beautiful, funny, sad & true

In the early 1980’s, the longest-lasting and most revolutionary new product was not the Rubik’s Cube, the tiny stuffed Garfield doll, or even MTV—it was the personal computer that would go on to change the world.  A closely related product that was also created around that time was the video arcade game. Home video games, like the Atari 2600, or even the quaintly archaic Pong, had existed for a number of years by then, but video arcades were a new and exciting phenomenon. Pinball was for old people; video games were for us kids.

The grocery stores near our house both had a couple games each, but the nearest serious video game parlors were Pizza World (which at the time of this entry is the current location of El Portón, an excellent Mexican restaurant) and Nob Hill Lanes, a bowling alley with a smaller but more unusual lineup of games, including a 2-player Ms. Pac-Man console, which was—and still remains—my all-time favorite video game.

I loved Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man so much that I bought the ‘strategy guide’ books about how to beat the games.  I even carried my little red portable cassette recorder to the arcade with me and recorded myself playing the games.  I took the tapes home and listened to them in headphones, imagining how the game play went, and trying to re-enact it in my little mind’s eye.

One day, we got a new refrigerator, and it came in a gigantic cardboard box. When it stood on end, it was the size of a video game, which gave me and my brother a brilliant idea: LET’S MAKE OUR OWN PAC-MAN MACHINE.  That’ll be great, we thought. Now, all our friends in the neighborhood won’t have to go to Pizza World or Nob Hill Lanes to play, they can just come to our front yard. And we’d be rolling in money!  Yakima wasn’t anything like Silicon Valley (either then OR now, quite frankly) and besides, I was ten and my brother was six, but at least we had imagination and determination.

The contraption we made is one of the things I really wish we taken at least one picture of.  It was absolutely ingenious, but surprisingly difficult to describe.  Follow me closely.  Here’s the type of original Pac-Man machine we were trying to emulate.

We stood the refrigerator box vertically, and then drew a Pac-Man maze screen in magic marker on the top half of the box. I think my brother drew the side panels, and we collaborated on the name plate that said, “PAC-MAN” on it. Directly underneath the ‘screen’, we placed a smaller cardboard apple box, which was for the joystick and coin slot. We cut a slot for people to insert quarters, and we sculpted a heap of clay into a joystick and plopped a golf ball on top of it.  Voila!

So now it looked good, but it didn’t do anything yet; we had to figure out how to bring it to life. We knew that one of us would have to be inside the box, but we struggled to come up with a workable solution. I think it was Mom who had the idea of using a box knife to cut a rectangular ‘track’ hole along a section of the maze we had drawn, and then we could stick a magic marker through the hole and tape a cardboard Pac-Man to the end of it to move him through the maze.  So that’s what we did.  The Pac-Man kept falling off the end of the pen, though, so it took a while to figure out how much electrical tape to stick him on with.  For the machine’s sound, I had all those cassettes I’d been making for weeks, so I put some batteries in the cassette player and brought it in the box with me.

We were ready to go.  We ran up and down the street, yelling, “Pac-Man!  Play Pac-Man!”  We cajoled everyone to give it a try, and somehow they all went along with it.  When someone put in a quarter, I would press the Play button on my tape recorder and the introductory song would play, followed by the sound of game play.  The person would grab the golf ball joystick and move it around as best they could, and I would move the marker with the Pac-Man on the end of it through the maze route, randomly.  Some people actually played this thing multiple times, but most realized right away that they weren’t actually able to control the Pac-Man at all, and that they’d spent the same amount as if they’d played the real game.  I think the box lasted only a few days, until the novelty wore off, both for us and for our friends.  But, like I said, I would dearly love to see a picture of that bizarre homemade contraption.

Since we’re on the subject of Pac-Man, once when my brother and I were at an arcade playing the game, a slightly younger kid we didn’t know (or maybe we did; I don’t quite remember) came up and said, very quickly and dramatically, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was this maze?  And there was all your favorite food and you just couldn’t resist?  And then you CHASE it?  And then when you get there, you EAT it?  That’d be awesome.“  My brother and I stifled our laughter and kinda said, “Sure, yeah. . .awesome—” and turned back to our game.

Portland has a ‘vintage’ arcade down in Old Town, and every once in a while, I like nothing better than to plunk a couple of quarters down and spend an hour or so in an attempt to get the new high score on Ms. Pac-Man, and occasionally I even get it.  You’ll know if I do, by the way, since I like to use the pseudonym Mr. T, so if you see ‘MRT’ on the high score list, that might very well be me.  Be all that as it may, I was very glad when that arcade opened, because that meant that all those skills I’d honed as a kid weren’t going to lie dormant anymore.  I would hate to think I wasted all that time on frivolous endeavors.  I can rest assured, though, because there’s still something to be said for hand-eye coordination, and running through a maze with your favorite food that you just can’t resist.

There’s also something to be said for the old video games from the ‘golden age’ of the early to mid-1980’s.  Despite their simplicity, they were captivating in a way that more modern games absolutely are not.  If you  haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing them, I urge you to arm yourself with a handful of quarters (most of these games, if they’re still around, still only cost a quarter to play, amazingly) and give some of them a try.  I know you’ll be glad you did.

I don’t like to jam.  There, I said it.

Musicians are supposed to enjoy jamming, it seems, but I usually prefer to work on songs with structure and create ‘perfect’ parts for them.  I do love to improvise, however, and I always jump at the opportunity to do so, especially with other musicians who can also improvise well.  I don’t know how to explain the difference between a Jam and an Improvisation, but a jam always seems so much more lame somehow.  It also implies that an actual song will come from it, as opposed to an improvisation, which exists as its own separate entity and then disappears into the ether.

The perfect opportunity came when a guitarist friend of mine used to host a weekly Not-Jam at his place.  It was all a group of professionals from various bands, and whoever wasn’t gigging that night had an open-ended invitation to come down and play.  There were two drum sets, a bunch of guitars, amps, keyboards, saxophones, percussion instruments, a full PA system, and everything.  The idea was to bring your instrument and your drink (or whatever) of choice, and everyone would grab whatever they felt like playing, and we’d all see what happened.  It was very Zen, and I miss those nights.  I’ve considered starting my own improvisational group of acoustic instruments.  I’ll play cello or accordion, and invite other string players and brass players, and anyone else who plays an acoustic instrument.

About five years ago, I was really trying hard to make a living at recording, despite the fact that I just getting started, and wasn’t quite up to that task yet, but that’s neither here nor there.  I try to carefully pick and choose the people I work with, since you end up spending a good deal of time with people when you’re in the studio with them, and I have to really like them and their music in order to want to spend that much time with it.  I would hate to slog through day after day with a black metal band, for example.  Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with black metal—you have to be an amazing musician to play it—it’s just not my thing, and I’d prefer to focus on My Thing.

So anyway, five years ago.  A songwriter friend hooked me up with a friend of his who I’ll call G, not because he’s a gangsta, but because that’s his first initial.  I didn’t find his songs particularly compelling, but I decided to work with him as a favor to my friend.  Plus, I needed the money.  G was (and still is) a guy of a certain age, whose songs were more classic blues-rock than I gravitate towards.  He also has a sort of ‘Earth Mother’ folky side to him that doesn’t quite jive with me, either, but he seemed to like what I did to his songs in pre-production, so we decided to work together a bit.

I told him that my usual way of working was (and still is) to record him doing his thing, and then I usually play most or all of the other instruments around what he had done.  I told him that I play drums and bass and all kinds of other things, and he wanted to hear me do that so he could assess my skills.  Fair enough.  He also had a weekly jam session with his friends, and he invited me to join them at his friend’s beautiful house near Mount Tabor.  They had all the instruments already, so I wouldn’t need to bring anything if I didn’t want to.  It was an offer too good to refuse, so I took him up on it.  I also brought my accordion and five-string Tobias bass, just in case.  I put them in the trunk of my forty-shades-of-purple BMW 2002 and drove over there.

It was quite different from the improvised music night that I’d been attending at my friend’s place, in that A) these guys were amateurs rather than professionals, and B) I suspect that they used their jam session nights as excuses to escape from their families and regular lives, rather than to express themselves musically.  I could be wrong, but that’s the impression I strongly got.   It was also different in that everybody else sat around and got high before we started playing.  I don’t smoke, myself, and I’ve found that when some people are blissed out, they occasionally overestimate their playing abilities.  That started out as one of those nights.

There were five musicians in the band, on guitar, bass, drums, piano, and organ, so whenever there was an instrument that wasn’t being played, I’d jump on it.  Usually that meant piano, but at G’s request, I played the drums a little bit, too, and played the bass a little bit.  Each song would start as a cacophony and then sort of find its way into a key.  We eventually hit our stride, played extremely well, and actually managed to create some beautifully dynamic pieces of improvised music.  After four or five songs, we all felt compelled to slap high-fives and have a group hug, which was interesting and a bit funny.

At that point, we’d been playing for a couple of hours, so we put our instruments down and walked into the kitchen to eat some food and refill our glasses.  We talked about how great playing together felt, and how amazing it was when songs spontaneously come together, almost as a form of emergence.  Suddenly, the pianist got very quiet and told us that he had a confession to make.  He had recently (maybe the week before) been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and he was gradually losing the use of his hands.  As a jazz pianist, this was particularly devastating, as I’m sure you can imagine.  This gave the evening an entirely new focus and gravitas, and Pianist told us how he would hear something in his head and attempt to play it, but his fingers were simply unable to comply.  He made a request that during our next song we go ‘all out’, in order that he could test the limits of his playing and manual dexterity.

I played my bass, and each of the other guys assumed their various roles, with the bassist switching between tambourine and percussion.  The pianist started the song as an atonal jazz ballad, and we all followed suit.  After a few minutes of atonality, my mind started to wander.  The good thing about playing bass is that you can really use it to lead and set the tone for the entire rest of the band, forcing them all to change structure if need be.  They kinda have to follow you if you’re going a certain direction.  I gradually morphed it in a very tonal, almost classical direction, and that, combined with the jazz piano, became really beautiful.  It was as if we all were creating a simultaneous homage to Pianist by weaving a colorful musical tapestry for him.  The song climaxed and wound down with a simple scale in B major, which gave everything a depth, and a certain positive overtone.  It was transcendent.

By then, it was ten o’clock, so we packed up all of the instruments and went our separate ways.  We seemed to be walking on eggshells.  What do you say when someone drops a bombshell like that?  ‘I’m sorry’ seems insulting, or anti-climactic, or insufficient at the very least.  Plus, it was the first (and last) time I ever saw any of those guys, so I was really at a loss.  I’m sure I stammered something tactful like, “Um, nice to meet you guys.  Good luck with the Parkinson’s—?”

As I was backing my ancient BMW out of the driveway, it slipped out of reverse gear, like it did occasionally.  It made a huge, metallic CLUNK sound which stopped the car in the middle of the street.  It sounded and felt as if I’d backed into something in the road, so I got out and looked behind me.  I saw nothing, so I got back in and drove home, albeit a bit nervously.  That was one of the most fun and also one of the strangest nights of music that I’ve ever experienced.

I haven’t done any improvisational nights lately, but I still think of that one.   I hope that Pianist is okay, and still playing.  I just looked up G, and he’s still out there playing.  And his music still doesn’t really do much for me.  He decided to record his album at his house, and spend the money to buy microphones and all that for himself.  I certainly can’t fault him for that, since that’s how I got started, but I do think that he’s the kind of person who could benefit from some editing and some outside influences.

And now I need to grab the cello, pack up the car and head over to tonight’s gig, but I’m glad to have been able to finally tell this story.  I really do hope that Pianist is okay, and that his Parkinson’s is under control.  I also want the best for G, and I hope that his career is going well.  I’ll keep tabs on him from a distance.  Who knows; maybe he’s doing the same for me.