Real Music & Real Estate . . .

I employed a custodian whose family was “a bunch of  burglars,” according to the investigating cop.  Why the cop had waited so long to tell me, I don’t know.

All along, the custodian’s kids had pilfered tools and lawnmowers, but I couldn’t prove anything and, besides, I liked the custodian.  He was a hard-working “hillbilly”— his term by the way.

I was his “little bitty buddy” — and his kids were crooks.  They took the master key and broke into an apartment across the hall.

Then they committed a botched burglary down the street and confessed to that, plus my break-in.

My custodian and his family had to move out.  “See you in the funny papers.”  That was my custodian’s sign-off.  Six years with me, then bye because his kids were crooks.

“I’m getting better by the numbers.”  He said that too.  I never did figure that one out.

Twenty-four years later: A different custodian, Speedy: the hardest working man on earth.  Speedy climbed many a ledge and ladder for me — and upped my workers’ comp.  He fell off a lot of ladders.  And he had some crook relatives and friends.

One relative, his so-called niece, was a prostitute.  The niece took the master key and entered a neighboring apartment and stole the tenant’s checkbook, ID and ring.

At first I thought the burglar was Speedy’s “nephew” Dave, a felon.   But then my plumber  reported seeing a new woman around, Amber, sleeping on Speedy’s couch.  “A black guy is pimping her,” the plumber said.

I told the police about Amber.  The detective said, “Amber Carney.*  She’s a known druggie and thief.” [*Not her real last name but close enough.]

Amber, the “niece,” got caught at the bank, forging checks.

The victim — my tenant—was more upset about the stolen ring than the stolen money.  She said it was an Irish ring.  It was fenced.  It was gone.  She asked if I was Irish.

“No, I’m Jewish,” I said.

“Funny, I’m Palestinian,” she said.

No problem— for her.   She was, as my father used to say, one cool customer. Most females would have been out of that burglarized apartment in a day.  I changed the lock and she stayed another year, pressing charges against the whore.

Amber, the prostitute, went to jail.  Speedy moved out and took a job at an adult bookstore.  I know because I received updates about Speedy’s employment through his workers’ comp lawyer, who kept sending me claims — for years— about Speedy falling off ladders back in the day.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/22/09.  Please see post below too.

Yiddishe Cup concert: noon Sun., July 26, Little Mountain Heritage Festival, Painesville, Ohio.

At the cushy, soft-seat auditorium gigs, Yiddishe Cup gets “green room” meals and people ask for our autographs.  At country club weddings, we enter through kitchens and are often treated like crumb bums.

Country club managers have thankless jobs.  They are either dishing out vitriol to the help, or receiving it from the members.

If you’re paying the county club manager, you’re golden.  If you’re not paying the manager, you’re not.  Everybody knows his or her place in a country club.  Except the musicians.

The musicians, in the hierarchy of wedding gigs, think they’re machers — a notch above the kitchen help, florist, photographer, video guy, and even the club members.

Nobody else sees it that way.

My drummer—number two—said he was a “professional” whenever club managers and party planners pestered him.  He had a PhD in music. He could take that PhD  “down the hall, turn left, make a right” . . . and use the storage room there.
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2 of 2 posts for 7/22/09

I’ve forgotten my clarinet. My third drummer — long gone — once showed up without sticks.  He cut up some curtain dowel rods to use.

Gigging is all about not forgetting stuff.  A band is like a platoon going into battle: mics, cables, axes, tune books, jackets, instrument stands, capos, neck straps, amps, monitors, lights.

When I forgot my clarinet, I played a lot of harmonica and clapped.  Thirty minutes into that gig, the rabbi asked me, “Where’s your flute?” (He meant “clarinet.”  Some old-time Orthodox rabbis don’t know their musical instruments.)  I said I was saving my flute.

My singer’s wife drove my axe to the gig — about 30 miles one way.  I paid her.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/15/09.  Please see post below too.

Nobody thinks Yiddishe Cup plays American music.

We do.

We should change our name to America’s Cup because we play James Brown, Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Motown, swing and Latin.  If we didn’t play that stuff, we wouldn’t work. [Watch video clip.]

The working musician’s world is very schizo.  In one set we might play “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Cecilia,” “In the Mood,”, a neo-Hasidic pop medley, an Israeli medley and klezmer.

Klezmer, historically, is Eastern European Jewish instrumental wedding music.  But “klezmer” now means “Jewish music.”   So “klezmer band” means “Jewish band.”  “Klezmer” means you have a clarinet and/or violin as a lead instrument.  It means somebody in your group sings some Yiddish too.

Klezmer — the actual word — means musician in Yiddish.

Stop.  This is not an Elderhostel lecture.  For more on klezmer, check out Henry Sapoznik’s Klezmer! and Yale Strom’s The Book of Klezmer.

There are five or six books on klezmer, total.  We’re not talking about Shakespeare.  You can become a faux klezmer authority in about 40 hours.

Yiddishe Cup sometimes does a whole gig without playing one klez tune. We did a rocker’s fortieth birthday and didn’t play any Jewish music.  The drummer from The James Gang was there, so we played “Funk 49” for the drummer and the birthday boy.  Nothing but rock, except the birthday boy wanted a couple Armenian songs for his mother.  That’s why he had hired us.

What does Yiddishe Cup have to do with Armenian? Maybe the clarinet sound.

At weddings we’ve also played Norwegian fiddle tunes, the Japanese ditty “Red Dragonfly,” and Guarani Indian music from Paraguay.

Country too.  A bartender once gave me a request — in writing — for “My Dixie Wrecked.”

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, Alan Douglass, will frequently complain: “Why don’t we play something we know!”

Because that wouldn’t be fun.  Nobody notices if we screw up at a party, so why not mix it up?  Now at a concert — where people are seated, staring at you, and paying — we try to play tunes we know.

At one concert I screwed up the beginning of  “Second Avenue Square Dance” because a newspaper critic was there.  I was nervous. My fingers went all over the place.  Afterwards I joked to Steve Ostrow, our violinist: “‘Second Avenue’ was the highlight of the gig, huh?”

Steve said, “It was the highlight for me because you got out of it.”

That was the ultimate musician’s compliment.
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2 of 2 posts for 7/15/09.

Real estate has cycles, but nobody knows what, or when, they are.  Real estate is like life.  It’s not orderly like music or tennis.  One day, two-bedroom apartments are moving; the next, nobody will touch them.  Some years tons of tenants move out in January.  Some years everybody stays in January.  There is no pattern to anything in real estate.  The only certainty is 10 percent of your tenants will give you 90 percent of your problems.

I try to avoid certain tenants.  If I say hi to some of these people, it’s going to cost me at least $400.  Could be a new stove.  Could be a bathroom tile job.

I had a tenant whose wristwatch played Beethoven. That was interesting. I talked to him and it didn’t cost me a cent.  He had moved to Cleveland from Buffalo to teach guitar.  And his family ran a musical gifts company, he told me.

A tenant lent me a beat-up clarinet and we jammed.  Horrible reed.

I had a tenant who included a poem with her rent about wildlife outside her apartment window.  “The hawk waits/a dignified duration./Flies.”  Not bad.  I told her to take $25 off her rent — once.

Those were the good tenants.

. . . I had a tenant who regularly won the Miss Cleveland contest for transvestites.  His apartment was jammed with beauty pageant trophies — and young guys who crawled in his ground-floor bedroom window.  The cops — and I — did not like that.  Too many visitors is a big negative.  William, my drug-dealing tenant, also attracted a lot of traffic.  Bad for the hallway carpet.  The cops told me to stand to the side of the door —not directly in front — when I gave him his eviction notice. The cops were right next to me.  William said he wasn’t dealing drugs.  But he did move; he didn’t like the cops bugging him.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/8/09.  Please see the post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert 7 p.m. Sun., July 12, Hudson, Ohio.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.