P-Day
The Poster Formerly Known as Craig Olson
"Preparation Day" – the one day a week for full-time missionaries to
get prepared for the rest of the week. Preparation could mean study
and prayer, but in most cases it meant laundry and grocery shopping
and any other errands that needed to be managed so you could get
through the rest of the week with food, clean clothes and bicycles
or a car that were in working order.
This particular P-Day was a bit unusual. My companion and I had
managed to get yet another flat tire on our car, so we needed to get
that fixed (which, alas, was not all that unusual) and we had a
third companion for the day (which was). Transfers had come out
uneven last week, so we had a soon-to-be homeward-bound Elder from
our district with us until we could hand him off to the Zone Leader.
The mission had a contract with Goodyear (or was it Goodrich?)
service centers to fix missionaries' flat tires for a flat fee (no
pun intended), so we set off to Memphis for the nearest service center.
Our temporary companion wanted to stop by a music store while we
were out; he had some bit of Memphis musical heritage in mind that
he wanted to take home with him. What should have been a fairly
straight-forward trip to the tire repair shop we knew very well – we
had flats often enough that we knew everyone who worked there on a
first name basis – became a quest to find a store that sold musical
instruments. One would think that, in a city like Memphis, it should
have required little effort to find a music store, but we spent the
entire gray and rainy morning driving rather randomly around with no
success.
Around lunchtime, we saw a Loeb's Barbecue Restaurant loom out of
the gloom, and Elder Whitney agreed to stop looking for now and get
something to eat. While it was easy to see the restaurant, it
wasn't so easy to see where to turn in. Everything was wet, gray
and Elder Lee, who was driving, missed the turn and we ended up
turning into a parking lot that was actually one past the Loeb's
lot. As we swung in to turn around, right in front of us was a
music store. "There's one," Elder Whitney said from the back seat,
pounding me on the shoulder, "let's stop!"
There wasn't a really good reason to not to stop, so we pulled up in
front, parked, and went in.
The store was narrow and deep, set between an office supply store
and State Farm agent. There were guitars and other instruments
hanging from the wall down both sides. A counter ran almost the
whole length of the store on the right hand side. On the left hand
side, the front of the store had racks of sheet music. Then an open
space with larger instruments pushed up against the walls. Way back
on the left there was what must be the service counter, with a door
that opened into a back room that would be behind the insurance
office. Down the center was a broad display of amps, drums, stands,
and accessories that left two fairly narrow aisles running front to
back.
There was one person behind the sales counter on the right, showing
a customer some guitar strings, and another customer looking at a
display of Fender guitars. Elder Whitney walked over to stand by
the guy selling guitar strings, and Elder Lee and I started looking
around for something to do while we waited. We both knew Elder
Whitney pretty well, and figured he might be awhile; Whit wasn't
necessarily picky, but he could be very precise. I was just glad I
wasn't the guy behind the counter.
During previous P-days and exchanges, I learned that all three of us
had some experience with playing music. We had all played in the
school band, and had also played in rock bands before coming on our
missions. Whit had played sax, Elder Lee had played bass guitar and
I had played keyboards. None of us had played recently (other than
that one time they asked me to play piano for Sacrament Meeting,
which would be a story all on its own).
While we waited, Elder Lee wandered over to a new Hagstrom bass,
took it down and was tapping out some runs. A guy came out of the
side room back by the service counter and was getting some pickups
off a rack over by Elder Lee. He turned and walked toward Elder Lee,
and Elder Lee stopped played and turned to put the guitar back on
the stand. The service guy was wearing a sleeveless black tee
shirt, black jeans and one of those long, chained wallets. Add the
long, rather straggly black hair, and he really did look slightly
menacing. I understood why Elder Lee was putting the guitar back;
some folks can be touchy about their stuff.
"Hey, man," the service guy said, "don't stop on my account. I was
just going to say jack it in if you want to hear it – the amps in
the middle are all plugged in; just turn one on and see what it
sounds like. Patch cords are hanging around all over. Just don't
open one that's still in the package." With that he turned around
and walked back into the service area.
Elder Lee turned to me, made a face and shrugged, and slipped the
guitar strap over his head. I decided to go look for some sheet
music and walked back towards the front of the store.
I never got there.
Pushed up against the wall, on the left hand side was a Hammond B3
organ. Someone had added a brace along the bottom of the organ at
the front, to make the front legs sturdier and to protect the foot
pedals. This must have been a B3 that had been out of the road with
some band and had wound up here.
If you think you don't know anything about the Hammond B3 organ,
you're either mistaken or haven't listened to much popular music
since the 1950s. The B3 is that throaty, mellow, rich, full warbly
sound that just makes any tune sound better, fuller, more complete.
The B3 is a keyboard player's ultimate quest. The system. The
sound. I just stood and looked at it for a long time. Then I saw
it had a price tag on it. $599. That was about 4 months worth of
my living expenses, so it was way beyond reach, but it was
incredibly reasonable for a B3. I looked around for someone to ask
if I could play it, but the counter guy was busy with Elder Whitney
and the service guy was out of sight.
Okay, I thought. Why not?
So I sat down on the bench and pushed the power switch. There was a
nice, muted pop and a slow, warming up hum. The light beside the
power switch glowed like warm charcoal. The beast was alive.
I heeled the volume pedal all the way down and tapped out a few
experimental notes, adjusted stops and draw bars to get the sound I
wanted. When I got a combination that sounded good, I started
playing House of the Rising Sun – a great tune for the Hammond, even
if it wasn't your standard mission fare.
As first, I was just playing the melody on the upper manual, then I
started to add chords on the lower one. It sounded good, so I kept
adding a little volume and getting a little fancier with the right
hand. After a couple of times through I must admit I was beginning
to forget where I was or that there were other people around. So it
might have been a while before I realized that there was a bass line
running underneath what I was playing. I turned my head and there
has Elder Lee, jacked into an amp in the aisle playing along. I
reacted like a kid caught in the cookie jar and pulled my hands off
the keys. Elder Lee grinned, nodded and kept playing the bass line.
It took me a minute to get back into it, but when he started into
the next verse I joined in.
We played through a couple more times, and I was about ready to try
to figure out how to stop and get out of there when all of a sudden,
an alto sax joined in, playing the lead that would normally be the
singer. I kept playing but looked around to see Elder Whitney
walking down the aisle with a saxophone, price tag twisting and
turning as he walked, in one hand and pack of reeds in the other.
It took a minute for him to soften a reed and get it adjusted, but
then he played along with us. After a bit we stopped, just sat (and
stood) there grinning, feeling, I suppose, a little foolish. The
red haired guy that had been looking at Fenders walked over carrying
a guitar and without a word or looking up, plugged into an amp,
turned it on and laid loudly into the opening bars of Misunderstood,
another Animals song. We just looked at him, not moving. There was
a line somewhere about appropriate music and being too "Gentile"
that we were getting fairly close it, if we hadn't already passed it.
He looked up. "You know it?" he asked. Elder Whitney looked at each
us, grinned with a "I'm on short time" look and nodded. "In B,
then" the new guy said, and started again.
I swung back around on the bench and joined him. Elder Lee picked
up the bass line, and Elder Whitney started playing the vocal
melody. By the time we got to the last chorus, we were all playing
together, singing along with Elder Whitney's sax. "Please don't let
me be mis-un-der-stood."
The red headed lead guitar player brought his guitar neck down with
sharp chop, and we all cut off together.
The last note seemed to bounce off the walls, and we all just
stopped and listened to it die out. I reached up to turn off the
B3, when Elder Lee started in on the opening of "Paint It Black."
It's just a repetition of two notes, a fourth apart, played in a
driving rhythm, but you can recognize it immediately. I knew this
one, too. So after a measure or two, I started putting some chords
behind what Elder Lee was playing. The lead guitar started playing
some rhythm chords and, when we got to where Mick Jagger would start
singing, Elder Whitney came in again on the melody. "I see a red
door and I want it painted black ..."
We rolled through the song, looking at each other as often as we
could to keep together with the time and the music. The end of
Paint It Black is a lot of fun to play; it has this strong repeated
beat that just keeps building – something like a shorter, rock
version of Ravel's Bolero. I was playing chords with both hands in
time with Elder Lee who was just hammering out the beat on the bass.
I was watching Elder Lee, which meant I was looking down towards
the back of the store as we kept building the ending. All of a
sudden, the service guy in the black tee shirt came vaulting over
the counter, and starts walking quickly down the aisle toward us
carrying a pair of sticks in his hands. I couldn't hear him, but I
could see him say something that looked like "That's enough!" And I
figured we were about to be thrown bodily out of the store. I
stopped playing, and started to warn Elder Lee, who was the closest
to the approaching doom, but facing the wrong way.
Just as he came up almost even with Elder Lee, the service guy
reached down, grabbed the bass drum part of a trap set from the
middle aisle, swung it around with one hand, moved a floor tom and a
couple of cymbal stands, pushed a short stool over with his foot and
began to beat the living daylights out of the snare, the tom, and
the bass drum. Boom! Bud-da-da-boom!
Bud-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-boom! He looked up at me, still frozen
with my hands hovering over the keyboards and just twitched his head
to his right. Play, he was saying, play. Okay, I got it. I
played. We all played. The sound was incredible in this small
narrow store. Everybody had been slowing cranking up the volume,
and we were approaching the point of pain.
We ended that one, then played a couple of other songs, doing well
at staying together, then seemed to run out of agreement of what to
play next. A couple of people jumped in with the start of different
songs. I heard what sounded like a bit of Johnny B Good and Heart of
Stone, which sounded really bad together. Everyone stopped, then
started up with a couple of other mismatched tunes. The blond
singer waved long-fingered hands in the air like albino crow's
wings. "Hold it, hold it, hold it," he said. He reached down and
unplugged the effects pedal from the lead guitar, then swapped
cables around until the Elder Lee's bass guitar was plugged into the
effects pedal and the lead guitar was plugged into the bass guitar's
amp along with the output from the pedal. Both Elder Lee and the
red-haired guy started to say something, and he just fluttered his
hands again.
"Trust me," he said. Turning to Elder Lee, he said "Just play the
lead same as him," he pushed a big thumb towards the red-haired guy.
"And you," he said to the lead guitarist, "just play like normal."
"Play what?" we all asked.
"Kicks," he said, walking back to the mike and waiting.
You might or might not remember Kicks. It was a hit song for Paul
Revere and the Raiders, has a pretty fast beat and starts off with
memorable melody line on the lead guitar. Dah-duh-duh-Dah-duh… The
service guy on the drums held one stick up and hit it with the other
one to set the tempo One,two,three,four. The blond kit waved his
arms over his head.
"Nah," he said, "not that way. Slow it down to this," and his
clapped his hands about 1/3 the speed the drummer had set.
"Okay," the service guy said and he repeated the stick beating to
the slower tempo.
On the downbeat, Elder Lee and the lead guitar started in on the
melody line. They looked at each other in shock. I think we all
turned to look at the bass amp to see if something magical had
happened. The combination of the special effects bass notes with
the lead guitar notes played through the same amp sounded like
bells, chiming out the melody. It was like listening to church
bells or a carillon. It was incredible.
The blond kid actually did know how to sing, too. This slower,
bell-driven version of Kicks was probably the finest version any of
us ever heard.
At the end, everyone took a few seconds to adjust things - Elder Lee
and the lead guitar player replugged things back the way they were,
the tall blond kid rolled up the sleeves on his work shirt, Elder
Whitney was fiddling with his reed and the service guy was adjusting
the arrangement of his drums and cymbals. I looked around, and
realized there were half a dozen people standing at the front of the
store. Just standing and looking at us. "Don't quit now! I just
got here," one them hollered. We laughed, they laughed, followed by
an awkward silence.
Someone started Hang On Sloopy. Everyone else jumped in, and we
were back into it. We ran through Sloopy and then instead of
stopping, the singer put his hand over the mike and shouted "Gloria"
to us. Without missing a beat, we all just switched to Gloria – the
original Them version, not the cover that come out later. We kept
doing that – jumping from song to song without stopping for five or
six more songs, all songs that were either E-D-A songs (like Gloria)
or E-A-B songs (like Sloopy). When no one could think of the next
song, we stopped, a beautiful crisp, clean, professional stop.
There was a burst of applause and whistles from the front of the
store. There were now about 20 people crowded in around the doorway
and the sheet music racks.
Time seemed to slow down, flow around us like cool honey, trapping
us, our music and the day in amber, glowing with an inner light.
Years afterward, I have pulled this memory out, held it up and
looked at this one day – locked in place by memory and sound.
I remember many parts of the day as if they were time-lapse
photography. Maybe because I spent a lot of time facing the
keyboards of the B3, when I turned around sometimes things seemed to
have changed in a jump from the last time I looked. People would
appear one time and disappear the next. I would notice others join
in and then stay the remainder of the time. It was an ad hoc
volunteer band, and people joined or left as they felt inspired.
I looked up once and saw a older man in a green corduroy coat and a
black dress hat playing a trumpet. Next time I looked he was gone,
replaced by really, really large guy playing the smallest 12-string
guitar I have ever seen. Next time I looked, the big guy was gone,
replaced by what had to be a college kid – gray slacks, blue blazer,
blue pinstripe button down shirt – playing a Gibson guitar. He
stayed. A couple of sax players appeared, standing beside Elder
Whitney. One of then disappeared, the baritone sax player stayed.
We were playing some other song, when a girl who wad been standing
close to the front of the crowd of listeners came over towards the
wall where the B3 was sitting and turned the power on a electric
piano beside me. She looked over at me and hollered "You mind?" I
shook my head. She pulled up a bench and began to play. At the end
of the song she stuck her hand out and said "Irene." I shock her
hand and said "Elder Olson". She gave me a very odd look.
Before I could spend much time in reflection or further
conversation, Irene started playing a string of fast, staccato
chords high on the electric piano. Elder Lee recognized it first
and started in on a bass line. I didn't know the song, but it was a
standard blues progression in E, so I joined in at about the same
time as someone else came in on the rhythm guitar. The tall blond
kid turned to the crowd and started singing:
"Let's go to the hop"
And there we were with what was an old classic, even then. There's a
part of this song that is so well known it is a cliché. The singers
build a chord, starting with the low note, where someone sings "Hop"
and holds it (so it sounds like "Hawwwwwwwwwwwwwww"), the next
person joins in a third above that "Hop", and then the next a third
above that, and so on.
When we came to that part of the song, the singer used his hands to
divide the audience – which had to be close to 40 people by now –
into groups, then picked the group on our right and brought them in
on the first "hawwwwwwwwwwwwwwp", then the next group on the next
note, until he had the whole crowd singing the whole chord.
At the next chorus, the crowd was singing along on both the "Let's
go to the Hop" and the "Oh, baby" parts, as well as building the
chord. The song was incredibly simple for me to play, so I could
watch the singer and the crowd playing off each other and I couldn't
tell you which of them was having the most fun.
At some point, the singer signaled the crowd to build their long
"Hop" chord, and somehow we managed to end the song with everyone
shouting "At the HOP!" in unison.
The place went wild. The crowd was, literally, jumping. The guitar
players were waving their fists in the air like prizefighters. I got
up from the Hammond just as Irene got up from the piano. She ran
over, grabbed me in a bear hug before I could react, then left go
and walked over to the singer and gave him a hug.
There was the click of drum sticks being put down from behind us.
"Right, then," the drummer, now back to his persona as the
behind-the-counter service guy, said. "Let me guess, no one is going
to buy anything." A laugh rippled through the crowd. "Not me,"
someone near the door hollered, "I was walking in to Loeb's but
decided come over here instead." Other people nodded or said similar
things. "That's nothing, I was sitting in Loeb's when I heard all
this and came out to find the concert," one girl said. "I was
driving by and could hear you guys over my radio," someone else added.
Elder Whitney held up a pack of reeds. "I bought the reeds," he
hollered. "Well, good," the counter guy said, pushing the drums back
where they had been, "at least I'm making money on something."
The drummer / repair counter guy walked over to the three of us. "I
know you guys," he said, "You're those Mormons I see around town."
We explained who we were (but didn't try to explain what we were
doing there). "I thought you guys were pretty weird, but I gotta say
you changed my mind today," he said. Taking our golden opportunity
we asked if he wanted to learn more about Jesus Christ. "Nope," he
said, "but y'all come back and play anytime."
And that was it.
People had already started to leave. The guys playing guitars put
their guitars back on the racks. We all put things away, turned
equipment off and walked out. It was evening. We had been playing
without a break for almost 5 hours.
"Anybody hungry," Elder Lee asked. We looked at each other. "Nah,
not anymore," Elder Whitney and I said together. So we got in the
car and drove home. Didn't get the tire fixed, didn't get whatever
it was that Elder Whitney thought he needed from a music store.
I always meant to find some way and go back and buy that B3.
I never did.
Paula
Olson <craig...@olsonhome.com> wrote:
>It was P-Day. For those not familiar with the term, it stands for
>"Preparation Day" – the one day a week for full-time missionaries to
>get prepared for the rest of the week. Preparation could mean study
>and prayer, but in most cases it meant laundry and grocery shopping
>and any other errands that needed to be managed so you could get
>through the rest of the week with food, clean clothes and bicycles
>or a car that were in working order.
[snip great story]
I think you should write a book with this and your other stories in
it. I know I'd buy it.
To bring this into something topical, I think your book should be
published by Deseret Book and you should promote it at Education Week.
Do they still have Education Week?
--
Paula
"Anyway, other people are weird, but sometimes they have candy,
so it's best to try to get along with them." Joe Bay