From the Vaults: Tickling the Ivories

      This FTV is an ode to those keyboard players out there who bring a lot of joy to those of us who don’t possess that particular skill.  Being married to a church organist doesn’t skew my view of keyboard players one bit.  She took piano lessons at an early age and at 14 was pressed into service one Sunday when the regular organist was unavailable.  Christine is fluent in both piano and organ having accompanied both school and church groups.  She has played at more weddings and funerals that you can shake a stick at.  St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Mass City has an old portable pump organ and back when the parish held an outdoor service at Twin Lakes, she got to practice that ancient craft as well.  Believe me when I say that pumping the pedals and playing at the same time are not necessarily compatible acts for mere mortals like me.  Did I mention that she also sings while she plays?

     St. Paul’s congregation will be celebrating our 125th anniversary with a special service and fellowship on August 2, 2026 (the service will begin at 10:30, with lunch to follow).  We had planned to honor our hard working organist when she reached her 50th anniversary on the bench but our plans were thwarted by COVID (just like many other things that had to be postponed during the darkest days of the pandemic).  It is high time that we are (finally) going to get around to saying ‘thank you’ to Christine for her 56 years of service tickling the ivories (just a little later than we originally planned).  To wrap up all the loose ends, we will also be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Pastor Bill Jacobson’s ordination – he has been acting as our interim administrator and ministering to our flock going on three years as we seek a new pastor.

     Perhaps it was just my lot in life to rub elbows with people (and yes, to marry someone) who speak that mysterious language called ‘keyboard’.  Before getting ‘the drum bug’, I was destined to be the musical sibling in our house.  My folks purchased a nice upright piano with the idea that my older sister would be ‘the one’.  I have no recollection of her ever touching it and before long, it was announced that my dad was building a basement fireplace for our up the street neighbors. They had bartered a deal that they would pay for the materials and his labor would be done in exchange for piano lessons.  It was only at that point that the second grade me discovered I was going to be the recipient of those lessons from Mrs. Bowers.  Maybe this was the plan all along but who knows?  It made sense that as long as we had a piano sitting in the living room, someone should learn to play it.

     None of the basic lessons from the big red Thompson Piano Lesson book were that difficult.  I learned the hand positions, time signatures, and the obligatory A to G note locations on both the sheet music and the piano keys.  I distinctly remember running home to play Good King Wenceslas for my mother and how happy she was to hear our piano actually being played.  My downfall as a piano player wasn’t learning to play;  it was the practicing that did me in.  It took me many years to understand why I plateaued and began to lose interest.  It all made sense when I heard Billy Joel tell the story about his early piano lessons (and no, there is no level where my playing approached where he took his…after all, he is The Piano Man!)

     Joel often shares the story of how his ‘banging on the piano’ at age four led to his mother having him take formal lessons.  Over the next twelve years, he became quite accomplished but also found the endless practicing to be dull.  The lessons did pique his interest in classical music so he began dabbling in making up his own tunes.  Billy found out that this was a bit of a problem when his mother would ask him what he was playing (he would make up a title).  When she asked him to play it again, he learned he had to actually pay attention to what he was inventing so he could repeat it and not make her suspicious.  He got very good at remembering and repeating songs he had made up on the spot, which for someone who made a career out of it, this was not necessarily a bad thing.

     When I heard him tell this story, it dawned on me that my progression in learning sheet music was stunted because I got used to playing songs from memory.  It took me one or two passes at a piece of music to learn it and from there on, I could play them without really having to follow the music.  Perhaps I needed a revelation of some sort to kick me in the butt and make me spend more time practicing to improve.  Unfortunately, near the end of third grade, I had just the sort of thing happen that should have lit a fire under me, but it had the opposite effect.  Our third grade teacher held an in class talent show where any students who took piano lessons were expected to play something for the class.  I do not remember how many of us performed that day, but the one who stood out was Mary Isabelle.  The comparison between her playing and mine that day really took the air out of my musical balloon.

     Mary was that one shining star that every classroom seems to have.  She was simply the best at everything we did.  She could out run and out jump everyone in our class.  She could sing and play the piano at a level that seemed well above her age.  After plunking through my piece (and no, I have buried the memory of what it was in some deep mental hole), my jaw dropped when Mary took her turn.  It did not seem real that a third grader could play that well.  I didn’t out and out quit practicing (by then I was on my own anyway and not taking lessons from Mrs. Bowers, no doubt another reason I stagnated), but my keyboard time became greatly diminished.  Luckily, fourth grade brought the prospect of taking drum lessons the next year and what I had learned about note values and rhythms was not wasted.  Learning to play the drums also gave me several opportunities to perform with Mary in high school.

     To this day I remember Mary as being one of those remarkable individuals who had so many talents.  In high school, she had a lead role in Bye Bye Birdie, the musical we did in tenth grade.  Her mother may have been the play’s director, but that certainly wasn’t why Mary got the part.  It was thoroughly enjoyable watching her work from my drum throne in the pit orchestra.  My high school band (The Twig) would play for the youth services at Messiah Lutheran Church and Mary was the music leader.  After high school, I lost touch with her and was sad to hear she died far too young in 2010 at the age of 57.  Unsurprisingly, she had completed advanced degrees in music and continued to excel in everything she did.  Married and living in Escanaba at the time of her death, it took me a few minutes to figure out who my old friend Jim was talking about when he emailed to tell me that ‘Mary St. Pierre’ had passed away.  He sensed my confusion and said, “I’m sorry – Mary Isabell…St. Pierre was her married name.”  Whenever I think back to the end of my own lackluster efforts learning the piano, I can still see her smiling as she played her piece so beautifully the day of our third grade performance day.  Perhaps Mary is one of the reasons for my life-long fondness for those who tickle the ivories well.

     The summer before my senior year in high school, I had two encounters with accomplished keyboard players.  The first was a percussion major at NMU named Larry Henry.  We were introduced by one of his drum instructors who happened to be my next door neighbor on Norway Avenue.  In July of 1970, Larry was short a drummer for a wedding gig they were booked to play at the Holiday Inn.  His ‘trio’ came over to find out if I could actually play and Larry was happy to hear I was already a member of the musician’s union.  He told me to show up at 8 PM the next Saturday night and to be sure to bring my kit (he was kidding).  I say ‘trio’ because the band was called the Larry Henry Trio but that night there were four of us with Larry on keyboards, a bass player, and a trombone player.  Without so much as a rehearsal, I played my first professional gig with three music majors.  Larry gave me some pointers on what to play for the obligatory wedding reception polkas (which is hard for a 100 percent Finn like myself to admit), but all in all, my first paying gig was a blast.

     A week or so later, I got a call from another keyboard player named Rex Bignal.  He said, “Larry Henry gave me your number.  My drummer quit on me and I have Friday and Saturday night gigs at Diamond Club for all of August.  I play a Hammond B-3 and my repertoire is pretty much instrumental cocktail lounge music.  If you can help me out, it would pay $40 a weekend.  Do you know how to play with brushes?”  I can definitely trace my love of the Hammond B-3 sound to that month of gigs with Rex.  After the first night jitters wore off, he was easy to back up.  Larry must have told him I was a senior which Rex had assumed meant ‘senior in college’.  When he saw the 16 year old me the first night, he said, “Larry said you were a senior – high school, huh?  Whatever you do, if the owner asks how old you are, tell him you are 18 and do NOT drink anything but pop during breaks.” 

      Rex knew what his clientele wanted to hear and he could really make that B-3 sing.  It was kind of weird to go from cocktail music on the weekends to rehearsing our Twig power trio stuff during the weeks leading up to our first paid job.  The gig with Rex came with a bonus.  He had purchased his previous drummer a 24 inch Zildjian cymbal and he offered to let me have it in lieu of one night’s wages.  I told him that it was worth much more than that but he just said, “Not to me – I am sure you will make better use of it than I would.”  When we played our first high school dance as The Twig, this monster cymbal sounded great and raised the value of my kit by many steps.  It also meant I had to start looking to replace my other cheap cymbals to match it, but it took a couple of years to make me a 100 percent Zildjian drummer.

      During my freshman year at Northern Michigan University, I decided to not join another band right away.  I resurrected my sister’s Montgomery Ward Airline acoustic guitar and started to teach myself the basics.  Midway through the second semester, I hooked up with three airmen from K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base who played out as Cloudy and Cool.  It happened after I had a couple of jam sessions in my basement with a keyboard player whose name I had found on a campus message board.  It didn’t seem to be going anywhere and I was about to tell him exactly that when he called and said, “There is a band from K.I. Sawyer looking for a keyboard player and a drummer.  I invited them to come to your house so we can audition.” 

      It turned out the keys guy’s mother worked at Sawyer and told one of the guys in C&C that her son and a drummer were trying to get a band together.  We did the audition and they hung around after the keys guy left.  The leader Ray said, “We have an organ player.  We need a drummer and if you want the gig, it is yours.  Do you sing?”  As I was about to cut strings with the keyboard jam guy, there was no way for me to not take this opportunity.  This was my second chance to play in a four piece band with keyboards (the Larry Henry Trio being the first).  Thus began a two year stretch of constant gigging but there was one hitch.  Not long after I joined, the keyboard player took a transfer to Greenland (yes, that Greenland, not the little town next to Mass City) and we had to come up with a new keys guy as quick as we could find one.

     The fall before Cloudy and Cool entered the picture, I decided to  give myself a new musical outlet by reaching back to my piano playing past.  It seemed that having a keyboard around to help me transcribe songs might make it easier for me to get into a new band.  I borrowed $500 from my folks and bought a used, somewhat reedy sounding organ (with an amp, mic stand, removable legs, and a hard shell case).  I was surprised how much I remembered about tickling the ivories, but it also reminded me of my inadequacies when it came to reading sheet music. 

      I picked up an ‘easy to play’ book for The Guess Who’s Greatest Hits album and began working it out.  The keyboard stuff I was dissecting helped me come to grips with how to play more chord positions on my old Airline guitar.  When my brother got me George Harrison’s triple album All Things Must Pass for Christmas, it came with a booklet containing all the songs.  I was having a ball figuring out more complicated tunes and used that knowledge to write out chord charts for new songs to play.  Many of these would finally get put to use with the Air Force guys.  With the addition of a new drummer, they decided to change their name to Knockdown.  As the only band member eligible to join the musician’s union, I also became the band’s booking agent and they were happy we were able to get more jobs as a union band.

     When the original keys guy went to Greenland, we picked up a temporary player by the name of Nick.  He was a high school student at Gwinn and had his own little compact organ.  He was fine playing with us in the summer of 1972, but couldn’t commit to playing every weekend during the school year.  Nick played great and we even worked up Uriah Heap’s Love Machine so he could show off some of his organ chops in the introduction and solo section.  When NMU resumed in the fall, I put out some index cards on the campus message boards looking for a new keyboard player.  It took less than a week for me to get a call from a Manistique native named Dave Waters.  If the name sounds somewhat familiar, he is the brother of White Pine (and later Ontonagon) science teacher Jim Waters whom I worked with for a number of years.

     Dave had his own keys and he also dabbled on bass.  He was glad to get the gig and really liked that my folks would invite him over for dinner some Sundays.  It turns out the year my dad had been at the State Police Post in Manistique, he knew Dave’s father, Dr. Waters.  Dave was in pre-med himself so we only managed a bare-bones rehearsal to get him on board and the rest was left up to him to learn on the fly.  It suddenly fell on me to show the real keyboard player in the band the little repeating organ riff in the song It Never Rains In California.  All was well until Dave announced that he would have to step out to concentrate on his studies.  When we played foosball during breaks, Dave would sit in a booth and study his chemistry notes.  We were disappointed, but it must have worked out for him as he did indeed become a doctor just like his father.

     In the space of less than a year, Knockdown was now looking for our fourth keyboard player.

Nick did a couple fill-ins for us until we were lucky enough to find another airman who played named Rich.  He was rehearsing with a group of guys but that band wasn’t coming together.  He had us meet him in a dank old garage in the basement level of a house on Baraga Street not far from the place I had picked up my cheap little organ.  We ran down a few songs and it was immediately apparent that a) he was eager to join and b) he could play anything.  Rich said he would join on one condition – we had to load up his organ and move it to my house where we rehearsed right away.  He was concerned that the other guys he was jamming with were going to be upset.  

     Rich came with a couple of positives beyond the fact that he was just a friendly, terrific human being.  He also played harmonica and the instrument we loaded into my truck on the spot was a Hammond B-3 organ with a Leslie speaker.  It was a bear to lug around but the sound he coaxed from it made it worthwhile.  It weighed enough that having it too far back in my truck bed affected the traction of my front wheels (and nobody wants to steer a truck with the front wheels barely touching the pavement).  With a cab level topper on the back of my pickup, it was no fun lugging it to the spot right behind the cab while doubled over at the waist.  At least our new house on Summit Street had a basement level garage on the downhill side of our lot so we didn’t have to tote it down any stairs to our rehearsal space.

     Now that I had a regulation Hammond B-3 sitting in my basement, my little reedy organ became an afterthought.  The speaker on the amp was starting to flutter but I was still able to sell the keys and amp for $300.  A few years down the line I started feeling guilty for not paying off my family friendly loan department with this small windfall, but my mom said it was fine as long as it went toward my tuition.  I had another ‘Billy Joel’ moment with my mother when I began noodling on the B-3.  I would come upstairs and she would ask what I had been playing.  The Moody Blues were high on my listening list so things like Nights In White Satin (from Days of Future Past), For My Lady (Seventh Sojourn), and Watching and Waiting (To Our Children’s Children’s Children) were fun to learn.  After a while, my noodling sessions would be interrupted when she would call down the stairs and request a specific song by name.  I guess it only took a decade for my mom to finally get to hear someone play the keys in our house.

 

Top Piece Video:  One of my favorite keyboard players – Australia’s own Lachey Doley featured in this Internet collaboration with Joel Hoekstra, Mike Portnoy et al.  Lachey also was on keys for Joe Bonamassa’s latest Royal Albert Hall shows when he replaced Reese Waynan’s in the spring of 2026.