The Strong Towns Podcast
Chuck is joined by Sam Quinones, author of “Dreamland” and “The Least of Us,” to talk about his newest book “The Perfect Tuba.” They discuss how a curiosity about tuba players turned into a deep exploration of hard work, community, and finding joy and purpose in difficult circumstances.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
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 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. Every year I put together a list of my top five books of the year. You've been on that list at least once, and I think twice.
Thank you.
I guarantee you, you will be on the list this time, because this is one of the greatest books I've ever read. 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 Towns Podcast.
Chuck, it's so nice to be with you, man. Thank you very much. I've always appreciated our conversations, very thoughtful and very cool. So it's wonderful to be here, man, thank you.
I'm going to rely on you to tell a lot of stories here, because this is the first podcast I've ever done where I have no notes, I just have this book. You're talking to a band nerd. My wife was a band nerd. My kids were band nerds. I did percussion, so I'm a rhythm person, and I'm close to the base and keeping the line. Every aspect of this book was so beautiful. I got to tell you, there were a couple times where I got teary eyed. I'm like, "Oh my gosh." Your writing is so good. So anyway, I'm thinking the place we should start is the idea of "The Perfect Tuba." What is this concept of the perfect tuba?
Well, here's my idea. I wasn't in band. I don't play the tuba. I don't play any wind instrument, but this book just kind of took me over. I can tell one reason was, normally I'm a crime reporter. My two books prior to this are about heroin and OxyContin, and then the last one was about fentanyl and methamphetamine. I've been doing this kind of work for years and years, and I just felt this need to do something different. After years of writing about people who are searching for happiness from something they buy, I wanted 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 talents and capabilities.
Years ago, I did a couple of stories about the tuba's popularity in LA when I was working for the LA Times. After that, I just began interviewing tuba players. I don't know why, except 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. It was just this wonderful revelation. I thought that was a powerful thing.
Along the way, though, what kept me going was I had this conversation 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 a good number of years ago now. At one point, he told me, "Have you heard about the York tubas?" 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. I'm sitting here on the other end of the line, going, "What the hell is this?" But 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.
These are enormous tubas, the biggest tubas of their time, although now the size is fairly common. Back then it was not. This tuba player was, let's call him portly. He had no lap. He couldn't play it. So he was a well-known tuba player, Philip Donatelli. He sells the tuba to his prize student named Arnold Jacobs, who at the time was 16. Arnold Jacobs takes one tuba. Donatelli says to the York company, "I need a tuba that sounds like the bass organ, this bone-shaking thing." So they make him one, but they didn't realize York had made another one, a prototype. So there's these two tubas.
Jacobs plays the one for many, many years, and then hears that there's this another one out there and buys it in the mid-50s. By now, he's working for the Chicago Symphony. With his tuba and his spectacular virtuoso skill on the tuba, it turns these York tubas into this legendary, mythical, holy grail tubas. One guy goes, "It's an honor just to be in the same room with these tubas." The York company 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 out of business in 1972.
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 woodwork. There's a big growth in tuba players.
They call it the Stradivarius of tubas.
The Stradivarius of tubas. Jacobs is part of this. He talks about his tubas all the time. It's a time when tuba players are looking for heroes. Jacobs is one of these guys who plays these masterful solos. There are these incredible players, and part of that is that there are these two tubas that are just this wondrous thing.
So I thought that was one of the coolest stories I'd ever heard. 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 into this tuba thing and find out and see if I could tell the story of these two perfect tubas. That's kind of what led to this book. It kept me going in the back of my mind, that's the most cool story I've ever heard. Everyone's trying to replicate, and no one can.
Then I met Bob Carpenter and another guy, Tom Triece, 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 that could show that they probably could replicate the two perfect York tubas in ways that other companies had failed. So that's kind of the story that really got this whole project going.
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 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 a tuba is filling out the sound. It's a subtle instrument a lot of times, because it just kind of sits there and thickens up the sound.
You described how they pulled out this tuba, the conductor turned his head, people in the audience perked up. There's just this astounding thing that for people who are close to music—I feel like I'm close to music, but I'm not a professional musician. I don't have the ear that some of these great people do. 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 Leonardo da Vinci's level.
Really quick, I was walking through the Uffizi Museum in Florence. It's amazing, room after room after room, and then you turn the corner, and what you see is 10x greater than anything else, and that's Leonardo da Vinci stuff. It just blows you away. As a simpleton, I can recognize the difference. You described to me was that difference in a tuba, right?
Yes. The other thing that connected up to my last two books is it feels very much to me like the tuba is a community enhancer. It builds out. Without a band, you cannot have a football team. Without a good tuba section in the band, you cannot have the band. The band just 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. "Oh, the tuba can only play whole notes. You're not up for the great musical virtuosity that we find in, say, violin or trumpet." 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. Without it, 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 skills. But the tuba itself was this gorgeous instrument of community enhancement and yet completely ignored with band directors. I wanted to write about band directors because, for the same reason, they did what they did because they loved it, without any promise of wealth or fame.
What is band directing, except for bringing people together? Where do you get your great joy? Watching the lights go on in the eyes of your students, who finally figure it all out. It's this beautiful thing. It was one startling realization after another in this that connected the instrument to issues that I had 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, focus in this time of babbling distraction.
You don't get anywhere 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 almost radical ideas, all through this instrument that everyone knows about and no one cares about.
I was struck over and over, how do you make a narrative out of this concept? 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. It's almost like the nuns rapping you on the wrist, going "No, again, again, again." These kids 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 students. It's so beautiful. I love Roma High School. Now, how did you come across them?
Yeah, I came across Roma 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 South Texas. This is all the Rio Grande Valley, which is where Mexico and the US meet. It's the Rio Grande leading to the Gulf of Mexico.
So you had these tuba professors there, and they brought all these kids with them, dozens of kids. I'm like, "I love the tuba, but it's awfully hard. You're training these kids to play the tuba. There's no jobs in that." He says, "Yes, that's normally true, except they're all going home to be band directors. They're not going to be tuba performers. There are many jobs down there."
I go, "Well, how many band instructors do you have per high school?" I was normally used to three, four. No, there's 9, 10. I went, "What are you talking about?" That led me into this whole story of how it is that they teach band in many schools down in the Rio Grande Valley. It led me back to this strange character named H.E. Nutt, who was this Buddhist monk of band directing. Very didn't care about the world's frivolities. He just wanted to teach proper band baton technique.
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, the gospel of proper baton technique. A lot of them end up in Brownsville, Texas, way at the very end of the Rio Grande. 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. 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 poor. They can barely afford instruments. They cannot afford music lessons. 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." It's competing for the attention of his kids. 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. He thinks, "If we don't change how we do band down here, we are 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."
So he devises a whole system. He comes to Roma, is hired at Roma with a system of creating top-flight bands from kids who can't afford music lessons. The way he does that is he convinces, to their great credit, the school district, the school board, to invest heavily in band instructors. So no longer is it three in high school. Now it's 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. Then after that, it's marching band practice. So this is true for French horn and tuba and drums and all the rest. All these instructors become the teachers these kids cannot afford.
When he does that, then he begins to create a huge—starting very, very strong with the young kids—real strict attention to detail, playing these notes nice and slow. You would think the kids would hate it, but actually, the kids are on the edge of their seats. "We got to do this 1B flat, no, just right."
Al's great insight, and it's a common insight, but 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. Just don't tell them that it's going to be hard.
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. 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 break that door down." They've been competing at that level for 20 years now.
It's astounding. You said many times in the book how a kid can't afford an instrument. "I wanted 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 can't take it home. You talk about a culture of tubas. It almost feels like there's a sorting mechanism. The poorest kids, the kids not in the limelight, the kids who are just going to be the steady backbone of it wind up playing tuba. Is that a fair statement?
That's a great answer. Yes, exactly right. Maybe because you have to try harder or something. You are marginalized. 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.
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 they don't have stories that would interest me.
Tuba players, because they're 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. Tubas are on the fringe of the band. It's this 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 first day of seventh grade or sixth grade, all the other instruments are taken. 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 gotten away from.
One symptom of that, I think, is our drug addiction problems. So, yeah, it attracts kids who 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. That's the story of a lot of kids, well, adults, by the time I'm talking to them in the book.
You and I have talked in the past about community, a lot of these things being an antidote to—how do we get people out of drugs? How do we get them into recovery? How do we help them not end up there? 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 saying, "Hey, having a high school band, or having music in your life and joining with others in that way," the high bar of entry to it is your time and energy, not your money and your resources.
Yes, exactly. 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." Through the stories, writing the stories about kids and these band directors and these tuba players, I thought it 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 is that you need to find purpose. The way you find purpose, though, is not a bolt of light. You don't find passion for something by some kind of hit by lightning. "Oh, I love this. Now I'm going to do it." No. The way you do it is you really dig in and you work hard. That's why the subtitle of the book is "Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work." I wanted to stand up and exalt hard work. So often in corporate marketing, it's, "Now take it easy."
For a while I was just focused on, "Okay, these kids are in music." But then I realized what they have found is through the tuba or through band directing, this great purpose. 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 down the road you are going to be really good at this if you do this.
So it became almost like the perfect tuba became a metaphor for any way that people find to avoid drug addiction. Frequently, you don't avoid drug addiction unless you have that deep purpose in life. You find something else. Drugs fill a void frequently. 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 lunch truck business, or you want to be a great, great police officer.
At a certain point, the perfect tuba became a metaphor for all of the things that we love to do that require lots of work on our stuff that keep us really centered and moving. These are enormously important to creating strong towns, healthy communities.
Yeah, I don't think that you get rid of obsessive behavior. I think you channel it in different ways. I had to laugh about the guy who built the perfect room for the perfect tuba. It was a side story. Can you tell that story? Because I sure found myself enraptured by this idea that a tuba needs a room.
Yes. This is Jim Self, one of the former USC tuba professors, a big player on lots of soundtracks, movie soundtracks.
Did he do the Jaws theme?
No, he didn't do Jaws. That was Tommy Johnson, his mentor. But he did "Close Encounters," the five notes communicating with the alien spaceship. Anyway, I go over to his house a couple of times and talk with him. I'm just wanting to see what the stories are. Then he said, "Yeah, so I built this practice hall on top of my house." This is in the Hollywood Hills. In the Hollywood Hills, if you're going to add to your property, it's gonna be a swimming pool or tennis court.
So this guy, Jim Self, wonderful man, wants a room. All his life he's practiced in practice rooms at universities that are 10 by 10. That's large enough for a piccolo, that's large enough for a trumpet. The sound wave of the largest tuba is 36 feet long. He wants a room where his tuba 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 this beautiful story of liberation. He wants to liberate the sound. So over a period of years, at great, great expense, 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.
He also says 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 19 feet wide, 38 feet long, long enough for his tuba sound wave to move, large enough so you're not just cooped up in this little cage. It's the liberation. But here's the other thing, Chuck, it's that was also his own liberation.
He had been looking for ways of being a full tuba player all his life. 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—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. Then it became the other thing that almost any arts group of people need, which is a community center, a place to meet and see other people. He's had many, many recitals in that hall. It's a remarkable thing.
I did not know the story. It took me a while to figure out. I'm sitting in the story here. This is 38 feet long. It's long enough for a B-flat Tuba sound wave, which is 36 feet long. I just thought, "These stories, they come when you immerse yourself in them." That's why I don't do interviews for an hour and say, "Okay, that's enough." I do over and over and over. With Jim, I think I did three or four for a long time, and finally I said, "Wait, time out. This thing you built just for this?"
"Yeah, yeah, right." Because the tuba showed me all the possibilities of life. All of a sudden I realized I could. The architect told me you could just remove part of that hill and you have—I was like, "Holy crap. Yeah, I'll build my own tuba practice hall, which is 38 feet long and 19 feet wide."
It's one of those stories, man, when you think—I mean, for me, this is why I'm a journalist—just bowls me over when I hear some of the stuff. But it doesn't come immediately. You got to dig. You got to dig. You got to be in it for a long time.
Well, you think you know someone—I don't know him, obviously—but you think about someone who has the capacity to do that. Wouldn't you want to travel the world? Wouldn't you rather have a fancier car? It's astounding to me when people do amazing things out of love like that, where it's, "I really want this sound and I'm going to chase this fleeting thing so that I can," because that's their love and joy, hearing that full sound completely.
Yeah, there's another guy in the book, Tom Triece, who's one of these two Orlando tuba player engineers who wanted so badly to kind of pursue replicating these two perfect tubas in Chicago. Tom spent his whole life like that. I mean, he was a tuba player from 15 on, but he also became a candy maker. He invented a rosin bass viol boss. He did all this. He was a bakery consultant for Albertsons. He did all of this completely on—he never went to college. He just found this on his own, because the tuba was emblematic of that. It was just finding who you actually are and going with it.
Then he said, "You know, if you only worry about how long someone's going to take or how much it's going to cost, you never do anything interesting." 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 quartets. By the time a tuba player is basically playing whole notes, because you can't play it before age 13, really.
A lot of people have gone into the tuba. Historically, it's not a conservatory instrument. Long ago, people were in circus bands or local municipal brass bands. That's how you got into it. So it breeds this kind of very classic approach to life, which was, again, another way of saying, when you find this thing that fills you with beautiful purpose and excitement, you can break with old molds, and you can do all kinds of things.
That's one of the reasons I really loved writing about tuba players. They get no acclaim whatsoever, and yet they're intensely inventive and curious.
So when I was in high school, we had a guy, a grade older than me. His name was Joe Koski. He's a great tuba player. At the end of the senior year, in our last show, he played Carnival of Venice and Flight of the Bumblebee. I think that I appreciate it more now, having read your book, because to me, it was, "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, it's such a stand-up thing.
There you go. Can you talk a little bit about—sure. It's all part of what I call the tuba civil rights movement, 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. They all come there, and they all learn that they're part of actually some national tuba tribe. There's this awakening of the tuba consciousness, that we're part of this larger group, and we all want the same thing, which is to break from the limitations that others would put on our instrument and therefore on us, and limitations that we have somehow accepted or internalized.
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, "Dude, how much do you bench press?" Well, with tuba players it's, "How fast can you play Flight of the Bumblebee?" It's normally Rimsky-Korsakov, the guy who wrote it, expected it would be a minute 20 seconds. It's unrelenting 16th notes, that kind of thing. Here you're getting it down to people playing it under a minute. Then I think the fastest I've ever heard played was 42 seconds, which is insane. You're gonna die of a stroke before this happens.
Go on YouTube and watch this for people listening. You can do Flight of the Bumblebee tuba on YouTube.
But it's part of that liberation again. It's a part of that liberation. "We can do what you don't expect us to do." That is the beauty of the tuba. 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.
You get the really beautiful values, again, that sustain you through life, through band. The same is true of the tuba. But I got into it to write about these quirky stories. Over and over, it became much more than a book about a quirky instrument and became about how you develop these values and these habits and these characteristics in people that allow them to succeed. Then drugs become, "Yeah, I want that."
Flight of the Bumblebee, I never believed anybody could play it when I started it. Then over and over and over people, "Oh yeah, dude, I could play that in a minute or something."
I'm 65 seconds.
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." 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 pink elephants playing tuba. It's a different way of viewing this unacclaimed essential instrument, both musically, but also in terms of societally. Your whole thing is about developing strong towns. I think that tuba and band are a big part of that.
Well, it occurs to me I've got three broken fingers, or three fingers that have been broken playing drums. 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?
Sure. The guy who really quantified all that was Arnold Jacobs, the great tuba player who became the first owner of these perfect tubas. 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 the low cloud cover 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. He studied this at University of Chicago, went to the physiology labs, and hung out at classes and developed these techniques and this way of teaching. He became a remarkable teacher of wind, not just tuba teacher. It was teaching people how to use that precious breath of air.
Again, I wrote two books about drug addiction. What is an opioid overdose? An opioid overdose is when you get so many opioids, your brain tells your body to stop breathing. Tuba playing is about strengthening that precious breath of life. The guy who did that most dramatically, I would say, would have to be Arnold Jacobs, because he had to, because he had asthma.
Yes, he also quantified that as you get older, your lung capacity reduces. There's this whole feeling of the toll that brass instrument playing especially takes on you, but especially the tuba. I had one of those perfect tubas on my lap one time, and I don't play the tuba, as I've said. I never was in band. I tried to make a sound to fill that thing with air, and all I could make was the sound that sounded like your stomach when it's grumbling, hasn't had enough to eat. Awful sound.
But the idea was that you had to learn to nurture that precious breath of air. That's what his teaching was all about. It was about doing more with what your body allows you to do, because eventually all that's going to die out. By 65, you really, I mean, you can't play the tuba anymore. So many people are, and very often, it's well before that, because it's like athletics. It takes a lot out of you to play brass instruments of any kind, but certainly to play the tuba without a doubt.
You had one moment 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. "How could this happen?" You talked about one time when they brought one of these perfect tubas to the shop, and I'm still outraged by this.
Arnold Jacobs had a problem with his lead pipe. Now, the lead pipe is the pipe that leads from the mouthpiece to the intestines of the tuba. It's a thin thing, maybe a foot or a little bit longer than a foot, very thin. 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 their names, a lot of the workmen in this company in Grand Rapids. They only know the foreman, a great brass instrument maker named Bill Johnson. But really it was in the tuba that they figured out some profound things.
We've come to realize the lead pipe is this 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. He comes back and suddenly realizes, "Oh, my God, no, no." They never found that original lead pipe ever, despite lots of searching.
It is viewed as one of these moments, the great tragedies of tubadom, I guess, where 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 play 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 dark day in the history of the American tuba.
It just shows you, too, when you get to that level, you're in great athletics. You are the NFL. 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. Then it becomes the whole story.
You play music at all?
I play the guitar, okay? 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 no, I've always wanted to be a much better musician than I ever was. I think there's 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. I wish I did have it. But I always marvel at it, but then I always marvel at people who master other walks of life as well.
I'm totally in awe of great homicide detectives. Great homicide detectives are not terribly exciting. They're kind of plodding. Sometimes can be kind of boring at times, but man, they don't mess around. It's that kind of thing. I really marvel at people who have mastered their craft.
I had a scholarship offer. I could have done music. I had this girlfriend at the time. I was kind of serious about her. She's now my wife, so that worked out well. I went into engineering, which a lot of people would think those are completely different things, and I never thought they were. But I played in bands then for years. 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. At the beginning of the song, it's just a rhythm guitar and a bass player and a drummer. So it is just the rhythm section. The rhythm section, like the tuba, is just the foundation that everybody else is playing on top of. Everybody else playing on top of gets all the accolades. But you just play this. The guitar player, the guy was playing lead guitar, he broke a string. He basically took his guitar and quick changed out his string, tuned it up, and then played. But it took maybe three minutes.
We hung on that intro riff for 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 so in sync with each other. It was so beautiful. 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 I've had at moments with my wife, I've had at moments with my parents, with my children. But I've also had that with other musicians, where it's just the music has connected us in a way that defies physicality.
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 rush—not rush, but no, it is—it's dopamine, serotonin, together. This contentment, this real unity. With drug addiction, you get there by hard work. 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.
With drugs, drugs give you 100 times more euphoria than you were feeling with almost no effort. You go, you buy the dope, you turn on the TV, you see your pornography or whatever. Those kinds of things have an enormous blast with very little work. The opposite is true of music and many other things that are really worth human beings' effort.
You get that feeling. It's fleeting. It is something you never forget. Obviously, most people don't. But it's not overwhelming. It does not overwhelm your life. The best example in the book is Willie Clark, the kid who starts the book playing in sixth grade, plays a 1B flat note in his band's rendition of the Star Trek theme, and never forgets how great he feels. That becomes the guiding feeling. He was taking the band and 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 the tuba world. They always have to be making these dumb tuba puns. Stop with the tuba puns. No more tuba puns, please.
Okay, anyway, the Tuba Fours play five times a day for tourists at the park. There's two euphoniums, which is a small kind of tuba, and then there's a larger tuba. He's playing one. He said after a while playing these songs like "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Mr. Sandman," 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.
He said, "You know, he played all his life, 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's so important because it's part of the payoff from hard work, from collaborating with others. It's 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, in a time of great isolation, you need collaborating with others. You cannot achieve this so well on your own.
It's 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.
The book brought back so many memories for me that were all positive, and it made me feel—there was a period of time in my life where my mother-in-law said, "We were worried you were going to be a musician." I get it. There was a time when I thought I would too. 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. 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?
Sure, yeah. I mean, I would say that this is true both of Southern California and Orlando. A major reason why 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 if you were employed as one of those bands in one of those parks, you would be playing all day long. It's that 10,000 hours idea. The Beatles in Hamburg or whatever. You are playing all day long. Frequently, if you're serious about your craft, a lot of younger tuba players would play there. They would be playing at night somewhere too.
So it would be 10 years of complete immersion in getting your tuba craft to where it needed to be. One of the stories I've 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, some several. So you had, again, a larger congregation of migrant tuba players who traipsed down to Orlando to live.
In most places, when you're a tuba player, you're all alone. The tuba in most orchestras is just one tuba.
Right, you got one tuba.
One tuba. Now in Orlando for at least 10 years, probably more, there were all these tuba players, and they all got together, and they would have these famous parties. These dudes would be going all night and drink—very heavy drinkers, these dudes at times. But what would they be playing? Tuba solos on the stereo. 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.
It was this glorious tuba moment when you could be as liberated as you want. Again, getting back to this whole theme of liberation. This one guy said it was, "We were breaking the box wide open. You could write your own story. You could be whatever you wanted to be on the tuba."
We all felt this enormous liberation, starting 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." It's why they got into the—why they found the beauty of the tuba in the first place. But 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, I'm nothing," and all of a sudden, through this instrument, largely through band, you're finding, "Oh, you know what? I could do all this. I could be the star. I could be someone of respect." I would posit to you that there is probably no more powerful feeling at that age, 15, 17, 22, whatever, that motivates you. 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. Your mother-in-law may have been correct in wondering if you're going to be a musician. She would have freaked out totally if you said, "Yeah, I want to be a professional tuba player."
That was—I think people should go buy this book. I'm going to get a copy for my brother, who was a tuba player in high school, with a stutter, by the way. There's a relation that you talk about, a stuttering tuba player. I was like, "Oh, 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? 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.
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 anywhere from 10 tubas to 700. It depends on where you are.
The reason that's possible is because all these people have kept their tubas from their accountants, their engineers. There's once a year for Tuba Christmas, or they bring it out maybe two, three times, but one of them is Tuba Christmas. They all come together, and you see all these tubas suddenly just arrayed before you, and then again, in many towns, it's hundreds of tuba players.
It just shows you it's a poignant thing. It's really a poignant thing because it shows you how many people just wanted so badly to be tuba players professionally, and how difficult that really is to achieve. It's really to a point where there are very few stable paying tuba jobs, and there are hundreds of university tuba programs.
You said in the book, at one point, we're putting out more tuba players per year than there are actual jobs total.
Yes. It reminds me—I studied economics in college, and it reminds me of the critique of capitalism that Karl Marx made, which is grossly expanding workers with the same skills and dramatically reducing number of jobs. Then there was fighting among them. That's what made the Orlando tuba scene so beautiful. It was the one time where tuba players were not in dog-eat-dog competition with each other for one job.
Every tuba job these days in a symphony creates 200 applications. 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. They bring it out two or three times a year. They just could never make it work.
However, there's this one chapter I just loved writing. It was about a guy just like that who went to school, was going to be—was one of the best tuba players in his college. He realized that that didn't really mean much, because there were other schools where they're much better players. He really wanted to be this solo tuba player, and he was going to do it all. Then he realized, "You know what, I just—it would lead nowhere. I would be impoverished and scuffling and living with one bulb in my little attic apartment or whatever."
So he switched, and he went over to veterinary science, and he is now—this is beautiful—he is now an exotic pet veterinarian, one of only six. He's American, but he lives in Ireland, married an Irish woman. But the beautiful part of the story is, and he was telling me this, he says it feels like the tuba never left me. 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. Exotic pets. They don't do cats and dogs, they do all these other animals.
It was almost like the tuba was like this—I lived in Mexico for a long time—a folk saint. The folk saint is a saint that you personally believe in. It may not even be sanctioned by the Catholic Church. It's a folk saint who was watching over you. 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 personal life. Except it just wasn't with the tuba.
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. Yeah, man, I love your writing, and I love the passion you bring to it. So thank you.
Well, Chuck, I love Strong Towns. I appreciate that. I was an early reporter. I was a city hall reporter, and so I've long kept—so thank you so much for what you do and especially for your interest in my work these last few years. It's really been great, and I so appreciate you.
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. By the way, I'm a 50 to 60 book-a-year reader. So that's not—I don't throw that out lightly. I read a book a week. So this one was amazing.
I love you, Chuck. Thank you so much, man. We'll talk soon.
Talk to you later. Everybody, thanks for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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