Pipe Dreams

Saturday, 17 June 2006
Once again, the story starts earlier in the week. A long running dream of mine has been to win the lottery and spend the rest of my life just making music. I would build a small castle in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of that castle would be a great music hall with perfect acoustics. At the back of the stage would stand a magnificant pipe organ. Ahh...to sleep, perchance to dream...

Having an organ in my home would be shear ecstasy for me (& a harpsichord as well, while I'm at it). The church in Granite City I attended in my youth (yes, I've actually been to church other than for weddings and funerals) has a rather nice organ, so I was bitten by that bug at an early age. This past week, I took a giant leap toward that goal...and very nearly attained it.

My job with Wicks Organ Company has allowed me opportunities I could not have fathomed just a few short years ago. A recent visitor to our website inquired about the logistics and cost of removing a small organ from the balcony of his church in Russelton, PA -- just north of Pittsburgh. The Shop Superintendent redirected the inquiry to me for the pricing aspect, but mentioned that I might want to first inquire about it personally, as he knew I was casually looking about for a home organ. So, I exchanged a few emails with the gentleman, asked some questions about it, and told him I might be willing to drive to Pennsylvania and remove the instrument myself if the price was right. It was a Wicks "Fuga" model from 1935, with three ranks (219) of pipes, a 2-manual console built into the casework, and stood only 8'5" tall -- my living room ceiling is 8'9". When he told me to make him a fair offer, I asked him for some pictures and some more details. People all around me at work started offering me advice on how best to remove it, and even their services to help with everything from moving it to tonal regulating it once in my home.

Thursday morning around 08:30, an email arrived from this guy. He explained that apparently the organ didn't want to be sold, for as he was preparing to go take pictures of it that morning, he received a phone call informing him that the church was on fire. He said he drove over there and stood in the street watching it burn, and could even see the organ burning through a window that use to be a stained glass representation of the Transfiguration...which was the name of the church.

I was literally within hours of owning my own pipe organ.

I surfed a few news websites Monday from the Pittsburgh area and found several stories and photos of the fire, which took 75 firefighters to extinguish. One even had several minutes of video from their news helicopter flying over the scene. The 91-year-old church was a total loss, as was the organ in the balcony.

I was literally within hours of owning my own pipe organ!

Oh, well...c'est la vie.

At a completely different point in the musical spectrum, BenWahBob was booked for a return engagement at The Crazy Horse Saloon in Wentzville, MO on Saturday. They had played a freebie the previous Saturday afternoon at a biker benefit in Moscow Mills while I was in Michigan...which reminds me...thanks to Mike Hirsch for sitting in for me again. That was the maiden voyage of Bobby's new PA rig. But this was the first indoor gig, for which it was intended. It seems he's pieced himself together a rather nice little system. I arrived at the bar just as Bobby and Carlos were about to unload the system from Bobby's trailer -- also a nice new addition. We got it in and set up in almost no time at all. They had spent several hours configuring it to be quick and painless, and they succeeded. All of the electronics are in an SKB GigRig, the Carvin subs have large casters on back, and the mains and monitors are all manageable by one person. With everything pre-wired, we just plug in the speakers, plug in the mic cables, power it up, and go. K-I-S-S.

I popped out front for the first couple of songs to check levels, and everything sounded great. I boosted the vocal levels a bit to get them more out-front, flattened out the bass channel EQ (Hirschie plays one of those damned Steinberger basses -- a bowling ball with strings), and left it alone for the rest of the night. Carlos said he preferred to have the PA rack on my side of the stage to avoid the temptation he would surely have to tweak it all night. Good call.

We rolled into the first set with virtually no one in the place. Oh, well...paid practice. Too bad I had to drive 65 miles for this. As the night wore on, though, things started to pick up and more people made there way to the bar. The first set was fairly vanilla, and went without any real glaring hitches. as we turned the page to browse the second set, though, a great opportunity presented itself. Bobby noticed immediately that Dale had written the Romantics song What I Like About You twice back-to-back. He asked me which one we should play, to which I responded, "The first one...it's longer!" -- and so it did extend farther across the page. Bobby suggested we play it twice, just as written. When we presented the idea to Carlos, he whole-heartedly agreed. It was a done-deal. Dale was going to think we were nuts or something.

Unfortunately, he ruined it for us by noticing his error and correcting it just a few songs before the debut of our Romantics medley. Curses! Foiled again! ...and we would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for you meddling kids! We did have more fun with him later in the evening, trying our level best to throw him off during songs we know he struggles with rhythmically. He was unflappable, though, on this night. Carlos and I even tried to throw off Bobby while he was singing the beginning of that acursed Georgia Sattelites song, only to be denied once again.

We had one of those "I used to be somebody" moments in the middle of the evening, too. Some biker-looking chick wearing a leather vest, do-rag, and pig-tails approached Dale during one break and asked him if she could come up and sing the Guns-n-Roses song Sweet Child of Mine. He hemmed and hawed, and siezed the opportunity to drag Bobby and me into it. When she asked us, we both shrugged our shoulders and said that we knew it. This wasn't the support that Dale was seeking. She launched into that old, tired, far-to-familiar sob story about how she used to be a singer, and sang on many people's CDs, but then got throat cancer and had to quit singing professionally. Uhh-huh...yah...sssure you did. I'll bet you played a Rickenbacker, too, right? If I had a dollar for every time I've heard some lame-ass version of that story as a pretense to get up on stage and suck the life right out of the place... She tried for about another 15 or 20 minutes, then got mad and gave up after we convinced her that Carlos really didn't know the song. Where's Deron when you need him?

We managed our way through the rest of the night, occassionally messing things up on purpose toward the end of trying to trying to throw off Dale. Still no luck. At the end of the festivities, tear-down of the new system went pretty quick. We could do better, though. We did stop and chat a bit here and there. I had a nice conversation with Dale's lovely wife Chris about long drives after gigs and playing at the Lake of the Ozarks. I couldn't remember the name of that bar on the lake to save my life (it was The Filling Station & Backwater Jack's, Chris). It's hell getting old.

During load-out, we were stuffing equipment back into Bobby's trailer when I burned the dickens out of my left hand. Bobby and I were lifting the PA rack into the trailer from the sides as Carlos was pushing from behind. As I got the front edge onto the trailer and reached back to steady the top corner, Carlos called out just as I grabbed the cigarette in his hand and mashed it into the rack with the palm of my hand. Ouch! I now have a nice little spot between my first and second fingers that's about the size of a cigarette (Did I STUTTER?). Oh, well...it'll be a nice reminder of my time in Wentzville at The Crazy Horse Saloon.

Yee Haaa!

For the long drive home, I popped in the Enchant CD Tug of War. I had listened to their Juggling 9 or Dropping 10 CD during the drive there, and was thoroughly progified by the time I got home just after 03:30. That kind of made for a mostly-wasted Sunday, but, hey, such is the life of a working musician, eh?