Dave

My mother dearly wanted me to become a competent enough keyboardist to play duets, I on the piano, she on the Hammond organ. By the time I was ten years old I had met and vanquished in glorious musical conflict seven little-old-lady piano teachers. They would come, some for weeks, some for months, brandishing their despicable books of scales and finger exercises which I would passively resist practicing until they gave up on me. I liked playing the piano; I just hated practicing pieces that didn’t sound like music to me.

My mother met Dave in a cocktail lounge and restaurant near our home and was impressed with his musical expertise at the piano. I don’t know how many cocktails she had imbibed or how hard pressed he was for money, but somehow she talked him into coming to our house and giving her electric organ lessons and me piano lessons. He told her in advance, “I don’t give lessons to children” but my mother insisted he give it a try.

Dave was built like a six-foot tall bear with a mole-like face. His pointy nose was centered between a high receding hairline of gray and floppy jowls. He had tiny, squinty eyes that he occasionally magnified with thick, black-rimmed glasses. He smelled musty and he had a deep, growly voice. But what totally undid me were his huge hands. They were old so the veins and tendons and knuckles were prominent but on his right hand he had the same ring as the vampire on my favorite television show of the time, Dark Shadows. Only someone who had made deals with the undead would have a ring like that and I was terrified. He told me to “play something” so he could get a feel for my abilities and I nervously started to pick out the first thing that came to mind until I made a mistake and he said in deep, sepulchral tones “No, that’s not right.” Sad to say, I did not take correction well so I burst into tears.

Dave leapt up as if my tears were made of acid, all the color drained from his already pasty complexion, and his limbs began to tremble. He snatched up the briefcase he had brought and fled down the hallway where my mother intercepted him at the door. I could hear her trying to placate the terrified man. I could hear him insisting that he was incapable of teaching little girls in pony-tails who cried when corrected. I did not hear how my mother convinced him to return another day but I can only suspect that generous sums of money were negotiated. Dave must have been hard-pressed for cash to pull himself together and face his greatest fear: the manipulative, passive-aggressive, spoiled little girl.

Music lessons with Dave – take two. This time he had me sit on the bar stool about two feet away as he sat at the piano. He asked me what kind of music I liked. I mumbled the sort of thing a ten-year-old would. So he played some jazz. Did I like that? “S’okay.” He played some classical, some rock, some ragtime, and then he did several of his lounge tunes. When he played his “standards” he would hum in this deep growly way to himself as he played. I could see what had impressed my mother: when Dave played the music was alive. He asked me, “What’s a song that you like to listen to?” I told him and the next week Dave came with an extremely simplified arrangement of the song I had mentioned. No finger exercises, no scales, just, “You know this song. Let’s figure out how you can play it.”

Dave came to my house every Thursday for the next eight years. I got used to his rings, and his smell, and his hot breath on the top of my head as he’d reach around to show me some intricate fingering or rhythmic pattern. I never got used to the fact that he’d do his growl/hum while I played. When I asked him about it he was unaware that he was even doing it. But Dave succeeded where the other music teachers had failed because he let me learn what I was interested in learning. He wanted me to love music, and to play the music I loved, and he empowered me to have a musical opinion and the technique to express it.

When I was twelve, Dave started introducing me to new genres of music. He’d come with a cassette tape of music he had compiled from his “collection” and have me listen to new musical artists in every musical style that existed. If I liked something, that sheet music would show up with the next lesson. I put in half an hour of practice before leaving for school in the morning and usually a half-hour of practice before or after dinner. As the years went by Dave introduced finger exercises only as they were needed for me to master the piece on which I was working. As I tackled new pieces that required understanding music theory, Dave would provide me with the necessary reading and charts.

By the time I was fourteen, Mom and I could play our organ-piano duets and she stopped taking lessons with Dave. It was then that he said I had to make a choice. “Do you want to be a piano player or a pianist? Do you want to play for your own enjoyment or do you want to play for performance? I can guide you either way but your choice will affect how much you practice and what kind of training I put you through.” I did not see a future for myself in “serious music” but I did enjoy the instrument and wanted to keep playing.

Every Thursday for the next four years Dave would unpack his briefcase with excitement, “Look what I’ve got for you this week, my musical child!” He would pull out rare recordings, antique folios, clippings about musicians and performances. I would have my own collection of show and tell for him. “Did you hear this on the radio? How do they get that sound? Wait, I’ve got their latest album, listen to track 8, and tell me is that in 5/8 time?” Whenever I asked Dave about his work or his career as a musician, he would refuse to discuss much with me, almost as if he was embarrassed. Every now and then while we were talking about performers and pieces he would let slip that he had played with someone famous. When pressed for more information he’d mumble about “poor choices, tough breaks” and go back to talking about the music on the music stand.

By the time I was eighteen I could jerkily finger my way through Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” It was the most complicated piece I ever got through on the piano and the height of my piano prowess. As the years would go by, lack of practice would diminish my skills but not my ability to appreciate music, all kinds of music, from all parts of the world. Music has added a richness and depth to every aspect of my life that I would have lacked if Dave had not persevered with me and allowed our lessons to be “delight-driven.”

I went away to college but Dave and I kept up the musical exchange through letters every season. He would always include a new cassette of something that “blew his mind” when he heard it, and I would tell him about what concerts I had gone to or what musical tastes my roommates had. When I took a class in Beethoven and was struggling for a topic on which to write my research paper, I wrote to Dave for advice. He sent me back a recording and pages and pages of notes on the Diabelli Variations. “Nobody thinks to do these – your professor will be thrilled.” Dave was right and he had provided exactly the resources I needed.

By the time I was 21, I had my own car and I decided one summer vacation to drive the 40 minutes to Dave’s house and visit him. He was retired, growing very paunchy, having all kinds of diabetes-related health issues. I had never been to his little seaside house before and I was totally shocked to discover that he had a wife and apparently grown children. He had never mentioned them in all those years of piano lessons. His wife didn’t look too thrilled to see the 21-year-old with the waist long hair being greeted by her husband and taken back to see his “collection.” An additional room built onto the house was filled from floor to ceiling along every wall with vinyl albums. In the center of the room was a “state of the art” recording set-up with his baby grand and his electric piano. Radio stations had smaller libraries than Dave. We spent the day just listening to one “cool thing” after another. His wife brought us, grudgingly, some sandwiches and iced tea. I tried to ask about her and his children but all Dave would say was, “They’re not interested in my collection.” Was that why he called me his musical child?

The next summer I took my fiancé to meet Dave. Back to the collection we went, and we spent the day talking about music. My fiancé was a piano player and had very eclectic musical tastes. Dave approved, and wanted us to come back and visit him more often. My wedding the next summer was a small, private ceremony and I wrote to Dave afterwards to let him know I was now married and living in Bakersfield. I told him about joining a hand bell choir with our church and he sent me several cassettes of his favorite church choir music. We had never discussed God so I had no idea what his views on spiritual life might have been. I wrote to him about my parents letting me have the piano for my own when we moved into our first rental house. He sent me a cassette of the musical “Chess” with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by the guys from ABBA but there was no note in Dave’s distinctive, spidery, block lettering accompanying it.

Sometime while we were still in the rental house, a postcard from his wife arrived stating that Dave had died, he had valued our friendship, and please don’t write any more. I looked around at the hundreds of cassettes he had recorded for me over the years, the shelves of sheet music he had given me aligned beside the piano. I wondered what his wife had done with Dave’s vinyl records which, while obsolete, represented a fortune from a music collector’s standpoint. I wondered if he had left as much of a legacy to his own children as he had to his musical child. I think Dave would have approved of all the different types of music I exposed my children to during the years I gave them piano lessons. I think he would enjoy talking with my son, the drummer, about bands, and cover tunes, and rhythms. If we’re not gone until we’re forgotten then Dave is as vibrantly alive as was his music.