What I Learned at Stanford

Riding up an elevator in the Washington D.C. Metro with my friend David, I hand him my IPod cued to a live 1969 recording of the Stanford University basketball band. I’m playing saxophone on the song, David is playing trumpet. Now we’re both pushing 60, David is in treatment at NIH in Bethesda, dying of cancer, I’m walking around blithely unaware of what I’m dying of, but I know I do want him to hear “Midnight Hour” one more time.

About 10 seconds into the recording, right on cue, he starts laughing, and I know he’s gotten to the point where, after four big introductory chords and a flourish of trumpets, there’s been an explosion in the drum section, as if the drummers had simultaneously experienced rapture but with great willpower and a communal spasm of energy had managed to fend off transport to the afterlife, and held the beat to finish the song.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but this same thing happens often in rock ‘n’ roll. The first time may have been in the 50s in “Jailhouse Rock,” when the inmate band turns down a chance to make a break out of the joint because as one of them puts it, “I wanna stick around I wanna get my kicks.”

The whole notion of “getting my kicks” was foreign to me when I joined the Stanford Band. In the winter of 1969 I was more or less fresh off the plane from Kansas, plopped down in chaotic, war-protesting, drugged-out, miniskirted-topless-and-worse California and playing rock songs with this zoo band. I was playing arrangements of big hits I hadn’t ever heard, not because the radio wasn’t playing them in Kansas, but because I wasn’t listening. I spent the fall of 1968 in a marching band that didn’t march but scattered, that never did disappearing diamonds in their halftime shows, instead performing theme shows on birth control and salutes to the parts of the body.

By the time basketball season came around, I was hooked. I know the moment it happened. It was about a month into the previous fall and we were on the practice field rehearsing an arrangement by a tuba player named Phil Imming. Imming was cool, what the Band called “godlike,” what Imming himself called “fat,” as in, “You’re fat, man.” He was tuba stocky, surfer blond. He wore T-shirts, shorts and a half-smile.

In these field arrangements saxophones seldom got the melody line. The melody went to the brass, the trombones or trumpets, people who could make themselves heard outdoors or in a noisy gym. Saxophones ended up playing background chords, whole notes, rests, more whole notes.

But in rock ‘n’ roll arrangements we also got the backbeats. I just didn’t know yet what to do with what I got. So we’re on the field and we’re playing Imming’s arrangement of Midnight Hour and Imming is walking up and down the line of players in formation, listening to what’s coming out of the horns.

As he came down the line I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what the song sounds like in microcosm?” When he got to me he stopped and listened, and I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what my dits sound like?” Because that’s what I was playing, back beat dits, on the second and fourth beats—rest, dit, rest, dit—short, precise, military band dits. “Who’s gonna hear these dits, anyway?”

Well, nobody, of course. At this point, I probably hadn’t heard Wilson Pickett’s original version of the song, and I certainly hadn’t heard Chuck Berry’s dictum “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it.” On the Wilson Pickett version, there are no dits on the backbeat. There are big, fat, solid BOPs, that nobody could ever possibly lose.

And that’s what Imming started singing to me as I played my dits—rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—until my dits got longer, and heavier, and more solid—rest, dit, rest, dit, rest, dat, rest, dot, rest, bot, rest, bop, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—and Imming smiled and said, “You’re fat, man.”

I also studied history of the English language and the French Revolution and biology and German at Stanford. But the most important thing I learned was the importance of the backbeat, and those who play it.