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- [00:02]
A
Do you have a local decision you're stuck on? Consider applying for the Strong Towns accelerator beginning June 1st. The accelerator is for people already moving work forward in their community, whether that's a street redesign, a needed policy change, or a project that's hit a wall. Bring your current challenge and work through it with Strongtown staff and peers who understand the constraints that come with local implementation. Applications are open now. Join us and leave with a clear next step for your visit strongtowns.org accelerator to claim your spot.
- [00:57]
B
Hello and welcome to OPZone. This is Norm with Strong Towns and as you have heard, we've made some changes to the upzoned podcast and I would love to learn from you how you feel about the new format. We're rolling it out with three participants talking about articles from the news and thinking about them from a Strong Towns perspective. And so some things are still the same in the podcast and others we're modifying and we're working with. We'd love to hear your ideas. Suggestions ready A shout out to several members that have sent in articles that we've been able to use in our podcast. Love that type of engagement and really appreciate it. Want to say if you want to send us some insights into how we can improve the upzone podcast, email us@podcastrongtowns.org now. This week we are on the heels of the Strong Towns National Gathering that took place in Fayetteville, Arkansas last week. It was fantastic. We had 300 enthusiastic advocates in a room together talking about Strong Towns ideas, talking about action, talking about random things as well, going on walking tours and it was. It was awesome. I hope, as was shared with the attendees there, that you will be able to join us next year in Sacramento for the Strong Towns National Gathering. We don't yet know the dates. We know roughly it'll be in the spring, May, June, somewhere in that window. But we know now where we're going to be going, which is Sacramento. The great folks with Strong Sac Town, our awesome local conversation there, are excited to welcome the Strong Towns movement even more fully into the spotlight in Sacramento coming up soon. Now, along with that, we had in our national gathering in Fayetteville a fantastic keynote address by Sam Quinones. Sam Quinones has been on the Strong Towns podcast before and is also a regular speaker and author and he talked in the final part of his message to us as National Gathering attendees about the power of the tuba. And it reminded me of this great episode that ran on the Strong Towns Podcast that we're actually going to play for you today here. This is a great discussion that Chuck and Sam have together. And again, if you haven't checked out the Strong Towns podcast, definitely go and do so. That's our flagship podcast. And then Upzone is more of our current affairs podcast. But just for this week, we're going to run a special episode, a replay of one of my favorite episodes of the Strong Towns podcast with Sam Quinones on tubas and the power that they provide in terms of community resilience, in terms of creating a great connective tissue within our places. And we certainly need this. What I love about it too, in this episode, as you hear the discussion, you'll hear those notes of of hope, the notes of endurance, notes of confidence that despite all manner of troubles and ails, that there are things that we can learn from humble communities. Gatherings of tuba players that know that they themselves are can never be the simple single star of the show, but are always better when in performance with others, participating in making bringing about the fullness of what a band's sound can truly be. And if I think about a Strong Towns member and and if I think about someone that is actively laboring in your community, you know that you don't need the spotlight. But when you are present and participating in what you're doing, you actually bring out the sound. You bring out the fullness of what your place can be. And so with that, I hope you're inspired. Take an opportunity to listen to this fantastic conversation between Sam and Chuck and would love again. If you've got feedback on the Epzone podcast, email us podcastrongtowns.org also look ahead. I look forward to having you in Sacramento and with that, I hope you enjoy this special episode, a replay episode of the Strong Towns podcast on our upzone feed today. Thanks so much. Enjoy.
- [05:00]
C
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. I don't even know where to start because usually when I start a podcast where I'm interviewing an author, I have notes, lines of questioning. Sam Quinones. You've heard him before. I think this is like your fourth time on the podcast. I know we talked about your first two books, the least of Us, Dreamland. I know we talked about an article you wrote about a town in Kentucky and something. Every year I put together a list of my favorite books, top five books of the year. You've been on that list at least once and I think twice.
- [05:34]
D
Thank you.
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C
I guarantee you you will be on the list this time because this is one of the greatest books I've ever read and I Think I have to tell people before we start. This has nothing to do with strong towns, but everything to do with strong towns. Sam Quinones, welcome back to the Strong Downs podcast.
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D
Oh, Chuck, it's so nice to be with you, man. Thank you very, very much. And I've always appreciated our conversations. Very thoughtful and very cool. So it's wonderful to be here, man. Thank you.
- [06:01]
C
I'm going to rely on you to tell a lot of stories here because I literally have. This is the first podcast I've ever done where I have no notes. I just have this book and you're talking to a band nerd. My wife and nerd. My kids were band nerds. I did percussion. So I'm a rhythm person and I'm close to the, the bass and keeping the line. Every aspect of this book was so beautiful. It felt like. I gotta tell you, there were a couple times where I like got teary eyed. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is. And your writing is so good. So anyway, I'm thinking the place we should start is the idea of the perfect tuba. What, what is the concept of the perfect tuba?
- [06:43]
D
Well, here's my idea. I never was in band. I don't play the tuba. I don't play any wind instrument.
- [06:49]
C
Yeah.
- [06:50]
D
But this book just kind of took me over.
- [06:55]
C
I can tell.
- [06:57]
D
One reason was so normally I'm a crime reporter, Right. My two books prior to this are about heroin and oxycontin. And then the one, the last one was about fentanyl and methamphetamine. And I've been doing this kind of work for years and years. And I just felt like this need to do something different after years of writing about people who, who were searching for happiness from something they buy. You want to write about people who are finding some kind of inspiration from hard work, from what they do with their own capabilities and honing those capabilities, talents and capabilities. And so years ago, I did a bunch of stories about the tuba. Well, two stories about the tuba's popularity in LA when I was working for, for the LA Times. And after that I just began interviewing tuba players. Because, you know why? I don't know why. I don't know why. Except for that they were people who loved what they were doing and there was absolutely no promise of wealth or fame from doing any of this. They just loved what the tuba showed them they could do or be. And it was just this wonderful revelation and I thought that was a powerful thing. Along the way, though, what kept me going was I had this Conversation with, with one tuba player, guy named Bob Carpenter, who was also an engineer at that point, I think he was working for NASA. This was many, this was a good number of years ago now. And he at one point told me, you're having this on conversation. And I would just call these tuba players up. And I say, hey man, tell me about your life. And. And Bob told me about this. He says, have you heard about the York tubas? And I'm like, I had not. There are these two Holy Grail tubas, this magical legend. There's only two of them. And they are the most beautiful, wondrous tubas ever invented. And I'm sitting here on the other end of the line going, what the hell is this? But sure enough, sure enough, there's these two tubas made by the York Instrument Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the mid-1930s, made for a tuba player for the Philadelphia Symphony who was physically not. These were enormous tubas, the biggest tubas of their time. Although now they're fairly commonly this, the size is fairly common. Back then was not. And this tuba player was, call him portly.
- [09:22]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [09:22]
D
Had no lap, like I said, and he couldn't play it. So he was a well known tuba player. Philip Donatelli. He sells the tuba to what his prize student named Arnold Jacobs, who at the time was like 16. And Arnold Jacobs takes one tuba. Donatelli says to the York company, I need a tuba that sounds like the base organ, you know, this bone shadowing thing. And so they make him one, but little they didn't realize this, but York had made another one, a prototype. And so there's these two tubas. Jacobs plays the one for many, many years and then hears that there's another one out there and buys it in the mid-50s. By now he's working for the Chicago Symphony. And with his tuba and his spectacular virtuoso skill on the tuba, it turns these York tubas into this legendary, mythical Holy Grail tubas. There's like one guy goes, it's an honor just to be in the same room with these tubas. And nine companies. Your company goes really falls on hard times. It becomes a munitions factory in World War II. And after that, it never recreated this wondrous workshop in which they created probably the best tubas in America, probably the world for that matter. After that, they were never the same. They went to, they went out of business this in 1972. And so all these companies through the years try to replicate these two tubas because there's this huge Demand for them. All these tuba players are coming out of the water. There's a big growth in tuba players,
- [11:05]
C
and they call it the Stradivarius of tubas.
- [11:07]
D
The Stradivarius of tubas. Jacobs is part of. Part of this. He talks about his tubas all the time. And. And it's. It's a time, too, when tubas players are looking for heroes. Jacobs is one of these guys who play these masterful solos and everything, and they're just this incredible players. And part of that is that there are these two tubas that are just this wondrous thing. And. And so I thought that was one of the coolest stories I'd ever heard. And so I kept on doing interviews with tuba players as I wrote the Dreamland book, and then as I wrote the least of us, always thinking at some point it would be so cool to get back in to this tuba thing and find out and see if I could tell the story of these two perfect tubas. And that's kind of what led to this book. It kept me going. Like, in the back of my mind, that's the most cool story I've ever heard, you know, And. And everyone's trying to replicate. No one can. And then I met Bob Carpenter and another guy, Tom Treece, who were two tuba players and engineers in Orlando, Florida, who together, without any help from any corporate R D budget or anything like that, just thought that they had data could. That could show that they probably could re replicate the two perfect York tubas in ways that other companies had failed. And so that's kind of the story that really got this whole project going.
- [12:38]
C
I've got a nephew who's done Tuba Christmas. We used to go watch that. I feel like the parts of the book that captured me, particularly at the beginning where you were talking about, you know, this guy's got a tuba, he's playing it. His role is to play these quarter notes in the back of the room. Basically, like a tuba is filling out the sound.
- [12:59]
D
Yes.
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C
And it's a subtle instrument a lot of times because it just kind of sits there and does, like, thicken up the sound. And you described how they pulled out this tuba. The conductor, like, turned his head. People in the audience, like, perked up. They're just this, like, astounding thing that for people who are close to music. I feel like I'm close to music, but I'm not. I'm not a professional musician. I don't have the ear that some of these great people do. I. I think when you are affecting people who are one or two degrees away from the virtuoso. Or maybe even more than that. To me, that is saying, this is like Leonardo da Vinci level. Really quick. I was walking through the Uffizi Museum in the Uffizi Museum in Florence. It's amazing, amazing, amazing thing. Room after room after room. And then you turn the corner and what you see is like 10x greater than anything else. And that's Leonardo da Vinci stuff. And it just blows you away. And as a simpleton, I can recognize the difference. Right. You described to me was like that difference in a. In a tuba. Right?
- [14:12]
D
Yes. And. And also, you know, the. The interesting thing about the tuba is the other thing that connected up to my. My. My last two books is it feels very much to me like the tuba is. Is a community enhancer.
- [14:25]
C
Yeah, right.
- [14:26]
D
It builds out. Without a band, you cannot have a football team. Without a good tuba section in the band, you cannot have a. The band just falls. Falls apart. It's about cohesion and bringing people together. For tuba players, part of the problem with that is that they very frequently get typecast, like, oh, the tuba can only play whole notes, or you're really not up for the great musical virtuosity that we find in, say, violin or trumpet or what have you. And so that's part of what happened. There's this kind of tuba civil rights movement that emerged. But the tuba itself has this enormous power to bring people together. And without it, like I say, you can't really have a good marching band without a good solid tuba section. To me, that was also part of this story. You had these virtuosos coming out of the woodwork now and really trying to perfect their. Their skills. But the. The tuba itself was this gorgeous instrument of community enhancement and. And yet. And yet completely ignored. Like the same with band directors. I wanted to write about band directors because for. For the same reason they did what they did, because they loved it without any promise of wealth or fame. And also, what is band directing except for bringing people together? And where do you get your great joy is watching the lights go on in the eyes of your students who will get. Kind of figure it all out. You know, it's this beautiful thing. And that's kind of. It was like one startling, I don't know, realization or something after another in this that connected the instrument to issues that I'd been writing about in my previous books, but also to ideas that I think we have gotten away from in this country, which is hard work, you know, focus in this time of babbling, distraction, you don't get anywhere with. With band or tuba without really quiet focus and patience and collaboration. In a time where we're so isolated, this collaboration with others, it seemed to me like almost radical ideas, you know, and this. And all through this instrument that everyone knows about and no one cares about,
- [16:50]
C
I was struck over and over and over. How do you make a narrative out of this concept? And it's beautiful what you've done with this book. The Roma High School stuff was just astounding. I had this vision that you laid out of these seventh graders, eighth graders, playing a note over and over and over, this repetition. And it's almost like the nuns wrapping you on the wrist going, no, like, you know, again, again, again. And these kids like showing up and doing it and having it be such a meaningful alternative to other things in their lives. I actually went on the website, and the website has a picture of all the, you know, students and every. It's so beautiful. I. I'm in love with Roma High School now. Can. Well, you know, how did you come across them? Like, why.
- [17:44]
D
This is. Yeah, I. I came across Roma at a. At a tuba conference, believe it or not. I went to two tuba conferences. This one was in Phoenix and met tuba professors from the. The South Texas. This is all the Rio Grande Valley, which is where Mexico and the United and US Meet, and it's the Rio Grande leading to the Gulf of Mexico. So you had these tuba professors there, and. And they brought all these kids with them, dozens of kids. I'm like, you know, it's. I love the tuba, but it's awfully hard. You're training these kids to play the tuba. There's no jobs in that. And he says, yes, that's normally true, except. Except they're all going home to be band directors. They're not going to be tuba performers. And there are many jobs down there. And I go, well, how many band instructors do you have per high school? I. I was normally used to, like, what, three, four. No, there's like, nine, ten. I'm like, what? What are you talking about? And. And that led me into this whole story of how it is that they teach band in many schools down in the Rio Grande Valley. And it. It led me back to this strange character named He Nutt, who was like this Buddhist monk of band directing variant. Didn't care about the world, you know, frivolities. He just wanted to teach proper band baton technique and this kind of thing. He sets out and he's doing this In a school in Chicago. He teaches all these people, all these students, they go out, spread his word of proper, the gospel of proper baton technique. A lot of them end up in Brownsville, Texas way at the very end of the Rio Grande. And from there those ideas begin to percolate up through the Rio Grande Valley. To one guy, a guy named Al Cortinas, who is a band director for many years. Band has changed his life and he believes that band can change kids lives constantly. He's a complete believer in this because he saw it in his own life. At the same time as he is teaching, he's only teaching with three band directors. And this is not enough. These are areas where kids are too poor, they can barely afford instruments, they cannot afford music lessons. And two things begin to happen that lead him to transform Roma High School band into what it became. One is that the cartels, drug cartels, are really expanding during these years and offering an alternative. Hey, easy money, big fancy trucks, all that kind of stuff at the same time. And it's competing for the attention of his kids. And at the same time, band competition is getting much more severe and really favoring wealthy schools, schools that have lots of money for new instruments and lessons and all that. And he thinks if we don't change how we do band down here, we're going to lose all our kids to the cartels and we will never be able to compete with these wealthy schools from Austin and Dallas and so on. And so he devises a whole, whole system, comes to Roma, is hired at Roma with a system of creating top flight bands from kids who can't afford music lessons. And the way he does that is convince, to their great credit, the school district, the school board and all to invest heavily in band instructors. So no longer is it 3 per high school, now it's like 9 or 10. But they don't just teach high school, they start with sixth grade. So if you're teaching clarinet, you start teaching sixth grade clarinetists. And then you meet in the middle school and teach them and then up into the high school and you have your lessons with them. And then after that it's marching band practice. So this is true for French horn and tuba and drums and all the rest. And all these instructors become the teachers these kids cannot afford. And when he does that, then he begins to create a huge, and starting very, very strong with the young kids, real strict attention to detail, playing these notes nice and slow. And you would think the kids would hate it, right? But actually the kids are like on the edge of their seats. We got to do this 1B flat note just right. It's kids will. Al's. Al's great insight, and it's not. It's a common insight, but it's. It bears repeating constantly, is that kids will meet the standards that you set. If you set them low, they'll meet it. If you set them high, they'll meet that, too. Except just don't tell them that it's going to be hard. And so he creates this entire system of transforming extraordinarily poor kids, some of the poorest kids in America, into bands that by the time they're in their 10th, 11th, 12th grade, are competing head to head with the wealthiest suburbs of Dallas and Austin and Houston and so on. And as one guy said, we are competing with kids who get their lessons from the symphonies of Texas, and we're not going to stop until we, you know, break that door down. And they've been competing at that level for. For 20 years now.
- [22:51]
C
It's astounding. You said many times in the book how a kid can't afford an instrument. Like, I want to play trumpet, but I can't afford it. So I'm going to take the free instrument the school has, which is a tuba, because the school generally provides tubas because they are so expensive, but you don't own it and you can't take it home. You talk about a culture of tubas. It almost feels like there's a sorting mechanism where the poorest kids, the kids not in the limelight, the kids who are just going to be like the steady backbone of it, wind up playing tuba. Is that a.
- [23:25]
D
That's very true. That's a great answer. Yes, exactly right. And maybe because you have to try harder for something, you know, you are marginalized. And I've been writing most of my life about marginalized people, drug addicts, but also my two previous books. I lived 10 years in Mexico and wrote about people on the margins of Mexico. That was my first book. In fact. I find that that's where you find fantastic stories. Talk to people who. I don't really hang. I've been a reporter 38 years. I could count on one hand the number of celebrities I met. I don't want to talk to a celebrity. I don't want to be around them. They're sure, they're nice people, but I don't. They don't have stories that would interest me, tuba players, because they're really, really on the fringe. Band is already on the fringe, sadly, but already on the fringe. In most kind of social circles in high schools. Right. Tubas are on the fringe of the band. Right. It's like there's a very different group of people, mostly boys. Most people don't play the tuba because they wanted to. They play the tuba because they're late for band class. On the first day of seventh grade or sixth grade, all the other instruments are taken. And that's why I wanted to write about them too, because they nevertheless find this deep, enduring passion for this instrument. How hard work, persistence through failure, patience, focus. All of these attitudes that we as a culture have. Have gotten away from. And we. And one symptom of that, I think, is our drug addiction problems, you know, that we've got. And so, yeah, it attracts kids who are. Have been told they're not worth much. And the tuba shows them you are actually worth a lot if you put your heart into it, if you really dive into it. And that's the story of a lot of kids. Well, adults, by the time I'm talking to them.
- [25:18]
C
In the book, you and I have talked in the past about community, meaning a lot of these things being an antidote to.
- [25:27]
D
Yeah.
- [25:28]
C
How do we get people out of drugs? How do we get them into recovery? How do we help them not end up there? And to me, as I'm reading your book, you say it in the margins, but I feel like there's a big part of this is saying, hey, having a high school band or having, you know, music in your life and joining with others in that way, there's the high bar of entry to. It is your time and energy, not your money and your resources and all that.
- [26:01]
D
Yes, exactly. And my evolution on this was very much like a journalist. I kept on doing this, and these ideas gradually occurred to me. When I started this project, I thought, I don't want to do anything that has anything to do with addiction anymore. I want to write about something entirely different. And through the stories, writing the stories about kids and these band directors and these two of players just. I thought I was on, and then it took me right back. So, first off, I would say that what is essential in confronting the problems of addiction and all that that we face is that you need to find purpose. And the way you find purpose, though, is not purpose a bolt of light. You. You don't find passion for something by some kind of hit by lightning. Oh, I love this. Now I'm going to do. No, the way you do it is you really dig in and you work hard. And that's why the. The subtitle of the book is Forging fulfillment from the Basehorn Band and hard Work. I wanted to stand up and exalt hard work. So often in corporate marketing, it's like, no, take it easy. And. And so for a while, I was just focused on. On this as, you know, okay, these kids are in music. But then I realized what they have found is through the tuba or through band directing, what have you, this great purpose. And then the perfect tuba became a metaphor for almost anything that you find in your life that you love so much that you want to put in a lot of hard work to get better at it. Sacrifice, postpone that gratification because you can feel that you are getting down the road. You are going to be really good at this if you do this. And so it became almost like the perfect tuba became almost like a metaphor for any way that people find to avoid drug addiction. And frequently you don't avoid drug addiction unless you have that deep purpose in life. You find something else. Drugs fill a void frequently. And my feeling is, okay, in this case, it was tuba players. But it could be you just have this deep, deep love for gardening or landscaping or your new small. Your lunch truck business, or you want to be a great, great police officer. Or at a certain point, the perfect tuba became a metaphor for all of the things that. That we love to do, that we require lots of work on our stuff that keep us really centered and moving. And these are enormously important to creating strong towns, healthy, healthy communities.
- [28:48]
C
Yeah. I don't think that you get rid of obsessive behavior. I think you channel it in different ways. And I had to laugh about the guy who built the perfect room for the perfect tuba. It was a side story, and it wasn't like. But can you tell that story? Because I.
- [29:04]
D
Sure, sure.
- [29:04]
C
Yeah.
- [29:05]
D
No, it's.
- [29:05]
C
I found myself enraptured by this idea that, you know, a tuba needs a room. Right.
- [29:13]
D
Yes. This is Jim Self, one of the former USC tuba professors, a big player on lots of soundtracks, movie soundtracks. And I went to him because of his career, and I wanted to. Talked. What's that?
- [29:27]
C
He did the Jaws theme.
- [29:29]
D
No, he didn't do Jaws. I was another. It was Tommy Johnson, his mentor, but he did Close Encounter of the. Of the third, those five notes. Communicating with this alien spaceship. Yeah. Anyway, I go over to his house a couple of times and talking with him, and I'm just wanting to see what the stories are. And then he said, yeah. And I. So I built this practice hall on top of my house this Is on the Hollywood Hills. In the Hollywood Hills, if you're going to add to your property, it's going to be a swimming pool or tennis court, right? So this guy, Jim Self, wonderful man, wants a room. He's all his life practiced in practice rooms at universities that are like 10 by 10. That's large enough for a piccolo, that's large enough for a trumpet. The sound wave, the largest tube is 36ft long. He wants a. A room where his tuba of sound can be liberated. The liberation again. This is so much a part of liberating. When you play the tuba, it's breaking from the ideas of what other people have about the instrument and therefore have about you as a musician. It's. It's this beautiful story of liberation. He wants to liberate the sound. And so over a period of years, at great, great expense, he. He clears away part of a hill, literally carves out a part of a hill, builds this 38 foot long tuba practice hall, which I've been in several times. It's enormous. And he also says, I learned that the best way to get the best acoustics are when you have a hall that's twice as long as it is wide. So it's 19ft wide, 38ft long. Long enough for his tuba sound wave to move like a zoo, you know, large enough to. So you're not just cooped up in this little cage. It's the liberation. But here's the other thing, Chuck, that's the other thing about that is it was also his own liberation. You know, he had been looking for ways of being a full tuba player all his life. And you would think, well, he's doing all these soundtracks and teaching, he does lots of recitals. But he felt that it was still kind of part of that he needed to do this for his own liberation. He had the money, he had the ability. It became kind of an obsession for a while, for several years, as he finally built this thing. And then it became the other thing that almost any arts or group of people need, which is a community center, a place to meet and see other people. And he's had many, many recitals in that hall. And it's a remarkable thing. And I did not know the story. It took me a while to figure out. I'm sitting in the story here. This is 38ft long. It's long enough for a 30, a B flat tuba sound wave wave, which is 36ft long. And I just thought, you know, these stories, they, they come when, as you immerse yourself in them. That's why I don't do interviews for an hour and say, okay, that's enough. You know, I do it over and over and over. Like with Jim, I think I did three or four for a long time. And finally being. I said, wait, time out. This thing you built just for this. Yeah, yeah, right. And because. Because the tuba showed me all the possibilities of life. All of a sudden I realized I could. Architect told me, you could just remove part of that hill and you'd have them. And I was like, holy crap, man. I'm going to build my own tuba practice hall, which is 38ft long in 19ft wide. And. And it's one of those stories, man, when you think. I mean, for me, this is why I'm a journalist. It just bowls me over when I hear some of the stuff, but it doesn't come immediately. You gotta dig. You gotta dig. You gotta be in it for a long time.
- [33:18]
C
Well, you think you know someone. I don't know him, obviously, but you think about someone who has the capacity to do that. Would you want to travel the world? And wouldn't you rather have a fancier car? And when. It's astounding to me when people do amazing things out of love like that, where it's like, I. I really want this sound and I'm going to chase this fleeting thing.
- [33:43]
D
Yes.
- [33:44]
C
So that I can. Because that's my, like, love and joy is hearing that full sound completely.
- [33:51]
D
And yeah. There's another guy in the book, Tom Treece, who's one of these two Orlando tuba player engineers who wanted so badly to kind of pursue re. Replicating these two perfect tubas. And in. In Chicago. And Tom spent his whole life like that. I mean, he was a tuba player from like 15 on, but he also became a candy maker. He invented a Rosam bass, Vile bows. He. He. He did all this. He was a. He was a. A bakery consultant for Albert and all of this. Completely. He never went to college. He just. He just did this. Kind of found this on his own because. And the tuba was. Was like emblematic of that. It was just finding who you actually are and going with it. And then he said, you know, if you only worry about how long something's going to take or how much it's going to cost, you never do anything interesting. And what I found in this book was, I think, because people are tuba players, they are wondrously inventive. If you're playing the violin, you're playing Mendelssohn Quartet. By the time a tuba Player is basically playing whole notes because you can't play it before age 13. Really.
- [35:07]
C
Yeah.
- [35:07]
D
And so. And a lot of people have gone into the tuba. Historically it's not a conservatory instrument. It's long ago is people were in circus bands or. Or local municipal brass bands. Yeah. That's how you got into it. And so it breeds this kind of. Very kind of classic approach to life. Which was again another way of saying when you find. I thought when you find this thing that fills you with beautiful purpose and excitement, that you can break with old molds and you can do all kinds of. All kinds of things. And that's. That's one of the reasons I really loved writing about tuba players. They're like get no acclaim whatsoever and yet they're intensely inventive and curious and all the rest.
- [35:51]
C
So when I was in high school, we had a guy a great older than me. His name was Joe Koski. He was a great tuba player. And at the end of the senior year in our last show, he played Carnival of Venice. And you talk about Flight of the Bumblebee and Carnival of Venice. It is these. I think that I appreciate it more now having read your book. Because to me it was like, this guy's amazing. He's going on to college to play music. He's really, really good. But in contrast to what tubas are normally expected to do. Right. It's such a stand up thing.
- [36:28]
D
There you go.
- [36:29]
C
Can you talk a little bit about.
- [36:30]
D
Sure. And it's all part of what I call the tuba civil rights movement.
- [36:34]
C
Yeah.
- [36:34]
D
Which really begins in this thing that I also call tuba Woodstock, which is this first gathering of all the tuba players in America. 1973, Indiana University, hundreds of tuba players. Nobody's seen this many tuba players in one place ever in the history of the country. Right. And they all come there and they all learn that they're part of actually some national tuba tribe. That there's this awakening of the tuba consciousness that we're part of this larger group and we all want the same thing.
- [37:04]
C
We.
- [37:04]
D
Which is to break from the limitations that. That others would put on our instrument and therefore on us. And limitations that we have somehow accepted or internalized. And so as time goes on. You mentioned Flight of the Bumblebee. Flight of the bumblebee almost becomes for tuba players a little bit like football players are like, dude, how much do you bench press?
- [37:27]
C
Right.
- [37:27]
D
250, dude. You know. Well, how fast among tuba players? That's. How fast can you play Flight of the Bumblebee? It's Normally, Rimsky Korsakova, the guy who wrote it, expected it would be like a minute 20 seconds, and it's unrelenting. 16th note. Yeah, that kind of thing. And here you're getting it down to people playing it under a minute, and then I think the. The fastest I've ever heard played was like, 42 seconds, which is insane. You're gonna get. You're gonna die of a stroke before this happens.
- [37:56]
C
You know, go YouTube and watch this for people listening. Like, you can go carnival. Like, you can do flight of the Bumblebee tuba on YouTube and see, but
- [38:05]
D
it's part of that liber. Again, it's a part of that liberation. We can do what you don't expect us to do. And that is the beauty of the tuba. And frankly, if you ask me, it's also the beauty of band. We are nerdy kids. We're not fast, we don't jump high. We're not big. But, man, look what we could do. It's just that we don't get individual props for it like athletes do. And you get the really beautiful values, again, that sustain you through life, through band. And the same is true of tuba. I got into it to write about these quirky stories, and over and over, it became much more than a book about a quirky instrument and became about how you. You develop these. These values and these habits and these characteristics and people that allow them to succeed and. And then drugs become. Becomes like. Become like, what the hell? I want that. What that, you know, so. Flight of the Bumblebee. I never believed anybody could play it when I started it. And then over and over and over, people. Oh, yeah, dude. I could play that in, like, you know, like a minute or something.
- [39:07]
C
You know, I'm 65 seconds. Yeah.
- [39:09]
D
Yes, exactly. Right. Because it shows yourself, but it shows the people around you. We're not whole notes. Fat elephants, jokey clowns, none of that. There's. I want to be very clear to all the tuba players out there, there's almost nothing in my book other than a casual mention of fat clowns and elephant pink elephants playing in tuba.
- [39:30]
C
Yeah.
- [39:31]
D
It's a different way of viewing this unacclaimed, essential instrument, both musically but also in terms of, you know, societally and as you. Your whole thing is about developing strong towns. I think that tuba and band are a big part of. Part of that.
- [39:48]
C
Well, it occurs to me, I've got three broken fingers or three fingers that have been broken playing drums.
- [39:54]
D
Yeah.
- [39:55]
C
I think the thing that astounded me was the toll it takes on your body. It never occurred to me that this would be a physical activity that would come at a cost. Can you talk a little bit about that because. Sure.
- [40:09]
D
And the guy who really quantified all that was a guy named, was Arnold Jacobs, the great Tupac tuba player who became the first owner of these perfect tubas. He had. He played for the Chicago Symphony for 40 years and retired in 1998, died 10 years later. But he had asthma. And he played in Chicago where the pollution from the factories and all the local, the low cloud cover and all made breathing especially difficult. So he made a study of the human body and how to breathe and how to breathe most efficiently because he needed to know that. And he studied this at University of Chicago, went to the, went to the physiology labs and hung out at classes and, and, and developed this, these techniques. And this way of teaching became a remarkable, remarkable teacher of wind. Not just tuba teacher, it was teaching people how to use that precious breath of air again. You know, I wrote two books about drug addiction. What is an opioid overdose? An opioid overdose is when your brain, you get so many opioids, your brain tells your body to stop breathing. Tuba playing is about strengthening that precious breath of life. And the guy who did that most dramatically, I would say, would have to be Arnold Jacobs, because he had to, because he had asthma. And, and yes, he also quantified that as you get older, your lung capacity reduces, you know, and, and there's this whole feeling of, of the, the toll that brass instrument playing especially takes on you. But, but especially the, the tuba. These. I had one of those perfect tubas on my lap one time, and I, I don't play the tuba, as I've said. I never was in band. I tried to make a sound to fill that damn thing with air, and all I could make was a sound that sounded like your stomach when it's grumbling, hasn't had enough to eat, you know, just awful sound. But the idea was that you had to learn to, to nurture that precious breath of air. And that's what his teaching was all about. It was about doing more with what your body, what you think your body has allows you. You to do, because eventually all that's going to die out by 65. You really, it's very, I mean, you can't play the tuba anymore. You know, so many people are, and some. And very often it's, well, well before that, because it, it's like athletics. It takes a lot out of you to play, to play Brass instruments of any kind, but certainly to play the tuba. Without a doubt, you had one moment
- [42:55]
C
in the book, and I'm not trying to make this overly dramatic, but I remember as a teenager learning about the library of Alexandria and how it was burned and just being outraged, like, how could this happen? And you talked about one time when they brought one of these perfect tubas to the shop. And I'm still outraged. I'm outraged by this.
- [43:18]
D
Arnold Jacobs had had a problem with his lead pipe. Now, the lead pipe is the pipe that leads from the mouthpiece to the intestines of. Though it's a thin thing, it's maybe a foot or a little bit longer than a foot, very thin. And it was original to the horn made by the York Instrument company, which we have to assume had figured out things about brass instrument making that were simply profound. These guys in the 30s, nobody knows the names of a lot of the workmen in this. In this. This company in Grand Rapids. They only know the foreman, a great, great brass instrument maker named Bill. Bill Johnson. But really, it was in the tuba that they figured out some. Some profound things. It's. We've. We've come to realize the lead pipe is a small part of the tuba. You would think it's not that big a deal. Arnold Jacobs has some leaks in the lead pipe. He takes it to a shop on his lunch break from the symphony across the street. They think they're doing this big favor for him, and they replace the old lead pipe with a new one, and they throw the old one away. All he really wants them to do is patch up the leaks, right? He comes back and suddenly realizes, oh, my God, no, no. And they never found that original lead pipe ever. Despite lots of searching. It is viewed as one of these moments, the great tragedies of tuba Dom, I guess where. And that horn has never played the same. They have tried. Master technicians and brass repairmen have tried to replace it with others, come up with other. And it just doesn't plate the same. So there's two of these perfect tubas. The second one is the one that's been used since that happened. But it's viewed as this kind of like, dark day in the history of the American. Of the American tuba. It just shows you too, when you get to that level, you're like in great athletics, you know, you were like the NFL. You're. The differences between one team and another are minuscule. The differences between one tuba and another are minuscule. Except to the people who know deeply what they're Doing. And. And then it becomes like, the whole story.
- [45:45]
C
Yeah. You play music at all?
- [45:47]
D
I play the guitar.
- [45:49]
C
Okay.
- [45:49]
D
You can see back there. Not very well. I tried to learn the accordion. I still want to learn the accordion because I love that instrument. But. But, no, I've always wanted to be a much better musician than I ever was. I think there's, like, all kinds of magic to be discovered on YouTube in terms of music instruction that I never had available to me when I was growing up and all. And I wish. I wish I did have, but, you know, I always marvel at it, but then I always marvel at people who master other walks of life as. As well. I'm totally in all of great homicide detectives. Great homicide detectives are not terribly exciting. They're kind of plotting sometimes, can be kind of boring at times, but, man, they don't mess around, and, you know, it's that kind of thing. I really marvel at people who have mastered their craft like that.
- [46:46]
C
I had a scholarship offer, or I could have done music. And, you know, I had this girlfriend at the time I was kind of serious about. She's now my wife, so that worked out well. And. And I went into engineering, which is. A lot of people would think those are completely different things. I never thought they were. But I played in bands then for years. And when I was reading your book, I remembered this one time, and it was just amazing. We were playing a gig, and we started the song Jumping Jack Flash, and I was playing drums. And at the beginning of the song, it's just a rhythm guitar and a bass player and a drummer. So it's. It's. It is just the rhythm section. And the rhythm section, like, the tuba is just, like, the foundation that everybody else is, you know, playing on top of, right? And everybody else playing on top of gets all the accolades and all the, you know, all that. But you just play this. And the guitar player, the guy was playing lead guitar. He broke a string. He basically is, like, took his guitar and, like, quick changed out his string, tuned it up, and then played. But it took maybe, like, three minutes. And we hung on that intro riff for, like, three minutes. And none of us wanted to get off of it. None of us wanted to move on to the next part of the song because we were. We were so in sync with each other. It was so beautiful. And I've tried to describe to people how you don't have to be even great, but when you get to a point where you can play music with other people, there's a certain connection that, like, you know, I've had at moments with my wife, I've had at moments with my, my parents, with my children. But I've also had that with other musicians where it's just like we're. The music has connected us in a way that defies like physicality right now.
- [48:41]
D
A beautiful idea, such a beautiful idea you mentioned. Let me depart a little bit back to that. If you think about drug addiction, what is the effect of drugs? What you're feeling is this kind of like rush of this feel. Not rush, but this.
- [48:58]
C
No, it is though, it's like a drug.
- [49:00]
D
Dopamine, serotonin, together like, oh, there's contentment, this real unity with drug addiction. And you get there by hard work with music. You don't get there by going in there one day and boom, now here I am. No, you get there by practice and practice and attention to detail and so on. And with drugs, drugs give you a hundred times more euphoria than you were feeling with almost no effort, right? You go, you buy the dope, you turn on the tv, you, you know, you see your pornography, you, whatever, you know, it's, it's that those kinds of things have an enormous blast with very little work. The opposite of true is true of music and many other things that are, that are really worth human beings effort. And you get that feeling. It's fleeting. It is something you never forget. Obviously most people don't and. But it's not overwhelming. It does not overwhelm your life. And the, the best example in the book is. Is Willie Clark, the kid who starts the book playing in sixth grade, plays as one B flat note in his band's rendition of the Star Trek theme. And never forgets how great he feels. That that becomes like the guiding feeling. And the, he was taking the band and they were, they were lifting off because of his 1B flat note. He later went to work at Disney World, which for a time was one of the top employers of tuba players in America. With Disneyland too, but Disney World in Orlando, Florida, he's part of a group called the Tuba Fours. This deals with the terminal kitschiness of tuba. The tuba world. They always have to be making these dumb tuba puns. Stop with the tuba puns. No more tuba puns, please. Okay, yeah. Anyway, the Tuba Fours play five times a day for tourists at the park. And there's two euphoniums, which is a small kind of tuba. And then there's a larger tube. He's playing one and he said after a while playing these, these songs like Chattanooga choo choo and Mr. Sandman and all this stuff over and over and over they would achieve this unity of mind. It's almost like the minds of the four players just melted into one. And he said, you know, he played all his life so, practiced so hard all his life, he didn't need a lot of money, but he just loved the moments that you are describing right there with that band that you were talking about is so important because it's what you get. It's part of the payoff of. From hard work, from collaborating with others at what. It's what, what makes, well, let's just say in this case tuba playing such a radical idea for our time that you need hard work. You need attention to detail and persistence through failure and collab in a time of great isolation, you need collaborating with others. You cannot achieve this so well on your own. It's like this thing that keeps people coming back and chasing that. But it's not. It can be, I suppose, addictive in some sense, but it's really not. Because the amount of just good vibes you get does not overwhelm your life. It makes you want to continue to do more though.
- [52:23]
C
Yeah. The book brought back so many memories for me that were all positive and it made me feel, you know, there was a period of time in my life where like my mother in law said we were worried you were going to be a musician. And like. Yeah, I get it. You know, there was a time when I thought I would too. And this kind of. There's a certain culture. Let me ask you this. You brought up Disney World and I will admit being a 13 year old at Disney World. And then in high school we went to Disneyland twice and performed from Minnesota. We flew out to LA and they used to have a thing where high school bands would play there. I still think they do to a degree. But I remember just thinking, this is what I want to do. I want to be a musician here. I want to do this. This would be really fun. Can you talk about the importance and I think even the sadness of Disney cutting back on that. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of Disney as the solid employer?
- [53:21]
D
Sure, yeah. I mean, I would say that this is true both in Southern California and Orlando, that a major reason why there was you had the ability in both towns to develop a musical career was the very stable salaries that Disney paid. But then also the idea that you would, if you were employed as one of those bands in one of those parks, you would be playing all day long. It's like that 10,000 hours idea. The Beatles in Hamburg or whatever. You are playing all day long. And frequently, if you're serious about your craft, a lot of younger tuba players would play there. You know, know, they would be playing at night somewhere too. And so it would be 10 years of complete immersion in getting your tuba craft to where it needed to be. And one of the stories I truly loved telling in this book was about the Orlando tuba scene that was created in the 1990s in Orlando, Florida, because Disney hired so many in person bands. And most of those bands had at least one tuba, several. So you had again, a larger congregation, migrant tuba players who like traipse down to Orlando to live. And they all. In most places, when you're a tuba player, you're all alone. You know, the tuba in most orchestras is just one tuba.
- [54:50]
C
Right, right, right. And you're hanging out with one section. You got one tuba.
- [54:54]
D
One tuba. Now in Orlando for like at least 10 years, probably more, there were all these tuba players and they all got together and they would have these famous parties and, you know, and they'd be guys going all night and very heavy drinkers, these dudes at times. And, you know, and they'd be. What would they be playing? Like tuba solos on the. On the stereo and. And then in another room, they'd be repairing somebody's tuba and then another guy would be trying something and five people will be listening to him and kibitzing and correcting him and that kind of thing. It was this glorious tuba moment when you could be as liberated as you want again. Getting back to this whole theme of liberation that. And this one guy said it was like we were like breaking the box wide open. You could write your own story. You could be whatever you wanted to be on the tuba. And we all felt this enormous liberation starting, you know, with that tuba woodstock congregation in 1973. By the 1990s, there's all these really young tuba players who are saying, I want to do this and I want to do that. And it's why they got into the. Why they found the beauty of the tuba in the first place, was because the tuba, through practice and hard work, showed them who they could be. That is a more powerful narcotic than any drug. When you are a kid who thinks I'm worthless. Yeah, yeah, I'm a thing. And all of a sudden, through this instrument, largely through band, right, you were finding, oh, you know what, I could do all this and I could be the star. I could be someone of respect. Yeah, I would posit to you that there is probably no more powerful feeling at that age, 15, 17, 22, whatever, that motivates you. And that's the beauty of that horn. The problem with the horn is that it very rarely, almost never can provide you with a stable livelihood. That your mother in law may have been, you know, correct. And wondering if you're going to be a musician. She would have freaked out totally if they said, yeah, I want to be a professional tuba player.
- [57:08]
C
Yeah, that was. I think people should go buy this book. I'm going to get a copy from my brother who was a tuba player in high school with a stutter, by the way. And there's a relation that you talk about a stuttering tuba player. And I was like, ugh. It hit close to home. My nephew was a tuba player. We're in the fourth quarter of the year and I think people are starting to think about Christmas presents. Can you talk a bit about tuba Christmas? Because.
- [57:36]
D
Sure.
- [57:37]
C
End with that. Because I feel like that is. I've been to a couple of them now. They are quirky, they are beautiful, they are interesting, they are fun, they are festive.
- [57:49]
D
What they show you too is that. And this is something I very clearly believe now out there in America, there is a massive community of former tuba players. Tuba Christmas owes its existence to the fact that there are tuba players all across. There's 300 plus towns that do this. And sometimes there's ever anywhere from like 10 tubas to 700. You know, it depends on where you are. But, but. And the reason that's possible is because all these people have kept their tubas from their accountants. The. They're engineers.
- [58:27]
C
They're once a year for tuba Christmas.
- [58:29]
D
Right. Or they bring it out maybe two, three times. But one of them is tuba Christmas and they all come together and, and you see all these tubas suddenly just arrayed before you. And then again in many towns, it's. It's hundreds of tuba players. And it just shows you it's. It's a poignant thing. It's really a poignant thing because it's, it shows you how many people just wanted so badly to be tuba players professionally and at how difficult that really is to achieve. It's really to a point where there's just not. There are very few stable paying tuba jobs and there are hundreds, hundreds of university tuba programs, I think. Well, hundreds. I'm not sure how many exactly.
- [59:19]
C
You said in the book at one point, we're putting out more tuba players per year than there are Actual jobs.
- [59:24]
D
Total, yes. And it remind me, I studied economics in college and remind me of the critique of capitalism that Karl Marx made, which is grossly expanding workers while all with the same skills and dramatically reducing number of jobs. And then there was fighting among them. And that's what made the Orlando tuba scene so beautiful. It was the one time where tuba players were. We're not in dog eat dog competition with each other for one job. Every tuba job these days in a symphony creates, you know, 200 applications, you know, and so tuba Christmas is where you see all across the country how many tuba players are still out there and still with their horns in their closets or in their basement, you know, and they bring it out two or three times times a year. They just could never make it make it work. However, there's this one chapter that I just loved writing. It was about a guy just like that. He went to school, was going to be. Was one of the best tuba players in his college, realized that that didn't really mean much because there were other schools where there are much better players. And he really wanted to be this solo tuba player and he was going to do it all. And then he realized, you know what? I just. It would lead nowhere. I would be. I would be impoverished and, and scuffling and living, you know, like with one bulb in little attic apartment or whatever. And so he switched and he, he went over to veterinary science. And he is now. This is beautiful. He. He is now an exotic pet veterinarian. One of only six, and he's American, but he lives in Ireland, married an Irish woman. But, you know, the beautiful part of the story is. And he was telling me this, he says, it feels like the tuba never left me. Yeah, I had to leave it. But it taught me the things that it taught me. Attention to detail, perseverance, hard work, interest in things that very few other people are interested in. All of that made me into a very good veterinarian who repairs the wings of owls. You know, exotic pet. They don't do cats and dogs. They do all these other animals. And it was like, almost like the tuba was like this. I lived in Mexico for a long time.
- [61:50]
C
Permission slip, right?
- [61:52]
D
It was, yeah, it was like this. A folk saint. The folk saint is a saint that you personally believe in. It may not even be sanctioned by the Catholic church. And so folks saying who was watching over you with the tuba was kind of like his folk saint watching over him, giving him what he needed, realizing it could no longer accompany him on his life's journey, but giving him what he needed to be successful and happy and have a beautiful professional. And a beautiful. A beautiful personal life. And a beautiful professional life. Except it just wasn't with the tuba.
- [62:24]
C
Sam, I'm so grateful that we have met. I'm really, really thankful that you wrote this book and that you shared it with me. I got an advanced copy and I'm just in love with it. And yeah, man, I love, I love your writing and I love the. The passion you bring to it. So thank you.
- [62:40]
D
Well, Chuck, I love Strong Towns.
- [62:42]
C
I know. I appreciate that.
- [62:43]
D
I had I. As an early reporter. I was a. I was a city hall reporter. And so I've long kept. And so thank you so much for what you do and especially for your interest in my work those last few years. It's really been great and I so appreciate you.
- [62:57]
C
Well, when you told me you were writing a book about the perfect tuba, I thought, well, okay, Sam, we'll see where that goes. I should not have had any doubts. It's one of the best books I've read in a long time, so thank you. And I, by the way, I'm a 50 to 60 book a year reader, so that's not a. I don't throw that out lightly. I. I read a book a week, so this one was amazing.
- [63:18]
D
I love you, Chuck. Thank you so much, man.
- [63:20]
C
Thank you, friend.
- [63:22]
D
All right then. Talk to you later.
- [63:24]
C
And everybody, thanks for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
- [63:30]
B
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong towns member@strongtowns.org membership.
- [63:47]
C
Sam.