Small World Stories

I was in a band named Looking Glass (not the one with a hit or two, coincidence) in the Norfolk, Virginia, area. Our guitar player left us to go with The Motions that later became Blues Image. I had moved on and was playing with a band named The Diminished Fifth. I came home after rehearsal one day and happened to go into the spare bedroom and on a table was a checkbook I didn't recognize. The name in the checkbook was the guitar player I had worked with in Looking Glass. It was sort of a surreal moment. How did a checkbook belonging to a friend who had left for L.A. a couple of years before show up in a bedroom in a house I had only lived in for a few months.
I asked my girlfriend about it and she casually said, "Oh, yeah, this guy said he knows you and he is looking for you. He left his checkbook on the coffee table and I moved it to the table in the spare room. He said he would be back tomorrow. He is probably at the Jolly Roger."
I went to the Jolly Roger and he had been there and gone. The next day, he did show up. He was looking for me because he was putting together a band to open for Steven Stills and Manassas. So I packed up and went to Tucson, Arizona, to help get the band off the ground, but it never did.

 

When I was in elementary school, I lived in Saginaw, a small town just north of Ft Worth. I moved away after fifth grade. I eventually graduated high school in Burleson, a small town just south of Ft Worth. My best friend from high school moved to Alvarado, an even smaller town considerably further south of Ft Worth right after I graduated. Time passes. MANY years later I was trying to find the football field where my son would be playing his first night game. The directions the coaches had given us got us ALMOST to Saginaw and then led us toward the neighboring town of Blue Mound, ending up at an abandoned feed mill. We could see the field lights from where we were. But we couldn't figure out how to get there, because at no point on the directions did it say "Not just once but twice you will have turn off of a real road onto an unpaved, unmarked, unlit, goat path to get there. My wife was getting remarkably grumpy by then and said "I don't care who the next person you see is. We're going to ask them directions." About that time, we see two people walking out of the house on the corner of the next street we were about to get to. She turned abruptly while pushing the down button for my window. We stopped in front of that house and there is a guy standing in the yard looking a little freaked out. I said "Excuse me." and that was as far as I got before he said "Wayne? What are you doing here?" It was Bob, the younger brother of my best friend from high school, who lived more than fifty miles from there and was in Saginaw for the first time ever that day to attend the party he was walking out of when we pulled up.

My wife came from a really really small town and couldn't understand why I thought it was odd to run into someone I knew by going back to a town I had once lived in. Years later, after the funeral of Bob's dad. My wife overheard him telling someone else there about the weirdly random event of my appearing from out of the blue to try to ask him for directions while he's in a town he'd never been to before. She finally got it.

 

When I was..

Naahh - never mind

 

Nothing in the world to do with music, but back in 67, there I was sitting in my office, in a bomb dump, in the jungle, in Panama, and the door opened, and in walked a guy I'd been in high school with in New Jersey in the 50s.

Raf

 

My wife and I were on a cruise in 2013 for our 20th anniversary. On the first night, I was doing karaoke (which I wound up doing every night of the cruise) and thought I was pretty hot s***, when this BEAR of a guy gets up and starts absolutely KILLING "My Girl". I can't decide if I'm hearing Marvin Gaye, James Ingram, or David Ruffin, but I know a ringer when I hear one. I asked him afterward, and he told me that he had replaced Teddy Pendergrass in Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. A quick check of the Internet on my cell phone confirmed that the man was speaking with a straight tongue. I was, needless to say, impressed. BTW, he told me he'd liked my voice too.

A couple of days later, we were both doing "band-aoke" - karaoke with a live band. On the songs I sang, I played bass as well (after a short discussion with the house bass player, during which I impressed him with my Carvin arsenal and correctly identified the tone woods and electronics on his Ibanez SR-506). My man Kenny asked me to play bass and sing with him on "Mustang Sally". Of course I complied.

On our actual anniversary, he was doing a Motown revue with the ship's band. He asked me again to come up, and with him I played bass and sang "My Girl", which he dedicated to my wife. Beyond cool...

 

I am originally from a very small tobacco town in south eastern North Carolina, about an hour from the coast. While in the Navy I did a couple years out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. One day I was driving the the main drag (don't recall the street name) along Waikiki Beach when right in front of me is a beat up, older car with a dealership sticker from the long gone Chevy dealership in my dinky hometown.

 

I used to work at a small music store. I did a bunch of online buying/selling on my own, and was approached by the shop to set up a webpage and e-commerce. I had zero experience on web building, but I learned html from some online tuitorials and put the little shop on the internet. That was back in college.

Fast forward a bunch of years - I'm on Talkbass and see Rocket Music is here as well! "My little e-commerce child is all grown up now..."

 

A few months back, the mrs. & i had a dinner date with her sister & her sister's husband, a keys player. He's constantly busy as he plays in several bands. The band I'm in occasionally has this female singer sit in so we are now FB "friends". From her FB page, I noticed that she has performed with one of the bands my wife's B-I-L is in, though it didn't appear they ever peformed at the same show.

So we go out to dinner and I mention to the B-I-L, do you know so-and-so (the chick singer)? He says, as a matter of fact, she just left an hour ago. One of his other projects was recording in his basement studio, and that BL wanted a female voice to do some harmonies. Then the B-I-L says, yeah, I had to kick them all out since I had to get ready for dinner! (that recording session was actually the 1st time they'd ever met)

OK, not really any big names to drop, but still ...

 

I met my guitarist in May 2011. He got married in Oct 2013. At his wedding I learned that his cousin was my roommate from 10 years ago, and 400 miles away.

 

A more music-oriented small world moment: Twenty two or so years ago, my now wife wanted to impress me by introducing me to her coolest cousin, who happens to be an amazing musician. Slim Richey is an absolutely killer swing jazz guitarist who had moved to the Austin area not real long before then. She didn't know that I'd known and actually jammed with him before he left Ft Worth. We go down to his place near Austin, knock on the door, Slim answers it. He sees me before Melanie and "Brother Wayne! What are you doing here?"

Melanie's surprise was kind of ruined. We visited for a while, crashed out for the night and the next day decided to make a big pot of chili, call around the neighborhood, and have a party/jam session.

I didn't realize that 'calling around the neighborhood' would gather SEVERAL amazing musicians, some of them national treasures. One of those in particular was the amazing Johnny Gimble. My Grampa had told me he'd played with Gimble when they were both immensely younger. I decided to find out, and said "Mr. Gimble, does the name Cleo Bagwell mean anything to you?" and he replied "How do you know Flash?" Flash Bagwell had been Grampa's nickname when he was with the Lightcrust Doughboys. Look them up.

It was a pretty cool moment for me.

 

This one might take a bit, pull up a chair.

I've recounted here before that I was introduced to drumming and playing bass at about the same time, at age ten thanks to a neighbor. I won't get deep into THAT story here, but he taught me the basics of keeping time on a drum kit and playing roots and fifths (and sometimes octaves) on bass.

I reeeeeeally wanted a drum set, but my folks thought that drums were too expensive, too loud, took up too much room. They bought me my first bass at "Murphy's Mart", it was a Tele Star (Teisco), I bought a used amp with money earned as a paper boy.

So I played bass.

Then my older brother's band lost their drummer, I borrowed a kit and filled in until they found a drummer who actually owned a drum set.

So, by this point I'm sixteen years old and working as a busboy in an upscale restaurant inside of a hotel. I made friends with a guy named Rob P________ from the next neighborhood, he was a dish washer in the restaurant. We were talking one night and somehow it came up that I played bass and drums. He said that he owned an old, beat up set of drums that he wasn't using, but he might be interested in trading it for a bass and amp. So we did. I delivered my bass and amp to Rob's house in Dormont on Espy Avenue and picked up my first drum set.

My brother's band had already gone through a few drummers by then, and I knew their songs. So, that's how I ended up a drummer. The trade took place in 1975.



I moved away in 1979 to Florida, although I ended up living in several cities up and down the east coast during the next thirty-five years. I played drums in bands wherever I lived.

In 2008 I bought another bass, a week or two later I suffered my first stroke. The strokes were why I eventually retired the following year and then moved back to Pittsburgh in 2010. We ended up buying a house in Dormont, one neighborhood away from where I grew up all those years ago.

So one day in the summer of 2010 I drove down into our local shopping district to run some errands. I backed my little white Chevy HHR wagon into a parking space in a lot on the corner of Potomac and Espy Avenue. My car has a plate on the front that says, "Got drums?"

I ran a bunch of errands, stopped at the bank, the library and the bakery and walked back to my car, there was about a thirty second window in which what happened next could have happened...

As I was walking into the parking lot a Buick pulled into the spot next to my car and a big guy around my age got out and was looking at the plate on the front of my car. "Is this your car?" he asked as I approached. "Yes" I replied. He liked the plate on the front and asked me where I got it. I told him that I bought it from "Drumbum" on line. "Do you play?" I asked. He said, "Yeah, I played when I was a kid, but I traded my drum for a bass years ago, I just got a drum set again a year or two ago and got back into it." That made me laugh. "That's funny, I traded a bass for a drum set a long time ago, I just moved here and bought a house here in Dormont." He then said, "I moved back here too, I grew up right down the street on Espy Avenue." I looked at him and said, "You must know Rob P________". He paused and looked at me for a moment and said... "I AM Rob P________!

So, Rob and I resumed our friendship thanks to me parking in that lot and him seeing the "Got drums" plate.

 

I met Daniel Rodriguez (the Singing Policeman) at a bar after the opening night of a musical I was playing in. Turns out his accompanist when he visits New Zealand is my music teacher, who was also playing in the show. I have three degrees of separation to both Letterman and George Bush!

 

About 15 years ago I was in a band for a brief span of time and was fired, unceremoniously, via email. When I went to go get my gear all I was given was a "it isn't working out....sorry."

Now, the music scene isn't huge and over the next few years I heard some rumors and stories about why I was brought on and then let go. With the physical build of a linebacker most of them centered around the drummer who felt intimidated by me.

I didn't give it much thought past that until I walked into the conference room at my current job and found the guy who fired me sitting across the table for a meeting. His client was about to become my client and we had to meet to organize a hand-off of IT services.

As I shook his hand he suddenly remembered where he knew me from and put it all together and then turned ghost white.

 

In the fall of '77, after just graduating high school that Summer, I was out on my own for the first time in my life.

The band I was in was playing at a house party (real popular for the under-aged back then) in the SF Bay Area. We really weren't that good - just some 18-19 year-olds playing Rock and Blues jams.

We met a dude older than us who said he was a singer up from L.A. looking to join a band.
We thought he was a really nice guy. He didn't know anyone at this party, so we hung out with him that night. We never saw him again.

Months later an album called Infinity by Journey came out, with it's big hit "Wheel in the Sky" all over the radio. When I bought the record - you guessed it - the back cover photo showed the guy we met that night - Steve Perry.

 

Not sure this qualifies, because it doesn't involve people, but in high school back in the '70's, a friend of mine was building a bass and I gave him a POS Danelectro for parts. He built this weird offset V bass. Haven't seen him since. A few years ago I went to a local luthier's shop and hanging on the wall was the bass, Dano parts and all. I bought it for $30.00 just for the sentimental value.