I asked. “Was Zulu a real person?”

“That’s Goldbergs from Ohio Savings,” Danny said.  “They did business.”

***

Maggies, the word, comes from Magnoleum, a linoleum brand, Danny said.  Pekar’s comic-strip character — an unnamed old man — said maggies got their name from calling female customers Maggie.

Harold Ticktin, 83, a former Kinsman cowboy and street-corner historian, might be able to settle this.

Answer the phone, Harold!

. . . Harold says, “I have no idea what maggies are.  Never heard of it. Now there was this Italian, Tom Black, who sold sweaters at One-hundred Forty-second and Kinsman. You tried the sweaters on in the bathroom at the gas station.  The sweaters looked real good in front but went up your back like a window shade.”

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Yiddishe Cup plays 8-9 p.m. this Sat. (Aug. 7) at the Harvey Pekar (urn) Benefit at the Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland.

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The meanest, baddest landlord in America is John T. Reed, a West Point grad in Alamo, California.  In Reed’s world, if you’re a day late with your rent, you’re on the curb with your cat and kitty litter.

Reed lost a ton of money in real estate, and made a lot of money writing about it.  I’ve read most of his books; he’s a good writer and smart.  (There are many savvy landlords but not many can write.  They’re too busy at target practice.)  Reed shows you how to twist tenants’ arms until they say: “Here’s the rent, sir, and it’s a day early!”

Reed claims you can mail it in — not the rent, but your on-site supervision.  Reed, living in California, owned apartments in Texas, so he sent postcards to his tenants, instructing them to drop dimes/postcards on his custodians and their job performances.

That long-distance supervision doesn’t work.  If I don’t check my buildings  at least once a week in person, the buildings will turn into dumps — Magic Marker on the mailbox labels, the exit lights burned out, and 100 cigarette butts on the stoop.

Nothing gets done if I don’t show up.  The painter, his back goes out until I show up.  I’m better than a chiropractor.  The Yellow Pages directories pile high in the lobby until I show up.  The grass doesn’t get cut until I show up.  I understand all that.

I say to my building managers: “You need to take care of this right away.”  And I show up.

I conduct exit surveys. I ask my former tenants if my buildings and managers are good.  The ex-tenants, long gone, are totally honest because they face no repercussions from building managers.

Here is a sample of  former tenants’ replies:

The apartment flooded.  It was not my fault!

I didn’t know I would need air conditioning in Ohio. And there wasn’t any!  [From a Californian.]

Water pressure — terrible.

Workers parked in my spot, and I was paying for it.

The marijuana smoke from the alley was very strong, and spending the summer with the windows closed was not acceptable.

The favorable comments, you don’t want to hear.  Too self-serving, too bubbly.

Maybe I should write a Nice Guy Landlord handbook.  That’s a niche John T. Reed won’t fill.  My title: How to Manage Apartments and Jam with Your Tenants, with accompanying CD featuring the songs “You Tore Out My Window Screens, Now my Heart?”, “I’d Like to Go Month-to-Month with You, Baby” and “I Can’t Find the Handle (To Your Refrigerator of Love).”

John T. Reed could be my sound man at real estate conventions.  We could share a booth. Do a good cop/ bad cop thing and split the profits.

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1 of 2 posts for 7/21/10.  Please see the post below too.

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Yiddishe Cup is the house band at the Lake County (Ohio) Heritage Festival.  We play there every July.  Twenty years in a row.

Why don’t the organizers get somebody else?

Because we talk.  Bluegrass bands and old-time musicians don’t talk.  They just pick.  Folk musicians, they’ll talk, but it’s pabulum about trees and trysts.  Polka guys, they talk — to each other.  And they mumble.

Lake County, just east of Cleveland, is a stronghold of Italians and Slovenians.  Many are retired railroad and factory workers.  They like to hear “Eaton Axle,” “Fisher Body,” and “Collinwood Railroad Yards.”

Those aren’t songs.  They’re just words, and I like to say them. For instance, I’ll say, “Who remembers the Collinwood Yards on East One-hundred Fifty-second?”  There are a couple klezmer train songs.  There’s a hit from Russia: “7:40.”

We do “Gino,” an Orthodox Jewish tune with an Italian-sounding name.  We also do “That’s Morris,” a parody of “That’s Amore.” We introduce it with: “This is by that great Ohio Jewish composer Dean Martin.  His name in Hebrew means ‘flying tiny octopus.'”

You have to be there.

The Slovenians like to hear “Slovenian” pronounced properly: Slovene-yun, not Slovene-ian.

I explain Hebrew is loshn kodesh, the holy tongue, like Latin. Yiddish by contrast is mama-loshn, the mother tongue.  “Mama Lotion. You can buy it at CVS.”

You have to be there.

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2 of 2 posts for 7/21/10

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Sun. (July 25):  Yiddishe Cup is at the Lake County Heritage Festival, formerly the Little Mountain Folk Festival.  Painesville, Ohio. $. www.lakehistory.org.  Final revised schedule: Yiddishe Cup is on at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

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Thurs., July 29:  “Driving Mr. Klezmer” duo show at Cain Park, Cleveland Hts., 7 p.m.   $20 in advance, $23 at the door. $2 off for 60+ and students.  216-371-3000 or www.cainpark.com.  If you miss this show, your last words might be “I really screwed up.”

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Harvey Pekar wasn’t that funny in real life.  He was a campeón del mundo bitch-moaner.  He would drey you with pedantic lectures on, say, an avant-garde jazz musician or a neglected writer such as George Gissing.  Harvey threw in gobs of “you know’s,” connectors that allowed him to talk for a half-hour nonstop and still retain membership in the Youse Guys Club.  The lectures were always about Harvey, with the occasional aside about the neglected artist, who was also Harvey.

When Harvey edited his work for his comic books, he distilled a year’s worth of  harangues and keen journalistic observation into a few thousand words.  The comic book — the insights, the dead-on dialogue and the self-deprecating humor — was the opposite of his rambles.

Ray Dobbins (a.k.a. Jim Flannigan), the author of Don the Burp and Other Stories, was an ex-Clevelander in New York, who lived in the East Village near a Village Voice critic.  Dobbins showed Harvey’s early comic books to critic Robert Christgau and his wife, Carola Dibbell, and she wrote up Harvey for the Voice, Dec. 31, 1979.

Onward.

Through the ensuing acclaim and fame, Harvey was, still, the Kinsman Road boy who unfortunately attended Shaker Heights High.  That move — from proste Kinsman to fancy-schmancy Shaker of the 1950s —  contributed mightily to Harvey’s me-against-the-world attitude.  Read about it.  It’s in his comic books.

At my first son’s bris in 1981,  Harvey gravitated toward the mohel, an Orthodox rabbi.

Harvey told me he was going to write about the bris.  Something about the mohel raising his arms and saying, “Golden hands!”

Pekar saw things others missed.  And he got it down on paper.

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[“Drey” is  turn/pester.  “Proste” is common/boorish.]

[More on Harvey at “Where is My Harvey Pekar Bobblehead?”, a Klezmer Guy post from 2/3/10.]

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2 of 2 posts for 7/14/10
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See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” 7 p.m. Thurs., July 29, at Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights.  $20 in advance. $23 at the door.  Call 216-371-3000 or visit www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is a clutch-popping trip through the states of klezmer, pop, Tin Pan Alley and spoken word.  The ride: a Ford Tsuris.

The show is a nudnik/beatnik mash-up of music and comedy.  Bert Stratton is on clarinet and spoken word (i.e., this blog). Alan Douglass, the chauffeur, is on vocals and keyboards.

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Subs are often the best musicians.  They’re great ear players.

I’ve subbed a few times.  One time I wore a suit instead of a tux and got The Ray (the stare) from the bandleader.  Another time I iced my tendinitis during a break and almost missed the downbeat (the start of the next set).

I don’t do much subbing.  I’m not the greatest ear player and my sight-reading skills are only so-so.

The worst player in the band should be the leader, who then hires people better than himself.

[Subliminal message  for non-readers: Jump to the video at the end of this post.]

Playing by ear . . . that’s the big mysterious matzo ball of music.  Fact: You can get better at playing by ear. A little better.  First, close your eyes for a minute before practicing.  Listen to the clock and your neighbor’s barking dog.  Then play a couple notes, eyes closed, like C, D, and E, and imagine why they’re different.  What is the distance between the notes?

You have no idea.

Follow up with a chromatic scale, C-C#-D-D#-E, and you’ll have an idea.  The chromatic run sounds like swarming bees, à la “Flight of the Bumblebee.”  This chromatic run “looks” zig-zaggy, as if you’re walking up the fire-exit steps at a downtown hotel.  C is the first floor, C# is the landing, and D is the second floor. You begin to feel the intervals (the leaps).

Don’t underestimate the eyes-closed part.  Pretend you have eye strain and need to rest your eyes.

If you’re a professional musician, try playing with your eyes closed on stage occasionally.  It’ll clear the visual clutter.  I spent 30 minutes at a concert trying to remember my kids’ preschool teacher’s name.  She was in the audience.  My kids are in their twenties.  I should have had my eyes closed.

***

I encouraged a gentile Yiddishe Cup musician to attend KlezKamp, the klezmer convention, to learn klezmer conventions.  When the KlezKamp registrar asked his Yiddish name, I interrupted, “Farbisener.” (Bitter One.)

My musician wore his Farbisener ID badge for five days.  He could take a joke — barely.

I’ve had goys in Yiddishe Cup since the beginning.  That’s no surprise.  Have you been to an Orthodox Jewish wedding in the Midwest?  The sole Jewish musician is often the singer, because he has to know Hebrew.  The rest of the band might be jazzers, many of whom are cool dudes with cigs, fraying tuxes, and war stories about backing up Jerry Lewis and Tom Jones.  Divide everything they say in half.   But they can play — anything from Charlie Parker to Madonna.

Some subs, on the other hand, are not old jazzers; they are young music school grads who don’t smoke, don’t dress like shlubs, and know all the tunes — and are also full of BS.  If a young sub says he just made $500, that means he drove to New York, slept on a couch, and didn’t calculate his travel expenses.  He has never heard of depreciation.

I hired a sub from a small town near Canton, Ohio.  (Yes, Canton is small, but this guy’s ville was very small.)  He played terrific guitar and sang in Italian, Spanish and English. He had grown up in three countries.  He claimed he did 260 gigs a year — a lot.  Most were quality gigs, he said, although some were “wallpaper” (background music), and some outright sucked: “I had a gig playing dinner parties for the Hoover vacuum family.”

Subs need quips like that to regale the band at breaks.  The regulars demand it; they are sick of each other’s jokes and stories.

The toughest job in music — subbing.

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This vid clip is from the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” show.  Includes klezmer and Mickey Katz’s “16 Tons,” followed by Alan Douglass, on keyboards, reciting the first verse of Genesis in Hebrew.  Not bad for a gentile.

See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” 7 p.m. Thurs., July 29, at Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights.  $20 in advance. $23 at the door.  Call 216-371-3000 or visit www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is a clutch-popping trip through the states of klezmer, pop, Tin Pan Alley and spoken word.  The ride: a Ford Tsuris.

The show is a nudnik/beatnik mash-up of music and comedy.  Bert Stratton is on clarinet and spoken word (i.e., this blog). Alan Douglass, the chauffeur, is on vocals and keyboards.

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I am the Sol Hiccup — maybe — of klezmer shows in Cleveland.  I am a volunteer on a Workmen’s Circle committee that has brought in Kapelye, Pharaoh’s Daughter, Theodore Bikel, Chava Alberstein, the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Shtreiml, Beyond the Pale, Susan Hoffman Watts and many more.

It’s not my money; it’s the Workmen’s Circle’s concert endowment earnings.

Many committee members don’t know much about Jewish music, so my opinion carries weight. Sometimes my picks work, sometimes not.

Anything experimental, feh.  Too much kvitching (squeaking) on the clarinet, feh.  Hebrew songs — no thanks, it’s a Yiddish concert. Obscure Yiddish songs — no thanks.

Last year the committee brought in Yiddishe Cup (from a distance of  7,920 feet).  The band played mainstream klezmer and did Mickey Katz–style Yinglish comedy.

A committee member said the band didn’t play enough klezmer instrumentals.  He said, “That’s what the Russians wanted to hear. They came to hear klezmer music, not  . . .” He paused.  “Ech, you were OK.”  Not a bad review, considering this critic  — a 94-year-old Yiddishist — often favored “horrible,” “not Jewish enough,” and “jazz – why jazz?”

Giora Feidman, the renowned Israeli clarinetist, played all instrumentals one year.  That was nisht gut (no good).  No vocals.

Where was the road to a good program? “Call Zalmen in New York,” according to one veteran committee member.  Call Zalmen Mlotek.

Zalman is not 94 years old, even though his name is.  Zalman is a baby-boomer pianist, theater director, and macher in the klezmer world.  He knows just about every quality Yiddish performer.

Zalman’s job, from the concert committee’s standpoint, was to forestall repertoire malfunctions.  The committee, which included several lawyers, stipulated performers should deliver “at least 70 percent Yiddish content.”  No more all-instrumental shows or predominately Hebrew and English song fests.

For instance, the headliner in 2007 had counted “Di Grine Kusine” (The Greenhorn Cousin) 100 percent Yiddish content, even though his group’s version was mostly instrumental jazz solos. When I told him he hadn’t fulfilled his Yiddish quota, he said, “Why are you telling me this the minute I walk off stage!”

He had a point. I should have waited.  But his pianist had taken more solos, on the clock, than his Yiddish vocalist.

I was only doing my job.  And I was in trouble. I was coming off a bad year; I had recommended an “experimental” act the year before.  I was losing my Sol Hiccup credibility.

We brought in a Canadian band, Beyond the Pale.  They covered the bases, mixing klezmer instrumentals and Yiddish songs. I was redeemed for a while.

Then a long-time committee member quit.  She said there wasn’t enough Yiddish, and hadn’t been enough mama-loshn (Yiddish/mother tongue) for more than a decade.

Azoy geyt es. (So it goes.)

A majority of the Yiddish-speaking audience was in the cemetery along with the committee’s top pick, Bruce Alder, a terrific Yiddish song-and-dance man who had died in 2008.  Our concert ushers — World War II Jewish War Vets — were also with Bruce.

I played a party for Jewish war vets. They were Vietnam guys, looking just like World War II vets, except breathing. The vets liked “Old Time Rock and Roll.”  I couldn’t see them ushering a klezmer concert.

This summer’s Yiddish concert is Sunday, featuring “New Voices of the Yiddish Stage,” an ad hoc musical variety show from Folksbiene — Zalmen Mlotek’s theater in New York.  The musicians are in their twenties and thirties.  Clarinetist Michael Winograd alone is worth the price of admission. 

Aside to the  “New Voices”  performers: Jazz is a four-letter word west of the Hudson.

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The 32nd annual Yiddish Concert in the Park is 3 p.m. Sun. (June 27) at Cain Park, Evans Amphitheater, Cleveland Heights.  Free admission.  The concert is a co-production of the Workmen’s Circle and the City of  Cleveland Heights.

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I played a crummy clarinet, blasting against the side of a barn door on a bike trip in rural Ohio.  I nearly destroyed my lip.

Last summer my friend Mark Schilling from Japan wanted to ride the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA), so I couldn’t very well say: “Mark, I’m passing on GOBA.  I have a big gig coming up and need to practice.”

I had to practice for Yiddishe Cup’s twentieth anniversary concert, which was the day after the bike tour.

Some musicians don’t need to practice; they practiced in music school and can wing it as adults.  I didn’t go to music school.  I have to feel the notes in my fingers and brain almost daily before a big show.

My borrowed cheap clarinet had decayed pads, squeaky keys and cracked dirty reeds.  The mouthpiece had layers of caked lip gunk. The axe was plastic and generic.  No name.  I got it from a friend.  Ray-somebody in Sioux City, Iowa, had once repaired it; his card was in the case.

Why didn’t I have a back-up axe of my own? Was this an example of rigid thinking on my part?  I had put my professional clarinet through so much — parades and other outdoor indignities — and didn’t own a back-up.  For example, I should have had a plastic horn for the 2004 Israel Independence Day parade when we marched outside in 40 degrees. (One Yiddishe Cup musician went AWOL on that parade because he didn’t play under 50.)

On the GOBA trip, I played next to the Wood County Fairgrounds sheep barn.  If I had stood in the middle of the horse-showing ring and played — without the barn wall to bounce sound off — I would have blown my lip out even more.

I had to practice high notes, which cheap clarinets don’t do well.  You need a decent mouthpiece and a quality reed.  I bit down hard and tore my lower, inside cheek.

Nobody on the bike tour — about 2,500 riders — complained about my playing.  Midwesterners, particularly bicyclists, are very tolerant and polite.

I also practiced at a high school football field. That town, Elmore, had a bass drone coming from the Ohio Turnpike a block away.

I used cortisone cream on my cheek.

The final day of the ride, my friend and I performed at the bike rally’s talent show.  Mark and I had written a song about aching backs, bad food and smelly port-a-potties.  So had all the other contestants.  The difference: our tune had a klezmer clarinet.

We riffed on the melody “Nayer Sher,” a.k.a. the “Wedding Samba,” popularized by Xavier Cugat.  I had heard that 1950s tune on Muzak in a Cleveland grocery store.  The song had crossover appeal.

But we didn’t win.

A barbershop trio did.  They sang about tandem bike riders smelling each other’s gas.  We hadn’t thought of that.

Irwin Weinberger, a veteran GOBA cyclist and Yiddishe Cup’s singer, came in second.  Irwin inserted port-a-potty lyrics into the Kinks’ “Lola.”

Irwin hadn’t practiced all week.  Irwin is a natural.  And he’s a gas.

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GOBA begins June 20 in Logan, Ohio. The GOBA encampment is half Pilot Gas rest stop, half Cabela’s.  There are six semi-haulers and many tents.  The semis carry the cyclists’ baggage.  Two of the semis are actually mobile shower trucks (which are sometimes used for natural disasters). There is close-quarters snoring on the football field, with hundreds of tents pitched within several feet of each other.  Rated: Difficult.
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Yiddishe Cup plays the post-parade concert at Parade The Circle 1 p.m. this Sat. (June 12).  Wade Oval, Cleveland. Traffic tip: Ride your bike to the parade and park in the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op lot.

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Everybody in world music wants to be the next crossover act.

Eddie Blazonczyk, the Chicago Polish polka musician, tried. And then there was Ruben Blades, the Panamanian salsa guy.

In klezmer, nobody has done it lately.

Lately is the key word.  [Continue by clicking on video]

CLOSED CAPTION.  6/4/10.  The paragraphs below are what the man in the video is saying, more or less, prior to playing “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” . . .

In 1938 the Andrews Sisters made “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” (By Me You Look Grand) the number one song on the American pop charts.

“Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” is the tune in the klezmer concert repertoire.

Yiddishe Cup was playing a concert in Detroit — just barreling through a medley of esoteric klezmer fusion — when I called an audible (changed the set list) to play “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.”  Bingo, the mostly elderly crowd was right back with us.

My daughter, when she was little, called the song “My Bear, Mr. Shane.”  My youngest son performed it at 3 ½. [Check out the boy’s video.]  Jazz musicians call the tune “My Beer is Duquesne.”

Only Jews think “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” is Jewish.  Everybody else thinks it’s German or plain nothing.  (The spelling on the original record label was “Bei Mir Bist du Schön.”)  I lectured a group of gentile senior citizens in Westlake, Ohio.  I asked if they knew “Bay Mir” was Jewish.  None did.

Sholom Secunda wrote the melody to “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” for a Yiddish play in 1932.  Then he sold the rights to a music publishing house, the Kammen Brothers, for $30.

Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin put English words to the Yiddish version.  The tune became a huge hit for the Andrew Sisters.

Secunda supposedly had a conversation with a shoeshiner, who was whistling “Bay Mir” in 1938:

Secunda: “That song is making quite a hit now, isn’t it?”
Shoeshiner: “Hit ain’t the word.  It’s a riot.”
Secunda: “I guess the guy who wrote that must be making plenty of dough.”
Shoeshiner: “Not him.  That dope sold his song for thirty bucks.”
Secunda:  “And that isn’t the half of it . . .” **

**From the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, Jan. 26, 1938.

Secunda had to split the $30 fee with the original Yiddish lyricist, Jacob Jacobs.

A Jewish tune crosses over to the big-time about once a century.  That’s my guess.  I’m thinking the next hit will be the Hip Hop Hoodios’ “My Nose is Large and You Know I’m in Charge.”
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On Sat. June 12, Yiddishe Cup plays the best event in Cleveland, Parade the Circle. We’re not marching in the parade; we’re playing a post-parade concert at 1 p.m. on Wade Oval. Gonna be a massive bar mitzvah party.

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If you’re on the Cleveland Workmen’s Circle concert committee, there’s a 25 percent chance you’ll be dead in 10 years. (I counted the dead from a 10-year-old committee roster.)

An elderly woman suggested we include a tribute to a recently deceased committee member in our concert brochure. But the brochure’s cover already read “in memory of Eugenia and Henry Green,” the concert’s principal funders.

I said, “People are dying on this committee every other year. We can’t be putting in written testimonials.”

“Like who?  Who’s dying?” the woman asked.

I didn’t name names.  Why sidetrack the meeting?

The committee met in a room under a portrait of Eugene V. Debs.  A photo of Norman Thomas was in the hallway.

This committee in its prime — about 20 years ago — was like hanging around the cafeteria at CCNY or Western Reserve University in the day.  There had been Max Wohl, Socialist (capital S) and major ACLU donor; David Guralnik, editor of the New World Dictionary; Herman Hellerstein, the cardiologist who first recommended, in the 1960s, exercise after heart attacks; and Harold Ticktin, Mississippi civil rights lawyer (summer 1965), authority on the Jewish Bund, and former “Kinsman cowboy” (Kinsman Road loiterer).  Ticktin said the Jewish Kinsman cowboys in the 1930s called the Italian Kinsman cowboys “noodles” and shkutzim (gentile boys).

Committee members occasionally called each other “friend,” a quasi-socialist salutation.

Several “friends” decided to honor Yiddishe Cup with a Workmen’s Circle dinner.  What Yiddishe Cup didn’t know: the honoree paid to be honored.

Ben Shouse, friend in charge of fundraising, had a booming voice and a shock of gray hair like H.L. Mencken.  And he wore suits like Mencken, and he smoked a cigar like Mencken.  Politically, Shouse was un-Menckenable.   Shouse was a retired labor union boss, autodidact (he liked inculcate), and an advocate for the arts, especially “Shakespeare for the workers”-type events.

Shouse phoned me, suggesting Yiddishe Cup musicians pony up for the banquet.  He said, “Stratton, you know how these things work. Cooperate!”

I didn’t know how these things worked.  Not in 1994, I didn’t.  I thought Yiddishe Cup was being honored because we were good — some sort of arts prize.  I had played tribute dinners before, but had never understood the dynamics.  Shouse said he had raised thousands at a previous dinner in honor of his elderly girlfriend.

Two Yiddishe Cup musicians told me they couldn’t afford the price of the dinner, let alone bring friends, or crazier yet, “buy a table.”

I corralled three people, including my wife, to attend.  I hesitated to hock friends, particularly for a chicken dinner at a windowless Alpha Drive party center.  And my friends would have to listen to speeches about a fraternal organization, Workmen’s Circle, most had never heard of.

Shouse phoned Yiddishe Cup’s singer and said to him: “Stratton gave fifty-five dollars.  Greenman gave twenty-five dollars.  How about you?  And who are you bringing?”

Shouse nearly traumatized my singer, a sensitive artist.

One Yiddishe Cup musician didn’t bother to show up for the tribute.   Another musician rewound his Shouse phone message for me: “This dinner is in your fucking honor!  You’re sophisticated. You know the rules.  Do your part!”

Shouse died in 2003. He raised a lot of money for the arts in Cleveland.

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Coda:
This year the concert committee added several younger members. Odds are now probably less than 25 percent of a random-selected committee member dying in the next 10 years.  Also, the  Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas pictures are down. Rebbe Menachem Schneerson is up.  A Chabad-affiliate organization bought the Workmen’s Circle building and shares it with the Workmen’s Circle. Now playing in Cleveland: Enemies: A Love Story.

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1. GOT A CARD?  NO!

I was a guest at a wedding where the band’s sign was bigger than LeBron James. The banner was eight-foot, like something you might see on a telephone pole announcing “125 years of excellence in education.”

The wedding reception was elegant, but the band’s sign was totally Bedford Auto Mile.  The sign read “More Acts, Better Music, Higher Standards.”

Higher Standards?  The bandleader was Italian.  I knew him.  Roman standard bearers?  The bandleader said to me, “It’s better to be a guest than to work, huh?”

What?  I always prefer playing over schmoozing.

When Yiddishe Cup does weddings, I hand out business cards.  Nothing gaudy.  And I don’t shovel them out.   These cards are almost collectors’ items.  I’m not going to pass them out willy-nilly.

Everybody already knows Yiddishe Cup.  If you say “klezmer band” in Ohio, it’s us.  Now, if we’re in Buffalo, N.Y., for example, I might go heavier on cards.  But I don’t put out a tray.  That’s too dental office.

Granted, we feature Yiddishe Cup’s logo on our bass drum.  Our logo is cool, whimsical and tasteful, and it gets us some gigs.  (Ralph Solonitz designed the logo.)

At the “Higher Standards” wedding, I met a businessman who did music production as a sideline.  I asked for his card.  He didn’t have one.  And he had 100 employees, he said.

He had achieved placid-plus status: no card.

My goal is to be him.

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2. BALLISTIC / LOADING / CAVS

A Yiddishe Cup musician went ballistic when he saw a college football game, or so he thought, off in the distance.  He said, “I’m so through with this country’s obsessions with sports!”

Yiddishe Cup was loading-in at a student union by a college stadium.

The Yiddishe Cup musician had fouled.  Here’s why: (1.) The college kids were playing lacrosse, not football.  (2.) It was a Division III game.  The stadium was small, with no crowd to speak of.  (3.) The kids were getting some exercise; this was not a big money, faux-pro game.

Yiddishe Cup musicians, for the most part, are not up on today’s sports scene.  For instance, I just learned a basketball shot “from downtown” means a three-pointer.  And I’m wondering what “the post” is.  I watched several basketball games lately.

I have an agreement with my cousin George, a serious sports fan, to go to the Cavs victory parade. I want to be there.  Depends on my Depends though, because I’ll be very old.  Also, depends if it’s raining.  I’m fair weather.

Last Sunday Yiddishe Cup had a gig, a pre-Shavuot Torah dedication/celebration, which was almost postponed to accommodate LeBron James’ reading of the Book of Kells.  The Cavs were scheduled to play the Celtics then.  (Cleveland lost prior, on Thursday, so the playoff series ended, and everything worked out fine for the Torah dedication.)

About championships . . . My father, Toby, promised to take me to the World Series, but the Tribe never made it when I was growing up.  My dad, instead, took me to Ohio State homecoming games.

I took my kids to the 1992 OSU homecoming game.  The Ohio Stadium scoreboard lit up: This Sat. at the Wexner Center, Don Byron Salutes Mickey Katz.

What next, Bucks?  “Fight the Team Across the Field” in Yiddish?

Don Byron played OSU, I think, because Columbus resident Les Wexner, the billionaire owner of The Limited, paid Byron’s band to entertain Wexner’s elderly mother, who probably requested the Mickey Katz show because she didn’t want to fly to New York.  That’s the only logical explanation.  Don Byron never played any other Mickey Katz–tribute shows in Ohio.

Go Mickey.

Go Katz.

Go ‘Cats.

Go Cavs.

If you’re a Cubs fan, or whatever, be quiet about your sports-induced suffering.  You don’t know anything.

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