Practical MIDI

I can go back forty years and recall when our four-piece band first recruited a keyboard player. Unlike the rest of us, he was trained and schooled in the fine points of music. That is, he could read it and play it better than any of the rest of us could have ever imagined was possible.

He brought with him to our band that final touch of professionalism we sorely needed. When we needed to learn a new song with multiple-part harmonies, he was the one who told each of us which part to sing. And soon it all fell together like a puzzle. Before we knew it, we’d graduated from “Gloria” and “Hanky Panky” to The Cryan’ Shames’ “Up On The Roof” and “First Train To California.” We won the battle of the bands that year under his direction.

That was the up side of hiring him. The down side (or so it seemed at the time) was that he also knew a carload of polkas and waltzes. Now, to a sixteen-year-old bent on rock and roll, I thought this was a total waste of my time to learn “Roll Out The Barrel” and “Blue Skirt Waltz.” It was my honest opinion at the time that there was only one polka in the world and that every oom-pa band just changed some of the words and called it “Polka Number Two” or whatever they called it. I hated it and dreaded those wedding jobs where I had to stand up in front of real people and make a total ass of myself playing polkas. I figured that somewhere down the road I’d hit the big time playing rock and roll and that all this nonsense was just a waste of my time.

Skip ahead ten years. My rock band had been broken up for five years and I was itching to play again, but the only opening was in (of all things) a polka band. Okay, so I’m a musical whore and took the job strictly for the money. And I got the job because my original keyboard player recommended me to the polka band leader. It was the longest three years of my entire musical life. I was only thankful that it was an out-of-town band and we only played where no one knew me. When my polka career petered out, I started another rock band and hit the road (or at least the streets of my hometown) and played a hundred plus jobs a year doing what I liked best—rock and roll.

We became good enough that eventually when some of our steady followers started to get married and began looking for bands to play at their weddings, they thought of us. Eventually, someone insisted that we’d be the perfect wedding band and hired us. We arrived at the hall, set up our equipment, went over our songlist and waited for the reception dinner to end and for our cue to play. As fate would have it, however, the bride’s father approached us and asked—no, insisted—that we play a waltz for him and his daughter. He also wanted a polka or two so his aged mother could also enjoy herself as well. When he walked away, we all looked at each other as if to say, “Oh oh, now what do we do?”

I quickly grabbed my guitar, pulled the bass player and keyboard player aside and explained which three chords to play and in what order. “Just follow my lead,” I said. In an instant, those three years in the polka band came pouring back into my memory and as if on auto-pilot, I soon found myself strumming the “Tick-Tock Polka” and instructing dancers to “switch partners.” Needless to say, we were a big hit with everyone there, including the bride’s father, who gave the band a fifty-dollar tip. We also picked up a few other wedding jobs shortly after. We soon found out that wedding jobs paid about five times what a bar job would pay and we all swallowed out pride and became musical whores.

Here I am, some thirty years later, still playing in my duo as well as my solo act. I still play the occasional wedding and while I’m letting my MIDI files do most of the oom-pa work these days, I can’t help but think back to those not-so-thrilling days of yesteryear when I wanted to wear a brown paper bag over my head and shrink away from embarrassment. I guess those years weren’t wasted after all.

©2007 Bill Bernico for CYBERMIDI.com Downwind Publications