My first band was actually playing music with my father and my sisters.
Around the same time that I started playing guitar, my sisters became interested in playing music, too, mostly through their infatuation with The Hudson Brothers, who are worthy of their own blogpost here in the near future. Brett Hudson played bass, so Phyllis played bass — a beautiful blond Fender Precision Bass. And Mark Hudson played drums, so Karen played the drums -- a pearlescent light blue Gretsch kit with crazy-heavy Zildjian jazz cymbals (which I still have). And Dad played piano. But more importantly, he picked the songs we played and wrote out the music for us.
Vince was a very talented sax, clarinet, and flute player, but his special skill was *arranging*, imagining what the song should sound like overall, given the available personnel, from a four-piece rock group through a 20+ person big band, and exactly how each of the instruments would contribute to that whole. He played the whole band, so to speak. He wrote out each part using black India ink and a battered fountain pen, and he wrote these parts on very heavy-duty, cream-colored music manuscript paper, stock that would withstand lots of handling and still stand up straight when placed on a music stand, which we each had in front of us.
This may not sound like much of a rock band, but the first song Dad wrote out for us to play was Carole King’s “It’s Too Late,” which begins with a funky two-chord vamp, then rises into a beautifully sad and melodic chorus. The chord changes are pretty complicated, actually, and the lyrics are an adult’s post-mortem on a failed relationship. As I look back, I realize that it was/is a pretty challenging song, all things considered, especially for newbies. But Vince clearly trusted both his skills and our ability to rise to his expectations, which we did.
Dad was an excellent music teacher. I took one year’s worth of sax lessons with him as a sophomore in high school, and most of what I know now about how to teaching *writing* effectively, I learned from watching him teach me how to play the sax. And one of his cardinal messages was simply this: “As soon as it stops being fun, the kid is going to put down the instrument.” I wish more music teachers, writing teachers, art teachers, shop teachers, French teachers, chemistry teachers, math teachers, etc., understood this reality. I understand that there are great forces at work making school a simply miserable experience for all involved these days, but I am seeing burnt-out and pissed off first-year college students who have long ago lost any joy in learning. It's heart-breaking.
But Dad kept our little band fun. We practiced when we felt like it, and didn’t when we didn’t. We made good progress. He praised us vociferously and clearly enjoyed himself, too, while it lasted. We eventually lost interest, probably because we kids just didn’t want to spend that much time with each other, being teenagers, after all. But he never gave us any grief about it, which I still find astonishing, given that we were letting go of the thing closest to his heart. I can only imagine that he didn’t want us to have any negative associations with music whatsoever, which remains an incredible gift of foresight and love. It has helped me shake off all manner of bad feelings about music that came afterward.