DETUNED PLAYER PIANO

Last month, I was invited to join a band. I said yes, despite the fact that I’m pretty booked up schedule-wise, and don’t have the free time to both rock and roll. (I chose roll.) Really, I was just flattered to be asked. It’s not often that one asks to do these things, and I’ve never seen a movie worth watching where the protagonist says No to these types of things.

At the first practice the lead singer, Spencer, who just so happens to be my best friend’s brother, told us all to tune down our instruments a half step. I obliged, because it was going to be easier on his vocal chords and easier on mine, too. But it made me think for a minute about the power of alternative tuning and what it means for the artist who chooses to play on an unorthodox set of strings.

I get headaches when I haven’t played the piano in a long while. I’m sure that sounds pretentious, but it’s true. If you know me, you know I’m a pretty laid back guy. I don’t raise my voice often, and rarely get in verbal altercations. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get angry, and that I don’t have a lot of anger to vent. I do, and, since it’s illegal to beat cats, I’ve found playing the piano is the only method I have of letting off what little steam I build up.

When I moved from New York to Los Angeles in September of last year, I sold the really nice keyboard I’d had since I was seventeen, the one that I’d recorded two albums with, the one that I’d trucked to all the bars in Greenwich Village for a  few rounds of sparsely attended shows.

Why did I do it? I don’t know, really. I think I was so piano’d out by the end of the musical that I wasn’t feeling sentimental. Or maybe it was because it felt like it was an artifact from a life I thought I didn’t want, and therefore wasn’t going to live anymore. Whatever the reason, when I showed up in LA with barely a thing to call my own and the headaches that often accompany moving didn’t go away after a month, I decided it was time to buy a piano.

I checked Craigslist, skimmed over pictures of waterstained upright pianos in poorly lit apartments until I found a posting for one that was in my price range, which was about five hundred bucks of my dad’s money. I called the number listed and talked to a woman who sounded very pleasant and a little surprised to hear from me. She said the piano was in great condition, but then admitted that she knew so little about pianos that she probably couldn’t be taken on her word.

That weekend, I drove out to their home in Altadena. They lived in a giant, two story mini-mansion at the end of a cul de sac. A place with bright red doors and two SUV’s out front. The two of them – both in their fifties, fit, graying – lingered in the living room with while I played scales on the piano and pretended I knew what I was doing. They told me that they’d kept the thingin a cabin up in Big Bear, and that the reason it sounded so awful is because it hadn’t been tuned in over a decade. I nodded and pushed the pump near the pedals, listening to the air escape through the cracks in the top. The player piano wouldn’t play, but that was fine with me. I didn’t intend of putting on any shows. I intended to beat the hell out of it and maybe finish that musical that I keep saying I’m going to write.

The keys were all brand new, and the finish matched my new living room carpet perfectly. Beyond the fact that it sounded like bean bags being shot into sheet metal, there was no reason for me to buy that sucker right there on the spot. So I did. I whipped out my checkbook and the couple shook my hand. I should have suspected something was wrong when they volunteered to pay for the moving.

It wasn’t until I had the piano moved into my house and the tuner showed up that I realized I had made an unfortunate purchase. “These strings are all too old to try and tune,” he said, his hands gripped the sides of his tool belt. “It’s be adding another couple tons of pressure to them, which would probably snap most, if not all of them.” I asked him how much it would cost to get a whole new set of strings and he said : “I’d do it for two thousand.”

I was furious. How could I have been so stupid? Of course the thing was going to end up costing me 2,500 bucks before it was of any worth.  I was so angry that I canceled my evening plans and spent the night getting high out of my mind and punching the keys until they howled.

That was almost a year ago, and now here I was in my best friend’s living room, playing a uniquely tuned guitar with some uniquely tuned people. Maybe being completely out of tune isn’t the total hindrance as I thought it was. Most people are playing the same chords in the same tired rhythms. I have a piano that is ugly on the ears. But what if it takes a new perspective on an old instrument to create something really new?

Advertisement