Max Is Set, Now Let It Begin

Posted on by johnpbaur
Max (right) and Chaz at the entrance to Pontchartrain Hall North on move-in day.
Max (right) and Chaz at the entrance to Pontchartrain Hall North on move-in day. (And by the way, the image on Max’s shirt is from a video game he plays, “Overwatch,” which Tori painted on the T-shirt for him.)

Saturday was move-in day for new students at the University of New Orleans, and Tori and I have been pretty achy and tired ever since, getting Max setup and ready to go.

But at least there was plenty of help. When we pulled up in front of the hall with a pickup load of his stuff, a group of student volunteers, faculty and administrators immediately engulfed us, unloading our stuff before I could even get out of from behind the wheel, and dragging it up to his room. This included his new mini-fridge (60 pounds) and his guitar amp (65 pounds.)

It’s a UNO tradition. It not only makes the moving go more smoothly for everyone, but it gives the new students (and their parents) the feeling of belonging, a feeling that people there care about their students.

We got his stuff unpacked and organized, making the best use of the space possible. It helped that the bed could be raised high enough so that fridge and amp fit underneath. After we’d done most of the organizing, Tori and I walked over to the University Center – the student union – and grabbed lunch, then got something for Max, who was helping Chaz – his best friend from high school and now one of his college roommates – organize his own stuff. At the cafeteria’s “Creation Station,” the woman showed Tori how to pull together a bowl of vegetables, meat and pasta, which the woman then stir fried for him. As she cooked the woman – Michelle was her name – assured us that Max was in the right place and promised Tori, “I’ll look out for him.” Had to feel good about that. And the stir fry looked delicious.

Pontchartrain Hall is an awfully nice facility. They’re not typical dorm rooms, they’re suites, with four smallish bedrooms, each. Max’s room (A) shares a bathroom with room B, which is occupied by Chaz. That unit then shares a large living area with another unit of two bedrooms (C and D, natch) and a bathroom. A fairly comfortable arrangement.

Sunday was moving day for returning students, and that includes the two guys who are sharing the other half of Max’s suite. On Sunday we had a few more things to drop off for Max and we met one of the two, a studiously nerdy looking guy who was busy setting up his computer system. Then we ran him over to the nearby supermarket to pick up some things. Yes, he’s got a meal plan and won’t starve (Michelle will look out for him, right?) But you know how college is.

Then, with lumps in our throats, Tori and I headed home.

Now it’s up to Max. There are a couple of days of “welcome to campus” activities and then, on Wednesday, classes start. And that’s Max’s job for the next four years – working hard, getting A’s (please gods, please) and becoming the great adult we know he can be.

It’s the way it should be, but we miss him.

And one other thing UNO

The mascot for the University of New Orleans is fitting for Max, the son of a pirate who also made a bit of a splash in the buccaneer world. They are the UNO Privateers. A privateer, of course is basically a pirate who did all the paperwork. Max will fit right in.

Full Circle on Button Fly Levis

Posted on by johnpbaur

Things came full circle Friday night.

The story starts 44 years ago, the summer of 1973. We had just graduated from high school and a group of six or seven of us – a mixed group, no couples – had jammed into a station wagon and headed out to a drive-in movie.

I have no idea what we saw. It was just a group of friends enjoying that interlude between high school and the rest of our lives. But one thing made it memorable, at least to me.

One of the people there mentioned having gone shopping that day and had purchased a pair of button fly Levis. Not remarkable in itself, but we started playing with the phrase. Someone, it might have been me but who knows, said, “Button fly Levis took the zip outta my romance.” And I said – and yes, I’m sure it was me – “Sounds like the title of a country western song.”

And my friend John Sanders (who now uses the full family name John DeGrazia-Sanders) turned to me and said – “Write that song!”

So I did. Took two days, but I was determined. Partly because it was a dare, right? I couldn’t turn it down, and partly because it was a funny idea and I didn’t want someone else to take it. I ended up with a plaintive country western ballad that told the story of unrequited love – or at least unrelieved teenage lust.

The problem was, I don’t read or write music, don’t play an instrument. I can sing bit. So I wrote the song but it was really just a bunch of words that fit a pattern. I sang it a few times, but it was probably different every time I sang it.

It was eight years later, when I was working at the La Grande Observer in the far back corner of Oregon, that I met my reporting colleague Jim Angell. Jim is also a great guitar player and performer. He listened to me sing it through a couple of times, tweaked a couple of lines and figured out the chords for it. It became a real song. We actually performed it at the Eastern Oregon State College Oktoberfest that year. Afterwards the college president told us we were nuts. I appreciated that.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, Father’s Day. We are now in the New Orleans area, and Max – as I’ve mentioned a time or two – plays guitar. Plays pretty well, as a matter of fact, and will be studying music in college this fall. He’s been taking lessons at the Guitar Center, and every fifth Friday of the month (for those months that have five Fridays, of course) they have a jam session. The students and the teachers get together and play. Sometimes a student will play something particular he or dshe has been working on. Usually one or two eight year olds will plunk out something on the piano, but there’s usually three or four people up on the stage playing drums, guitar, keyboard, bass. There’s an old guy who teaches wind instruments, and he’s usually on stage throwing in sax solos and keeping them together. Tori’s gotten on stage a couple of times to sing with different combinations of players. It’s fun.

Well, we’ve been going to these for four years, and Friday’s was Max’s last as a student, since he starts classes in August and the next five-Friday month is September. So earlier this year I tracked down Angell – he’s in Wyoming no happily married and just back from a vacation in Iceland – and he sent me the chords, and this Father’s Day Max sat down and played “Button Fly Levis.” We practiced it a few times this Friday at the jam session we performed it together.

It was a blast. If you listen to the video, you’ll recognize that my voice doesn’t go quite as high as easily, as it did 43 years ago. It’s a little strained. But I’d forgotten how fun it could be to perform, and Max followed me wherever I was going so it was OK. I told the story, and people laughed in all the right places, and applauded at the end.

It was especially sweet to perform the song with Max. He is the age now I was when I wrote it. It was fun to share that moment from my past as he’s getting set to start his future.

Blues on a Sunday Afternoon

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Max at Preservation Hall 061117About this time five years ago we were planning our move from St. Croix back to the mainland, and we had picked New Orleans as our landing spot.

It wasn’t the “safe” choice – we could have headed back to the Northwest where we have friends, know the lay of the land, could have blended right back in. But we wanted the adventure to continue. So we picked a city we’d visited once and found interesting and started getting ready.

We also wanted to give Max a chance to explore. He was 14 years old and really getting into music. What better place to scratch that itch than New Orleans?

And Sunday that all paid off! On Sunday, Max got a chance to perform in the legendary space of Preservation Hall, one of the cradles of traditional jazz and the blues. Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the New Orleans jazz world has played in that very modest space. And now Max has too.

Max has been taking lessons at the Guitar Center almost since we got here. Back on St. Croix he took lessons from a teacher at Good Hope School. This fall he’ll continue his study as a music major at the University of New Orleans.

Preservation Hall is not a grand concert space on the order of Carnegie Hall or anything like that. It’s actually one of the shabbier buildings in the French Quarter, and that’s a place that has some shabby buildings. The hall’s exterior is a muddy brownish color with streaks of other hues – it’s almost impossible to describe the color except for “old and weather beaten.” Inside, the paint is peeling, the plaster is cracked and falling. It’s maybe 25 feet square, with a couple of rows of benches in front of the performance space. I leaned against the wall in the back – but only after checking to make sure it wouldn’t collapse under my weight.

But it’s not about the state of the walls. It’s what has happened inside those walls, in the air, the enclosed space, that matters a great deal. It was started in the 1950s as a place for the city’s traditional jazz musicians to gather and jam. It became the place to hear traditional New Orleans jazz, and grew into a band that traveled the world, turning people on to the joy of their music.

That joyful music was starting to fall by the wayside in the ’50s, along with the musicians who had lived it all their lives. Preservation Hall became the place where it was collected and treasured and performed and revived. And now Max has a part of it.

The Guitar Center holds a regular performance time – I guess you could call it a recital – and the woman who organizes it happens to be married to the guy who does tech for Preservation Hall, and one thing led to another and there we all were Sunday at 11 a.m. Instead of cramming into the performance space at the center, we were cramming into one of the hallowed venues in the city.

Instead of the Guitar Center’s electronic keyboards, the piano students played the hall’s old upright piano – battle scarred but still with a bright sound. Several of the drummers, playing on the Preservation Hall kit, did very well. And there was a woman, I’m guessing in her late 30s/early 40s, who a year ago decided she wanted to play sax. She got up there and did fine. Got a ways to go, but I marveled at the guts she showed.

And then there was Max. He was playing “Graveyard Playboy,” a blues song he wrote that displayed both very good musicianship and his weird sense of humor. Over the years all our kids have all displayed humor that the more rigid, stodgy types might sniff at and call “inappropriate.” It comes from being raised in a largish theater family where the influences included a lot of hanging around with adults. And Max, being the youngest by a good many years, has it in spades.

Max is very comfortable in his skin, he knows who he is, isn’t afraid to show that to the world, and isn’t interested in judging or being judged about it. He just got up and performed – he’s a good musician, can play the hell out of that guitar he got as a high school graduation present, and perhaps more importantly, he’s becoming a very good entertainer. (You can see his performance here.)

So when he sang about meeting a woman in the cemetery who was there to bury her second husband (who had died when she fired a bullet “and he got in the way,”) he paused and said, “I like ’em crazy,” it was pretty funny. The woman sitting next to me paused, cocked her head then said, “OK” and laughed.

Max had a couple of things the other kids didn’t. It wasn’t just the musicianship. There was a pretty wide range of that. But most of the kids, you could see them thinking, could almost hear them counting, worrying more about getting the exact right note than keeping the flow, the rhythm. Max was just up there playing, relaxed and confident. He had stage presence. He missed a couple of lines, jumped a couple of places, but if you’d never heard him practice the song you’d never have known it. He just smiled and kept playing. He had fun with it, and the audience did, too.

And now, no matter where he goes in life, no matter what he decides on for a career, he’s always got that on his resume. “Oh yeah, I played Preservation Hall.”

 

Max, Poor Minn and the Holy Martin

Posted on by johnpbaur

Max takes guitar lessons at the Guitar Center. The last Friday of each month they hold a jam session, open to the public, where people just sign up to perform. Friday there were a couple of dozen people there, I’d guess, including three or four who were really good, the kind of guys who are always in at least one band, sometimes several at once, depending on the gigs.

They’re the kind of guys who, if someone said they were going to sing “Red House Blues” and not everyone knew it, they could huddle together for a minute and figure it out, then go ahead and play it.

Max jamming There were also kids, the students at the center. One 14-year-old girl who could really sing, just tore it up on “House of the Rising Sun.” And a kid about 8 or 10 who sat in at the drums and was really good. Another young guy who played keyboard for a while, just making it up as he went along, then switched to drums.

Max played guitar for a while, then sat out. Then he got up and sang, and – oh man!

My 17-year-old son sang “Minnie The Moocher,” Cab Calloway’s signature 1931 song! With growls and “hidee hidee hidee hi” and scat and everything. And unlike most of the people who sang while reading the lyrics on their smart phone screens, Max knew all the words! (I mean, really, how could you decide “I’ll get up and sing a song” if you don’t know the words?)

Kind of thing that makes a parent feel like it hasn’t all been in vain. Couldn’t be prouder.

Speaking of the Guitar Center

The Guitar Center is a great place for musicians, no matter what your instrument. LOTS of stock, a large staff of very knowledgable people who can’t wait to talk to you about the instruments and equipment. You can even rent rehearsal space from them.

In the back of the store there’s a small room, tastefully decorated and lit with guitars on the wall, each illuminated with its own track light. A hushed air pervades the place. We call it the church.

The cheapest instrument in the room is an $800 acoustic. In the picture below, the least expensive guitar you see is $3,000. The one in the middle, that Max is bowing down to, is a handmade Martin for $15,299.

“In the name of the Gibson, and the Fender, and the holy Martin, amen.”guitar church