Over Easy:”Schreeeeee”
When I’m asked if I come from a musical family, I always pause. I think the right answer is “sort of”. Whether it was Sinatra, Rachmaninoff piano concertos or her Majesty’s Royal Dragoon Guards pipe and drum band, something was always playing on that hulking blonde piece of furniture in the living room. This was before the British Invasion take-over of the hi-fi.
My dad had musical aspirations to be sure. First, there was his flirtation with the gutbucket. For the uninitiated, a gutbucket, also known as a washboard bass, is a single-stringed bass played with an overturned metal tub, a broom handle and a piece of clothesline. I can see the hardware store trip that produced the parts, and remember the countless other visits when my dad would be rooting around through barrels of plumbing parts and spare doorknobs and marveling at the multitude of basin wrenches available while I saw my Saturday morning road hockey game being played without me.
A quick sidebar – The Quarrymen, John Lennon & Paul McCartney’s first band, featured a gut bucket, common at the time in skiffle bands and referred to as a tea chest bass.
My dad loved taking things apart and putting them back together, so it shouldn’t have surprised me years later, when he wanted to know how I go about writing songs. “So, do you study the marketplace to figure out what kind of songs they’re looking for?” I’m sure I stared at him blankly. “So you can write what people want?” Being a salesman, of course he would see it as a commodity. I mean, I wanted people to like my songs, and I really wanted them to be played on the radio, but as far as working up a market analysis before figuring out the chord change back into the second verse, well, no.
As for my dad’s other enthusiasms, he’d gone through an intense poetry writing phase, during the early to mid bicycle shorts period. I’m recalling the chromatic harmonica years with fondness as we get to the ne plus ultra of musical pursuits.
Much of the latter part of my dad’s life was taken up with being Scottish. Like many of his age, he’d pursued an interest in genealogy, a passion that saw entire holidays in Scotland taken up wandering through old churchyards and visiting musty public records offices in search of an undiscovered Angus somebody whose cousin married my dad’s grandfather’s sister. And then it happened – he got a kilt and took up playing the bagpipes.
Family events became a forum for him to kilt up, and blow until he was “fair puckled” (out of breath). We endured hair-raising, ear-twisting, shockingly loud performances that are legendary in my family.
When my ex-wife Robin and I told my dad that we were getting married he was excited because, as he said, “I’ll be piping you in!“, a terrifying concept. I hastened to reply, “Well no, no you won’t.“ and I further explained that there were many things that wouldn’t be happening, including a head table, a first dance, toasts and speeches, and especially no piping in. He got over it, but that wasn’t the last word on the subject.
A couple of years later there was a command performance when my dad came to visit shortly after the birth of our daughter Rachel. He felt qualified to entertain a youthful audience because he’d played the bagpipes for some kindergarten age kids at the school near his place in Las Vegas. He said that they had only two types of responses. They either covered their ears and fled the room or wailed in terror. Our daughter revealed an early resilience that would serve her in the coming years – she fell asleep.
My dad definitely saw the humour in all of this, as he did a couple of years later when we surprised him by showing up for his 75th birthday. There was a big event at his church and I played a video that I made, editing his bagpipes performance together with scenes from disaster movies, like the Poseidon going down and people running screaming from Godzilla. He laughed the loudest.
My 50th birthday party, held outside in cottage country, was the perfect opportunity that he’d been waiting for since the marriage disappointment. The guests looked up from their meals in bewilderment at the first “schreeeeeeeeee” reverberating across the lake, and I spotted my dad through the trees, in full Scottish regalia. I found out later that he’d had a couple of glasses of champagne, unusual for him, on an empty stomach, because apparently, it’s hard to fill the windbag after eating. Just add trifocals and unusually deep stairs and a series of czchpflawhreeeeeee moments followed each treacherous step.
If only he’d been around for “Outlander”.
I regret that I wasn’t more encouraging of his bagpipes playing because he really took joy in it. He was especially proud when he helped to inaugurate the first official Nevada tartan. The last time I saw my dad, he was in the bed where he spent his last few days, and he was bragging to the nurse taking care of him of his son’s accomplishments as a songwriter.
