This story is the latest submission for the Upton bass pickup raffle. If you’d like to be a contestant in the raffle, just email me your worst gig story (either personal or second-hand is fine) by March 15. You can send them to jasonheath -at- doublebassblog.org.

Gig Story from Deborah Lamb

Here at The University of Oklahoma (OU), I play in various ensembles. Some required of me, some just for my own enjoyment. Wind Symphony is just that!

Two weeks ago the OU Wind Symphony had a concert, and we were going to play David Maslanka’s 4th Symphony, which requires A LOT of bass and has some very exposed parts. David Maslanka was there for the concert, so the pressure was REALLY on. During the day of the concert, I wanted to make some improvements on my bass to get more sound out of it. So, I took it to my apartment to accomplish the task.

My uncle, who comes to every concert, wanted to take me out to dinner that night to celebrate my recent birthday. Around 5:30 I loaded up my bass in my car and headed back to the music building to meet him. After parking in the parking garage, I usually take the stairs down unless I’m on the 3rd or 4th level of the parking garage. I had parked on the second level. Seeing as how I live up a flight of stairs, I saw no problem taking just one flight down to ground level. While going down the stairs, I put my foot where a stair should’ve been, and it wasn’t. I then fell down 6 stairs, injuring both of my knees and my left elbow.

I gathered myself together (with the help of some very nice strangers) and headed into the music building. Noticing the top of the bass was limping down, my heart sank into my stomach- I knew then and there what happened. The scroll broke completely in half and everything had collapsed. Not caring about my injuries or my crazy crying over what happened, I needed a GOOD bass- I had a concert to play in after all, and I didn’t want to let anyone down with this incident!

I found a master key, broke into my bass professors office, and stole a bass from one of our graduate students. I played through the concert on a bass I had never laid my hands on before with two injured knees and an injured elbow. I had never been so proud of myself in my life. I definitely earned my scholarship that night!

-Debby Lamb
Music Education Student at the University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK

This story is the latest submission for the Upton bass pickup raffle. If you’d like to be a contestant in the raffle, just email me your worst gig story (either personal or second-hand is fine) by March 15. You can send them to jasonheath -at- doublebassblog.org.

Gig Story from Kells Nollenberger

(This story is already giving me nightmares, by the way…)

It was the summer of 2000 and I had just finished high school in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Soon, I would be heading off to college to study music with my 100-year-old Czech bass that I had recently purchased from A440 Violin Shop. I bought the bass in the classic American fashion, by accruing massive debt. I didn’t care though, I was officially a bass player and I was loving it.

That same summer I was chosen to perform at the Texas Educators Conference with an All-Star College Big Band. There were going to be clinics and musicians from other states and free hotel rooms in San Antonio! My father agreed to buy me a plane ticket to the event for $350. Soon after I convinced him to pay for the flight, I found out that I could take the bus to San Antonio for only $150. My father agreed to let me keep the difference if I took the bus instead. $200!!! It was only a 22-hour bus ride, how bad could it possibly be? The prospect of sitting in a bus and making $5/hr seemed better than going out and trying to find a job that summer. Plus, the bus provided an added benefit in moving the bass. I figured that I would have a much easier time getting my bass on a bus than on a plane.

So my plan was hatched. I called Greyhound and gave them the dimensions of the hard double bass case that I was planning on borrowing from my high school. The woman on the phone informed me that there was no size limit on luggage, just a weight requirement of a 100 pounds. Her conformation was all I needed and I showed up the next week at the bus stop in downtown Chicago with my mom and a comically large instrument.

When I arrived at the gate, the Greyhound employees did not seem happy to see my seven-foot tall friend. They insisted that anything that big had to be sent through the shipping department and could not be put under the bus. We wandered over to the shipping department. Walking around with a hard-shell bass case can make you feel as if you have a large growth on the side of your head. Everyone just quietly stops what they are doing and stares, minding their words carefully. Naturally, the people in the shipping department also wanted nothing to do with me. It is around the time that you turn 18 and become an adult that you realize new things about your parents and that day I found out that my mom is an awesome “bad cop.” She was not going to take “no” for an answer. She started yelling, and I tried to look as pathetic as possible. One of the greatest weapons that you have as a traveling bass player is that people will do whatever it takes to make you someone else’s problem. The man in shipping department insisted that if we returned to the main terminal and informed everyone that I was a professional musician and the bass was essential to my livelihood then they would have no choice but to be accommodating. So we headed back to the terminal and after several more rounds of academy award winning “good cop, bad cop”, we managed to get my bass into the belly of a greyhound bus.

Once the baggage door was closed, I hugged my mother and made my way up to the bus door. The bus driver stopped me before entering. There was no room left on the bus for me. My brain went crazy. Should I try to get my bass back out of the bus? Would it take another two hours of yelling to get it into another bus? I couldn’t handle that. So I watched as the bus pulled out of the terminal. The bass that was leaving in the bus had a value that I could barely understand. I had not worked enough hours in my life to pay for the item that I had just lost control of. It had taken me several years just to raise enough money to have a down payment.

The next bus to San Antonio arrived shortly and it too was packed with people. I somehow managed to get on board to begin my 22-hour journey. The seat next to me was full for almost the entire ride. Mothers with their babies screaming, cowboys sleeping on my shoulder, air conditioning that barely worked: these were the least of my worries. Each time the bus stopped the bus driver would announce over the intercom and kindly remind the crowd, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please make sure that any and all of your luggage remains in the bus that you are traveling on. Greyhound can not be held responsible for any luggage that is not on your bus.” I tried to fall asleep.

We arrived in San Antonio and I jumped out of the bus looking for my bass. I looked all around the inside of the terminal. There was no sign of it and it’s not the kind of item that can easily blend into its surroundings. Having been unable to find it inside the terminal, I desperately rushed outside and could not believe what I saw. All seven feet of bass case sitting up on its own in the middle of the parking lot. I still have no idea what it was doing out there. I can only assume that someone saw the unclaimed instrument, and thought to themselves, “Maybe I should give the bass a try?” After carrying the instrument one hundred feet, they must have decided that it simply was not worth it.

This story is the latest submission for the Upton bass pickup raffle. If you’d like to be a contestant in the raffle, just email me your worst gig story (either personal or second-hand is fine) by March 15. You can send them to jasonheath -at- doublebassblog.org.

Gig Story from Eric Hochberg

My band was scheduled to play at a private residence in Glencoe, IL (tony Chicago suburb) for a reception on a Saturday afternoon. It was a beautiful summer day when we arrived at the house. When I enquired where we would be setting up, I was told by the boat dock. When I asked where the boat dock was, I was directed to a tram that went up and down a ravine from the dock on Lake Michigan to the residence. Ok, pretty weird, I thought, but manageable. So, my bandmates and I made a few trips getting our equipment down to the lake on the tram. When we got there I realized there was no covering for us to play under, ( a usual requirement for outdoor gigs), but being a sunny clear day, I thought nothing of it and we set up.

The guests started to arrive and we began playing. By the middle of our second tune I see a bit of blackness over the water out in the distance and for the next five minutes or so it gets blacker and closer. I’m getting a little worried at this point, but we keep playing, until you guessed it, we’re in the middle of a thunderstorm. Naturally, the guests were all rushing to the tram and stairs to get back up to the house. We were stuck on the deck, out in the open with no cover and all of our gear. I noticed a small shed that I opened and found a nasty old tarp in, so, we gathered our instruments and sound equipment in a pile and covered them along with our tuxedo clad selves under that funky tarp (complete with dirt, spider webs and leaking holes) until the rain stopped about 20 minutes later. What a damn mess!

We made it back up the ravine, packed up our cars and when our employer came out to say that she would like us to meet them at a restaurant in town to continue the “party”, I told them our equipment was more than likely damaged by the rain and we wouldn’t be able to make it… I guess she didn’t notice our rain soaked tuxes, either!

Eric Hochberg
www.erichochberg.com

Gig Story from Brayden Wise

When I lived in Vancouver, I played with the Pacific Symphonic Wind Ensemble (http://www.pswe.ca) under the direction of Marc Crompton. One of the things I loved about playing with PSWE was that we always got to play some really bleeding-edge wind band music. Sure, we did the classics — Grainger, Claude T. Smith, etc, but we also got a chance to have at stuff by guys like Adam Gorb and Fred Stride, and play wind band (and chamber-winds) adaptations of Zappa, and so on.

This particular show in question featured a tune by Robert Jager called “A Sea of Glass Mingled With Fire”, which was originally a commission for the Tacoma Concert Band. The second movement of this tune is quite peaceful and pastoral, unlike the bookending movements which are a little more on the “fire” side of the title. In any case…

I was just out of college at the time, working a low-paying job in a high-rent city, and couldn’t afford great gear, but the stuff I had sounded wonderful, and worked for me. The bass I was playing that night was a Chinese plywood bass (I can hear the groans already!) which was seemingly made out of balsa wood and put together with Elmer’s glue. Despite its (many) shortcomings, it had an amazing sound to it, and was ridiculously easy to play. That is, until the quietest part of the aforementioned piece.

The score was down to just a few players, and they were all at the low end of the dynamic spectrum, when this earth-splitting cracking noise came from my bass.

This cracking noise was followed in quick succession with the sound of wood clattering on the stage.

I looked down, and wouldn’t you know it, my tailpiece wire had snapped and my bridge had fallen onto the floor.

My bass had basically gutted itself onstage at the LEAST opportune moment.

Panic gripped me quickly as I realized that we were only coming up to intermission and I was now bass-less. Irrational (and terrifying) thoughts of my soundpost falling over started to enter my mind, so I laid my bass on its back and hoped for the best. Mercifully, the third movement of “A Sea of Glass…” is played on Electric Bass, so I calmed my nerves, strapped on the electric, and played the end of the half.

At the start of intermission, my friend Roy Sluyter (a fantastic Vancouver-based jazz pianist and recording engineer) comes bounding down the aisles and just says “Get your keys — let’s go”.

We jump into my car and split from the theatre. Now, I have to fill you in on Vancouver geography. The show was being held at the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam. Roy lived in Port Moody — about a 15-minute drive away. Now, especially as a father, I don’t condone driving like this, but Roy and I managed to drive from the ECC to his house in PoMo, get the double bass that just *happened* to be sitting in his living room, jam it into my hatchback, and get back to the ECC in time to tune up and play the second half of the show.

It was through this experience that I got acquainted with Gerard Samija, who became my luthier of choice for the rest of my time in Vancouver. Gerard did a wonderful job of rehabilitating my instrument and it’s still working well for me to this day.

Brayden Wise
Bassist – The Central Band of the Canadian Forces
Ottawa, Ontario
http://www.braydenwise.com
Twitter @braydenwise

As a professional harpist since 2001, I’ve played my share of normal,
everyday gigs that most other freelance instrumentalists have had
experience with. I’ve played with dozens of orchestras, from the
community orchestra down the street to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
I’ve played hundreds of weddings and nearly as many cocktail party-
type gatherings.

Over the years, unfamiliar situations that once made me nervous have
become routine, and I have developed a distinct mental blueprint for
efficiently executing the various gig types I encounter. For example,
my mental map of a typical cocktail party: load harp in car. Drive to
swanky venue using trusty GPS. Park as close as possible, especially
if in a snowstorm. Unload harp and wheel it into the venue, digging a
path through the snow if necessary. Pretend like it’s the first time
you ever heard the joke, “Bet you wish you played the (insert small
instrument here)!” even though at least one person says it to you
every single time you move your harp from one place to another.
Endeavor to keep your head from exploding when one more person looks
at the huge harp, which towers over your 5′10″ body, and asks you,
“Hey! Is that a cello???” Find a mirror and make sure all of this fuss
didn’t mess up your hair or otherwise make you look unfit to play a
swanky party. Meet and endear yourself to the client and the catering
coordinator or event planner. Tune harp. Set up stand… Realize you
forgot stand in car while trying to keep your head from exploding when
passerby asked if your harp was a cello. Go back for stand.
Eventually… Play. Have fun. Chat with random and always-interesting
people on breaks. Etc. Okay, it’s not always a perfect blueprint, but
what I’m trying to say is that I generally know what to expect when
I’m on the job.

But my harp playing career has also brought me some rather out-of-the-
ordinary experiences. One summer day a few years ago, I had such an
experience. A call came in from a casting agency, saying that they had
found my website and were wondering if I wanted to come downtown and
audition to be in a commercial. Having zero experience with such
things at the time, I was thrown off. “Uh, well – I mean, sure, but
I’m not, like, an actor or anything,” I stammered. No, no, the man
said, this was an audition to play harp in a commercial, and he was
inviting about 20 other harpists from around town. Now I was back on
solid ground. “oh, a MUSIC audition. Yes, sign me up.”

The next day I was sitting in the casting agency’s office in a row of
other artsy-looking harpists seated along one wall. I learned that we
were auditioning for a commercial for Totes, which I vaguely recalled
as a brand of slippers, umbrellas, and maybe gloves. There must have
been another audition going on for a role called “Skinny Woman” or
“Woman with Pelvis-to-Head Ratio of Less Than 1,” because a row of
impossibly thin and far more fashionable ladies were seated along the
opposite wall.

The agency had rented a harp for the audition, and the paper-thin
walls in the trendy loft that housed the agency permitted each
harpist’s audition to come through loud and clear into the waiting
room. A harpist would be called in, and within moments we would hear a
blazingly confident, supremely professional rendition of a standard
harp excerpt or solo – we were told we could play whatever we wanted.
And this is when things started to become a bit unusual. Following
this performance, we would then hear a long series of muffled,
cacophonous harp sounds that are hard to describe directly. Rather,
I’ll liken it to an actor who has just performed a famous Shakespeare
monologue and then tries to repeat the same monologue, but this time
his mouth is stuffed full of cotton balls and the casting director is
trying hard to strangle him as he speaks. The harpist would then come
back to the waiting room to retrieve her things, face red and eyes
cast down to the floor, and hurry out before we could find out what
had happened. Every audition before me went this way, and I was
supremely uncertain of what was going to happen when I got called in
to the audition room.

Masking my nerves with a smile so wide my face hurt, I breezed into
the room and exchanged pleasantries with the casting director and
others in the room. I sat at the harp and played a piece I figured
people unfamiliar with the harp would like – one filled with
glissandos and other fun, flashy things that let me kind of ham it up
physically. This was an audition to play on camera, after all – I
figured that how it looked was at least as important as how it sounded
in the commercial milieu.

The casting director cut me off after a generous amount of time.
“Okay, that was really great. Now, I need you to play that again…
While wearing THESE.” And he proffered a pair of bright-red leather
gloves.

Mystery solved.

“Ah. Okay. You know, you… Can’t really play the harp with gloves
on,” I protested as politely as I could.

“Yes, so it seems,” replied the casting director, “But I need you to
TRY.”

Shrugging, I donned the gloves – rather loose and clumsy-feeling on my
bony fingers – and dove back into my solo with all the charisma I
could muster. Luckily, glissandos sound pretty darn good even with
gloves on. The bulk of the piece didn’t sound so great, but I left my
pride behind and just tried to have fun and look as graceful as
possible.

The director cut me off, promising a call the next day, and I returned
to the waiting room. The remaining harpists looked at me expectantly.
I walked to the exit and opened the door. Just before slipping out, I
turned and said, “You have to wear gloves.” The room burst into
conversation as I got out of there.

I actually ended up getting a callback audition and was subsequently
cast as the harpist in this commercial for Isotoner Gloves (made by
Totes). They ended up recording the harp separately (thank
goodness!!), then playing the track back as I faked playing the piece.
In addition to a cool experience on a set and getting to feel
glamorous with wardrobe, hair, and makeup, I got a great paycheck and
a sweet pair of leather gloves that had been perfectly tailored to my
fingers in order to look good in close-up shots. Unfortunately, I
eventually lost those gloves – probably in a moment of distraction on
a subsequent gig as I tried to remain polite when the thousandth
passerby asked me if I wish I’d played the piccolo.

A professional harpist for many years, Courtney currently works in a research lab and will be starting medical school at The University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine in August 2010.

What the hey?!?

I was playing bass for one one these aforementioned whole-note sessions, flipping each chart over as we wrapped it up and thinking about my various dinner options.

I flipped the next chart in the stack, and my heart took a sudden leap into my throat. The music I was about to sight-read for this session was absolutely covered in black, with sixteenth notes buzzing up and down the staff, intricate hemiolas and rest patterns, and tons of tricky accidentals all over the page.

Crap!

How could I have missed this one when I was flipping through my music at the beginning of the session? And what on Earth was a nutso chart like this doing in my stack of easy-as-pie first position whole note tunes?

With no time to think (the engineer was ready and waiting for our small string group to start behind the glass), I picked up my bow, knowing that I was about to embark on one heck of a sight-reading adventure.

Click, click, click…

We were off and running, and I was bobbing and dipping like a maniac, navigating these off-the-wall sixteenth note passages as best I could. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that all of my upper-string colleagues were watching me with bemused grins. Their parts were half-note and whole note chords, just like all the others, and I soon realized that this track (for Christmas album, of all things!) was arranged as one bizarre bass solo.

Fortunately, I’m a pretty good sight-reader, and I started to gain confidence as I realized that there would be no respite for me through the entire track. I jammed out as well as I possibly could given the circumstances, and was feeling pretty darned proud of myself as the other string players played the final chords of the arrangement.

As silence filled the studio, I shook out my arms and waited to see what the engineer wanted to punch in. After all, I did a good job, didn’t I? Maybe just few bars here or there to clean up?

Long silence.

My confidence wavered.

Finally, the studio speakers came on:

“Um… Jason. Can I see that bass part?”

I snaked my way through the cables and mic stands, meeting him at the door.

“Jason,” he said, “that’s the electric bass part.”

Apparently, the bass guitar part had been misfiled in my folder. The string tracks were just sonic padding on this record, and the electric people would be in a few days later to lay down the groovier stuff.

Blushing profusely (though it wasn’t really my fault, was it?) as my actual part was handed to me, I took my seat again, and we took it from the top, with my actual part being even simpler than the other tracks. I only played a few pizzicati and a couple of whole notes, in fact.

So much for my rockin’ Christmas solo upright bowed solo jam track!

Apparently, this orchestra never pre-screens their candidates, making for a quite egalitarian yet massively populated pool of candidates. Due to this policy, there are at least a handful of auditionees that have the panel rolling on the floor (figuratively, at least) in suppressed laughter or else slouched in their chairs with tears of pain rolling down their cheeks.

The double bass always attracts a motley crew of candidates anyway, and having no screening process usually means that there are some real characters stepping up on stage to strut their stuff. While painful to the ears of the long-suffering committee, it can also provide for some much-needed levity after hour after interminable hour of nervously executed symphonic snippets.

One such bass player entered for his audition (behind a screen, of course) and started tuning extremely loudly, roaring away on his low strings in an apparently futile attempt to get in tune. Not a good sign.

The committee was fidgeting away while waiting for the candidate to begin, only to slowly realize that, in fact, the candidate had begun, and that these crass attempts at tuning had somehow morphed into the first movement of the Vivaldi Sonata No. 3 for Cello, played as low as possible in the fist position of the bass. The candidate clacked and rattled his way through the first few phrases of this piece, grinding his low strings like some sort of lower life form, with the committee looking at each other with some amusement.

This audition was going to be fun.

The committee cut off the “grinder” after a bit, asking him to play the final movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, a tricky excerpt that requires quite a bit of agility on the part of the player. Not easy even for a top-caliber player, so how would this fellow fare.

Long pause.

The first four notes came out, a confused jumble of crud, then nothing.

Long pause.

Another attempt at those first four notes.

Silence.

Finally (and with much hysterically silent laughter from the committee), this fellow burped and snorted his way through this excerpt, like a piano falling down a set of stairs, only less graceful.

Having fun now, the committee proceeded to ask the candidate to play rehearsal number 9 from Ein Heldenleben, an even more fiendishly difficult passage for string bass.

Longer pause.

Finally, the proctor (the person with the candidate who points out what excerpts to play and helps coordinate the audition facilitation) calls out from the candidate’s side of the screen:

Proctor: Uh… the candidate declines to play this excerpt…

Committee: OK–thank you!

Don’t you just love bass auditions?

One of the shops exhibiting basses was using a classy kind of bass stand–wooden and elegant, something like the following:

Now, these racks are attractive, but as you can see from the photo above, they don’t provide a whole lot of stability for the instrument. In this scenario, each bass is resting in a shallow indentation, with nothing else supporting it.

Apparently (and I wasn’t there to see this, but word traveled fast across the convention floor after the incident!), one of the parents of a young bassist was putting a bass back that they were trying out. They put it back in the rack and must have gotten it off-center. As they let it go, the bass tipped over.

Now, this is bad enough on its own, but this was but one bass in a long line of basses, all in similar racks. The off-kilter bass smacked into the bass just to the side of it, knocking it over as well, thereby setting in motion the world’s most expensive set of dominos:

Can you imagine the utter shock and horror on everybody’s part: parent, shop owner, and conventioneers? Each bass clobbered the one right next to it, damaging (to greater or lesser degrees) the bass next to it, which in turn fell over, damaging the one next to it. Yikes! I still wake up dreaming about this… and I wasn’t even there to witness it!

I was sharing stories of horrific double bass destructions with the students in the low string methods class I was teaching at DePaul this past spring, and I realized that I actually had two tales (not about me, luckily!) that I hadn’t yet shared on the blog:

Look Behind You!

One of my students was getting all packed up and ready to do to youth orchestra rehearsal. He took his bass outside and set it down, heading back inside for some reason or another. Unfortunately, he had set it down behind the van that his mom would be driving, and while he was away from the bass, his mom popped the car into reverse and backed out of the garage, squishing his bass in the process. That must have been a horrific feeling for both parent and bass player!

Squished by the Set

Another former student of mine was playing bass for his high school’s variety show. He had his bass stored backstage (just like I’ve done for countless shows). A big piece of the set toppled over at some point during the show, landing right on top of his bass and flattening it.

Both of these students actually ended up with much better basses than the (now squished) ones they had been using. I suppose that’s one way (certainly a dramatic way) to get the ball rolling on a new instrument!

Has this (or something like it) ever happened to you?

You’ve just gotta love this profession. No matter how many roadblocks get tossed in their path, musicians always seem to find a way around them, taking things in stride and laughing about it later with each other over either coffee or beer (depending on the hour!). Whether it’s butchering the Messiah by whacking the transposition button on the organ, dropping bows and breaking into hysterics mid-concert, or finding oneself face-to-face with a leering colleague just as they are about to play a big solo, musicians are often only a hair’s breadth away from making fools of themselves in very public settings.

The following series from 2007 describes a week filled with enough painful (yet strangely humorous) moments to warrant a series all its own:

Part 1 – Locked Out in the Cold

Part 2- Parking Nightmares

Part 3 – Behind the Scenery

Part 4- Look Out!