Suck and Blow Read Free Page B

drummers went through that, particularly because they were rock drummers and he wanted a big-band drummer. The drummers’ love of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham was unacceptable to Mr. Biancosino, but if you were a high school drummer inthe eighties, you loved John Bonham. At some point he’d get so frustrated that he’d play the drums himself, and he was terrible at it.
    He really did love the kids, though, and wanted us to succeed as a top-notch band, which we did, and we had the trophies to prove it. I still have a couple of my own; they’re in my office at home: Best Soloist trophy from 1985 Carteret Jazz Festival and the Verona Jazz Festival Outstanding Soloist Award.
    The songbook, though, was an advanced repertoire compared to most other high school bands. Chan Kinchla, my future guitarist, was on the Princeton High School football team and remembers being mortified by this. At halftime the other team would have a marching band parade show, then we’d bring out a little stage and play Glenn Miller. Seeing our big band come out at halftime was not a source of pride or inspiration for the squad.
    We played these aggressive competitive-style jazz songs with super-challenging time signatures, crazy-ass solos, and ridiculous horn parts. They were all written by some asshole at a music college somewhere who saw a business in creating weird things for high school bands who wanted to participate in the competition circuit.
    But even though Mr. B certainly could be intense, particularly when it came to the drummers, I escaped all of that. We’d play “Whiplash,” which Hank Levy wrote in 7/4, or “Chain Reaction,” which was in 13/8, and everyone else had to learn these very precise parts. But not me. I was free to make up what I wanted because there weren’t any harmonica parts written. There was no one to tell me if I was doing it wrong; there was no harmonica authority. There was a trumpet authority, there was a trombone authority, there were authorities for all the other instruments, but I had this great autonomy.
    I was an attraction, and Mr. B would just point to me for a solo, and that’s all I had to do. I would watch my band leader yell at everybody else while I would just sit there. On the rare occasion when he did yell at me, it would be something vague like, “Could you make it a little more peppy?” or, more commonly, “Don’t be such a smartass.” That’s when I would excel; I would soar when they just left me alone. The key lesson was that there are times when you should fear authority, but you certainly don’t have to listen to it.
    I took a clean, unused plunger to make a homemade harmonica amplifier and plugged it into a bass amp. I cut a larger hole into the end of the plunger where the stick normally goes in and wedged a tape recorder microphone into the contraption.
    Then Mr. B put a few more rock songs into the repertoire within the confines he deemed acceptable. We did the Ghostbusters theme and “Lapti Nek,” the song they play in Jabba the Hurtt’s palace in Return of the Jedi, which was a funk in E-flat, so I could jam on that. My harmonica was a selling point for letting him do this, and instantly I went from being a weird mutant into being the big man on campus.
    When you start out so antisocial, it’s a pretty lonely existence. I’d already made my peace with all of that. So to turn it around within the time I was in high school seemed to me like it was out of a movie. I felt like Molly Ringwald.
    That band was the first team I ever belonged to. At first they didn’t know what to make of me—they thought I was an antisocial belligerent—but eventually we became friends. The first girl I ever fell in love with was the alto sax player. I would have a crush on her forever and write tons of songs about her.
    But although that whole experience transformed me in many ways, the one thing it