Real Music & Real Estate . . .

This just in . . . the lineup for the klezmer clarinetists’ all-star game:

Andy Statman ss

Good hands in the altissimo register.

Marcel Salomon 1b

More Dutch than Honus Wagner. Flying Dutchman II.

Margot Leverett 2b

Good with grace notes.

David Krakauer rf

Mr. Twinkle Toes. Moves lightly over the clarinet break.

Don Byron cf

Eccentric, yet loved. “That’s just Don being Don.”

Michael Winograd c

Young enough to crouch for three hours.

Ilene Stahl 3b

Best Jewish third-baseman since Al Rosen.

Glenn Dickson lf

Ripken-esque.  Can play the entire Nutcracker without water.

Kurt Bjorling dh

Can drive notes to any field: right, left, jazz, klez.

Moshe Berlin p

Has super-wiggly vibrato and Hoyt Wilhelm longevity.

Joel Rubin coach

Two-time NCAA klezmer coach of the year.

Hankus Netsky mgr

Best first name.  Better even than “Honus.”  It doesn’t matter  Hankus is  more of a sax/piano guy.

National anthem by Yiddishe Cup:

” . . . And the party planner’s red glare,
The seltzer bottles bursting in air.”
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2 of 2 posts for 7/8/09

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“Inductee class” is a phrase one hears around Cleveland.

Who’s going to be inducted into the next Rock Hall class, and who isn’t.

Mr. Stress is in the first inductee class of the Cleveland Blues Society’s Hall of Fame.  That’s a new place.  Doesn’t even have a building.  (Stress is a terrific harmonica player.)

The National Cleveland-style Polka Hall of Fame has a building.  It’s in the old Euclid, Ohio, city hall.  Frankie Yankovic was the man in Slovenian/Cleveland-style polka.

Yiddishe Cup has a polka pedigree – a small one. The DJ on the radio show “Polka Changed My Life Today” plays our “Tsena, Tsena” recording regularly.  “Tsena, Tsena” isn’t polka, but it is upbeat and major key.  Some polka aficionados clamor for “happy music,” and “Tsena, Tsena” fits the bill.

Generally, Jews aren’t big on “happy.”  For example, recently Yiddishe Cup performed “A Hard Day’s Night” in Yiddish (A Shvere Togedike Nakht) but sang the “I feel all right” line in English.  Why?  Because you can’t say “I feel all right” in Yiddish.  No such thing.  (Also, Gerry Tenney wrote the Yiddish lyrics that way.)

[Another acknowledgment: Plain Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg pointed out the “I feel all right” paradox to me.]

My point here . . . When  is Cleveland going to get a Challah Fame?

I have the beginnings of one in my basement. I have a plywood cut-out/statue of Dave Tarras, the great klez clarinetist.  Must be 10-feet tall.  Irwin Weinberger, Yiddishe Cup’s vocalist, made it.  Irwin is also an art teacher.  Irwin’s Tarras cut-out folds in half at the waist.

Tarras (left), a giant of the clarinet, and Klezmer Guy

We used the Tarras statue as a stage prop at our Chautauqua Institution gig.  That was one complicated deal; I brought a rechargeable drill to screw Tarras’ halves together.  And I reinforced his back with metal channel strips.

The first class of inductees at The Challah will be some dead old guys, like Tarras and Brandwein, plus for post-ceremony partying needs, some living old guys: Danny Rubenstein and Ray Musiker.

For personal reasons, the museum’s second cut-out/statue will be Willie Epstein (1919-1999), the klezmer trumpeter from Florida and New York.  In 1997 Willie came  to Cleveland for the local premiere of the Epstein Brothers documentary A Tickle in the Heart, and my band played prior to the movie.  Willie was impressed with Yiddishe Cup’s trombonist, Steve Ostrow.  Willie cornered me in the hall and said, “You mind if I call your trombone player later.  I’d like to take him on our tour of South Africa.”

That was class: asking me — the bandleader — if Willie could raid my band.  Most music contractors would have just raided, no questions asked.

Willie never called.

Did the Epsteins ever make it to South Africa?   I don’t know.   Doubt it.  Nothing on the Internet about it.
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Read a Cleveland Scene review of Yiddishe Cup’s recent 20th anniversary concert.  By Anastasia Pantsios.

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How hard is this to understand: “If the applicant is approved and makes a deposit— and then decides not to move into the apartment — the deposit will be forfeited.”

Nobody gets it.

“I changed my mind . . . My mom just found out she’s terminally ill
. . . I’m going back with my wife . . . I should have told you I’m an alcoholic and need to move into a sober house.”

Bidness is bidness.  I hang on to the deposit.

Once a “changer” stopped payment on her deposit, a bank check.  That worked.  I didn’t know you could stop a bank check.  Nice move.  She got me.
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Next posting:  Wed., July 1.

Read an article about Yiddishe Cup in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6/28/09.  By John Petkovic.

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The electric company used to be my favorite utility.  They rarely raised rates, and I knew how to get a live person quickly on their phone system.

Then the electric company jacked up their rates 10-fold in one day. I was paying $3.50/month for a vacant store.  Now it’s $35.

So I told the electric company to shut off the power at my vacant stores, and I told my building mangers to buy the biggest flashlights they could find.

Vacant stores . . . I’ve seen them in Phoenix and Boca Raton, Fla., too.

I used to lament I didn’t have all commercial stuff.  Commercial,  you just collect the rent, nothing to it.  Commercial tenants are not drunks, druggies or nuts.  Now I’m glad I have a mix of residential and commercial.

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When you have a dead body in the real estate biz, go in with the cops.  The tip-off is the smell in the hall.

One time a tenant died without any heirs, so the tenant’s estate lawyer practically begged me to take a few months’ rent.  It was free money.

I once put an ad on Craigslist captioned “50-year lease available. Die here.”  Craigslist spiked that one pronto.  My point: the building had three tenants who loved the building so much they had clocked more than 50 years each and were going to go out on gurneys.

Reality check: one-third of tenants move out in a year; one-third move out in 2 years;  about one-third stay 3-to-8 years; and a minuscule fraction stay longer than that.  Doesn’t matter what you do.

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I had a beer with Andy Statman, the acclaimed klezmer clarinetist, in Little Italy, Cleveland.  He looked more Italian than the locals.  Statman, an Orthodox Jew, wore a Borsalino hat.

I knew the restaurant owner, Robert.  He once took me to mobster Jack White’s house to see White’s wine cellar.  White was a little old man, and the last head of the Cleveland Mob.  Real name: James Licavoli.

Cleveland loved its mobsters. . . a couple cool names: Shondor Birns, Mushy Wexler. They’re history.

Statman said you can only play your hometown once a year.  He does one big show in New York per year.  (He plays a lot of little shows, like every Monday night at a New York shul.)

Yiddishe Cup’s big show is Cain Park, Sunday June 28.  Cain Park, that’s where all the great Cleveland tennis players used to hang out.  Some still do.  Next to the courts, there’s a WPA amphitheater that seats 2,400.

Yiddishe Cup will have a couple guests on the bill: Shawn Fink and Gerald Ross.

Even though Shawn is a baby (30-something), he knows a bisl (little) Yiddish.  Shawn’s father, Phil,  has done a Jewish radio show for more than 40 years.  Shawn sings a dead-on version of  “Joe and Paul,” a comedy tune about a Jewish radio station.

The second guest, Gerald Ross, is a well-known ukulele and Hawaiian lap steel guitar player from Ann Arbor, Mich.  He’ll, no doubt, wear a Hawaiian shirt.  In fact the whole band will wear Hawaiian shirts.  Why?  Because we’re going to a Yiddish luau. And according to the Cleveland Scene, “It doesn’t get more festive than Jews in Hawaiian shirts.”
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Hear Klezmer Guy interviewed on public radio today, 6/24, at noon.  Dee Perry’s  “Around Noon” on WCPN-FM 90.3.

Read in today’s Cleveland Scene about Yiddish Cup’s new CD, Klezmer Guy.  By Anastasia Pantsios.

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The only advice I ever gave Yiddishe Cup’s drummer, Don Friedman, was buy the roasted, milled flax seed with blueberries at Trader Joe’s.

I don’t tell him how to play drums.

Our keyboard player, Alan Douglass, tells our drummer how to play.  In fact Alan tells everybody how to play.  Good, somebody has to do it.

Except some guys don’t like being told how to play.

Me, I’m open to constructive criticism.

Danny Rubenstein, the legendary klezmer clarinetist, told me I play with “a lot of guts but little technique.”  I’m OK with that.  Beats the alternative.

I like wailing.  I like Kramtweiss and Brandwein — big wailers.  (Kramtweiss and Brandwein recorded in the 1920s.)  But the older I get, the more I prefer Tarras — Mr. Subtle, Mr. Refined.  Dave Tarras (1897-1989) was the Sinatra of klez.

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What’s the most important element at a wedding?

Maybe not the band.

After the party, guests often can’t recall if they saw a live band or a DJ.

How many pieces in the band? No idea.

Guests attend parties primarily to schmooze. They dance a bit, they drink a little, they eat a lot, and they talk — to friends, relatives.

Loud music . . . the bane of all parties. I was at a family bar mitzvah in Chicago where everybody went into the atrium to talk. The DJ was blasting it.

I have a case of earplugs, 50 of them. Got them in Orrville, Ohio, home of Smucker’s.

I didn’t like the earplugs I was getting at CVS; they’d pop out of my ears because the plugs were too big. The earplugs from Orrville, they’re jelly.

I use orange marmalade.

(The earplugs are actually tiny orange inserts.)

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Maybe one in 50 tenants is a derelict.

Try this . . . I’ve rented to a Cavani String Quartet violinist, a dancer in the Cleveland Ballet, and a prize-winning chef.  Plus tons of engineers, teachers, waiters and social workers.

I have a tenant who is always on the road with his band.  For a long time I didn’t know what band, because he was always on the road.

So I Googled him. He’s with Big Brother and the Holding Company.  Some of the Janis Joplin’s guys are still out there doing it.  My guy—my tenant —is young.  Maybe he props up the original guys.

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If possible, avoid dealing with companies with more than 50 employees.  For instance, if your bank wants to show you a new “product,” don’t go in.

What product?  Banks don’t give out toasters any more.  I got a ski cap twenty years ago.  Last product I got was a bunch of  red tape.

Don’t make any errors when filling out bank and government forms.  If you make an error, you’ll spend months correcting it.

Good news:  IRS literature is decent reading.  If you want to read some clear prose, read the 1040 instructions.  It’s business poetry.  Engaging stuff about depreciation: 200 percent declining balance and straight line . . . “The straight line method is the only applicable method for trees and vines bearing fruit or nuts.”  Expands your vista.  The world is a more than just boilers and refrigerators.

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I’ve sent out two versions of Yiddishe Cup on a single night.  Not often.  It’s hardly worth the logistical contortions: Yiddishe Cup does mitosis.  I name the groups the A Band and the B Band.

Probably should go with the red unit and blue unit, like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey does, so there are no bruised egos.  I’m fortunate, I  always wind up in the A band.

I tell my customers up front what the story is.  I say, “We’re  booked but if you really want us I might be able to pull it off.”   Then I try to steer them to another band, but if they keep insisting, I’ll do the B Band routine.

I didn’t try the A and  B band maneuver until I was 15 years into the biz and had a full stable of subs who knew the Yiddishe Cup Method.

Repeat:  Don’t play the A/B game without being very experienced and upfront.  If you’re a liar, you’ll encounter what the New York boys call a “screamer” gig.  That’s when the mom is screaming, “Where’s your bandleader?  I didn’t hire this band!”

When we do A/B gigs, “Stratton” is at both gigs.  The B Band is led by Alice Stratton, my wife, an expert dance leader.

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“I’m going to take legal action.” That’s a favorite line from the intelligent disgruntled tenant.  The favorite line from the average tenant is profanity.  The favorite line from a  23-year-old is “That’s really sketchy.”

Go ahead and sue me.

As my father used to say, “Let them call me pisher (a nobody, a little squirt).  Who cares.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, nobody sues.

My father once withheld payment from moonlighting cops who botched up a floor- sanding job.  That flabbergasted me — messing with cops.  It didn’t faze my father.  “Let them call me pisher.”

The cops really screwed up that floor.  It rippled like Lake Erie on a bad day. We had to go to carpet.

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You rarely find “Hava Nagila” on klezmer CDs.

Too hackneyed?

No, there’s no such thing as too hackneyed in klez.

“Hava Nagila” is too Israeli.  Klezmer is mostly Yiddish-based music from Eastern Europe.

At Klezkamp in 1987, the conference director pleaded with several old-timers not to play “Hava Nagila.”  But they insisted.  And they added “Mayim,” an Israeli dance, to salt the director’s matzo.  Yiddish is supposed to trump Hebrew at KlezKamp.

Yiddishe Cup plays more Israeli music than klezmer at parties.

Yiddishe Cup’s new record, Klezmer Guy, has a couple Israeli tunes.  The album is mostly live, which gives it an easy-breezy style.  Some of the band’s spoken intros are on the record.  I told the producer to get rid of the quips, but he objected.  Those intros are funny once.  Then what?

About half the tunes are creative and/or original.  That’s a decent quotient.  And the other half — the rip-offs — are only quasi-rip-offs.  We try to make the tunes new.  For example, we took a Romanian Gypsy tune, “Tsiganeshti,” and turned it into a klez/beat-box number.  [Watch “Tsiganeshti” video here.]

I own a lot of Klezmer Guy CDs. I paid for them.  (Harvey Pekar used to order 10,000 copies of each American Splendor comic book run.  Paid for them himself the first few years.  The man was running a warehouse.)

On Klezmer Guy, the song “Hallelujah”  might be the signature tune of the CD. It’s a tune a lot of people know.  Barbara Shlensky, the late cojones-busting party planner, insisted we play “Hallelujah” whenever she swung open the party room doors to the guests. [Watch “Hallelujah” video here.]

Barbara didn’t like us. That was her job — dislike the band.  Make sure the musicians stayed in line.

What Barbara didn’t get: Klez musicians are from the same social class as the guests.  Klez musicians will see the party guests the next day at the school play or swimming pool.  Klez musicians will not get drunk and act like Keith Richards.  Klez musicians will eat a bowl of cereal after each gig and go directly to bed.
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Hear an interview, 6/16/09, with Klezmer Guy on Israel National Radio.  Heads-up: The interview is almost as long as this blog.

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Eviction notices, I buy them by the carton. I go to court every two months.  The deadbeats rarely show up, and if they do, there’s nothing to talk about.  They didn’t pay the rent; they have to move.

I have a friend who is a nice-guy landlord.  He knows all his tenants and sometimes they screw him out of four months’ rent because he’s so nice.  I know another landlord who takes some of his tenants out to dinner.

At Christmastime I used to buy chocolates for tenants.  Spent over $1,000.  I got thank-you notes from 1 percent of the tenants.  My dad thought I was nuts.

I used to keep a folder called “goodwill,” in case the media phoned and said, “Can I speak to the slumlord?”   I’d whip that folder right out.   Haven’t needed it yet.

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There are two kinds of musical chairs: the party game, and when tenants move from suite to suite within the same apartment building.

Typically, the tenant wants to step up from an efficiency (studio) to a one bedroom.  If you don’t let her, she’ll move out of the building entirely.  But if you do let her move across the hall, you have to decorate two apartments — the one she’s moving out of, and the one she’s moving into.

Do it.  Better than losing her.

And make sure the security deposit is brought up to the new rent level.  You never know, she could go ape-wire with new wall colors.  You can paint with neutral colors has many interpretations.  Tenants will not willingly use antique white.

I had one tenant who moved across the hall and left behind a pile of pizza boxes with maggots all over his pepperoni.  Luckily his new unit was close enough we had leverage to get him to clean up the old place.

Musical chairs — the bar mitzvah variety— is fun.  If you’re doing a job — any job, no matter how lowly, do it . . . blah, blah.  Yes, we’re glorified baby sitters, but we’re good glorified baby sitters.

For musical chairs we play everything from “Wipe Out” to “Moshe Emet” (Moses Told the Truth).  We try to rig the game so the bat mitzvah girl can win. Never stop the music when the kid is rounding a corner.

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Yiddishe Cup’s violinist, Steve Ostrow, is in the union.  That’s because he’s in the Akron Symphony as well.

Cleveland Local 4 was big about the time hotel dance bands were big.

My other favorite union member is Karl Zahtilla, who has subbed a few times with Yiddishe Cup. He hung around with Chet Baker in L.A.  Karl plays jazz clarinet better than anybody else in town.

He used to play all the shows at the Hanna Theatre, the Front Row, Playhouse Square, and a lot of private parties.  He knows the Jewish stuff.  He played Orthodox gigs for years.

Karl grew up when clarinet was still a dominant instrument in popular culture.  Nice timing.

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Natural gas, car gas and human gas.  It’s all organic.

Natural gas is what kills landlords.  The bills.  My buildings are pre-World War II — built when gas was cheap— so the decrepit single-pipe steam-heat systems pump all the heat to the top floor first.  Stupid.

It would cost a zillion dollars to change.  Not a great ROI.  Return on Investment.

Gas bills . . . how badly are you getting burned? You have to adjust for HDDs.  Heating Degree Days.

Gasoline . . .  That’s easier to calculate.  When the price at the pump goes up a dime, that’s about 10 cents.  Gasoline costs are about the same as two decades ago, based on constant dollars, and natural gas has more than doubled.

Human gas.  That’s an ocasional bandstand issue. “Who did that?”  We’re in junior high again.  Cheap time-traveling.

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On our thirtieth wedding anniversary trip, my wife, Alice, and I were in a small town, Creel, Chihuahua, northern Mexico, along  with a lot of federal cops.  Some of them were crowded around a store window that had bullet holes in it.  This was déjà vu for me; I used to rent to the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Center, which always had its share of bullet holes, plus red food coloring, red Jell-O and toy baby doll arms piled in the doorway.  I never billed the government for cleaning up.

The Mexican federales wore all black.  Some had masks, so the drug cartel boys wouldn’t recognize them.  Other than that, Creel was like Put-in-Bay, Ohio: a resort town with tchatche shops everywhere. And there was a coffeehouse, featuring an open mic night, in the Best Western.

I often pack a harmonica when I camp— and  we had just spent a few days in the Copper Canyon mountains — so I did a blues harmonica ditty at the open mic.  An American, Diddle, backed me on guitar.

After this cross-cultural interlude, my wife and I walked past the store with the bullet holes again.  We heard a “rat-a-tat-tat.”  No, a “pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.”  We ducked and ran like Groucho Marxes. We wound up on the floor in a nearby hotel lobby, where a clerk jabbered about how she had never been so frightened in her whole life.

Me too.

And I had just paid thousands of dollars to get shot at.  At least in Israel it would have made some sense — solidarity with my people and all that.

How was your trip, Bert?

Nice except for getting shot at.

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I’ve been in the rag trade for 17 years, selling Yiddishe Cup T-shirts.  Black tees with the band’s logo superimposed in white.

East Coasters buy the tees just for the look.  Yiddishe Cup, the band?  Feh.  The T-shirt?  Cool.

The tee is a limited edition.  Probably about 750 of them in the world.  I don’t advertise.

You have to be invited to wear one.

Sometimes I get a photo from, say, Mount St. Helens, Wash., of a man in a Yiddishe Cup T-shirt.  I played his wedding.  Or a photo of a Missoula, Mont., man wearing a Yiddishe Cup T-shirt on a cattle ranch.

I give the T-shirts to newlyweds and bar mitzvah moms.  Or the bat mitzvah kid, herself, if I think she’s woman enough to handle the impending peer harassment.

I saw a young man on Coventry Road, Cleveland Heights, in a Yiddishe Cup T-shirt, with black jeans. Was this hip kid a Cuphead?  I asked him where he got the tee.  He said at a thrift store for $1.  He had never heard of the band.

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The Red Roof Inn is the band’s official hotel.

The worst one is in Southfield, Mich.  The smoke detector was ripped out and a guy was already in the room.  A greeter?  Joe Louis?

The wake-up call the next morning never happened.  The cops raided a nearby suite, so we really didn’t need the wake-up.

The band’s favorite restaurant is Bob Evans. The man himself, Bob Evans, died a couple years ago. I had my picture taken with him in Rio Grande, Ohio.  (Also, had my pic taken with actor/singer Theodore Bikel at KlezKanada. That didn’t kill Bikel.)  At Bob Evans, order the potato-crusted flounder, coleslaw and biscuits.

The Waffle House — that was a mechaya (pleasure) for a while-a.   I told Steve Ostrow, Yiddishe Cup’s vegetarian trombone player, the brown strips in his omelet were mushrooms. (They looked like mushrooms.)  Turned out to be steak.  We haven’t been back to Awful House. I miss the home fries with onions.

Here’s another band favorite: The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.  A woman—all decked out in Northwestern purple — said she would put us on the school’s Web site (Rabbinic Management Program page) if we did an original song while wearing purple shirts.  She saw us at a gig in Florida and is married to the dean emeritus of Kellogg, so maybe . . .

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