January 7, 2008
I love these 25-hour days, and that’s all we’ll be getting until we run up against the North American continent. From there we edge southward to the very tip of South America. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Last night was an eventful night. Musically, it was the first night of Pete’s return on trumpet. Our section is reunited after three weeks of the hysterical but not particularly musical Frederick from Montreal. Predictably we had all of the blend and phrasing intact from the moment we sat down together for the 7:45 set. Pete’s switched to a Martin trumpet from the mid-fifties, the same model that Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown, Miles, and Chet Baker played. There was much horsing around over this, from Stew mostly, who said, “Dude, you’re IN now!”
Anyway, I told Pete how nice it was to play with a trumpet player who didn’t have to shake his trumpet to make a vibrato. But there’s more to it than that. We’ve been through a struggle and made each of us the decision to subsume our individuality for the greater good of the section. There’s only one musical organ, and that’s the ear.
The singer who was supposed to have arrived to take Doug Murray’s place had some last-minute problems arise, like we all don’t have last-minute problems, and blew us off. We’ll struggle on regardless, of course. In this part of the business, unless someone lives pretty close to the docks, you can’t ask “Who lives close.”
Tonight around three in the morning Pedro went berserk because a party was spilling out from the cabins below where the restaurant servers make their cramped homes. I was asleep, despite the muffled noise from the party-goers and the rolling of the ship as we entered the North Atlantic, until Pedro had enough and pounded on the walls of our cabin. Jeez, aside from his musical shortcomings I’m not going to miss him at all when he leaves for Madrid on Monday in New York.
January 8, 2008
We continue to drag across the Atlantic at about half speed so this new ship, the one launched by Camilla Parker-Bowles, the one where the meeting of the champagne and the hull resulted in not a single drop of liquid or a shard of glass, tries to get up up to speed. Not that it will ever approach our top speed of 30+ knots. She’s designed to go 19, tops. But we’re going 17 so she can keep up with us. It’s always a dangerous thing to turn matters over to the marketing department, which I fear is what has been done with this crossing. There must be some helicopter somewhere with a photographer inside getting ready for a money shot.
Unfortunately, there is also a ship full of buffs who want to know why we’re going so damnably slow.
The band sounds great without a singer, and that is bothering a few people in authority, people who think that a band had better have a singer. This will take its toll on things I feel certain. We’ll have the male production singer who is more a yodeler than a singer thrust upon us and that will be the end of the good news coming from the Queens Room.
January 9, 2008
As predicted in this space just yesterday, we had a young production singer foisted upon us, and it makes me want to cry sometimes how things have changed in musical education. Not only is this guy making a lot more money than I am with my years of checkered experience, he gets his own cabin. He’s living testimony to youth being wasted on the young, too. He came onto the bandstand with two charts, including one of Sway based on Michael Bublée’s chart, but which inexplicably went into the key of G flat at the end, thus derailing our rhythm section’s best efforts. The good news is, with the lack of charts (the singer who left in Southampton did 14 charts in two sets) we concentrated this young feller into 4 tunes (2 charts, 2 fakes) in the second set.
January 10, 2008
There are several ways of looking at this Tandem Crossing, as the marketing geniuses call it. We have the Queen Victoria on our starboard side, setting the pace with its slower design.
We--the QE2--are an ocean liner, remember, and the last of the breed at that.
They more resemble a Holiday Inn than an ocean liner. They are designed for gentle itineraries in sheltered waters, for passengers with a vacation goal of shopping, beaches, and monumental architecture.
The QE2 was designed to haul ass. There’s no way to put it politely. This is a performance vehicle, like a Ferrari. But we are traveling in tandem with a Winnebago.
That’s I call it the Doppelganger crossing.
If it weren’t for this ill-advised photo opportunity, we’d be a lot closer to New York on this, the fourth day of the voyage. There was a brief moment yesterday when a rumor circulated that because of a breakdown in the Vic’s #4 engine, we would have to leave her and press pedal to metal, or we would never get to New York on time. But here we are, still going about 20 knots. We were going 16, though, but we could go 29 if we felt like it, and that is a tremendous speed differential. The QE2 generally crosses in 4.5 days, and we’re scheduled for 6.
Still, the sunsets are gorgeous here on the 42nd parallel. We’ve avoided storms since the second day, although it can get mighty cold and windy.
This afternoon, when Captain MacNaught came on the PA with his navigational pitch, you could hear the gritting in his teeth as he explained that we’d be in New York by now if we weren’t in tandem. And so we get to enjoy 2 days at sea.
Things are no better on the Vic, which is still in its shakedown. The celebrities they invite on these adventures are in a state of rebellion, according to Sian, whose fiancée, Gareth, is improbably on the Vic (which he booked before they had met) in cabin 5009, which is Siân’s cabin number as well. There are lines of complaint in the Purser’s office and the Cruise Director’s. Cabin size is a common complaint, with only 2 drawers for a tandem. One thing I’ve observed from here is the nose of the ship tends to dive in waves, even the most moderate ones. That can’t be very comfortable.
For Captain MacNaught I offer a couple suggestions. One is to use our oft-mentioned by not often used capacity to run at 20 knots in reverse and go that way the rest of the way to New York. The other, less drastic, suggestion is to circle the Queen Victoria in lazy eights between here and the Statue of Liberty.
We’re back in the same time zone as Nuuk, Greenland, two long time zones from EST. But the sunset was nice up in the overstuffed chairs in the corridor next to the Queens Room.
Celebrities on this cruise are. so far, Robbie Coltrane, English comedian and actor who adopted the surname, and, of all people, Chris Riddle, the son of Nelson Riddle, who is now leading a band bearing his father’s name, working mostly in England. Most folks wouldn’t give his celebrity a nod, but I noticed.
January 11, 2008
Word is out that we have given the slow, troubled Victoria the slip. I haven’t checked the speed on the television yet because of the slumbering Pedro, but it certainly feels like we gained speed in the night. We are finally in Canadian time, somewhere on the Grand Banks I imagine. Just one more time zone to go, then immigration and a Coast Guard drill and I meet up with Lou and Liz, who are coming down with their daughter from the Hudson valley for a day in the City.
Lou DeFeo and I were cab drivers in New York together back in 1977. I had talked with him a couple times at “shape up,” as they called the often 3 hour wait for our cabs to come in from the day shift. Then one day Lou came in with an alto, fresh from a lesson with Lee Konitz. Just one of those coincidences I guess. We drove Checkers for Hudson garage, at night, back when you could make maybe $10 an hour, including tips and an occasional trip off the meter. Those were less than good times for me. I’d come to New York expecting something to break for me, and it didn’t. I surely didn’t come to New York to drive a CAB. For that I owe thanks to former UCSC grad student Brian Vermeersh, who got there first and told me the arcane mechanics of hacking.
If I hadn’t been driving a cab up to Stryker’s on 86th one night to drive the cats from the Dave Matthews Big Band downtown, I’d have not picked up Laigh Langley for just one more paying fare. Things would have turned out a lot differently then.
Lou moved out of the city since then, married Liz, they adopted a daughter who was born in Austin . . .
Sharon Wong, who gave me a place to live way beyond my station when I was driving a cab (Jim Baum was a beneficiary too, although he’s off the radar lately) lives in LA and is married to a fabulous guy who edits movies (as she does too) and has almost raised a large brood of children.
Some of the guys I picked up in my cab are gone now: Remo Palmier, Michael Brecker . . . A lot of them are still slogging it out in New York: Art Baron, half of the Mingus Big Band, Gary Anderson. Meeting Laigh was a real turning point.
My life would have been a lot different if I hadn’t driven those Checkers. (Like Nixon, I guess.) At the time it seemed like the world was ending. I’d been one of the top dogs in Santa Cruz, which matters very little, it turns out.
Enough nostalgia! Onward!
January 12, 2008
We’re drawing closer to New York, and soon, at 6:00 pm local time, we’re going to give the Victoria the slip and heading off on our own so we can make the arrival time. They will be late. Our captain is having a lot of fun at their expense over there on the Queen Vic. He loves telling us where we’d be right now if we weren’t encumbered with her presence. In about an hour he’ll have his wish.
My suggestions were that we either:
Go backwards. We can make a greater speed backwards than the Vic can go forwards, or
Run lazy eights around the Vic in the open north Atlantic. Good practice for the bridge crew!
Of course there was much amusement in the Crew Mess at these suggestions, but they came to naught, which is the Captain’s name after all, Ian MacNaught.
The word from Siân’s fiancée is that the Vic sustained a pod injury when hit by a wave going out from Britain. (Who knew there were waves?) Repairs will have to be made in Hamburg.
One thing for certain: Our arrival in NYC will involve clearing 1000 crew members and passing a Coast Guard drill. I figure a four-hour window tops. With luck, I’ll get to see Lou and his family for a couple hours. This is just the way things are. Maybe we can do something a little more comprehensive when we come back to NYC in April.
Getting off the ship proved to be almost impossible. The Coast Guard drill dragged on until 12:45, with us shivering on the deck. By the time I was excused, got out of my vest and went to the front of the ship to get off at the gangway, there was a line of several hundred of my closest associates and the forces of Security were having a meltdown because no order for shore leave had been explicitly ordered. The chief Purser, whose job it wasn’t, yelled at them to get us moving off the ship so he could get on with his business. The tall, blond Englishman with all the stripes got on the radio to the bridge and got the Nepalese security to wilt. We were free, but it was 1:20.
I was emotionally drained from the experience. The crew members waiting in line at the crew gangway were jostling in a cheerful way, but we had been on this ship for a week without seeing land, and there, in the near field distance, was New York City. With another two sea days to look forward to when we were to have left in just a few hours, every minute wasted in line to get off the ship was wasted, especially with with our fate in the hands of the indifferent Security staff.
I soon met and spent the rest of the afternoon with Lou and Jemma, his daughter. We took a cab up in Columbus Circle and ducked into a Starbucks. We spent a lot of time at the Whole Foods store in the Time Warner shopping center across the street. It’s a little bit of Austin imperialism. Judging by the crowds, the store is doing very well indeed. I got a couple jars of salsa and a bag of chips, an Arrogant Bastard ale, and a box of Odwalla bars to take back to the ship. At the store I ate Indian: a couple pieces of chicken, some korma and paneer. Then we stopped at a news stand and I walked away with a New Yorker and the Sunday Times. We piled into another cab and they dropped me off on their way back to their car.
It’s hard to believe that this is the same city I lived in back in the late seventies. Everything is clean, there are virtually no street people or homeless people. The buildings are scrubbed clean, and there isn’t any graffiti. What happened here? Was there a fascist takeover? Was it worth it?
Got back on the ship with time to spare, in time for another drill, this one a passenger drill for the 600 new forks who got on in New York.
The Queen Vic was parked next to us. The Queen Mary, too long to park in the Manhattan docks, was parked at the new cruise terminal in Brooklyn. All three ships were scheduled for a marketing photo op that called for them to converge at the Statue of Liberty for a fireworks display. (We had a similar event when we left Southampton with the Vic last week.) Unfortunately we had a 7:45 band set scheduled, which meant we’d have no audience, because by the time the ships were positioned just so the time was 8:00. We rehearsed a couple of my charts for a bunch of empty chairs and Jim had the good sense to pull the plug on the set. We watched the fireworks through the large windows in the Queens Room while I talked to Jan on my cel phone until the battery ran out.
January 15, 2008
We’re on the second sea day since leaving New York. It’s morning off South Carolina and the Vic can be seen through the cabin’s porthole. At 11:15 we have a meeting of the entertainment department, reportedly a White Star service exercise, in other words more marketing crap, this time pointing inward at the crew. (Remember, White Star was the line that had a ship called the Titanic, some time after which Cunard bought their assets.) White Star service is one of our foundations here at Cunard.
It’s marketing turned inward, though. They spent millions on the launch of the Vic, and they’re advertising like mad, but yesterday a trial started of a reputed serial killer in England who turns out to have been a waiter on the QE2. Let’s see them put a positive spin on that one!
There’s actually an ad for Cunard in the latest New Yorker that has a wildly stylized version of the Queens Room, complete with the band. “We” are standing (we sit when we play) in the background, in silhouette, striking odd poses which no good musician would strike if a photographer hadn’t told him or her to. In the foreground, the Folks are dancing in formal wear, looking well-fed and elegant. There is a lot of snappy prose, written by an army of skilled propagandists, in the words of Stevie. It’s a full page, 4/c (actually it looks like a duotone, for you hame gamers) bleed ad on page 6 of the world’s greatest magazine. The headline is: MIDNIGHT FINDS YOU HAVING THE MOST INTIMATE OF MOMENTS IN THE GRANDEST OF BALLROOMS. Well, I don’t know about the 2 other ships, but we at the QE2 QUIT at midnight and head for the buffet and the only 20 minute period in the whole day when we don’t have to eat in the mess. If you come around the Queens Room at midnight to have an intimate moment, you might be disappointed to find a couple bar staff folks cleaning up the room. (Update: the shot was taken in the Queens Room of the Queen Mary 2 and the guys in the band are identifiable. Our new Bandmaster identified them to me, but all I remember was that the singer’s name was Paul.)
I guess the important thing is we are part of the marketing campaign. I wonder, though, how much longer the Ballroom Dance people are going to be able to walk up the gangway for embarkation. Why nobody hasn’t figured out a way to incorporate R&B and other Boomer music into the Queens Room is a mystery to me. Just last night a fantastically ride passenger came waltzing by and asked us to play “Johnny B. Good.” Sure we can do it, but there’s no guitar up on this stage. You, as a musical dolt, would notice that we don’t sound like the record, and the reason is that Chuck Berry is nowhere near and there sure as hell is no guitar in the Queens Room, I told him. Or something to that effect. What I should have said is go upstairs to the Yacht Club bar, where the Caribbean band is playing. They can do that tune surely.
I don’t mean replace the Queens Room dance band with a rock cover band. Far from it. But with the resources we now have and a rewrite of the book we can at least branch into a few areas that we now don’t do. And we might need a guitar player. And a baritone saxophone, king of instruments.
Sounds like a band I know.
The day drags on here. The Vic still looms large in my porthole. I’m going upstairs to the rehearsal in the Grand Lounge.
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